Monday new releases: 9 December 2024

The Problem with People is in cinemas and The Movie Teller is a digital rental from AroVision

It’s a very slow week for new releases so I’m going to make this update free to everyone as I’m doing a bit of recycling. The low-budget horror, Your Monster was also released to cinemas this weekend but not in Wellington and I’ve tried to review the special cinema launches of anime series like Solo Level – Reawakening in the past and failed to wrap my head around them so that one misses out, too.

The Problem with People played in the recent British & Irish Film Festival which I previewed here:

This is an Irish crowd-pleaser with two well-known faces up front (Colm Meaney and Paul Reiser, who also co-wrote the screenplay).

Knowingly inspired by Yankee fish-out-of-water films like Local Hero, it sees New York property developer Barry (Reiser) invited by his cousin Ciáran (Meaney) to visit the old country and try and bridge the multi-generational divide that has kept the American and Irish sides of the family apart.

An easygoing allegory about how stubbornness and misunderstandings can breed fresh discord, even while you’re trying to heal the old ones, the pleasure here is mainly in watching these veterans in action and in seeing how this sort of fiddle-dee-dee Irishness is being updated for the modern world. Same sex marriages and all that, to be sure.

(Also in that preview were Lies We Tell which I liked less, Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger which is coming to DocPlay in the new year and the Merchant-Ivory classic Howards End.

On the hunt for something to talk about on the radio last Friday night, I came upon this new rental release called The Movie Teller and I’m jolly glad I did. The paragraphs below are adapted from a transcript of my conversation with Emile Donovan about the picture on Nights so apologies for the lack of polish:

It’s a Spanish, Chilean, Brazilian co-production called The Movie Teller that played at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. We don’t have a Latin American or Spanish language film festival anymore here in New Zealand so there’s no obvious place for it to land in terms of festivals and it’s too commercial for the New Zealand International Film Festival.

It’s real crowd pleaser – a bit of a weepy – and it's set in 1960 in Chile in a small mining community where a young girl discovers that she has a talent for narrating the stories of the movies because, you know, not everybody can afford to go to the cinema in this small town, and also you probably can’t afford to go more than once so – even if you have seen the film and you want to relive it – she is the person that you go to. She will tell you the story of these films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Paths of Glory, Some Like It Hot, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, etc.

So it’s a film that starts off being about the love of movies themselves, about escapism – that’s the theme that we've got for tonight – it’s the the fact that movies can take us away from a home life that might be founded on hard work or disability or poverty. Her father ends up being a paraplegic after a mining accident and so her skill at telling the stories of the movies actually is what ends up feeding the family for quite a few years.

It’s just a lovely film, and it really is about how storytelling and movies in particular can help take us away from our lives for a little while.

What’s interesting is the film is set in Chile, but stars Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), a French-Argentinian actress. Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds, Goodbye Lenin) is German – he plays the German boss of the mining company – he’s got perfectly good Spanish. There’s another Spanish actor (Antonio de la Torre) playing the father.

It’s also written by a Brazilian called Walter Salles who’s a wonderful director in his own right (The Motorcycle Diaries) and it’s directed by a Dane, Lone Scherfig (An Education) so it really is a United Nations of a film.

On the subject of escapism, we also talked about the TV series Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways and the long-running Māori+ series Hunting Aotearoa.