Diverse range to suit everyone’s taste in cinema
By Rama Gaind
These three films are the best of those presently screening in Canberra.
Up: A delightful animated comedy escapade unfolds when a 78-year-old balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen fulfills his life-long dream of a great adventure after tying thousands of balloons to his house and flying to the South American wilderness.
Too late, however, he realises to his horror that he has an eight-year-old stowaway on board. Young Russell is an overly optimistic wilderness explorer, but their exciting journey sees them facing some precarious situations and coming into contact with some lovable creatures.
It features the voices of Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, John Ratzenberger, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo and Jerome Ranft.
This Disney-Pixar film from the Oscar-nominated director Pete Docter (‘Monsters, Inc.’) is a must to view!
Mao’s Last Dancer: Veteran Australian director Bruce Beresford draws out the best in a rags-to-riches story adapted from a best-selling autobiography by Li Cunxin.
The script by Jan Sardi (‘Shine’) captures the perseverance in Li’s remarkable journey.
Li Cunxin was plucked from a poor Chinese village at 11 years of age by Madame Mao’s cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. With incredible determination, resilience and vision, he graduated to become one of China’s best dancers.
He was discovered by Ben Stevenson, one of the world’s most respected teachers, choreographer and the artistic director of the Houston Ballet as part of the first US cultural delegation to communist China. He became one of the first two cultural exchange students allowed to go to America to study under Mao’s regime.
In the early 1980s he defected to the US in dramatic circumstances and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet. He then went on to become a principal dancer with the Australian Ballet, married an Australian ballerina, Mary McKendry, and moved to Melbourne, where he’s now a successful stockbroker.
Inglorious Basterds: Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, this is a World War II epic set in German-occupied France, which tells the story of two plots to assassinate the Nazi political leadership.
One of them is planned by a team of American solders called the ‘Basterds’, while the other is a young French Jewish cinema manager.
This is one of Tarantino’s (‘Pulp Fiction’) best.
