Australian Penthouse

Movies, books, games and music from the pages of Australian Penthouse. This month, we review movies including Star Wars, Che and The Hurt Locker; books including Fit to Print, Twisted Triangle, Rain Gods and Deer Hunting With Jesus; and games including The Conduit and Shadow Complex.

STAR WARS (1977)

20th Century Fox
Director: George Lucas
Stars: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness

THE LOWDOWN
YOU may have heard of this film. But, for those who haven’t, Star Wars introduces audiences to bored farm boy, Luke Skywalker, who lives on an outlying planet under the thumb of an autocratic military regime, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (etc.). Two robots come into Luke’s possession—one carrying a cryptic distress call from a pretty girl—and when Luke goes in search of the enigmatic local hermit to whom the message is addressed, the old man informs the boy that things aren’t what they seem, and invites Luke to accompany him on a daring mission to strike a death blow to the evil Galactic Empire.

NUTS AND BOLTS
Lucas distilled hundreds of years of heroic mythology and classic good-versus-evil themes into an easily digestible romp, mixed with plots from the Flash Gordon serials he loved as a kid and referencing the visuals of frenetic dogfight scenes from WWII action films. Still reeling from the social upheaval of Vietnam and Watergate, Americans were making dark, cynical movies with immoral anti-heroes during the mid-’70s. At a stroke, Lucas cleaned the cultural slate, rebooted the moral code, and made it okay to have fun again.

DVD EXTRAS
The 2005 trilogy DVD release features an entire disc of extras, including the 2.5-hour documentary, Empire of Dreams—the story behind the saga, with archive footage and interview input from all of the movie’s key players). Other, smaller documentaries highlight everything from the creative reasoning behind the lightsaber to today’s biggest filmmakers talking about how much the film(s) affected them.

VERDICT
Films of such range as Citizen Kane and Pulp Fiction to Jaws and The Blair Witch Project may have changed effects, language and style, but Star Wars forever changed what was possible in movie entertainment.

CHE (THE ARGENTINE AND THE GUERILLA)

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Stars: Benicio Del Toro, Joaquim de Almeida, DemiÁn Bichir
ICON

SPLIT into two parts (and two films), Che: The Argentine and Che: The Guerilla, Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) gathers a career-defining performance from Oscar winner, Benicio Del Toro, for which he won Best Actor at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

Part One follows the charismatic revolutionary as he joins Fidel Castro’s band of Cuban exiles and journeys to the island on a leaky boat in 1956. From humble beginnings, the small team of rebels mobilise popular support and recruit an army which will ultimately topple the US-friendly regime of dictator, Fulgencio Batista, while Che himself undergoes a transformation from a doctor to one of the most iconic political figures of the modern age.

Part Two sees Che at the peak of his fame and power, when he vanishes without a trace. Later resurfacing in the jungles of Bolivia, Guevara recruits a new band of insurgents to help him spread the revolutionary message across the rest of Latin America. But as the Bolivian government and CIA close in on him, the South American experiement will prove Che’s most dangerous campaign yet.

THE HURT LOCKER

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Stars: Jeremy Renner, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, Guy Pearce
ROADSHOW

SET amidst the chaos of the Iraq War, Staff Sergeant William James (Renner) is the seemingly happy-go-lucky frontline defuser of the US Army’s bomb squad unit, his chipper demeanour playing hard against work conditions that would break most men.

The Hurt Locker focuses on the odd contrast such a life holds for those who routinely put themselves in grave danger in a foreign country, while their wives and girlfriends deal with the banalities of suburban life.

Director, Bigelow (K-19:The Widowmaker, Point Break), goes against the ‘blow-shit-up’ Hollywood grain by purposefully selecting a slow pace; the real story lies in revealing and examining the divergent realities between a job that could take your life at any minute, the isolation of working with men who are afraid to get close to you, and the off-duty stresses of trying to stay connected to ‘the real world’ without bringing the pressures of your job into your private life.