Court of Lonely Royals had its world premier at the Adelaide Film Festival.
Personally i have never watched nor been interested in Australian films (multiple reason, but there is some real gold). The only reason i went was due to the hype around this film and the statement that the work was similar to the works of Wong Kar Wai (one of my personal favourite directors) and authors like Bret Easton-Ellis. As well the film was touted as Australian Neo Noir. A very interesting concept. And the fact that it was made for around 500 thousand dollars was also very exciting.
The plot basically resolves around 4 disaffected 20 somethings in a near future Dystopic future. The characters live in a metropolis, 2 as assassins, a prostitute and one a fixer of some sort.
2 assassins Holden and Hunter work for the police and themselves assassinating people, in very interesting ways (infact this was the only original part of the whole film), using peoples weaknesses. Into this comes Camille a girl who gets things for her boss (basically a fixer)and charli a prostitute angry at the world. Ina near future Australian metropolis they intermix with themselves and the seedy underworld of corrupt police, politicians and clients.
The plot could very easily work, especially when the cinematography is very good (although it is heavily borrowed from WOng Kar wai and in the last half is very bad with random changes from hyper colour and black and white)
The major issue with this film and why it fails is the character development. The characters are unconvincing and very unrealistic. We don't feel for them at all. I think more emphasis should have been done on showing the loneliness and sadness in the characters, instead we get clichéd treatment of characters (i.e a clients dialog to Charli) and rather bad dialog. (Was it meant to be funny?)
This film did have a lot of potential, sure it was very stylish and did succeed in somewhat displaying a dystopic and noirish city at night. But even that was sort of discarded at the end. The characters were unconvincing (and in the character of Camille very very annoying) and the plot line shouldn't have given an open ending.
At the festival i asked the director if this film borrowed heavily from Wong Kar Wai's "Fallen Angels". His response was basically yes a little and that they had thanked the director in the credits. Thats okay, however, i personally believe that major sequences of cinematography and the general idea (assains,loneliness etc) were more than borrowed from Wong Kar Wai.
That would be forgiven if there was more character development and a better ending.
Personally i have never watched nor been interested in Australian films (multiple reason, but there is some real gold). The only reason i went was due to the hype around this film and the statement that the work was similar to the works of Wong Kar Wai (one of my personal favourite directors) and authors like Bret Easton-Ellis. As well the film was touted as Australian Neo Noir. A very interesting concept. And the fact that it was made for around 500 thousand dollars was also very exciting.
The plot basically resolves around 4 disaffected 20 somethings in a near future Dystopic future. The characters live in a metropolis, 2 as assassins, a prostitute and one a fixer of some sort.
2 assassins Holden and Hunter work for the police and themselves assassinating people, in very interesting ways (infact this was the only original part of the whole film), using peoples weaknesses. Into this comes Camille a girl who gets things for her boss (basically a fixer)and charli a prostitute angry at the world. Ina near future Australian metropolis they intermix with themselves and the seedy underworld of corrupt police, politicians and clients.
The plot could very easily work, especially when the cinematography is very good (although it is heavily borrowed from WOng Kar wai and in the last half is very bad with random changes from hyper colour and black and white)
The major issue with this film and why it fails is the character development. The characters are unconvincing and very unrealistic. We don't feel for them at all. I think more emphasis should have been done on showing the loneliness and sadness in the characters, instead we get clichéd treatment of characters (i.e a clients dialog to Charli) and rather bad dialog. (Was it meant to be funny?)
This film did have a lot of potential, sure it was very stylish and did succeed in somewhat displaying a dystopic and noirish city at night. But even that was sort of discarded at the end. The characters were unconvincing (and in the character of Camille very very annoying) and the plot line shouldn't have given an open ending.
At the festival i asked the director if this film borrowed heavily from Wong Kar Wai's "Fallen Angels". His response was basically yes a little and that they had thanked the director in the credits. Thats okay, however, i personally believe that major sequences of cinematography and the general idea (assains,loneliness etc) were more than borrowed from Wong Kar Wai.
That would be forgiven if there was more character development and a better ending.