Mum, movies and a mad world

My mum, Maggie, came to visit yesterday, and stayed the night. She lives in the small country town of Numurkah, so only gets down to Melbourne a few times a year - when she's not otherwise engaged by driving up to Canberra to visit my sister and her kids; or jaunting off around the country/overseas SPENDING MY BLOODY INHERITANCE GODDAMMIT, who does she think she is, aggreived huff, etc etc.

Anyway, as I write she's just finishing off the huge pile of dishes that's been sitting on the kitchen bench for the last few weeks. I did mean to get around to doing those myself at some stage, probably in fits and starts admittedly, so can I just say that I highly recommend having your mother visit if she's going to start cleaning things all the time? Certainly saves me having to clean the place to a presentable standard before she arrives, that's for sure. Thanks mum. xx

Took her out to lunch yesterday (excellent Malaysian at this superb little place in a laneway off Bourke Street) then last night to the opening of the latest Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces exhibition, and to see United 93.

We both came out of the film with white faces, knotted stomachs and red eyes. My god but its an amazing, harrowing film. If you haven't heard about it already, it's the story of the fourth plane that was hijacked on September 11, 2001; the plane that didn't hit its target.

Through a careful and collaborative process, which includes the use of real-life transcripts and painstaking interviews with the friends and families of those who died aboard the plane, writer-director Paul Greengrass has constructed a deeply moving and detailed picture of the final hours of the plane and its passengers.

Instead of Hollywood bombast and 'God bless America' hyperbole, he's given us a film in which the terrorists are presented as humans, not monsters; in which ordinary people are stirred to do extraordinary things without recourse to cinematic cliches; a film that manages to be deeply moving in spite, or perhaps because of, the absence of slow motion, overwhelming music, etc.

It's engrossing but also deeply disturbing, watching a film whose dreadful outcome you already know. The first time the camera focuses on characters waiting at the airport I had this dreadful frisson: You're all going to die.

United 93 is in general release. It's one of the few must-see films to have been released this year.

Other things I've done this week have included:

• Seeing Ross Mueller's superb, minimal play Construction of the Human Heart at The Malthouse; an intense exploration of grief and love, and a clever use of the dramatic staple of a play-within-a-play.
• Seeing another stripped back theatrical production at The Carlton Courthouse: Dolly Stainer of Kew Cottages by Janet Brown. I was afraid that this production might be trite, but instead it was a simple yet deeply moving study of one woman's life as lived in an institution, where she was placed at five years of age.
• Meeting one of my blog readers for coffee; and catching up with a slightly harried Mike over a glass of wine (don't let the bastards get you down, mate!).
• Running into the always lovely Ms Fits at a new, work-in-progress performance by The Town Bikes called Milk (which was difficult to see properly, unfortunately, due to the venue it was staged in, but which showed real potential as a more complex work by the performance duo; although I think its narrative threads need to be drawn out more clearly before it truly works).
• And going to see the truly shithouse DaVinci Machines down at the sterile Docklands. I still don't know what was worse; the pathetic exhibition that failed to showcase the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci in any tangible way; or the lifeless new suburb it was housed in...

And last night, after mum had gone to bed, I curled up with a glass of wine and watched two more episodes of Russel T Davies' excellent reinvention of Doctor Who (the Chris Eccleston series) which I purchased on DVD last week.

All things considered it's been a rather splendid week. How was yours?