MAN ABOUT TOWN

Work deadlines and other things have slowed down my festival viewing this week, which is why I haven't posted since Monday. I have managed to squeeze in a couple of sessions, though... Jerusalem is Proud to Present details the turbulence leading up to Jerusalem's 2006 World Pride festival; a celebration of queer human rights which was marred by violence and death threats by religious extremists. How ironic that expressions of same-sex love should be the only thing capable of uniting feuding Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious leaders. The film's talking heads included various homo-haters, a gay Palestinian who had to flee Jerusalem after threats to his life from Hamas, staff from Jerusalem's Open House (an LGBT community centre) and a gay Jew who was almost killed in a knife attack by a Jewish extremist in an earlier pride march. Director Nitzan Gilady's fascinating feature wasn't as gripping a documentary as I'd hoped for, but his skill in encouraging ...

An endearing Swedish drama about love and family, Patrik 1.5 aka Patrik, Age 1.5 sees gay couple G ö ran ( Gustaf Skarsgård) and Sven Skoogh (Torkel Peterson) moving into a new home in preparation for the impending adoption of their baby son. Stresses soon arise over difficulties with the neighbours, not all of whom are thrilled about the pair moving in next door, and are compounded by Sven's drinking and his relationship with his ex-wife; but when, due to a clerical error, the couple are lumbered with a homophobic 15-year old with a criminal past (Tom Ljungman) instead of the one and a half year old boy they were expecting, fault lines rapidly begin to emerge in the Skooghs' relationship. Like many genre films - for Patrik 1.5 is eventually a contemporary take on the rom-com formula - the joy of this movie is not the fairly predictable outcome, but the unexpected twists the story takes in getting there. Strong production values, a solid script that mostly manages to avoid t...

Like Cocktales , which I saw a few days ago, Short & Burly , is a collection of of gay-themed short films from around the world; and is definitely the stronger of the two packages. First up was Grímur Hákonarson's Wrestling (aka Brædrabylta , literally 'Brother Tumble', a word from the vocabulary of 'glima', as Icelandic wrestling is known, which describes a move in which both contenders fall to the ground and no one wins ). This subtle, sombre film tells the story of two wrestlers living in rural Iceland who are struggling with their love for one another. Denni (Halldór Gylfason) gives Elnar (Björn Ingi Hilmarsson) an ultimatum: leave your wife or our secretive relationship is over. But Denni, who lives with his elderly and infirm mother, has problems of his own. Beautifully lensed and featuring excellent performances, as well as a haunting soundtrack by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Wrestling uses silence and open space to great effect. Masterful and beautiful...

As mentioned in my last/first MQFF post, I skipped seeing anything on Friday night in favour of grabbing an early night. That said, I'd already seen a work-in-progress version of SHANK (see my interview with the film's co-writer/producer Christian Martin, and director Simon Pearce on the MCV website, here ), so I wasn't entirely missing out, even though it would have been good to see the film with an audience. Saturday's festival-going commenced with the charming US feature Ready? OK! at 1:15pm. Written and directed by James Vasquez, Ready? OK! is a slight but sincere drama about Andrea Dowd (Carrie Preston), a mid-career woman and mother struggling to deal with her 10 year old son Joshua's fondness for dolls and dresses, and his determination to become a cheerleader. Josh (Lurie Poston) is aware that he doesn't fit in, but is seemingly unconcerned by this fact, although he struggles to conform to the expectations of his Catholic school teachers, and his mot...

Welsh theatre company Hoipollo i are 'committed to creating new work for theatre that imaginatively engages our audience and makes them laugh' and aspire to the 'creation of strong stage worlds that are unbound by the confines of reality'. With Floating , which has a very limited season at Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall , ending tonight, they have more than met that brief. A fantastic exploration of islander identity; a wild and whimsical ride at the far fringe of theatre; a lo-fi multi-media spectacular about family, community and belonging; Floating is all these things and more: hilarious, surreal, vivid and delightful. The production's co-creator, Hugh Hughes, plays a character - also called Hugh Hughes - whose plans to leave his island home of Anglesey , off the north-west coast of Wales, are rudely interrupted when the entire island breaks loose from its moorings and begins to float away across the Atlantic at the mercy of wind and tide. This is the bas...

No news yet on when The Planet of the Dead , the next Doctor Who special for 2009 will be screening in Australia that I know of, though it's scheduled for an Easter screening in the UK. Promo images from the episode have been released though; the above being one of them, naturally, from a sequence for the episode that was filmed in Dubai. Heaps more great images, set shots, news and more over at one of the blogs I follow: Life, Doctor Who and Combom (beware spoilers!).

The 19th Melbourne Queer Film Festival kicked off at the Astor on Wednesday night with the usual speeches, sparkles and not-entirely-fantastic opening night film. This year we were served up the sweet confectionery of Were The World Mine , which two unforgiving friends described as "a trainwreck". They were a bit harsh, I thought. True, the festival does prefer to open with a party-friendly feel-good film rather than a movie of real quality (the year they opened with Infamous was a pleasant exception to the rule; usually we're lumbered with the likes of last year's Breakfast With Scot (ugh) or But I'm A Cheerleader ), but I honestly didn't think Were The World Mine was that bad. Yes, its first 30-odd minutes dragged rather badly, but once the actual plot (gay student discovers secret love charm hidden in the pages of A Midsummer Night's Dream and uses it to make all the homophobes in his town walk in his shoes for a while) really got underway, there wa...

This article in The Onion is the funniest thing I've read all week. Admittedly it's only really funny if you've read the gothic horror stories of American author H.P. Lovecraft, which I have: thus, I think it's fucken hilarious !

On Wednesday night I had the pleasure of attending the world premiere of a major new work by my favourite Melbourne playwright Lally Katz, Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd . Directed by Chris Kohn (whose previous collaborations with Katz have resulted in two of my favourite theatrical experiences of this decade, The Eisteddfod and The Black Swan of Trespass ) and staged in the Beckett Theatre at The Malthouse , Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd - henceforth Vaudeville for short - is a darkly comic gothic melodrama set in the damp, decaying theatre of one Charlie Mudd Esquire, impresario and MC, on the eve of the Great War in 1914. To Charlie Mudd's Vaudeville Castle on the banks of the flood-prone Swanston River comes Violet (Julia Zemiro), a singer of some renown. Strangely, her new employer Mr Mudd and her fellow performers - the pianist Mr Bones (Mark Jones), illusionist and magic-worker The Great Allarkini (Alex Menglet), ventriloquist Maude (Christen O'Leary) and her foul-m...

Populated by two dimensional characters - a Big Brain (script doctor Ben Hecht), a Big Guy (director Fleming) and the Big Shot (producer David O Selznick) as they're referred to at one point, and the Big Shot's secretary (the little seen Marg Downey) - and mechanically directed by Bruce Beresford, Moonlight and Magnolias is a laboured and lacklustre play about the behind-the-scenes dramas involved in writing the screenplay for that classic Hollywood melodrama, Gone With The Wind . The backstory for the play is fascinating - production on the film had ground to a halt and Selznick was losing $50,000 a day, so the movie magnate (played by Patrick Brammall) pulled in Hecht (Nicholas Hammond) and Fleming (Stephen Lovatt) to help him hammer out a workable screenplay based on Margaret Mitchell's sprawling Civil War novel . In theory this should be the basis for a great production, but Ron Hutchinson's script never goes anywhere: it's full of sound and fury - well, argume...