MAN ABOUT TOWN

STARRING DEMETRI MARTIN, IMELDA STAUNTON DIRECTED BY ANG LEE 3.5 stars Woodstock, the music festival which became the crowning moment of the hippie era, would not have happened were it not for Elliot Tiber, a young gay man trying to save his parents’ struggling motel. Exploiting his position as the youngest ever president of his local Chamber of Commerce, Tiber (comedian Demetri Martin) gives permission for the concert be staged on a local farm in order to ensure customers for the El Monaco Motel, setting in motion this low-key but charming comedy-drama about family and finding yourself. Rather than focus on the festival itself, the film – based on Tiber’s own account of events – looks at the people behind the scenes who made Woodstock happen. Performances, especially from the supporting cast, are excellent, with Liev Schreiber (recently seen as the villainous Sabretooth in Wolverine ) particularly charming as a transvestite ex-marine who teaches Tiber a valuable lesson about life. Ang...

One of Australia's most important cultural institutions is under major threat. I've talked about it a lot already on 3RRR but it suddenly occurs to me that I haven't written about it yet on this here blog. Bloody remiss of me. There's gonna be a big rally tomorrow to help save the Victorian College of the Arts from Melbourne Uni's new, economic rationalist educational model (a new model which has already axed the VCA's puppetry and musical theatre courses. What next?) under which academic breadth will be considered to be more important than hands-on expert teaching. Who was it who said we don't need dancers who can write essays, we need dancers who can dance? Rally tomorrow at the VCA at 10am and march on Parliament at 11am. Details here. See you there.

I've been spoiled for entertainment over the last week. Last Friday was the opening night The Ballad of Backbone Joe , the latest but all-to-briefly showing production by The Suitcase Royale at the Arts House Meat Market, North Melbourne. A clever combination of film noir and Fisher's Ghost , it was another fine example of the Suitcase boys' 'junkyard theatre' aesthetic, and a wonderfully entertaining show, though to my mind it felt a little undercooked - something I also felt about their Chronicles of a Sleepless Moon when I saw its first incarnation at the 2006 Next Wave Festival, mind you. Given time, and fine-tuning, I have no doubts Backbone Joe - a rib-tickling tale of boxing and butchery - will reach similar heights of success. It already has the same quotient of unhinged tomfoolery! On Monday night I saw a preview of the new Australian film by director Jonathan Auf Der Heide, Van Diemen's Land , a beautifully rendered story about terrible events ins...

DEAD SNOW (Dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2008) Screening as part of the festival’s ‘Night Shift’ program, the Norwegian horror-comedy Død Snø ( Dead Snow ) is light on thrills and heavy on laughs; a bloody romp involving horny medical students, an isolated cottage, and a battalion of Nazi zombies. The film opens with Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) chased by shadowy pursuers through a twilight of snow and skeletal branches, to the accompaniment of Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’; one of several knowing winks made in the audience’s direction throughout the film. The joking tone is maintained a few minutes later, when one of a small group of holidaying medical students (who are traipsing through the wilderness intent on rendezvousing with Sara at her chalet) discovers that their group has no mobile phone coverage. “How many films start with a group of friends at a cabin with no cell phones?” he wonders aloud; an obvious reference to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and other films of that il...

THE BEE HUT By Dorothy Porter (published by Black Inc, 2009) LUCKY For Andy There's a damp melancholy in T'ang poetry that smudges the lovely jade precision. I love Walt Whitman's spunky company but under his bardic whistling I can hear his lonely heart howling at the turned back of some deaf rough trade. So many poets starve in the cold faery spaces between their frost-bitten ears. How lucky I am to hear you, darling, coming up the stairs to smell the coffee floating ahead of you like my favourite incense. Dorothy Porter 1954 - 2009 From Literary Melbourne Edited by Stephen Grimwade Published by Hardie Grant Books August 2009

Don't watch this if you haven't seen Torchwood: Children of Earth yet. If you have, make sure you have a box of tissues handy...

BLESSED (Dir. Ana Kokkinos, 2009) Based on the Melbourne Worker’s Theatre production Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas (which was first performed at the Victorian Trades Hall in May 1998), Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed will doubtless re-engage the audience she lost with her last effort, the painful The Book of Revelation . Blessed is a bleak story of mothers and children set in contemporary Melbourne; and as with the play, a number of storylines play out simultaneously over its 113 minute running time: Tanya (Deborah Lee-Furness) and her husband Peter (William McInnes) watch their relationship fall apart as they argue and fight over their mortgage, while their son Daniel (Harrison Gilbertson) tries his hand at crime, having already been accused of theft by his mother. Young runaway Orton (an excellent performance by Reef Ireland) struggles to look after his mentally retarded sister Stacey (Eva Lazzaro) on the city’s...

FLAME & CITRON (Dir. Ole Christian Madsen, 2008) This grim exploration of life as a resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Denmark during the dying days of World War II is based on a true story, and stars Mads Mikkelsen and Thure Lindhardt as partisans lost in the fog of war. Ordered to assassinate collaborators and traitors, these two “soldiers without a front” soon find themselves drifting away from friends and family, the moral ambiguity of their actions placing increasing pressure on their relationships and themselves. Set in Copenhagen, and shot in cold blue tones, Madsen directs this increasingly complex story well, but given I fell asleep part-way through the film – a victim of festival fatigue – it would be inappropriate, not to say unethical of me to review it in further detail. Unrated MORPHIA (Dir. Alexei Balabanov, 2008) Set in a remote corner of Russia in 1917 that has not yet been touched by revolution, this bleak study of addiction and tragedy is not for the faint-heart...

A LOVING FRIEND (Kerry Negara, 2009) The posthumously published diaries of Australian draftsman, diarist, printmaker and painter Donald Friend (1915 – 1989) – especially the fourth and final volume, which covers the extended period Friend resided in Bali – reveal that the artist was sexually active with teenage and pre-pubescent boys, some as young as 10, over a number of years. In her documentary A Loving Friend , filmmaker Kerry Negara sets out to confront the Australian art world with this fact, which has been largely ignored by Friend’s colleagues and associates as they attempt to bolster his standing as an artist of merit in the years following his death. Artist Margaret Olley and academic Ian Britain are among those interviewed by Negara who either sidestep the issue, or obfuscate when confronted with the fact that Friend was a paedophile. “He just liked the young company about him, and they’re easier to draw,” Olley claims of Friend’s predilection for the company of boys, despit...

POST-PUNK MIX TAPE #2 (Various directors and years) The cinematic exploration of the punk and post-punk era in Australia, and especially in Melbourne, is the focus of a central programming stream at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival. Curated by Michelle Carey, Punk Becomes Pop: The Australian Post-Punk Underground consists of three feature films and over 40 shorts documenting the vibrant inner-city scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where music, art, film and fashion fused together in a raucous and chaotic whole. Post-Punk Mixtape #2 is the second of five short film screenings programmed as part of Punk Becomes Pop . This diverse array of film clips and experimental shorts included a hilarious, drunken interview with Boys Next Door members Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave; a film noir inspired music video for Sydney band Frontier Scouts, When Daddy Blows His Top , directed by Kriv Stenders; the hallucinatory and surreal short drama by Swinburne student...

HUMPDAY (Lynn Shelton, 2009) This indie comedy written and directed by Lynn Shelton explores a reunion between two former best friends from college when they reunite ten years later. Ben (Mark Duplass) has married and settled down. He and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) are trying for a baby, so far unsuccessfully. The quiet order of their lives is interrupted late one night by the unexpected arrival of Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a hard drinking, fast living man still clinging to his shiftless collegiate lifestyle. Within 24 hours Andrew has led Ben off the straight and narrow. At a drunken party, the pair hear about a local porn film festival, and drunkenly decide to enter by making a film in which they have sex with each other. It will, Andrew declares, be “beyond gay”; it will be porn as art. When they sober up, instead of recognising what a bad idea this is, the two men persist with the plan; Andrew because he needs to prove that he really is a wild bohemian rath...

I don't often cut and paste emails and media releases, but in this instance I'm happy to make an exception: DearRichard It's business as usual on the MIFF ticketing website! You may have read a lot of information recently in the press about the MIFF website and ticketing system. This email is to remind you that the web ticketing system is functioning as per normal, with some changes described below. Some important points to note: - The MIFF ticketing system has not been compromised in any way; no-one has been able to break into the system - The ticketing system website passes PCI credit card and McAfee security checks; both are best practice industry security standards. - All customer and credit card details are transferred using SSL encryption to maintain your privacy - The ticketing site is locked down to Australian computer ip addresses only to filter out any potential offshore issues - All information and activity on the system is logged and actively...

Continuing my series of off-the-cuff reviews from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival... RED RIDING: 1983 (Dir. Anand Tucker, 2009) The final chapter in this grim trilogy was, regrettably, the most laboured, weighed down as it was by the need to pull together the various plot threads established in the preceding two films. Nor was the complex story aided by constant flashbacks to past events, though I appreciated the filmmaker's willingness to credit his audience with the intelligence to recognise when we were witnessing events set in a previous time without having to blatantly signpost them. That said, it was sometimes a struggle to recognise or remember key characters as a result, to the detriment of the story's concluding big reveal. David Morrissey (pictured, top) was strong as Detective Chief Superintentdent Maurice Jobson, a guilt-ridden copper finally sick of his corrupt cohorts' excess; but the film really belonged to Mark Addy (pictured, right) as John...

LOUISE-MICHEL (Dir. Gustave de Kervern & Benoit Delepine, 2008) Screening as part of the festival's 'Vengeance is Mine' stream, a program of films about retribution, is this macabre French-Belgian comedy about a team of female factory workers who hire a hitman to take out their boss when he closes their manufacturing plant down. September 11 conspiracy theorists, people smuggling, the green movement and rampant capitalism all cop a serve along the way, as a bumbling pair - Louise (Yolande Moreau), an antisocial and illiterate man who is pretending to be a woman in order to find work after serving 15 years in prison; and Michel (Bouli Lanners) a woman living as a man after taking too many hormones as a child in order to become a champion hammer-thrower - try and track down and kill the man responsible for the factory's misfortune. This comedy is as black as it gets (as evidenced by a scene where the bumbling and slovenly Michel weasels out of shooting the capitalist ...

RED RIDING 1980 (Dir. James Marsh, 2009) Each chapter of this made-for-television drama about unspeakable crimes and police corruption is shot by a different dirctor on different stock, meaning that each part has a drastically different style and tone. Part One, Red Riding 1974 , was shot by director Julian Jarrold (who made last year's cinematic remake of Brideshead Revisited ) and was overtly cinematic and artful in its look and tone; but with Red Riding 1980 , director James Marsh ( Man on Wire ) takes a leaner, meaner approach to the tale, and to far greater effect. Set against the backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper's killing spree, the plot sees Paddy Considine as Peter Hunter, a copper who has tried and failed in the past to unravel the web of corruption and graft which makes up the world of Yorkshire's police force; and who now is called back to conduct a review of their investigation into the Ripper's crimes. Before long, Hunter and his team have turned up a susp...