MAN ABOUT TOWN

So it seems that 20 year old J. from Reservoir, who I've been seeing on and off over the last few weeks, is actually 18 year old K. - and he's out on parole from the Parkville Juvenile Justice Centre. Do I know how to pick them, or what?

Here is the full list of 2010 Green Room Award recipients, as presented last night at The Famous Spiegeltent at the Arts Centre. Panel: Theatre – Alternative and Hybrid Performance Outstanding Production: Pin Drop – Tamara Saulwick Composition & Sound Design: Jethro Woodward – Irony is not Enough (Fragment 31) Production Design: Claire Britton, Matt Priest, Danny Egger – Conceptual Design – Hole in the Wall (Matt Priest & Claire Britton / Next Wave Festival) Video Design: Fleur Elise Nobel – 2 Dimensional Life of Her Mise-en-Scene: The Bougainville Photoplay Project – Paul Dwyer Site-Specific Production: Southern Crossings – One Step at a Time Like This Panel: Cabaret Best Production: Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert – Gasworks & Arts Victoria in association with Melbourne Workers Theatre and Yana Alana and tha Paranas Artiste: Yana Alana – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert Ensemble: Yana Alana and the Paranas – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert Origi...

There are a few films screening at the 21st Melbourne Queer Film Festival that I've already seen and previously reviewed; one of which I highly recommend (if you like your comedy pitch black) and another I was deeply underwhelmed by. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's I Love You Phillip Morris is hilariously funny and totally unpredictable, and a film I very much enjoyed when it screened at MIFF last year. I'm very much looking forward to seeing it again on the big screen. Conversely, the Danish drama nicknamed 'Brokeback Nazi', Brotherhood , failed to engage me due to its underdeveloped screenplay and an over-reliance on dramatic plot contrivances. Over the last two days I've also caught two collections of lesbian shorts, Femme Fatalities and Short and Girly , and the earnest, energetic UK drama Fit . Of the shorts, the highlight of the rather mediocre Femme Fatalities collection was Rebecca Thomson's Cupcake: A Zombie Lesbian Musical . Filmed in suburban Ho...

The conflicts sparked by generational and cultural change find form and focus in writer/director Peter Bratt’s La Mission , a sometimes predictable but nonetheless engrossing drama set in San Francisco’s slowly gentrifying Mission district. A vibrant mélange of Mexican and South and Central influences and immigrants, the Mission is virtually another character in the film thanks in part to the dynamic cinematography of Hiro Narita, but the story’s main focus in the tough and uncompromising Che Rivera (Benjamin Bratt, Law and Order , Modern Family ), a single father, recovering alcoholic and ex-con. Che works as a bus driver in order to provide for his son, Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez), and takes pride in his position of authority and respect in the neighbourhood; but when he discovers that Jesse is gay, the foundations of Che’s life – family, community, and a slowly developing relationship with his new neighbour, Lena (Erika Alexander) – are dealt a blow from which he may never recover. Th...

The 21st Melbourne Queer Film Festival kicked off on Thursday night at The Astor, opening with Kaboom , the latest film from queer auteur Gregg Araki ( The Living End , The Doom Generation , Totally Fucked Up ). It returns to the themes of his earlier, rawer, angrier work – sexual fluidity and teenage angst – with a newfound confidence seemingly gained while making his critically acclaimed, poisonously beautiful drama about the impact of childhood sexual abuse, 2005’s Mysterious Skin . Set at a nameless Southern Califorian college, Kaboom focuses around film studies major Smith (Thomas Dekker) and his immediate circle of friends, including his sarcastic lesbian buddy Stella (Haley Bennett), the free spirited London (Juno Temple), Smith’s ‘friend with benefits’, and his dumb but gorgeous surfer roommate Thor (Chris Zylka). As Smith’s 19th birthday draws near, he begins to experience a series of unsettling, possibly prophetic dreams involving a red-haired girl, a mysterious door, and t...

“There is no Beat Generation,” poet Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) tells an anonymous interviewer in 1957. “Just a bunch of guys trying to get published.” The original Beats, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs were indeed all writers, whose biographical and self-mythologising works directly inspired a countercultural movement that scandalised the USA in the staid 1950s. The publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 was a key moment in Beat history, but the catalysing event which rocketed the Beats, Sputnik-like, to fame across the USA was the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by San Francisco’s City Lights Press in 1956; and the court case the following year which saw its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, charged with obscenity. The trial was widely covered by the press, with articles appearing in both Time and Life magazine; and the decision by Judge Clayton W. Horn that ‘Howl’ was of “redeeming social importance” and was therefore “not obsce...

Located in the dusty, industrial wastelands of Melbourne's Docklands stands a vast red and yellow marquee reminiscent of Cirque du Soleil's Grand Chapiteau; the custom-built 'pleasure dome' home of Xanadu the Musical , which had its gala Australian opening on Thursday night. Based on the unsuccessful 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly (which critic Roger Ebert decried as 'a mushy and limp musical fantasy, so insubstantial it keeps evaporating before our eyes') Xanadu the Musical is a tongue-very-firmly-in-cheek retelling of the film about roller-disco and romance to which a hefty dose of contemporary irony has been added. Reviews of the original Broadway production were strong. As to whether the local production is any good I unfortunately can't say as I walked out of the opening night performance only half an hour after it started. From where I was seated (section D, row L, seat 124) the sound quality was appalling : thin, tinny and inaud...

Best known for his magnificent, melancholy and blackly comic feature film In Bruges , and a series of plays which gleefully invert the clichés of the Irish character, A Behanding in Spokane is Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s first new theatre script in 15 years. Unlike the two trilogies on which his early reputation was based (including The Lonesome West and The Beauty Queen of Leenane ), set on Ireland’s rural west coast and written in a white-hot creative frenzy in 1994, A Behanding in Spokane takes place in the United States, and seizes on the familiar tropes of that all-American film genre, the Western – including bloody vengeance, vigilantism, and the quest for justice – in order to tell its tale. In a shabby, run-down hotel room partially illuminated by the ruddy glow of a neon sign, we meet the hulking Carmichael (Colin Moody), a one-handed racist whose obsessive quest to find missing his left hand, severed and stolen by a gang of hillbillies, has carried hi...

Wicked and winsome, The Wau Wau Sisters (US duo Adrienne Truscott and Tanya Gagne) have been leaving a trail of gently ruffled feathers and delighted audiences around the country in recent months. Having already wowed crowds in Sydney, Perth and Adelaide to date, their tour now wends its way to Melbourne and a short season at The Famous Spiegel Garden, serving up a typically ‘Spiegelian’ blend of music, circus, burlesque and cabaret. Even before the audience are seated in the Famous Spiegeltent, a taste of the show’s irreverent nature is served up – literally – by drag king ushers handing out wafers to the patrons like cross-dressing priests at communion; and when the show gets properly underway it begins with a gleefully blasphemous mockery of Catholic ritual and the peccadilloes of private school girls that includes simulated crucifixion and cunnilingus. Next the pair slip into country & western costumes and strap on guitars for an acrobatic serenade that boasts w...