MAN ABOUT TOWN

TAXI

2012-01-06T20:06:00.001+11:00

‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’

When he wrote those words for a 1945 essay in The Atlantic Monthly, Raymond Chandler was describing the ideal private detective, such as his own Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of hard-boiled classics like The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell My Lovely (1940), but they could also apply to the protagonist of Patricia Cornelius’ latest work, the site-specific performance piece, Taxi.

Created for this year’s Big West Festival, and directed by Susie Dee, Taxi sees a small audience seated in the back seat of a taxi and driven about Footscray, from busy thoroughfares and desolate riverbanks to quiet suburban back streets. Throughout the journey, as a subtle sound design broadcasts snippets of talkback radio, opera and dispatch calls, we witness the trials and tribulations of the taxi driver (the quietly charismatic Rodney Afif, in this instance) as he goes about his daily drive, encountering everyone from scammers and drunks to a potentially suicidal passenger.

This is not the first time such dramas have been created with passengers in mind – Hackney Horse at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival explored similar themes, albeit more confrontationally, while Robert Reid’s Empire (2004) explored Australian bigotry and anger in a parked car, with the rear-seated audience looking on – but as one would expect from an award-winning writer like Cornelius, this is a nuanced and fascinating work, which over the course of its 50 minute running time slowly allows a simple, subtle plot to emerge.

Not everything that happens is strictly by the book – the rules taxi drivers must follow regarding drunk passengers, for instance, are overlooked to ensure a dramatic resolution; and it’s unlikely that so many colourful passengers would be encountered in such close proximity, let alone in a single day – but such minor flaws don’t really impact on the structure of the piece, and certainly don’t reduce its effect.

At least half the play passes in silence, save for the soundscape and the sounds of the road, and when drama does unfold, it’s often understated. The first passenger is a young woman who shrieks with delight on her mobile phone while virtually ignoring the driver, except to order him about. Next comes a sad young woman who nurses an empty blanket as if it were a child, and who speaks no English. When the driver drops her off at a refugee referral centre, he is still forced to ask for money for the fare despite doing a good deed – a sad reminder that few people can afford to be a knight errant in this post-GFC age.

Audiences will experience different characters and different stories depending on their particular taxi driver and the route they take; and I am loathe to describe events in detail for fear of spoiling the considerable impact of this considered and engaging production. But watching the world pass by as we drove about Footscray, I suddenly began to see the world through the driver’s eyes – every person we passed was a potential passenger; everyone was a potential actor, with a story to tell.

Back at our starting point, the ride ended with a short, affecting coda – a video featuring firsthand accounts from real taxi drivers; an all too human reminder of the intrinsic truth of this work.

It’s a rare piece of theatre which changes your view of the world, even temporarily, and it’s a credit to Cornelius, Dee and their team that Taxi does just that.

Rating: 4 stars

Taxi
Presented by D & Associates and the Big West Festival
Writer: Patricia Cornelius
Director: Susie Dee
Assistant Director: Nicci Wilks
Visual Media: Tamsin Sharp
Composer: Ian Moorhead
Production Manager: Bec Moore
Production Assistant: Brienna Macneish
Costume: Zoe Rouse
Cast: Rodney Afif, Angus Cerini, Ananth Gopal, HaiHa Le, Amanda Ma, Nicci Wilks and special guests throughout the season.

Departs from Bluestone Performance Hub, 10A Hyde Street, Footscray
November 16 – 26

Big West Festival
November 15 – 27
www.bigwest.com.au

This review originally appeared at Arts Hub on November 25th 2011.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2012-01-06T20:02:00.002+11:00

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People premiered at the St James Theatre, London, on February 14, 1895. Following Wilde’s first trial, it closed after just 66 performances and would not be staged again until the following century.

A comedy par excellence, the play’s deliciously witty text elegantly satirises Victorian conventions – respectability, marriage, social obligations – and was described by authoritative Wilde biographer Richard Elleman as the playwright and poet’s ‘most brilliant work’.

This new production of The Importance of Being Earnest is the swansong of the Melbourne Theatre Company’s outgoing Artistic Director, Simon Phillips. His last production for the company as their AD, it is also a remount of an earlier production of the play which Phillips directed for the MTC in 1988.

Three of the cast members of that original production – Jane Menelaus, Bob Hornery and Geoffrey Rush – take on the roles of the governess Miss Prism, butlers Lane and Merriman, and the fearsome society dame Lady Bracknell respectively (other members of that influential production, including legendary thespians Frank Thring and Ruth Cracknell, are now deceased). Phillips has also resurrected the late Tony Tripp’s original set and costume design; on opening night, the set – a circular, tiled stage supporting a vast book which opens page by page to reveal elegant, black and white Beardsley-esque interiors and gardens – rightfully received its own applause.

While some opening night nerves and stumbles were apparent, overall the cast acquitted themselves well, although Patrick Brammall as Algernon Moncrieff and Toby Schmitz as Jack Worthing seemed to struggle slightly with the pace of the play and Wilde’s glittering dialogue, and were consequently outclassed by their fellow thespians. Presenting the perfect mix of guile, charm and arrogance, Christie Whelan was delightful as the Honourable Gwendolen Fairfax, as was a radiant Emily Barclay, who shone as Jack’s charming young ward, Cecily Cardew.

Menelaus as Miss Prism was excellent, and Rush – the man everyone had come to see – was a delight as Lady Bracknell. Enunciating every word with precision and subtly underplaying his role, he became the personification of a Victorian society dame instead of a parody of one.

The weakest links in the cast were Tony Taylor as the Reverend Chasuble – he seemed far too young and ineffectual in the role – and Bob Hornery in the twin roles of Algernon’s arch manservant Lane and Jack’s elderly butler, Merriman. “It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting,” Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, an aphorism Hornery might have considered before hamming up his Merriman quite so consistently. Mugging for a laugh once is amusing, but when the same shtick is repeated at every opportunity, it becomes grating.

Hornery’s overplayed doddering was indicative of the one real fault in the production: Phillips’ insistence on an emphasised physicality, which resulted in several jarring moments out of character with the Victorian tone of the play, – most obviously an exaggerated fight between Jack and Algernon just before interval, though a moment in which one gentleman patted the other on the arse later in the piece also jarred; it was a gesture more suited to a sporting field than a Victorian-inspired stage. At other times the physicality of the production was expressed far more gracefully, with the performers circling one another like automatons in a particularly complex and beautiful music box.

Phillips’ remounting of The Importance of Being Earnest risked being overly reverential, and consequently beautiful but lifeless, like a dragonfly trapped in amber. Instead, he has created a memorable and marvellous production of Wilde’s masterpiece: a beautifully paced, gorgeously staged work that gives free rein to Oscar’s wit and reinforces the play’s reputation as one of the best English-language comedies ever written for the stage.

Rating: 4 stars

The Importance of Being Earnest
By Oscar Wilde
Director: Simon Phillips
Assistant Director: Daniel Clarke
Original Set and Costume Designer: Tony Tripp
Set Realiser: Richard Roberts
Costume Realiser: Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting Designer: Matt Scott
Additional Music: Phoebe Briggs

Cast: Emily Barclay, Patrick Brammall, Bob Hornery, Jane Menelaus, Geoffrey Rush, Toby Schmitz, Tony Taylor, Christie Whelan

MTC Sumner Theatre
November 12 – January 14

This review originally appeared at Arts Hub on November 25th 2011.

Return to Earth

2012-01-06T20:00:00.002+11:00

Set in Tathra, a quiet seaside town on the NSW south coast, Lally Katz’s Return to Earth tells the story of Katz-substitute Alice (Eloise Mignon) as she returns home after a mysterious absence and seeks to reconnect with the life she left behind.

Tragedy has struck in Alice’s absence, adding tension to her relationships with her mother, Wendy (Julie Forsyth), father Cleveland (Kim Gyngell), brother Tom (Tim Ross) and young niece Catta (played on opening night by Allegra Annetta). Her former best friend Jeanie (Anne-Louise Sarks) has grown up and grown distant. Even the fisherman Alice begins a new relationship with keeps her – at least initially – at arms length.

Complicating matters further, during her absence from the family home Alice appears to have forgotten basic motor functions such as how to chew her food. Simple routines such as setting the table now elude her. Has she always been this scatty? Has she been institutionalised? Where did she go, when she went away?

Katz offers few answers in this skittish production, and when she does, they are rarely satisfying.

There is no doubt that Lally Katz is an important playwright with a unique voice, but Return to Earth is not her best work. Earlier plays such as The Black Swan of Trespass (2003) and The Eisteddfod (2004), originally written for independent theatre company Stuck Pigs Squealing and later restaged at the Malthouse Theatre, revealed a playwright who could blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy with aplomb while very deliberately playing with notions of theatrical reality - themes she went on to explore with great success in Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, the winner of the 2009 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Drama. More recently, the minimal, magnificent A Golem Story, staged at the Malthouse in June this year, displayed Katz’s maturing talent.

Originally written in 2006, and further developed and presented as part of PlayWriting Australia’s National Play Festival 2009, Return to Earth lacks both the startling imagination of Katz’s early work and the fine-tuned control of her more recent plays. It’s very much a transitional work, and sadly, an inferior one.

Its comedy falls flat – I did not laugh once during its one hour and forty minutes running time, though admittedly many of the opening night audience around me did – and the story’s more melodramatic moments border on bathos. Nor is its combination of magic realism and melodrama ever entirely successful: early scenes are reliant on gentle domestic details which, while sweetly observed, are far from compelling, while a wild flight of fancy which comes late in proceedings feels overwrought and frankly, unnecessary. Like oil and water, the play's component parts never successfully blend.

Performances are generally strong, though Mignon, in the lead role, grated at times as a character far less emotionally mature than her peers. Forsyth occasionally overplayed her character’s moments of enthusiasm, but as the laconic fisherman, Theo, Anthony Ahern shone.

Aidan Fennesy’s direction is static and conservative, in keeping with the realist elements of the play perhaps, but definitely at odds with its occasional flights of fancy. A revolving stage was occasionally used effectively, but more often demonstrated all too literally that characters were moving on or being left behind.

Lisa Mibus’s lighting, at times subtle, at other moments otherworldly, is exquisite; the highlight of the work. Kelly Ryall’s sound design is restrained and evocative, and Claude Marcos’ set, which includes a reproduction of Katz's imagined Tathra in miniature elevated at the rear of the stage, is charming. As strong as they are, however, sadly such elements are not enough to ensure a successful or compelling production.

Rating: Two stars

Melbourne Theatre Company presents
Return to Earth
By Lally Katz
Director: Aidan Fennessy
Set & Costume Designer: Claude Marcos
Lighting Designer: Lisa Mibus
Composer/Sound Designer: Kelly Ryall
Assistant Director: Patrick McCarthy
Cast: Anthony Ahern, Julie Forsyth, Kim Gyngell, Eloise Mignon, Tim Ross, Anne-Louise Sarks and Allegra Annetta

Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
November 4 – December 17

This review originally appeared at Arts Hub on November 22nd 2011.

Holding the Man (State Theatre Company of SA)

2012-01-06T19:57:00.003+11:00

The State Theatre Company of South Australia’s final play for 2011 is a deeply moving production about love and loss, based on the acclaimed memoir by actor and playwright Timothy Conigrave.

Posthumously published in 1995, just a few months after Conigrave’s death from HIV/AIDS, Holding the Man tells the charming, frank and touching story of Conigrave’s relationship with his partner John Caleo, who he met in 1976, while the pair were still in high school. Despite their differences (John was the captain of the school football team; Tim was an aspiring actor) and the challenges posed by conservative parents, infidelity and occasional separation, their love flourished for 15 years, until John’s untimely death from an AIDS-related illness in 1992.

This new production of Holding the Man (originally staged in 2006 by the Griffin Theatre Company, and adapted for the stage by Tommy Murphy) is directed by Rosalba Clemente, a former Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia. It stars Luke Clayson as Tim, and Nic English as John. The four remaining cast members (Catherine Fitzgerald, Nick Pelomis, Geoff Revell and Ellen Steele) play multiple roles between them, including various sets of parents, horny schoolboys, Tim’s NIDA colleagues, and the strutting clientele of a gay bar.

Dramatically, Holding the Man is a play of two very distinct halves. The first act plays up the comedy – most notably in a hilarious ‘circle jerk’ scene – but after interval the tragic aspects of the story come to the fore, with a particularly poignant sequence late in the piece utilising a puppet (designed by Stephanie Fisher) to great effect. By the time the curtain fell, there was barely a dry eye in the house.

I was not entirely convinced by Luke Clayson as Tim, who never quite sold the conflicting charm and bluntness of Conigrave, but Nic English as John was superb; quiet, gentle and charming. As a couple, their chemistry was perhaps a little subdued, though both actors gave their all to their respective roles.

Of the supporting cast, Nick Pelomis was particularly memorable in his multiple roles, especially as the surprisingly compassionate mother of Tim’s friend Juliet (Ellen Steele). Catherine Fitzgerald also impressed.

When not part of the action, the actors sat in plain sight at the side of the stage, one of many insightful additions to the already deliberately theatrical script, which, as befits a play about a theatremaker, makes use of numerous stage techniques – mime, improvisational games, puppetry – to tell its story.

Morag Cook’s simple but striking design frames the action under a series of large wooden bookcases to which props are added as the story unfolds – a scrapbook, a wig – mementos of Tim and John’s shared life.

Other elements of the production, such as Mark Shelton’s subtle but focused lighting design and composer Stuart Day’s score, are equally accomplished and never intrusive. Direction in the first half felt a trifle heavy-handed, though the second half proceeded with a lighter touch, ensuring the drama flowed naturally and was never forced.

The book of Holding the Man is already an Australian classic, and I have no doubt that Tommy Murphy’s play will also come to hold such status in 20 years time. This fine production by the State Theatre Company of South Australia, while not quite up to the remarkably high standard set by the original Griffin production, will also, no doubt, be talked about for many years to come.

Rating: Four stars

Holding the Man
By Tommy Murphy
From the book by Timothy Conigrave
Director: Rosalba Clemente
Designer: Morag Cook
Lighting Designer: Mark Shelton
Composer: Stuart Day
Cast: Luke Clayson, Nic English, Catherine Fitzgerald, Nick Pelomis, Geoff Revell and Ellen Steele
Duation: Approximate 135 minutes including interval

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 21 – November 13

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on October 29th 2011.

Aftermath

2012-01-06T19:55:00.002+11:00

Compassion fatigue afflicts many in the western world due to prolonged exposure to suffering via the media. Already encouraged to think, during wartime, of an enemy as ‘other’, as something less than human, our concern and empathy for victims of war and natural disaster further diminishes when we are saturated with images of tragedy in newspapers, magazines, on television and online.

Aftermath, by the writer/director team of Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, was originally developed by the New York Theatre Workshop in 2009. Based on a series of interviews Blank and Jensen conducted with Iraqi refugees living in Jordan, the play is a remarkable exercise in humanising the people of Iraq, and a powerful antidote to compassion fatigue.

On a stage bare save for a series of chairs, eight actors take on the roles of real Iraqis: a theatre director and his artist wife; a pharmacist; an Imam; a dermatologist; a housewife and mother; a married couple, both cooks; and a translator who learned English playing computer games. The stories they tell are carefully interwoven and dramatically rich; revealing simple details of their daily lives, the chaos that followed the downfall of Saddam Hussein, and the impact and horrors of war.

A roadside bomb that kills almost every member of one character’s family; religious conflicts that seek to turn neighbour against neighbour; fundamentalists who consider artists worthy only of death; and the unspeakable indignities of Abu Ghraib; the topics explored in Aftermath are not for the faint hearted, though the script is judiciously leavened with humour at certain points, and often leaves the worst details unsaid. It is a dignified, deeply humanising piece of theatre.

Subtle lighting and sound design add to the impact of the play, and performances are, without exception, excellent. The script is careful to establish the normality of the characters’ lives in detail, gradually and deliberately building towards the more confronting elements of the work. Its impact comes like a blow to the heart that left this reviewer wiping away tears and gasping for breath.

Documentary theatre at its best, this carefully constructed, remarkably moving play is a highlight of the 2011 Melbourne Festival.

Rating: Four and a half stars

Aftermath
Text: Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen
Director: Jessica Blank
Executive Producer: Arktype/Thomas O. Kriegsmann
Production Stage Manager: Larry K. Ash
Production Manager / Technical Director: Justin Partier
Costume Designer: Gabriel Berry
Scenic Design: Richard Hoover
Based on a Lighting Design by David Lander
Produced by The New York Theatre Workshop
Original Music & Sound Designer: David Robbins
Cast: Barzin Akhavan, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Leila Buck, Daoud Heidami, Lameece Issaq, Omar Koury, Ryan Shams, Ted Sod, Rasha Zamamiri

Merlyn Theatre, CUB Malthouse
October 11 – 14

Melbourne Festival
October 6 – 22

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on October 14th 2011.

Namatjira

2012-01-06T19:51:00.003+11:00

I am accustomed, at the theatre, to occasionally wiping away tears. I am not used to being so moved by a production that I have to struggle to stop myself breaking down completely and bawling my eyes out in a snotty, sobbing mess at its conclusion.

Big hART’s account of the life of celebrated and betrayed artist Albert Namatjira left me reeling.

The basic story of Albert (Elea) Namatjira is relatively well known: the Western Arrernte man whose exquisite watercolours taught white Australians to look at their country in an entirely new way, and the first Australian Aboriginal to be granted citizenship. In 1958 he was sentenced to six months jail for supplying alcohol to members of his extended family. After a public outcry, and two appeals, the sentence was reduced to three months. Namatjira finally served two months of ‘open’ detention at the Papunya settlement in March-May 1959. Three months later he died at Alice Springs Hospital, aged just 57.

Written and directed by Scott Rankin, Namatjira was developed in close consultation with the Namatjira family, many of whom continue to be involved in the production as it is performed, bearing witness to the story and drawing their country on the set, a giant blackboard portraying the mountains, trees and plains of Namatjira’s home. It’s a beautiful touch, ensuring an authenticity that most biographical theatre works could only dream of. The other key element of the set is a striking wooden structure, its soft lines evoking the weathered strata of sandstone and shale, which sits in the centre of the stage.

Equally important to the production is Genevieve Lacey's haunting live score (played on a variety of instruments, including a gorgeous, sonorous contrabass recorder) and Jim Atkins’ sound design, enriched by the vocal talents of the performers as they sing in English and Aranda. And oh what performers they are.

As Namatjira, and a variety of other roles including the war veteran Rex Battarbee who first taught Namatjira to paint, the charismatic Trevor Jamieson is a revelation. Cheeky, playful, dignified and solemn, he switches effortlessly from character to character, displaying a deft physicality and a beautiful voice, as well as an electrifying stage presence; a bravura performance. He is ably supported by Derik Lynch, also playing a number of characters, including most memorably the young Queen Elizabeth II. Lynch demonstrates wonderful comic timing, though his playful roles become a trifle repetitive in the second half of the show; one of the only flaws in this otherwise excellent production.

As the details of Namatjira’s life unfolds on stage – his birth and family life, his missionary school education, the impact of his growing fame, and the ugly truth behind the government’s decision to award him citizenship – the audience finds themselves laughing one moment, and gasping in genuine shock a minute later as the racism of the day is bluntly revealed – most confrontingly in a voiceover taken from a newsreel detailing Namatjira’s visit to meet the Queen in 1954.

Featuring a memorable explanation of the importance of the sacred to Indigenous communities, expressed in terms white Australians can understand; and a laudable expression of hope for a better Australia (“Not this one, the one we’ve found ourselves sliding into…”) Rankin’s script is subtle, remarkable, nuanced and detailed, and is supported by an impressively realised and finely tuned production.

Namatjira is a magnificent theatrical achievement; a marvellous, deeply moving, incredibly human story of triumph and tragedy, and my current contender for the mainstage show of the year.

Rating: Four and a half stars

Namatjira
A Big hART production
Written & Directed by Scott Rankin
With Trevor Jamieson & Derik Lynch
Composer: Genevieve Lacey
Set Designer: Genevieve Dugard
Lighting Designer: Nigel Levings
Costume Designer: Tess Schofield
Sound Designer: Jim Atkins
Creative Producer: Sophia Marinos
Assistant Producer: Cecily Hardy
Community Producer: Shannon Huber

Also performed by Robert Hannaford, Genevieve Lacey, Kevin Namatjira, Lenie Namatjira, Gloria Pannka, Ivy Pareroultja, Michael Peck, Elton Wirri, Hilary Wirri.

Malthouse Theatre
August 10 – 28

This review originally appeared at Arts Hub on August 17th 2011.

Pin Drop

2012-01-06T19:48:00.003+11:00

Originally staged in an all-too-brief season at the City of Melbourne’s Arts House in 2010, this genuinely startling one-woman show by Tamara Saulwick is a theatrical exploration of the experience of fear; an evocation of those incidents, events and imaginings that cause your pulse to quicken and raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Clad in boots and a blue dress which she occasionally smoothes across her lap or picks invisible specks from, Saulwick recounts moments of genuine terror as told to her by a range of interviewees, women and girls ranging from six to 92 years of age.

Walking into your house to discover a man hiding in your wardrobe. Waking suddenly in the middle of the night as someone tries to break down your door. A late night train trip in an unknown country. A frantic race through a lonely forest. An obscene, threatening phone call.

Sometimes Saulwick embodies their stories, speaking their words in her own voice but copying their every inflection, stammer and pause. At other times she shares the stage with the interviewees’ fractured voices as their tales echo unpredictably from a series of speakers set around the theatre.

On many occasions the stage is plunged into darkness, with Saulwick’s voice whispering threats and fears; the unseen antagonist of your worst nightmares. At other times she crouches over a small light, illuminated for fleeting moments in a series of grotesque tableaux; or stands at the rear of the stage, a vast and threatening shadow looming over her.

Saulwick’s vocal mimicry of the interviewee’s voices is remarkable, her physicality controlled and assured. Only at one point, late in the show, when she talks about being paralysed with fear while executing a series of rapid, repetitive movements choreographed by Michelle Heaven, do Saulwick’s physical actions jar with her spoken narrative.

But as impressive as Saulwick’s performance is, it’s Peter Knight’s sound design that is the real star of this show: a haunting mix of brooding, blasting music, looped voices, echoing footsteps, and seemingly innocuous sounds – scissors cutting, a zip unzipping – that take on terrifying implications when amplified. Coupled with the evocative and atmospheric lighting design by Bluebottle, Knight’s sound work is striking in the extreme.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is how deeply gendered a performance Pin Drop is. While I was awed by the technical proficiency of the production and empathised with the stories Saulwick was recounting, Pin Drop failed to resonate with me emotionally. The fears explored in the performance are not my fears; they were not familiar to me. This is certainly not a criticism of the show, which is remarkable in the extreme, but perhaps an indication of the deeply personal nature of fear itself; particularly the fears that Saulwick taps into, given that all the women I spoke to after the show were deeply engaged by what they had just witnessed – even, in some cases, disturbed.

Rating: Four stars

Pin Drop
Created & Performed by Tamara Saulwick
Composer & Sound Designer: Peter Knight
Movement: Michelle Heaven
Set & Lighting Designers: Bluebottle - Ben Cobham & Frog Peck
Costume Designer: Harriet Oxley

Malthouse Theatre
July 26 – August 27

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on July 30th 2011.

Hamlet

2012-01-06T19:46:00.001+11:00

Last year’s MTC production of Richard III was widely proclaimed as a masterpiece, with particular praise heaped on Ewen Leslie’s striking performance in the title role, Simon Phillips’ bold direction, and Shaun Gurton’s revolving, West Wing-inspired set.

This year, the same creative team have re-assembled for Hamlet, with Leslie taking on the demanding role of the melancholy Dane.

There is much to like about this new production, but for all its strengths, there is something of the air of a Hollywood sequel about it; a sense of rehashing a winning formula with less successful results.

Updated into a world of power and politics where electronic surveillance is commonplace, this Hamlet sees messages delivered by mobile phones instead of by heralds and pages, an effective trick which was slightly undone by the cheap gimmick of having one of the actor’s mobiles ring during the opening scene, interrupting Claudius’s speech.

Once again the production makes full use of the Sumner Theatre’s revolving stage, with the action taking place in a set of acrylic ‘glass’ and steel; highly polished and allowing for multiple film noir-like reflections depicting Hamlet’s conflicting emotions, but also cold and stark; a set which seemed to overpower some of the actors and drain their performances of emotion on opening night, simultaneously distancing the viewer. Too, the transparent nature of the set meant that from where I was sitting near the rear of the theatre, your reviewer was often distracted by glimpses of actors and stage hands racing across the set from one side of the stage to the other, behind the action that was supposed to be the focus of my attention.

More problematic was Ian McDonald’s sound design, which was all too often invasive rather than atmospheric, and which often relied on cinematic ‘mood music’ to generate atmosphere rather than allowing the lighting and performances to set the tone.

Of the actors themselves, Leslie acquitted himself well as Hamlet, though he failed to totally sell the emotion of his character to the audience on opening night until after interval, at which point he – and the production as a whole – really kicked into gear.

Rabe is particularly strong as Gertrude; her anguish over the murder of Polonius was palpable. In the dual role of Polonius and the Gravedigger, McDonald displayed exquisite comic timing. However, the night’s most striking performance came from Eryn Jean Norvill as Ophelia, whose mad scenes were truly poignant, even heartbreaking.

Throughout this modernised Hamlet, where guards fire guns instead of drawing swords, the question of how Phillips would handle the climactic sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes nagged. The answer was simple and striking, though perhaps slightly at odds with the tone of the production as a whole. Do many scions of the unspeakably wealthy really practice fencing in this day and age?

Slick and stylish, though not always totally engaging, this production of Hamlet will certainly entertain those lucky enough to get their hands on a ticket. At the time of writing, the production is almost entirely sold out.

Rating: Three and a half stars

Hamlet
By William Shakespeare
Director: Simon Phillips
Set Designer Shaun: Gurton
Costume Designer: Esther Marie Hayes
Lighting Designer: Nick Schlieper
Composer: Ian McDonald
Fight Choreographer: Nigel Poulton
Assistant Director: Leith McPherson

Cast: John Adam (Claudius), Ian Bliss (Marcellus), Jamieson Caldwell (Player Queen), Grant Cartwright (Horatio), Travis Cotton (Rosencrantz), Ewen Leslie (Hamlet), Garry McDonald (Polonius), Robert Menzies (Player King/ Ghost), Tony Nikolakopoulos (Captain), Eryn Jean Norvill (Ophelia), Pamela Rabe (Gertrude), Tim Ross (Laertes), Brian Vriends (Osric) and Lachlan Woods (Guildenstern).

The MTC Theatre, Sumner
July 19 – August 31 Running time: Three hours 15 mins (approx) including interval

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on July 30th 2011.

Toby Francis: Blokelahoma!

2012-01-06T19:42:00.002+11:00

Judging from his short season at the second annual Melbourne Cabaret Festival, 23 year old Toby Francis – the winner of Sydney’s 8th Annual Cabaret Showcase in December 2010 – has a remarkable career ahead of him.

Possessed of a powerful tenor voice - displayed to good advantage in a selection of songs ranging from rock numbers to showtunes - as well as excellent comic timing and a gently self-deprecating wit, there were times on Wednesday night when Francis definitely felt too large for the small Butterfly Club stage, despite being very new to the cabaret world.

His debut solo show, Blokelahoma! – directed by David Campbell and previously performed at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival in June – is an engaging exploration of what it means to be a man in a post-modern world, in which Francis discourses about everything from painful hair removal incidents to coming out as an atheist to his deeply religious family.

Impressing with both his emotional and vocal range, in a show that embraced bawdy comedy as well as heartfelt emotion, Francis was at his best when belting out such familiar numbers as ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning’ from the 1943 Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and Jim Steinman’s rock epic, ‘Bat Out of Hell’.

A medley of Australian rock classics by such artists as The Angels, Divinyls, and Skyhooks also impressed, as did his poignant cover of Joe Jackson’s ‘Real Men’.

One or two minor stumbles served to remind audiences that Francis is still very new to the world of cabaret, but he quickly rose above them. Nor did he seem unsettled by the presence of his mother and grandmother in the audience, which might have inhibited less assured performers, especially in light of some of his more colourful material.

Accompanying Francis on piano and occasional backing vocals was the dextrous and versatile Andrew Worboys, whose deft performance added greatly to this already engaging production.

Keep an eye out for Toby Francis – this young man is going to be a star.

Rating: Three and a half stars

Toby Francis - Blokelahoma!
The Butterfly Club
Season concluded

Melbourne Cabaret Festival
July 19 – 24

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on July 25th 2011.

Nederlands Dans Theatre I

2012-01-06T19:40:00.002+11:00

Founded in 1959, when 22 rebels broke away from the Nederlands Ballet to form a new company dedicated to contemporary rather than classical dance, over the past 52 years Nederlands Dans Theatre has developed a global reputation for choreographic excellence and virtuosic performance.

On the opening night of their exclusive Australian season at the Arts Centre, that reputation was bolstered by the performance of three works, beginning with a dramatic solo choreographed by the company’s former Artistic Director, Jiří Kylián, Double You.

Created by Kylián in 1994, this was a work of muscular choreography performed by Bastien Zorzeto. To the accompaniment of a Johann Sebastian Bach harpsichord work, and as two large pendulums swung hypnotically at the rear of the State Theatre stage, the shirtless Zorzeto spun, slapped, pointed and whirled through this powerful piece; the slow roll of a shoulder here, the deliberate tremor of a leg there displaying a precise and controlled physicality.

After a short break came the spectacular The Second Person, a 2007 work choreographed by Crystal Pite which can feature as many as 24 dancers on stage. An exploration of the tensions between the individual and the collective, this exquisite work featured a voiceover by Kate Strong intoning phrases about memory and movement, as a troupe clad in suits and dark glasses performed against a backdrop of ominous storm clouds.

Precise formations and sharp movements contrasted with moments of individual, unfettered joy, while imaginative stagecraft that was by turns poignant and playful enriched the massed lines on display. One moment a group of dancers manipulated a rod puppet with careful, controlled gestures; the next, a dancer became the puppet, seemingly controlled by the linked arms and assured movements of the dancers gathered behind her.

Finally, after interval, came the 2005 work, Silent Screen, choreographed by the husband and wife team of Paul Lightfoot and Sol León and set to the music of Phillip Glass. A celebration of silent movies, the work made stunning use of footage projected on screens behind the dancers: a lonely shore, a bleak forest, a close-up image of a child’s eye which transformed into a whirlpool dragging our gaze down into hidden depths.

In lesser hands such footage might overpower or detract from the movement on stage; here, the cinematic sequences only enriched and complemented the exacting choreography. An intensely physical pas de deux by two dancers in white, and remarkable imagery – the highlight being the striking entry of a dancer from the audience, the vast train of her dress stretching across the entire stage – ensured the mind never wandered during this compelling and beautiful work.

I am used to being reduced to tears by cinema, and sometimes by theatre, but never before have I experienced an evening of dance so sublime that I was moved to tears of joy. It has been 14 years since Nederlands Dans Theatre last performed in Australia; after Wednesday night’s exemplary performance, I for one can’t wait for them to return.

Rating: Four and a half stars

Nederlands Dans Theatre I
Double You: choreographed by Jiří Kylián
The Second Person: choreographed by Crystal Pite
Silent Screen: choreographed by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León
Dancers: Shannon Alvis, Celia Amade, Karyn Benquet, Lydia Bustinduy, Anna Herrmann, Carolina Mancuso, Heather Myers, Sarah Reynolds, Parvaneh Scharafali, Ema Yuasa, Brett Conway, Silas Henriksen, Fernando Hernando Magadan, Menghan Lou, Jamy Meek, Georgi Milev, Jorge Nozal, Ivan Pérez, Dominic Santia, Rupert Tookey, Roger Van der Poel, Anton Valdbauer and Bastien Zorzetto

The Arts Centre, Melbourne
July 13 – 17

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on July 16th 2011.

King of Bangor

2012-01-06T19:35:00.002+11:00

Crouched over his typewriter and relying on booze, coke and pills to kick-start his imagination, horror novelist Stephen King sits tormented by writers block, waiting for the muse to strike. But rather than inspiration, his subconscious dredges up characters from his already published works to mock and torment him, as the boundaries between real life and fiction slowly begin to blur.

Written by Australian playwright, essayist, and regular contributor to horror film magazine Fangoria, Lee Gambin, King of Bangor sets out to explore the relationship between a writer and his work; examining the alchemical process by which a writer’s imagination takes personal experiences and transforms them into fiction.

Unfortunately, while Gambin is clearly knowledgable about his subject, he fails to adequately explore the writer’s psychology in compelling detail. King’s struggle with writer’s block and addiction, as depicted in King of Bangor, feels more cartoon-like than truly dramatic, an impression reinforced by Dione Joseph’s one-note direction and a tone which borders on the hysterical.

American accents are inconsistent, as are the performances, with some exceptions. Mim, who plays King’s housekeeper, demonstrates good chemistry with Peter Berzanskis as Stephen King, but when she takes on the role of an obsessive, intrusive fan (either inspired by, or the inspiration for, the crazed Annie Wilkes in King’s novel Misery) her performance needs reigning in. Of the remaining cast members, Nicholas Brien as King’s errand boy (as well as characters from Salem’s Lot and Christine) is the strongest, with Tamara Donnellan also noteworthy.

The lighting design by Roxan Bowes is simple but effective, while Gowri Paary’s set design is ill-suited to the stage and forces the actors to awkwardly clamber over and around it. The live score – provided by violinist Christine Munroe – is suitably evocative, and displays a restraint lacking in the rest of the production.

Despite its faults, King of Bangor is a passionate piece of theatre, with so much heart it virtually bleeds on stage. I may not have especially enjoyed the play, but it did inspire me to re-visit King’s oeuvre, starting with his classic vampire tale, Salem’s Lot, for which Gambin and company can take all the credit.

Rating: Two and a half stars

King of Bangor
By Lee Gambin
Directed by Dione Joseph
Performed by Mim, Nicholas Brien, Tamara Donnellan, and Reville Smith
Live music by Christine Munroe

Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall
June 29-30, July 1-2, and July 6-9
www.bellaunion.com.au
kingofbangor.wordpress.com

This review first appeared on Arts Hub on July 6th 2011.

Metropolis Reconstructed + Restored

2012-01-06T19:31:00.002+11:00

Perhaps the most influential science fiction film ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) was also the most expensive silent film ever produced, going well over its allocated budget and failing to make a profit – which perhaps explains why its distributors were so eager to see the original German print drastically cut down for the US and UK markets.

Reduced from 153 minutes to approximately 90 – cuts which significantly altered the story, as well as the film’s pacing and tone – the international release of Metropolis failed to recoup its losses, though a review commissioned by the New York Times from none other than H.G. Wells, in which he dismissed the film as “unimaginative [and] incoherent” probably didn’t help it find an audience.

Today, Lang’s magnum opus is widely recognised as a masterpiece of German Expressionist cinema, and one of the first dystopian science fictions films ever made. This is despite the fact that the Metropolis we have seen has always been a bastardised version, either the butchered American print, a cut-down German edition released by Lang’s studio, UFA, some 10 months after the film's original release, or the partially restored print created by the F.W. Murnau Foundation in 2002 (which drew on lost clips in the possession of various institutions around the world as well as title cards detailing missing scenes and sections) to approximate the film that Lang had created.

Then, in 2008, a 16mm negative of the original cut of the film was found in the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires; a sensational discovery which resulted in this reconstructed version of Metropolis, which had its premiere in 2010 in Berlin, 83 years after its original world premiere.

The film takes place in an imagined future, in the vast city of Metropolis, where its rulers live lives of idle luxury in towering skyscrapers. The workers, meanwhile, are banished below ground, and toil under frightful conditions for the benefits of their masters. When the idealistic young Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) meets Maria (Brigitte Helm) his eyes are opened to the workers’ plight, sparking rebellion, destruction, and ultimately, hope – as well as the leading to the creation of one of cinema’s most iconic robots in a scene that would influence horror and science fiction films for many decades to come.

This ‘new’ version of Metropolis, released in Australia by Madman as a two-disc DVD set, is a revelation; restoring logic to the narrative, re-emphasising important subplots (such as the long-standing rivalry between Fredersen, the ruler of Metropolis, and the archetypal mad scientist Rotwang, caused by their love of the same woman, Hel), and casting new light on the film’s almost Shakespearean exploration of doubles and mistaken identities.

Due to the poor quality of the found footage, the viewing experience is not perfect; the negative has been badly scratched in places, and black bars appear at the sides of the screen where the cut-down frame of the 16mm footage has been inserted into the print, but overall, this reconstruction of the film is remarkable.

Viewers who have never before seen Metropolis will no doubt be struck above all by its visual style: the special effects of Eugene Schufftan and the in-camera tricks of cinematographer Karl Freund, are truly breathtaking, as are the film’s vast sets and dramatic lighting. Its heightened theatricality and somewhat simple social message may grate with some viewers, but are very much of their time and add to the film’s charm.

DVD extras on this local release of Metropolis – Reconstructed + Restored include an audio commentary by Dr Wendy Haslem and Dr Angela Ndalianis from Melbourne University’s School of Culture and Communication; and director Artem Demenok’s 52 minute documentary, Journey to Metropolis (2010). The documentary highlights the staggering scale of the film, which employed 36,000 extras, and debunks some of the myths that have grown up around it, such as Fritz Lang’s claim that Metropolis was inspired by his 1924 visit to New York, when in fact he and his wife, Thea von Harbou, had already completed the screenplay before leaving for America.

An accompanying booklet featuring essays by the likes of director Terry Gilliam and Australian film historian William D. Routt is also included with the DVD.

Without Metropolis there would be no Alphaville, no Blade Runner, no Brazil. This new edition of a truly timeless and remarkable film is heartily recommended.

Five stars

Metropolis Reconstructed + Restored
Directed by Fritz Lang
Germany, 1927, 150 mins
Madman Director’s Suite
Rated G

This review first appeared at Arts Hub on July 2nd 2011.

A Golem Story

2012-01-06T19:27:00.004+11:00

Long before Frankenstein’s Monster aroused both pity and terror in a generation of film-goers, there was the Golem. Lurching out of the myths and mist of antiquity, this soulless creature of clay, animated by the name of God and designed to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution, has fascinated storytellers since at least the Middle Ages.

While references to Golem-like creatures appear as far back as the oldest books of the Bible (Adam, after all, is made of “the dust of the ground”) perhaps the most famous version of the Golem story is the landmark 1920 film by actor/director Paul Wegener, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World), ranked alongside The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922) as one of the true masterpieces of German Expressionist cinema.

Expressionistic motifs are subtly referenced throughout the Malthouse Theatre's latest production, A Golem Story. Anna Cordingley’s stark wooden set, the stage jutting out into the audience, effortlessly evokes Prague in 1580 while simultaneously recalling the haunted streets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Paul Jackson's exquisite lighting design is equally Expressionistic, but it is the sparse script by Lally Katz (Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd, The Black Swan of Trespass) which perhaps most successfully evokes the spirit of Expressionism though its focus on mood and emotion over fine detail, on archetypes over individuals.

As the play opens, a young woman, Ahava (a compelling performance by Yael Stone) awakens beneath a candle-lit chandelier, questioning all around her. A recent exorcism to remove the dybbuk (a malicious spirit) that has possessed her – the spirit of her late fiancée, Israel Hasidim, a suicide – has rendered Ahava without memory, and more importantly, without knowledge of God.

Ahava’s exorcist is the Rabbi (Brian Lipson), but while he welcomes her into the synagogue, his student, (Dan Spielman) is uncomfortable with Ahava’s presence, a fact the young man makes no attempt to hide.

While tensions exist inside the synagogue, greater dangers lurk outside. A child has been murdered, and the Guard (Greg Stone) blames the Jews. His bigotry and hatred know no bounds, and in fear of a pogrom, the Rabbi – assisted by Ahava – creates a Golem to protect the ghetto and its inhabitants.

Angered at such resistance, the Guard will go to shocking lengths to incite violence against the Jews, despite the wishes of his Emperor (Mark Jones, displaying superb comic timing), a far more reasonable man, and one with an appreciation of both aesthetic beauty and the arcane arts.

Unsurprisingly, the results are tragic, not least for Ahava, but from an audience member’s perspective they are also engrossing, engaging, and deeply compelling.

Some may find the starkness of the text underwhelming – this is perhaps Katz’s most minimal and refined work to date; a tone which the sometimes excessive Kantor matches, directing with considerable restraint. Others may miss the presence of a physical Golem, which is represented by a shimmering light, as if the animating spirit of the Lord had manifested on stage instead of an all too solid creature of clay – but then this is not an Andrew Lloyd Webber production, where stagecraft takes the place of story.

Where A Golem Story is grandiose is in its music – a haunting vocal score arranged and directed by Mark Jones (The Beautiful Losers) and performed by the whole cast – and in its deeper themes; its exploration of the ineffable and the spiritual.

Sparse, controlled, and deeply moving, A Golem Story is highly recommended.

Four stars

A Golem Story
Written by Lally Katz
Directed by Michael Kantor
Set and Costume Design by Anna Cordingley
Lighting Designer Paul Jackson
Music Director & Vocal Arrangements Mark Jones
Performed by Nicholas DeRossos, Joshua Gordon, Mark Jones, Michel Laloum, Brian Lipson, Dan Spielman, Greg Stone, Yael Stone

Malthouse Theatre
June 10 – July 2

This review first appeared on Arts Hub on June 25th 2011.

Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne

2012-01-06T19:23:00.003+11:00

If your perception of history is that it’s the dry and dusty domain of tweedy old academics, this accessible and engaging publication from the Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives (ALGA) will surely change the way you think about the discipline.

An account of the travails and triumphs of Melbourne’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex – or ‘queer’ (to use the umbrella term that has grown in popularity since it was first introduced to Australia circa 1991) – community from the 18th to the 21st centuries, the book makes no claim to be a comprehensive history. Rather, as its editors acknowledge in their introduction, it is a series of ‘snapshots, fragments, vignettes’; a collage of histories told over 51 chapters, written by 12 separate authors.

Having grown out of a series of history walks presented by the ALGA at Midsumma and similar festivals, the book’s tone is accessible, concise, and distinctly non-academic despite the qualifications and careers of its various contributors. It is also immaculately researched, with an array of footnotes providing proof of the writers’ and editors’ rigorous approach to their subject.

“The history of queer Melbourne is stored in documents, in newspapers and magazines, in police and court records,” writes co-editor and author Graham Willett in one chapter of Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, and certainly much of what we know about early queer life comes from incidents where gay or bisexual men came into contact with the law, such as the case of Yackandandah resident John Morrison, who in 1870 was sentenced to ten years hard labour for the ‘abominable crime’ of buggery. As an additional punishment, in the first six months of his sentence, Morrison was flogged three times, each time receiving 50 lashes from the cat-o’-nine tails.

Elsewhere, Willett acknowledges the difficulties of researching queer lives in periods when homosexuality was both illegal and taboo:

“When we speculate upon the sexuality and sexual identity of people who lived in times so very different to our own, we are always on uncertain ground. Unless they are caught in the act, or write about themselves in unambiguous ways, we are forced to try harder to find our way into their lives.”

The authors of Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne have clearly tried very hard indeed, and with considerable success.

From the fascinating account of bushranger Captain Moonlite (after his lover James Nesbitt was killed in a police shootout, Moonlite ‘wept over him like a child, laid his head upon his breast and kissed him passionately’ and later, throughout his trial, wore a ring on his finger made of a lock of Nesbitt’s hair) through to the flappers and ‘fast women’ of the Roaring Twenties (such as the trail-blazing Alice Anderson, who opened an all-women’s garage in Kew in 1919); from secretive wartime romances, and nocturnal assignations in Melbourne’s parks and laneways interrupted by the police, through to the gay pride movement of the 1970s and the AIDS activists of the early 1990s, three centuries of queer life are detailed, explored and entertainingly speculated upon.

The book is not without its faults – for instance, Michael Connors’ chapter on AIDS activist group ACT-UP describes the group’s 1991 ‘D-Day’ campaign (which saw the St Kilda Road floral clock deflowered in a late night raid in which the blooms were replaced with small crosses signifying the deaths of people with HIV/AIDS due to government inaction) as a ‘masterpiece of media activism’, when in reality the ensuing media storm caused the group to fracture under the pressure and blame the floral clock attack as the work of rogue elements – but overall it is an fascinating, detailed, and rewarding study of queer life in the Victorian capital.

Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne
Editors: Graham Willett, Wayne Murdoch & Daniel Marshall
Paperback, 172 pages, $40 RRP
Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives

Film review: I AM ELEVEN (MIFF 2011)

2011-07-25T23:53:00.002+10:00

Shortly after young Melburnian Genevieve Bailey’s father died, she embarked on her first trip overseas intent on doing something with her life.

Most people in her position would have thrown themselves into a series of hedonistic backpacking adventures, but not Bailey. Armed only with a digital video camera and unbridled optimism, the 20-something filmmaker set off to interview a wide range of children about their experiences of being 11 years old in a world that is changing as rapidly as they are themselves.

From Thailand and India to France and Japan, over the next four years more than a dozen 11 year olds – some affluent, some poor; no longer quite children, but not yet teenagers – spoke candidly and openly to Bailey about love, war, global warming, music, terrorism, culture, family, happiness, religion and the future.

Bailey's resulting documentary, a composite portrait of children around the world, is heartwarming, charming and life-affirming: a remarkable and engaging tapestry of young hopes, fears and dreams.

Melburnian Jamira talks about how proud she is of her Indigenous heritage and her father, who is raising her singlehandedly; young Frenchman Remi speaks passionately about his disdain for racism and his country’s failure to deal with inequality and poverty; and in Thailand, Jack and Goh share their experiences of working in an elephant sanctuary.

Bookended by Bailey’s deeply personal introduction to the documentary and a summing up of the experience of making it, the film includes sequences in which the young protagonists reveal startling insights into bullying and mental resilience, sweetly innocent attitudes towards romance and relationships, and remarkable self-awareness as they speak about not wanting to grow up too fast.

The patchwork assemblage of footage is linked together by the children’s commonalities and shared experiences, such as a series of discussions about bullying; a guided tour of their homes; a sequence of dance routines. Though one occasionally wishes for more extended interviews rather than constant snippets of discussion, the overall effect is both detailed and delightful.

At numerous times while watching the film I was choking back tears; at other moments I was laughing unrestrainedly. Insightful, compassionate and poignant, I Am Eleven is highly recommended.

I Am Eleven (Dir. Genevieve Bailey, Australia, 2011, 93 mins)

Rating: Four stars

Film review: KNUCKLE (MIFF 2011)

2011-07-23T11:05:00.007+10:00

Directed and photographed by Ian Palmer, this raw Irish documentary looks at bare-knuckle boxing matches between Irish traveller families the Quinn McDonaghs, the Joyces and others, and the long-running feud that the fights are supposed to resolve.

Palmer spent 12 years filming the families and the brutal fights staged between their representatives, with much of the story told through the eyes of James Quinn McDonagh, his family's best fighter and a man who vast sums of money - upwards of £19,000 - are wagered upon (though the question of whether the fights are now driven more by money than family honour is never clearly explored by Palmer; one of several faults in the film).

As well as filming the fights themselves (usually held on country back-roads to avoid police intervention), Palmer tries to come to grips with the tragedy that first sparked the feud: a pub brawl gone wrong that resulted in two deaths and a manslaughter charge. Few of his interviewees, including James' hotheaded younger brother Michael, and Big Joe Joyce, 'the King of the Travellers', are particularly forthcoming about the issue, and the murky question of guilt and blame, and the pointless cycle of violence and trash-talking retaliation that the families are caught up in, drives the film's occasionally muddy narrative.

At 93 minutes, Knuckle feels overlong; a tighter pace and shorter running time would have done its compelling subject more justice; and the handheld camerawork is sometimes irritatingly shaky. Nonetheless, its view of Traveller culture is unique, and Palmer's footage of the fights themselves has undeniable power. As a study of the pointlessness of violence, however, it's more than a touch repetitive.

KNUCKLE (dir. Ian Palmer, Ireland, 2011, 93 mins)
Rating: Two and a half stars

Film review: THE FAIRY (MIFF 2011)

2011-07-23T10:02:00.005+10:00

My 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has kicked off with a leisurely - and to my mind, sane - pace: two films in two days. I was asked if I'd participate in the MIFF Blog-A-Thon this year, but while flattered, I said no: given everything else on in Melbourne at the moment, including the Melbourne Cabaret Festival and State of Design, there's no way I'd have the time to see 60 films in 17 days (an average of 3.5 films a day, though six brave/insane souls have accepted the challenge, and bravo to them).

Nonetheless, I do intend to try and review most of what I see at the festival this year, though I'm well aware that time constraints and other issues will cause my blog entries to become increasingly sporadic and minimal as the festival unfolds. Nonetheless, hopefully I get to write about most of the 40-odd films I plan to see. Let's give it a shot, shall we?

THE FAIRY (dir. Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon & Bruno Romy, France/Belgium, 2011, 93 mins)

My first film at the 60th MIFF was the opening night feature; a wry, absurd and charming comedy set in the grimy port city Le Havre. After the disappointment of last year's opening night film, the muddled Australian rom-com The Wedding Party (which has yet to gain release either at the cinema or on DVD) I approached The Fairy with some trepidation. I need not have been so suspicious. It was delightful; a perfect film to kick off a night of celebrations at Melbourne Town Hall.

Dom (Abel) is a gangly, awkward clerk in a rundown hotel whose life is transformed when he meets the barefoot Fiona (Gordon). Claiming to be a fairy, she grants him three wishes, the first of which immediately come true.But is she really a fairy, or an escapee from the local mental hospital?

The question quickly becomes irrelevant thanks to the film's deft combination of slapstick, farce, magic realism, graceful dance sequences (one underwater, the other on a rooftop) and a charming array of characters, none of which are traditionally attractive - a refreshing change from the romantic leads in more mainstream fare.

Setting its tone almost immediately with a droll routine in which the increasingly frustrated Dom attempts to settle down with a video and and a late-night sandwich, only to be interrupted by a string of customers, The Fairy is a skillfully made comedy that gently reminds us of the plight of refugees in modern Europe, and of the power of love, without resorting to heavy-handed tactics or twee clichés.

Framed and shot in such a way that constantly reminds us we are watching a story - a deliberate reference to Abel & Gordon's earlier careers as theatre makers, perhaps - and featuring a hilarious car and scooter chase up a mountain acknowledging an earlier cinematic tradition, this whimsical film will certainly not be to everyone's tastes. Memorable, distinctive and gently madcap, it was a delightful way to get the 60th MIFF underway.

Rating: Three and a half stars

Review: TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY

2011-07-06T18:36:00.003+10:00

So, over at Arts Hub I've written up a review of Torchwood: Miracle Day. As is my habit, I'll post an except here, but if you would like to read the whole thing, get thee to Arts Hub!

Newcomers to Torchwood need not fear they’ll be lost in the usual convoluted back stories and continuity references of a successful TV series, for Miracle Day is at pains to introduce viewers to its world and its characters through the eyes of Matheson and his CIA assistant, Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins) – indeed, for long term fans, the drip-fed details may be occasionally irksome. That said, the pace of the first episode (written by Davies, the showrunner, and the only episode that has been provided for review) is generally excellent: it’s a fast and thrilling ride featuring a large cast of well-detailed characters, and with scenes rapidly cutting between numerous locations on both sides of the Atlantic.
Davies has a deft ear for dialogue, and the script for this first episode sparkles, featuring both one liners, and in-jokes for long-term fans of the show. It also establishes a number of plot threads to be explored in the remaining nine episodes of the season, and in the tradition of speculative fiction, raises a number of philosophical questions around the central theme of life, death and immortality that will no doubt be explored over the coming weeks.
The budget for Torchwood: Miracle Day is clearly larger than most BBC productions, given the influx of US funds from Starz, and it shows: this is a good-looking piece of television, full of swooping helicopter shots and luscious cinematography that makes the most of the show’s various locales.
The most obvious US influence is apparent in the episode’s action sequences: there are more guns, and bigger explosions, than Torchwood has ever seen before. At its heart, however, it still feels like Torchwood, albeit on a larger, more expansive scale.

Rating: Four stars

Torchwood: Miracle Day
Saturdays at 8.30pm from July 9 on UKTV
www.bbcaustralia.com/torchwood/

Review: A GOLEM STORY

2011-06-25T12:05:00.002+10:00

Unsurprisingly, the results are tragic, not least for Ahava, but from an audience member’s perspective they are also engrossing, engaging, and deeply compelling.

Read my full review of A GOLEM STORY at Arts Hub, here.

Torchwood: Miracle Day

2011-06-19T20:26:00.007+10:00

Thanks to BBC Worldwide and UKTV I've now watched the first epsiode of Torchwood: Miracle Day twice, and I like it a lot. I'm still formally formulating my thoughts about the episode, what I enjoyed and what I disliked, so a proper review will be coming soon, I promise. But trust me, it's one hell of a ride and I can't wait to see what's in store for us in the rest of the series, which premieres in Australia on UKTV at 8.30pm, July 9th.

Meanwhile, hear are some photos of the cast to enjoy:

Review: SECRET HISTORIES OF QUEER MELBOURNE

2011-06-09T20:39:00.004+10:00

“The history of queer Melbourne is stored in documents, in newspapers and magazines, in police and court records,” writes co-editor and author Graham Willett in one chapter of Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne; and certainly much of what we know about early queer life comes from incidents where gay or bisexual men came into contact with the law, such as the case of Yackandandah resident John Morrison, who in 1870 was sentenced to ten years hard labour for the ‘abominable crime’ of buggery. As an additional punishment, in the first six months of his sentence, Morrison was flogged three times, each time receiving 50 lashes from the cat-o’-nine tails...

Read the full review at Arts Hub.

Review: SUPER 8

2011-06-08T12:28:00.005+10:00

OK, so you probably know the drill by now: I've written up a review of J.J. Abrams' new film, Super 8. The review in its entirety is over here, at Arts Hub, but here's an extract to whet your appetite:

Like the young protagonists in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986), the main characters in Super 8 are in their last days of innocence before puberty sends them raging into adolescence. Their precarious position, on the cusp between childhood and their teenage years, means a very specific – and deliberate – tone permeates the film; an awareness that something threatening, powerful, and irresistible is lurking just out of sight.
This ‘puberty-as-monster’ subplot is by no means original – it’s a key theme of The Lost Boys (1987) for example – but here it’s played out subtly, more as a mood or a motif than as an overt theme of the film. Other films Super 8 references include The Goonies (1985) and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), but while the film is clearly crafted as a homage to the movies of Abrams’ childhood, it is simultaneously contemporary and engaging, playing to the sensibilities of modern 12-14 year olds as much as to their nostalgic parents.
Modern references abound – such as a scene evoking post 9/11 New York, when Joe posts a message about his missing dog on a local notice board, only for the camera to pan back and reveal his flyer is just one among dozens – alongside obvious homages to even earlier horror films, most notably Christian Nyby’s Cold War classic, The Thing From Another World (1951).
Performances are strong – particularly Elle Fanning, who is exceptional – and the film looks fantastic, though Abrams still can’t seem to resist an excess of lens flare in several key scenes, which some will find distracting. The film’s ending borders on the mawkish, but just holds back, while its evocation of period and obvious delight in referencing its cinematic forbears sometimes feels a touch contrived, and consequently occasionally distances the viewer instead of allowing one to be swept up in the drama...

So, that's my take on the film - what did you think of it?

Review: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

2011-06-01T11:40:00.004+10:00

So, last week I had the pleasure of seeing the latest addition to the X-Men franchise. You can read my full review over here at Arts Hub, but here's an extract to whet your appetite:

Set in the 1960s – the era in which Marvel Comics editor and head writer Stan Lee, together with artist Jack Kirby, originally created the X-Men comics – X-Men: First Class is a rollicking action movie, a thoughtful character study, a satisfying origin story, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) the film focuses on the friendship between two young mutants, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy, in the role created by Patrick Stewart) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender playing a young Ian McKellen), and explores the origins of the intense rivalry between them that will drive later (earlier) films in the series...

Briskly and efficiently told, X-Men: First Class feels a little disjointed and travelogue-like in its early scenes, but quickly settles down to tell its story in a way that is engaging for fans of the series and newcomers alike.

Possessing both genuine emotion (a scene between Charles and Erik in which long-buried memories of Erik’s dead mother are finally unlocked brought a tear to my eye) and moments of real exhilaration (such as the scene in which Banshee learns to fly), the film’s main fault is that it tries to pack too much into its 132 minute running time. Nonetheless, Vaughn successfully balances the many beats and plot elements of his story, capturing a swinging Sixties aesthetic and referencing some of the deeper thematic concerns of the more successful X-Men films along the way.

Three and a half stars from me, Margaret.

The changing face of me (part one in a series)

2011-05-30T19:09:00.009+10:00

Sharing a laugh with horror film maestro George Romero at Triple R on Monday July 28, 2008. (Photo by Donna Morabito)

May, 2008: Melbourne Zombie Shuffle (Photo: Brian Villamin)

Anti-racist protest, Fawkner, March 1997 (Photo by Grebo)

A punk pub-crawl, Melbourne, circa 1996 (Photo: Ian Cook)

Sarah Sands Hotel, Brunswick, circa 1990.

March, 1986, shortly after moving out of home aged 17.
(Photo: John Stewart)

Review: LOVE NEVER DIES

2011-05-30T17:52:00.003+10:00

Photo by Jeff Busby

On Saturday night, the Australian premiere of a significantly overhauled Love Never Dies - the latest blockbuster musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber - was held at the Regent Theatre. It wasn't as dreadful as some people were perhaps expecting/hoping for, but it was definitely far from brilliant.

I've written a detailed review over here, for Arts Hub, but here's a short extract to whet your appetite:

Saved from the hands of a vengeful French mob a decade ago by choreographer Madame Giry and her ambitious daughter Meg, and secretly installed as the master of a Coney Island freak show and music hall, The Phantom pines after Christine, his muse, without whom his life has no meaning and his music no inspiration (opening number ‘‘Til I Hear You Sing’).
Reunited (‘Beneath a Moonless Sky’), the Phantom begs Christine to sing for him one last time, in return for which he will pay off all of Raoul’s gambling debts and leave them in peace at last. Their reunion, of course, cannot be so easily engineered, sparking tragedy, madness, murder and betrayal before the final curtain falls.
For fans of the original The Phantom of the Opera – which this reviewer is not – the story of Love Never Dies presents several significant challenges. Characters have changed considerably in the intervening decade – romantic hero Raoul has become a boozy, bad tempered gambler, while The Phantom, formerly a masked madman who killed without compunction, is now an altogether blander, less threatening figure.
A key plot detail is equally problematic. In the parlance of fandom, the events of Phantom have apparently been ‘retconned’ (from the phrase ‘retroactive continuity’) in order to create a paternity drama that drives Love Never Dies.
Even for theatre-goers who are not ‘phans’, the story lacks cohesion. It ignores Chekhov’s advice about guns fired in the final act being visible in the first, and introduces a character’s derangement so abruptly, and so late in the piece, that it comes across as pure deus ex machina. The conclusion of the tale is anti-climactic in the extreme.
Also problematic are the musical’s songs and lyrics. The latter are leaden and expository, while musically, despite lush orchestrations, there simply isn’t a showstopper; that one grand song which catches the heart in the throat and which audience members find themselves still humming a few days later.

Still, it looks fantastic, and technically it's extremely impressive. The after party, too, was great fun, though I didn't stay too long.

So what did you think of Love Never Dies?

Review: SNOWTOWN

2011-05-08T11:49:00.004+10:00

Lucas Pittaway as Jamie Vlassakis in Snowtown

Last week I had the pleasure - if pleasure is the right word to describe such a disturbing but powerful film - of seeing the new Australian film Snowtown. I've written a detailed review over at Arts Hub, which you can read here, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Thanks in part to Adam Arkapaw’s accomplished and voyeuristic cinematography, the movie quickly and deliberately distances the audience from the events it depicts. This is not a film which asks the viewer to identify with its protagonists; rather, its actions unfold with the viewer held resolutely at arms length. Tight editing and an ominous score ensure that it remains a compelling and unsettling experience.
The involvement of mostly non-professional performers ensures that the audience is never distracted by stars pretending to be members of a socially and economically deprived underclass (a jarring flaw of Ana Kokkinos’s Blessed); and their presence, coupled with the film’s subdued realism and the filmmakers’ decision to shoot in the locales in which the movie is set, ensure an immediate and unsettling verisimilitude.
Conveying a palpable sense of menace and unease, Snowtown draws power from what it does not show, though its brief scenes of violence are disturbing in the extreme. Shaun Grant’s script is excellent, as is Kurzel’s direction. As Bunting, Henshall is a revelation: an attentive, charming monster, and utterly compelling.
The film is not entirely successful – the large cast of characters lack definition, and are occasionally indistinguishable as a consequence; while the final act of the film ... lacks the palpable sense of tension that makes the first two thirds of the movie so memorable – but overall, Snowtown is a remarkable, albeit disturbing film, and a compelling portrayal of the banality of evil.

I will be discussing Snowtown with fellow critics Cerise Howard and Tara Judah at a special 3RRR subscribers' preview at Cinema Nova this Tuesday. Perhaps I'll see you there?

More MICF 2011 review

2011-04-23T09:09:00.002+10:00

As well as reviewing for The Age this year (which is where the ten Comedy Festival reviews I've posted so far were originally published) I've also been reviewing for Citysearch and Arts Hub. For completeness sake, here's a summary of the other shows I've seen and reviewed to date:

Anyone for Tennis? - Prepare to Be Tuned
Three and a half stars

Xavier Michelides - Future World
Four stars

Zoe Coombs Marr - And that Was the Summer that Changed My Life
Three stars

Carl-Einar Häckner's Swedish Meatballs
Three and a half stars

Smart Casual - The Story of Captain Entree
Three stars

Tom Ballard - Since 1989
Three and a half stars

Hannah Gadsby - Mrs Chuckles
Four stars

Eva Johansen - Fran I Am
Three stars

Josh Earl's Love Songs & Dedications
Three stars

New Art Club's Big Bag of Boom
Four stars

MICF 2011 review; THE SUPER SECRET AWESOME SHOW

2011-04-23T09:02:00.003+10:00

In a secret bunker somewhere in central Melbourne, two brave advocates of free speech and transparent governments are preparing to announce a shocking secret that will forever change the face of Australian society. Can they evade the sinister forces arrayed against them long enough to make their revelation, or will they end up imprisoned in Australia’s version of Guantánamo Bay?

In their first show as a duo, charismatic local comedians Adam McKenzie and Tegan Higginbotham (formerly of trio The Hound of the Baskervilles) take their audience on a frenetic, occasionally self-indulgent (did we really need to see Adam's Yoda impression again?), but entertaining tour through the world of conspiracy theories and espionage, referencing everything from Mission Impossible and Mythbusters to Wikileaks and a 1966 UFO sighting in the Melbourne suburb of Westall.

Pacy and punchy, though sometimes ragged, the end result is a show that’s cinematic, distinctive, playful, and surprising – especially its climax.

Three and a half stars

Watson in The Super Secret Awesome Show
Victoria Hotel until April 24

MICF 2011 review: ROBBINS, STILSON & MOLLOY

2011-04-23T08:56:00.003+10:00

If you’re amused by blokey stand-up routines about bodily functions, misbehaving footballers and drunken strip club ejections, you’ll probably enjoy this return to stand-up by Messers Robbins, Stilson and Molloy.

With the bogan-impersonating Robbins as MC, Stilson castigating himself for supporting the Richmond football club, and Robbins making light of his current Adelaide court case by describing the presiding judge as a “fuckwit”, this was a night of cheap laughs by three crowd-pleasing comedians who gave their audience exactly what they wanted to hear.

I honestly didn't laugh once throughout their trio's entire hour, though I appeared to be the exception amidst a crowd that was noisily lapping up their every word.

Stilson’s misanthropic material was the strongest, covering numerous topics relatively quickly, though his punch lines were occasionally laboured. Robbins stuck to safely suburban material, joking about hard rubbish collections and Brendan Fevola; while Molloy made light of mobile phone scandals and home detention.

The overall impression was one of laziness from successful comedians who know they no longer need to exert themselves to entertain their fans.

Two and a half stars

Robbins, Stilson & Molloy
Melbourne Town Hall until April 24

An edited version of this review appeared in The Age on Saturday April 23.

MICF 2011 review: BIG SHOES TO FILL

2011-04-18T09:03:00.003+10:00

If making breakfast while juggling the demands of parenthood has ever seemed challenging, spare a thought for Anna Lumb. Balanced precariously in high heels, Lumb makes herself a breakfast of rice bubbles, coffee and fruit while spinning a hula hoop around various extremities, including her neck. It’s a strong opening scene for this occasionally uneven show, which employs circus, cabaret, and comedy to tell the story of a 50 foot woman in search of a new home.

Replete with B-movie imagery, a hairy sidekick, and a slideshow of tacky tourist attractions such as the Big Banana, Lumb is at her best with the production’s physical elements. Other sequences, such as a more contemplative scene set to Aretha Franklin’s ‘(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman’ are less successful.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a woman dance en pointe while wearing an apartment block on her head, this is the show for you.

Three and a half stars

Anna Lumb - Big Shoes to Fill: An Expose of a 50 Ft Woman Trades Hall until April 24

This review originally appeared in The Age on Monday April 18.

MICF 2011 review: SEXYTIME!

2011-04-14T12:51:00.002+10:00

An exploration of human sexuality told through dance and mime, Sexytime! is not a show for the shy or prudish. Performers Tessa Waters and Kai Smythe spend some of their time on stage semi-naked, and are well aware of their ability to induce laughter by wobbling a belly or jiggling a buttock; a skill they exercise regularly.

With Waters as the beehived host and Smythe a silent, hirsute stage presence, the two successfully skewer gender roles, pay homage to the 60s’ Sexual Revolution with an interpretive dance set to Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’, and satirise modern mating rituals in a hilarious extended sequence that starts in a nightclub and ends in an awkward morning after.

Opening night nerves resulted in an initially stiff performance, but the duo’s expressiveness and confidence increased as they relaxed into the show. Though covering some familiar ground, Sexytime! is an engaging, endearing, and very physical comedy.

Three and a half stars

Sexytime!
Tuxedo Cat until April 24

This review originally appeared in The Age on Thursday April 14.

MICF 2011 review: Blue Grassy Knoll - Three Short Comedies

2011-04-12T07:51:00.003+10:00

Since 1996, Melbourne quintet the Blue Grassy Knoll have played their bluegrass-inspired live scores for the silent films of Buster Keaton around the world; an inspired fusion of cinema and performance that never fails to delight.

Keaton, a stony-faced master of physical comedy, made a remarkable series of silent films between 1920 – 1929, including the features The General and Sherlock Jnr. For their Comedy Festival appearance, Blue Grassy Knoll accompanied three of Keaton’s short films, including the world premiere of their brand new score for his 1921 film The Playhouse, a homage to vaudeville notable for its innovative camera work.

The band provides a soundtrack for every aspect of the films, from carpentry and shrill voices to dramatic moments and comedic hi-jinks. Attuned to every nuance of Keaton’s performance, whether lugubrious or gleeful, their versatile scores bring his films to vivid life. The Blue Grassy Knoll are a national treasure.

Five stars

Blue Grassy Knoll - Three Short Comedies
Melbourne Recital Centre
Season concluded

This review originally appeared in The Age on Tuesday 12 April.

MICF 2011 review: ONE MAN LORD OF THE RINGS

2011-04-11T09:44:00.004+10:00

God knows what the one hapless audience member on Saturday who’d neither read nor seen The Lord of the Rings made of this mad, magnificent performance by Canadian comic Charles Ross, in which he condensed Peter Jackson’s three epic fantasy films (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King) into a single hour of hilarity, vocal dexterity, and fan-love.

With a judiciously raised eyebrow, a hunched shoulder or a guttural voice, Ross successfully and faithfully evoked the films’ numerous characters and key scenes, while simultaneously mocking the movies’ more ludicrous lines and moments.

Sometimes the humour lay in Ross’s portrayal of a character, such as a running joke about actor Orlando Bloom’s hair; at other times a knowing aside to the audience or a reference to Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ evoked gales of laughter. Definitely one for the fans, but equally definitely, brilliant.

Five stars

Charles Ross - One Man Lord of the Rings
The Arts Centre, Playhouse
Season concluded

This review originally appeared in The Age on Monday April 11.

MICF 2011 review: Buttle & Buttle

2011-04-09T10:14:00.003+10:00

As anyone who’s ever moved back in with their parents knows, co-habitation between parent and adult child entails a whole new set of rules. For comedian Mel Buttle, living with her father Barry in semi-rural Queensland means following his lead – even if it means hiding from his pet magpie.

Eager, awkward, and self deprecating, Buttle is at her funniest when discussing her own accident-prone existence, such as a cringe-inducing encounter with a dead wombat, and a painful episode involving a Religious Education teacher and a banana peel. Routines about her father’s escapades, such as his harassing neighbours in the name of koala protection, are less effective; she seems hesitant to fully engage with the material, perhaps for fear of insulting Barry by mocking him as fully as she mocks herself.

Consequently, Buttle & Buttle feels uneven; the flashes of brilliance are overshadowed by Buttle’s subdued and anxious delivery.

Three stars

Mel Buttle - Buttle & Buttle
Melbourne Town Hall until April 24

This review originally appeared in The Age on Friday April 8

MICF 2011 review: SAM SIMMONS AND THE PRECISE HISTORY OF THINGS

2011-04-06T14:57:00.005+10:00

Mining a rich vein of absurdist humour, and utilising a selection of lo-fi props, including a cardboard spaceship and a series of flipchart cartoons, broadcaster and comedian Sam Simmons’ latest show baffles and delights in equal measure.

The Precise History of Things is nominally a collection of responses to letters and emails Simmons has received at JJJ; the jumping-off point for a collection of sketches that range from toilet tips for men to an opera set in the Mexican food aisle at a Coles supermarket.

Transgressing both audience boundaries and traditional narrative structures, and featuring everything from nudist pinecones to shorts-wearing moths, the dream-logic progression of Simmons’ manic performance conceals a subtle concern for the petty cruelties of modern life. Not every element is completely successful, but anyone who can turn a packet of Continental Creamy Alfredo Pasta Sauce into an object of hilarity is truly deserving of praise.

Rating: Four stars

Sam Simmons and the Precise History of Things
Melbourne Town Hall until April 24
Tue-Sat 9.45pm, Sun 8.45pm

This review originally appeared in The Age on Wednesday April 6.

MICF 2011 review: Felicity Ward - HONESTLY

2011-04-05T07:47:00.004+10:00

For a woman who admits to suffering from an anxiety disorder, Melbourne’s Felicity Ward seems to have almost no capacity for self-censorship or shame – and if she does, she hides it well.

In Honestly, Ward presents an array of ideas and anecdotes loosely connected by the theme of frankness, ranging from her obsessions with punning shop names (‘Halal, Is It Meat You’re Looking For?’) and the public behaviour of junkies, through to weight issues and depression. Some inspired moments of audience interaction, which never seem forced or cruel, feature throughout; the highlight of which is a routine discussing the ubiquity of autotune in pop music, memorably demonstrated via an iPhone app and a volunteer.

Foul-mouthed, feisty and very funny, Ward’s expletive-laden delivery sags in the home stretch with some weaker routines about STD checks and 'sax-crimes', after which even a dynamic musical performance can’t quite recapture her earlier brilliance.

Three and a half stars

Felicity Ward - Honestly
Melbourne Town Hall until April 24
Tue-Sat 8.15pm, Sun 7.15pm
$18 - $26.90

This review originally appeared in The Age on Tuesday 5th April, 2011.

MICF 2011 review: THE HERMITUDE OF ANGUS, ECSTATIC

2011-04-03T12:37:00.004+10:00

Meet Angus, a socially inept idiot savant determined to uncover the secret formula of the universe. His awkward encounters with arrogant businessmen, cursed Collingwood beanies, Murakami-quoting junkies, and the villainously moustachioed Manobozo are about as far removed from traditional stand-up as possible, but generate scenes of exceptional, unbridled hilarity and occasional and surprising pathos.

Created by comedian Vachel Spirason and director/producer Stephanie Brotchie (Slow Clap Productions), this remarkable show – a Fringe Festival award winner – utilises dance, physical comedy, and a talking book to shape its story of virgin births, crop circles, and chocolate-coated eroticism.

Spirason’s gurning and clowning don’t always generate a laugh a minute – the hilarity deliberately shifts into occasional scenes of quiet contemplation – but his remarkably focussed physicality and precise comic timing ensure solid and consistent entertainment. Offbeat, original, and highly recommended for anyone who likes their comedy a little left of centre.

Four stars

The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic
Melbourne Town Hall until April 24
Tue-Sat 7.15pm, Sun 6.15pm
$16 - $20

This review originally appeared in The Age on Saturday April 2.

The perils of modern dating

2011-03-22T13:55:00.003+11:00

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?

Green Room Award Recipients 2010

2011-03-22T09:26:00.003+11:00

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
Original Songs: Yana Alana and tha Paranas – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert
Director: Anni Davey – Yana Alana and the Paranas in Concert
Musical Direction: Sarah Ward, Bec Matthews & Ania Reynolds – Yana Alana and tha Paranas in Concert
Innovative Use of Form: Emily Taylor – Hello You
Contribution to Cabaret: Kaye Sera

Panel: Dance
Music/Sound Composition and Performance: Ezio Bosso & George Gorga – We Unfold (Sydney Dance Company)
Design: Jacob Nash – Set – Artefact (Bangarra Dance Theatre)
Male Dancer: Tim Ohl – Mix Tape (Chunky Move)
Female Dancer: Emily Amisano – We Unfold (Sydney Dance Company)
Ensemble: Bangarra Dance Theatre – Of Earth and Sky
Concept & Realisation: Private Dances (Next Wave Festival & Natalie Cursio)
Betty Pounder Award for Choreography: TIE: Frances Rings – Artefact (Bangarra Dance Theatre) AND Stephanie Lake – Mix Tape (Chunky Move)

Panel: Theatre – Independent
Male Performer: Thomas Conroy (Henry) – Something Natural But Very Childish (Dirty Pretty Theatre / La Mama)
Female Performer: Justine Campbell (Jane Franklin) – The Fate of Franklin and his Gallant Crew (Four Larks Theatre)
Ensemble: Us (Grit Theatre / The Function Room)
Design: Sebastian Peters-Lazaro & Ellen Strasser – Set & Properties Design – Body of work (Four Larks Theatre)
Lighting Design: Bluebottle – Ben Cobham with Jenny Hector – Lighting Design & Realisation – Madeleine (Jenny Kemp & Black Sequin Productions / Arts House)
Sound / Composition: Mat Diafos Sweeney (Four Larks Theatre) – Music/Sound/Composition – Body of work
Direction: Gary Abrahams – Body of work
Production: Us (Grit Theatre / The Function Room)

Panel: Music Theatre
Direction: Richard Eyre & Matthew Bourne – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Costume and/or Set Design: Bob Crowley – Set & Costumes – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Lightning Design: Trudy Dalgleish – Hairspray (Dainty Consolidated Entertainment / Roadshow Live)
Sound: Peter Grubb – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Choreography: Matthew Bourne & Stephen Mear – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Musical Direction: Michael Tyack – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Female Artist – Leading Role: Verity Hunt-Ballard – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Male Artist – Leading Role: Geoffrey Rush – The Drowsy Chaperone (Melbourne Theatre Company)
Male Artist – Featured Role: Philip Quast – Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Female Artist – Featured Role: Esther Hannaford – Hairspray (Dainty Consolidated Entertainment / Roadshow Live)
Featured Ensemble or Full Ensemble Performance: Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)
Best Production: Mary Poppins (Disney / Cameron Mackintosh)

Panel: Opera
Production: La Sonnambula – Opera Australia
Design: Adam Gardir (set) and Harriet Oxley (costume) – Angelique (Victorian Opera)
Female Lead: Emma Matthews (Amina) – La Sonnambula (Opera Australia)
Male Lead: Peter Coleman-Wright (Harry Joy) – Bliss (Opera Australia)
Female Support: Catherine Carby (Orovsky) – Fledermaus and (Hippolyta) – Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)
Male Support: Conal Coad (Bottom/Pyramus) – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)
Conductor: Paul Kildea – The Turn of the Screw (Victorian Opera) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Opera Australia)
Director: Julie Edwardson – La Sonnambula (Opera Australia)
Lighting: Nigel Levings – Bliss (Opera Australia)

Panel: Theatre - Companies
Lighting Design: Rachel Burke – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)
Set/Costume Design: Shaun Gurton (set) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)
Sound / Composition: Jethro Woodward (composer) – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)
Female Actor: Alison Whyte (Queen Elizabeth) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)
Male Actor: Ewen Leslie (Richard) – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)
Direction: Simon Phillips – Richard III (Melbourne Theatre Company)
Production: Thyestes – Malthouse Theatre / Hayloft Project
Ensemble: Thyestes – Malthouse Theatre / Hayloft Project

Association Awards
Lifetime Achievement Award: Carrillo Gantner AO
Technical Achievement Award: David Miller, Production Manager, Malthouse Theatre
Award for Outstanding Contribution to Melbourne Theatre: Lisle Jones
Best New Original Writing for the Melbourne Stage: Declan Greene – Moth (Malthouse Theatre / Arena Theatre Company)
Best Adaptation for the Melbourne Stage: Simon Stone, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan & Mark Winter – Thyestes after Seneca (Malthouse Theatre / The Hayloft Project)

More from the Melbourne Queer Film Festival

2011-03-20T14:21:00.005+11:00

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 Hobart, this gleefully gory, tongue in rotting cheek comedy pitted a lesbian couple and their homophobic neighbours against a zombie apocalypse, with entertaining results. The final musical number about zombie pride fell a little flat, but otherwise this little film was a real charmer. Bonus points for the inventive use of a dildo as an improvised weapon, too.

Conversely, Katrina Del Mar's Hell on Wheels: Girl Gangs Forever promised so much but failed to deliver. What could have been an inventive comedy set in a world of skateboarding girl gangs and roller derby was a badly scripted, limply directed, overlong mess. I could see what it was aiming for, but it fell well short.

Thankfully, the films in Short and Girly were of a higher standard, though there will still a couple that only barely limped across the finish line. The best of the bunch by a country mile was Gina Hirsch's concise, warm and witty You Move Me, a comedic celebration of friendship and an evocative demonstration of the film-making adage that less is more. With a sharp script, well developed characters and strong performances, this rare gem of a lesbian buddy movie stood head and shoulders above all the other films in the package.

Written and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair (who also stars in the film as the out and outgoing dance & drama teacher Loris), the UK teen drama Fit was a real charmer despite being occasionally hindered by its overly earnest and self-consciously educational script.

Adapted from a play designed to address anti-homophobic bullying which has successfully toured UK schools and institutions, the film explores the lives of a disparate group of teens, some of them struggling with their sexuality, other struggling with their peers' preconceptions about their sexuality. There's the closeted gay jock, the straight tomboy who everyone mistakenly assumes is a lesbian, the homophobic bully who is himself bullied by his father, and a range of others who have been brought together in a hip hop dance class at their school for kids who are struggling in the education system.

Is it a trifle over-earnest? Yes. Does it wear its heart on its sleeve? Yes. But the performances are excellent, its message is important, and its vibrant approach to equality and tolerance makes for an engaging, ebullient and delightful film which I thoroughly enjoyed.

21st MQFF review: LA MISSION

2011-03-20T09:23:00.003+11:00

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.

The film is somewhat beholden to its traditional three-act narrative structure, and key plot elements unfold with a degree of predictability, but La Mission tells its story with charm and verve thanks to powerful and believable performances from its lead actors, and a script that only occasionally crosses the line into cliché (though when it does, it turns the cliché meter up to 11).

Characters are quickly and deftly sketched, save for Jesse’s boyfriend, who remains little more than a cipher; and the tensions that underpin the film – generational conflict, the shifting demographics of the Mission – are alluded to subtly but effective through the soundtrack, where the youthful voice of hip hop clashes with the funk and soul of Che’s generation.

By the time the film moves into its third act, Che’s battle to avoid the bottle is as constant as his struggle with his son’s sexuality, ensuring that he remains a fascinating and engaging character despite his violent outbursts and old-fashioned, unforgiving machismo.

A tighter pace (and less reliance on unsubtle visual symbolism) would have ensured a stronger film, but its drama packs a punch and the chemistry between its two main leads is palpable. Overall, La Mission overcomes its flaws to become a rewarding and engaging portrait of a man in crisis, and of a father and son – and a community – struggling to adapt to change.

This review originally appeared on Arts Hub.

21st MQFF review: KABOOM

2011-03-20T09:16:00.005+11:00

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 the secrets that lie behind it. In the days that follow, Stella hooks up with the obsessive, supernaturally gifted Lorelei (Roxane Mesquida), and Smith encounters the red-headed woman from his dreams while tripping – only to see her murdered by a pack of animal-masked men, who soon start stalking Smith himself across the campus.

Soon events start to spiral out of control, and the plot threatens to follow. Smith hooks up with a handsome stranger at a nude beach, meets a potential love interest at a concert performed by Texan post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, and discovers the existence of a doomsday cult whose machinations threaten to bring about the end of the world.

This gleefully deranged comedy-drama features many of Araki’s familiar trademarks, including witty one-liners, a colour-saturated design aesthetic, provocative statements about the construction of personality and sexuality, and a dynamic soundtrack featuring a who’s who of contemporary alternative music, including The XX, The Horrors, The Big Pink, Yeah Yeah Yeah and Interpol.

The film’s heady blend of elements may not be especially deep, but Araki is cleverly enjoying himself as he splashes about in the shallow end of the cultural pool, mixing and matching genres with gay (or omnisexual) abandon.

Kaboom blends a hefty dose of horror film and science fiction tropes into its hot-blooded story of sexual and personal awakening; and rockets along at a breakneck pace, ensuring a wildly enjoyable ride for audiences in tune with Araki’s slyly subversive and playful approach to filmmaking.

Kaboom opens in limited release at Cinema Nova on Thursday 27 March.

Review: HOWL

2011-03-14T12:55:00.005+11:00

“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 obscene” was a significant landmark for freedom of artistic expression.

As writer Fred Kaplan noted in Slate, the court case was ‘serious business':

'If Ferlinghetti had been found guilty, Capt. William Hanrahan, the juvie chief who arrested him, was going to send his cops to sweep the filth from every bookstore in the city – he'd drawn up a long list of titles – and San Francisco, which was just emerging as an avant-garde haven, would have retreated into backwater provincialism for years, if not decades.’

In the hands of Academy Award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet), the obscenity trial becomes the dramatic centrepiece of a new docu-drama that explores Ginsberg’s creation of ‘Howl’ and the poem’s lasting cultural impact as a transcendent work of 20th century literature.

Based on court transcripts and a 1957 interview given by Ginsberg, the film uses carefully orchestrated re-enactments and archival footage to capture the spirit of the times, and vivid animation to convey the poem’s dramatic imagery. Also interwoven throughout the film is a vivid recreation of Ginsberg’s first dramatic reading of ‘Howl’ at San Francisco’s Six Gallery on October 7, 1955; a night which Kerouac would later immortalise in his novel The Dharma Bums.

Set in 1957, both the trial – featuring Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as defence attorney J.W ‘Jake the Master’ Ehrlich and David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Ralph McIntosh – and the extended interview with a strikingly frank Ginsberg are shot in colour. Flashback sequences showing the creation of the poem and other key episodes from Ginsberg’s life are shot in crisp black and white.

The film leaps back and forth across its various timelines, with the hallucinatory animated images designed by artist Eric Drooker further complicating its narrative. The overall effect could have been dizzying and confusing; instead, like ‘Howl’ itself, the film is inspiring and ecstatic.

As the young Ginsberg, James Franco is brilliant, capturing the poet’s clipped and awkward speech patterns; his frustrated love for Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and the “cocksman and Adonis of Denver,” Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott); and his lasting guilt over his mentally ill mother, Naomi, whose lobotomy papers Ginsberg had to sign at the age of 21.

The animated sequences are occasionally a trifle literal, but they also provide an emotional component which is otherwise absent from the film, particularly when illustrating parts II and III of ‘Howl’; and Beat Generation devotees will enjoy spotting scenes which the filmmakers have recreated directly from Ginsberg’s own photographs, such as Kerouac smoking on a New York fire escape, and Allen and his lover Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) sitting back to back, like one of Plato’s Children of the Sun reunited at last.

The film’s production design, by Thérèse DePrez, is detailed without being flashy, Jake Pushinsky’s editing is excellent, and Carter Burwell’s original music sensitively and generously compliments the action on-screen.

Cleverly cast and imaginatively made, Howl is a fitting testament to the power, beauty and passion of Ginsberg’s poetry, and a fascinating fusion of cinematic forms. At the time of writing it is showing on a single Australian screen, at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, prior to a Madman DVD release later this year. It deserves a much wider audience.

Xanadu the Musical

2011-03-05T17:17:00.006+11:00

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 inaudible. I had to strain to hear anything that was said on stage, and once the singing started, the lyrics were muffled and indistinct, even though the music itself seemed hardly loud.

My view of the stage, too, was terrible, with a large tentpole (which doubled as a major lighting rig) blocking a significant degree of the action. I don't mind tickets being sold with a poor view of the stage if they are advertised as 'impeded view' or 'restricted sight lines', but there is absolutely nothing to that effect on the Xanadu the Musical website, which I think is disgraceful.

Had I actually payed for my seats I would have been furious; as it was I was deeply frustrated with the situation, and extremely concerned for those people around me, paying customers including a young child and two elderly women who were becoming increasingly distressed at being unable to clearly hear or see anything of the musical they had come to see.

Based on my experience of the show, I cannot recommend Xanadu the Musical to anyone - unless perhaps (based on the opening night reviews in today's Age and Friday's Herald Sun) you're sitting in the $155.90 a head VIP seats, where sound quality and sight lines were apparently a non-issue.

A Behanding in Spokane

2011-03-05T17:07:00.004+11:00

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 him “across this sad, decaying nation” for almost 30 years.

Carmichael has come to meet a young couple, white trash Marilyn (Nicole da Silva) and African-American grifter Toby (Bert LaBonté) who claim to have his hand for sale. Also present is the strange and sardonic Mervyn (Tyler Coppin), a lonely hotel clerk who expounds upon his curious outlook on life in a rambling and imaginative monologue about lesbians, monkeys, and high school massacres that somewhat awkwardly occupies the play’s middle third.

What unfolds between these four characters on Christina Smith’s perfectly realised set provoked laughter, shocked gasps and some genuine surprises on the production’s opening night.

This pitch black comedy is not for the easily offended, with McDonagh’s expletive-laden script featuring enough racial epithets to shock even a Cronulla rioter, and an abundance of grand guignol humour. But for those with the stomach for the playwright’s playfully warped view of the world – typified by a speech late in the piece in which Carmichael screams down the phone at his equally racist mother in order to re-establish his white supremacist credentials – there is much to enjoy.

Peter Evan’s direction keeps the unfolding series of increasingly bizarre events skilfully on track, with Ben Grant’s subtle sound design gently adding to the mood and tone. Performances are mostly strong, especially Moody as the grimly single-minded Carmichael, though da Silva failed to impress with her bland take on an admittedly underwritten character. Conversely, LaBonté excelled as a cringing, weeping petty criminal, showing impeccable and impressive comic timing at every turn.

Darkly entertaining and perversely engrossing, this pitch-black comedy is highly recommended.

A Behanding in Spokane
MTC Sumner Theatre
February 5 – March 19

This review originally appeared on Arts Hub.

The Wau Wau Sisters' Last Supper

2011-03-05T16:49:00.005+11:00

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 witty dialogue, entertaining ad libbing, and some pretty impressive physicality. It quickly becomes apparent that the duo's comedic timing is excellent, as are their circus skills, though the latter only really come into their own later in the show, when willing audience members are hoisted aloft on Truscott and Gagne’s taut and muscular legs in an impressive display of acrobalancing.

With a surreal sensibility reminiscent of local duo The Town Bikes, The Wau Wau Sisters’ Last Supper is an accomplished show which nonetheless fell a little flat in spots on its opening night, particularly during changeovers between acts, but the energy of the two performers soon lifted proceedings back to a more manic level.

A double trapeze act late in the piece was a particular highlight, showcasing the pair’s well honed athleticism and remarkable rapport; and their audience participation was engaging without ever being cruel.

By the time we reached the show’s bacchanalian climax – complete with red wine poured over the pair’s bare breasts and audience members dressed as satyrs devouring bunches of grapes – the repeated transgressions of religious and sexual taboos were growing perhaps a little thin, but overall the show rose above such minor faults to genuinely entertain.

If you have strong religious beliefs this is not the show for you, but for this particular godless sodomite the fare on offer at The Wau Wau Sisters' Last Supper definitely satisfied.

The Wau Wau Sisters’ Last Supper
The Famous Spiegel Garden at the Arts Centre
March 1 – 6

This review originally appeared on Arts Hub.

FebFasting

2011-02-07T12:23:00.004+11:00

As of February 1st I decided to try and give up drinking for a month.

I'm doing this - unofficially, at present - as part of a fundraising event called FebFast. The reason it's unoffical is that I'm flat broke (work didn't pay me last week as scheduled due to an issue with invoices and a new purchase order number) so I can't pay the necessary registration fee. Hopefully I get paid tomorrow though, at which point I'll be an officially paid up FebFaster. Huzzah.

Last year I failed spectacularly at FebFast, falling off the wagon after only three days and not getting back on. This year - perhaps because I made a second, more concerted effort to abstain from alcohol later in the year - I'm doing much better.

At the time of writing I'm six days' sober, part way through the seventh day, and finding the whole affair considerably easier than when I tried temporary sobriety last year. Instead of being anxious about not drinking and regularly craving booze, the past week has been significantly calmer and easier. Only in the first two days did I have minor cravings for alcohol, and they were easily quashed.

My reasons for doing FebFast are varied, but include wanting to lose weight and wanting to gain control over my drinking habit, which regularly saw me downing an entire bottle of wine or a six-pack of cider a night.

Since I first got drunk at 14, I've been a regular drinker; a heavy drinker at certain stages of my life, such as the last six to eight months, and for the year or so after my dad died when I was in my early 20s. To my knowledge, the longest I've ever gone without a drink in the last 29 years has been six days - that was last year, when I was seeing a counsellor to help me quit. This year I'm doing it on my own (though with a lot of peer support via social media).

I'm determined to break last year's personal record of six days sober; and then to push on through the month, and perhaps beyond. I'm doing it baby steps though: the first goal is to get through seven days completely alcohol free, a goal I'll achieve at the end of today; then ten days, and so on.

Whether I give up drinking for good remains to be seen (it's certainly something I've considered in recent months) but once thing's for certain: I've already proved to myself that I'm in control of my drinking, rather than the alcohol controlling me.

Midsumma: PRODIGAL and THE BLUE SHOW

2011-02-01T18:58:00.006+11:00

Melbourne's queer cultural festival Midsumma is in full swing at the moment. For a range of reasons (including being broke, tired, lethargic, having a head full of other projects to organise and stress about, and doing a week of breakfast radio - as well as the fact that I've seen enough bad gay art over the festival's 22 years to last me a lifetime) I've only seen a handful of shows so far this year, although I plan to rectify that this evening by attending another production.

My Midsumma highlight to date was definitely the latest from Circus Oz, The Blue Show, an intimate and brilliant production in the company's new Spiegeltent. Set in the lifeless and barren surrounds of the docklands, the contrast once you stepped inside the gilt and mirrored interior of the Melba Spiegeltent was simply remarkable.

The intimate scale of the venue, coupled with director Annie Davey's challenge to the performers to push themselves creatively while exploring the theme of 'blue' (from having a blue, to having the blues), made for a brilliant night. Seeing Circus Oz perform in their Big Top is one thing, but seeing the performers from only a metre or two away as they balanced, swung, clowned about, danced, sang and were generally amazing - sometimes directly overhead - was a whole new experience.

From inventive things with bubblewrap to a nerve-wracking group juggling routine (which began with hard hats being handed out to audience members in the front row), The Blue Show was simply first class.

This Midsumma I've also seen the 11th anniversary revival of the award-winning Australian musical Prodigal, which had its World Premiere in the festival back in January 2000. A contemporary take on the biblical parable of the prodigal son, I've reviewed it in detail here, over at Arts Hub, but here's a quote or two to give you an impression of what I saw:

Briskly and effectively told, Prodigal is a stripped back production featuring five performers (one of whom plays two roles) and a single pianist, Mark Jones (The Beautiful Losers).
It tells the story of 18 year old Luke (2010 WAAPA graduate Edward Grey), who has grown bored of life in his home town of Eden on the south coast of New South Wales; a ‘Picture Postcard Place’ where he lives with his family, fisherman father Harry (Peter Hardy), housewife mother Celia (Anne Wood) and knockabout older brother Kane (Adam Rennie).
After running away from home Luke reinvents himself in Sydney; coming out, studying, sharing a flat with performance artist Maddy (Christina O’Neill), and discovering the pitfalls and pleasures of the gay scene with his new boyfriend Zach (Adam Rennie again).
Before long a fondness for partying hard and drug-taking has caused Luke to hit rock bottom, forcing him to return home for a painful reunion with his estranged family.
With a strong story that occasionally suffers from compressing events in order to keep the show moving – such as Luke’s descent into drug use, which is so tightly telescoped that it lacks dramatic impact – Prodigal is definitely entertaining, but it feels too much like a promising first show from talented young writers – which is exactly what it was when it premiered 11 years ago.

If you'd like to read the full review, you can do so here, as I said. Enjoy the festival!

A new theatre blog to visit

2011-01-31T11:21:00.003+11:00

Playwright Robert Reid has launched a new venture; a combined blog and podcast called Flashing Twelve O'Clock. Go visit!

Review: Don Parties On

2011-01-22T12:41:00.003+11:00

Last week I attended the world premiere of Don Parties On, the latest work from Australian playwright David Williamson, at the MTC. I was less than impressed. My full review is available at Arts Hub, here, but here's a snippet to whet your appetite:

"Around sound-bites of Kerry O’Brien discussing the unfolding 2010 election results, Williamson’s assemblage of characters bicker, bellow, and pontificate. Here one of the first flaws of the play becomes quickly evident: these constructs don’t speak in dialogue, they talk in exposition and rhetoric, sounding more like Williamson himself than well realised characters.

Too, they’re thinly drawn; two dimensional at best (with the sole exception of the caustic and cutting Jenny, who brings some much needed life to the party when she arrives). At worst, in the case of the snivelling man-child Richard and Roberta, his drama queen lover, they’re totally one dimensional; an impression that is not helped by both Gilshenan and Shiels badly overplaying their roles, a fault that can only be laid at the feet of director Robyn Nevin, who should have pulled them back.

Other faults in the production, such as the static blocking of the characters on stage, are definitely Nevin’s fault also, but most of the flaws in the play are clearly Williamson’s."

Happy reading!

Farewell to 2010 part one: Cinema

2011-01-03T13:03:00.021+11:00

I didn't see anywhere near as many films in 2010 as in previous years, as a consequence of investing more heavily in the performing arts over the past 12 months, but I still managed to get to the cinema 56 times to see a range of new releases and festival-only flicks. More than most people, obviously; considerably less than my many professional film-reviewing friends.

Since I missed out on quite a few of the so-called 'best' films of the year (e.g. The White Ribbon, Un prophète) I'm going to list my personal favourites - the films that most moved or excited me - rather than claiming that these are the absolute cinematic highlights of the year.

In the order in which I saw them, then, here's my Top Ten for 2010:

Precious (Dir. Lee Daniels, USA, 2009)
A harrowing film about redemption, Precious is the story of an obese, illiterate African-American teenager (Gabourey Sidibe) who is pregnant to her own father for the second time; whose mother belittles and beats her; but who refuses to let life grind her down. The film’s grim nature may put some people off, and certainly the cavalcade of misery Precious lives through is difficult to stomach, but while director Lee Daniel doesn’t skimp on the grim details of the story, he also imbues the film with a palpable sense of grace. Harrowing and difficult viewing, but ultimately uplifting and inspiring.

Children of God (Dir. Kareen Mortimer, Bahamas, 2009) A powerful and beautiful story about love, fear and religious intolerance set in 2004, when anti-gay hysteria was at a violent peak in the Bahamas, Children of God is the island nation's first gay feature film, and screened at the 2010 Melbourne Queer Film Festival. The stories of three people - a young gay artist, a closeted black man, and the deeply religious wife of a closeted Christian pastor - slowly intertwine in this intelligent, exquisitely shot and emotionally bruising drama.

The Man Who Loved Yngve (Dir. Stian Kristiansen, Norway, 2008)
A breath of fresh air for that tired old genre, the coming out film, this charming coming of age film from Sweden also showed at the 2010 MQFF, having previously screened in 2009 at the Nordic Film Festival (which sadly appears to have vanished off the festival calendar following its one-off appearance that year). Set in 1989, and opening with a direct-to-camera monologue that quickly establishes the light and engaging tone of the film, The Man Who Loved Yngve centres on Jarle Klepp (Rolf Kristian Larsen), a bored teenager living in Norway’s oil capital, Stavanger, whose life in turned upside down when he falls in love with a new student, Yngve (Ole Christoffer Ertvåg). Incisive direction ensures that the film authentically captures the heartbreak and joy adolescent romance; and the film’s refusal to resort to cliché - and the filmmakers’ decision not to pigeonhole Jarle’s sexuality (films acknowledging bisexual identity are rare on the queer festival circuit) - were especially welcome.

Animal Kingdom (Dir. David Michôd, Australia, 2010)
The most highly acclaimed Australian film of the year, David Michôd's debut feature is a truly remarkable, albeit low key, domestic drama about a family of career criminals; and was partially inspired by the 1988 murder of two young policemen in Walsh Street, South Yarra and the unsuccessful court case which followed. Central performances from Jacki Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn and understated newcomer James Frecheville are all excellent, as is the sound design; and the film caught my attention right from the word go thanks to its understated and surprising opening scene. Rather than a flashy, high-octane gangster flick, Michôd has crafted an oppressive, subtle and powerful drama, where suspense is created by the camera lingering and holding a shot instead of leaping from scene to scene. It’s a remarkably confident debut feature, and a truly compelling film.

Fish Tank (Dir. Andrea Arnold, UK, 2009) Set on a housing estate in rural Essex, Fish Tank for me featured one of the best performances of the year: a fragile, violent, angry and compelling turn by untrained actor Katie Jarvis making her screen debut. Andrea Arnold's second feature film as director features characters who are simultaneously unlikeable and deeply sympathetic, explores themes of alienation and sexual awakening, and casts a bleak eye over the fractured families of modern Britain. Grim but powerful, it unfortunately seems to have been one of most overlooked films to be released in Australia in 2010, and more's the pity, for it certainly deserved a wider audience.

Inception (Dir. Christopher Nolan, USA, 2010) Though initially over-hyped, and then consequently suffering somewhat from a critical and popular backlash, Nolan's intelligent blockbuster Inception was certainly one of the standout films of the year. It's dreams-within-a-dream approach to the plot may have confused some audiences but I found it an engaging storytelling construct; and its reliance on characters over CGI (though when such effects were used, they were dazzling) made for a winning cinematic experience. And for me, anything that gives UK actor Tom Hardy wider exposure has got to be a good thing.

Red Hill (Dir. Patrick Hughes, Australia, 2010) Kinetic direction, strong performances, superb cinematography and an excellent sound design made for an impressive first outing for directorial newcomer Patrick Hughes. This contemporary western set in Australia's high country, around Omeo in regional Victoria, failed to connect with audiences at the box office, which was a real shame given the way it successfully presented the issue of relationships between Indigenous and White Australians under a cop movie veneer.

Winter's Bone (Dir. Debra Granik, USA, 2010) Debra Granik’s second feature film is a vivid exploration of the lives of the USA’s working class and the impact methamphetamines have had on their lives; and a chilling and compelling slice of rural noir set in the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri. As the young lead, Jennifer Lawrence was outstanding - if she doesn't get an Oscar nomination I'll be very much surprised - while the supporting cast, and the film's vivid captured sense of place, are equally compelling. Every scene in Winter's Bone breathes authenticity on rank, whiskey-scented breath; it's a grim yet restrained masterpiece.

I Love You Philip Morris (Dir. Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, USA, 2009)
Gleefully offensive, wonderfully romantic, and featuring an electrifying chemistry between its two male leads, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, this hard-to-believe-it's-based-on-a-true-story-but-it-is prison rom-com was hands down the funniest film I saw all year. The fact that it still hasn't got distribution in Australia is nothing short of criminal.

Boy (Dir. Taika Waititi, New Zealand, 2010)
This ebullient, hilarious and charming film about an 11 year old boy called Boy (James Rolleston) successfully combined comedy, pathos and nostalgia its its evocation of a 1980s childhood spent in rural New Zealand. Part coming of age story, part family tragedy, it's hilarious, heartfelt and absolutely delightful.

Honourable mentions: Bran Nue Dae, The Road, Welcome, The Kids Are All Right, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, The Social Network, The King's Speech.

Dishonourable Mentions: The Wolfman, Robin Hood, The Wedding Party, Clash of the Titans.

Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

2010-12-01T16:49:00.006+11:00

Based on the best-selling children’s fantasy novel by CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and a none-too-subtle Christian allegory about the quest for a spiritual life.

As in the first two films (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian), the film’s protagonists are children from our world – specifically England during World War II – who find themselves drawn into the magical world of Narnia, where animals talk and mythological creatures such as dragons and fauns coexist with human beings.

In this latest installment of the franchise, filmed in Queensland, Edmund Pevensie (Skandar Keynes) and his younger sister Lucy (Georgie Henley), along with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter), are swallowed by a painting and transported back to Narnia, only to find themselves floundering in the Great Eastern Ocean, far from land.

Rescued from drowning by King Caspian (Ben Barnes, returning to the role he first played in 2008’s Prince Caspian) and a warrior mouse named Reepicheep (voiced by Simon Pegg, taking over from Eddie Izzard, who voiced the character in the previous film) the children are taken aboard Caspian’s ship, the dragon-prowed Dawn Treader, on a quest to uncover the fates of the seven lost Lords of Telmar, the exiled best friends of Caspian’s murdered father.

As the companions sail into ever further into the unknown east, they must overcome personal temptations, explore mysterious islands, and fight dreadful foes before they can be reunited with their friend and protector, the great lion, Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson).

Whereas the first film of the franchise was all-too-faithful to the book it was based upon, giving the cinematic version of the story no room to breathe, and the second film took considerably more creative liberties with the text, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader sits somewhere between the two. Unfortunately, despite rearranging elements of the story to suit the storytelling conventions of cinema, screenplay writers Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Michael Petroni, together with director Michael Apted (the Seven Up! series) have failed to create an engaging or satisfying film.

Fans of previous entries in the franchise will question such elements as the loss of Caspian’s Spanish accent, which has vanished completely, while film buffs will question the necessity of much of the film’s awkward and laboured dialogue (which relies heavily on clichés, such as the line uttered by the wizard, Coriakin (Bille Brown): “To fight the darkness out there, you must first defeat the darkness within.”).

Action scenes are brief and generally unsatisfying, save for a dramatic battle with a sea serpent late in the film, while overall the film feels episodic, like a bad road movie – hardly surprising given the plot’s reliance on voyaging from island to island in search of the lost lords and their magic swords.

The CGI is often poor – typified by a distinctly unconvincing sea nymph, or nereid – and not even the appearance of a dragon can lift the film’s generally flat and stilted feel; while its post-production conversion to 3D adds nothing to the story.

One of the few pleasures of watching The Voyage of the Dawn Treader comes from spotting various Australian actors playing supporting and minor roles, including the aforementioned Brown as well as Bruce Spence, Roy Billing, Terry Norris, and most prominently Gary Sweet as Lord Drinian, the Captain of the Dawn Treader (though his accent, which shifts from Irish to Scottish to English at various points in the film, distracts from his performance).

Performances from the young leads, especially Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie, have improved dramatically since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although Will Poulter’s Eustace Scrubb is perhaps a bit too unlikeable; and to the film's credit it is well-paced and never drags, though this seems to have been achieved at the cost of fleshing out some scenes in the journey east.

Finally, as an atheist, I found the film’s heavy-handed approach to its religious subtext more than a little galling. Constant reference is made to the importance of faith; the character’s individual struggles with temptation throughout the film clearly reference the Seven Deadly Sins (well, most of them – there’s no room for lust in a PG-rated fantasy); and the final scene, in which Aslan is directly equated with Christ, was almost too much to bear.

Truly it seems that, in the words of CS Lewis biographer and academic Alan Jacobs, Narnia’s creator has become ‘a pawn in America’s culture wars’.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader opens nationally on Thursday December 2.

Happy 47th birthday, Doctor Who

2010-11-23T20:24:00.003+11:00

I can't remember life before Doctor Who.

The iconic British science fiction program, which premiered in the UK on this day, November 23rd in 1963, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. While there were periods where my love for the program waned (such as the mid-to-late 1980s, after I moved out of home in January 1986 at the age of 17 into a share house with no television, meaning that I missed almost all of the Sixth Doctor and the entire run of Sylvester McCoy's mischievous and manipulative Seventh Doctor; nor did I see the Doctor Who telemovie when it screened on the ABC on July 7, 1996, the day after my 29th birthday) the series - and its mad, time-travelling protagonist in his stolen blue box - has always been close to my heart.

According to my mum, our family accidentally discovered Doctor Who some time in the very early 1970s, when Jon Pertwee was playing the role of the Third Doctor. We were, she tells me, collectively hooked after just one episode, and thereafter it was a Watts family ritual to sit down to dinner at 6pm so that we were ready to watch the Doctor's latest adventure (or the endless repeats of certain episodes the ABC showed with monotonous regularity in the late 70s and early 80s) at 6.30pm, just before the news.

My sister, who is older than my by two years, says she, like me, cannot remember life without the Doctor.

While none of us can pinpoint the exact moment our family became Doctor Who fans, research leads me to believe that my family's accidental discovery of the Doctor - driven, I suspect, by my science fiction loving father, who similarly introduced me to 2001: A Space Odyssey and later the writings of Asimov and Clarke at an early age - may well have been in July 1971, shortly after I had turned four. It was that year that the ABC began to screen the Third Doctor's first adventures (in black and white, as the ABC didn't begin broadcasting in colour until 1975), starting with Pertwee's very first episode, Spearhead From Space.

While I can't remember it, it seems logical to think that the ABC's promotion of a new series of Doctor Who, with a new actor in the title role, would have caught my dad's attention; and once we'd watched the program, sparked my whole family's imagination.

Today, decades later, we all still love Doctor Who. My father died on March 9th 1989, but my mother, my sister, her husband and two children, and most definitely myself still love the program. As I write this, there are small figures of the Third, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors standing on my desk (together with a Cyberman and an even smaller TARDIS), and come Boxing Day I have no doubt that the three generations of my family will be gathered together to watch the new Christmas special, A Christmas Carol.

A time-travelling hero whose brains and non-violent approach to the universe around him will triumph over brawn, no matter whether his opponents are Daleks, Cybermen, Zygons or Sontarans. A clown, a dandy, a bohemian, an alien who can never quite belong to the world around him. A madman in a blue box.

Whoever he is, wherever his adventures in time and space take him, I will never stop loving Doctor Who.

Happy 47th birthday to my favourite Time Lord and to a remarkable, inspiring, entertaining and wonderful television program.

Interviewing Ryan Kwanten (naked)

2010-11-20T19:54:00.006+11:00

This is Australian actor Ryan Kwanten, probably best know for getting his kit off in Alan Ball's Southern Gothic vampire series, True Blood:

And so is this:

And this:

That last photo is a publicity still for the new Australian film Red Hill, which opens in cinemas next week. Last Friday I interviewed Ryan Kwanten naked.

As in, I was naked, not him.

The phone interview was scheduled for 4.55pm, so at 4pm I went to bed for a quick power nap, with the alarm set for 4.30pm. And yes, I sleep naked, deal with it.

At 4.25pm I was woken by a phone call from the publicist asking if I can do the interview now. "Umm, give me five minutes," I mumble, half awake. I then proceed to race around my flat grabbing my list of questions, my tape recorder, my phone pick-up microphone etc. There's no time to get dressed before the phone rings.

Consequently, I interviewed Ryan - and Red Hill director Patrick Hughes, who I wasn't expecting to speak with - naked. Ironic, much?

Update: You can read my interview with Ryan here, at Citysearch.

Review: The Animals & Children Took to the Streets

2010-11-17T23:35:00.006+11:00

All cities have their slums. In The Animals & Children Took to the Streets, set in a prosperous and cultured city “where art is spelled with a capital R”, the slum’s dark heart is the festering and fetid district around Redherring Street, and in particular, the stinking, sprawling Bayou Mansions.

A cavernous and decaying apartment building where the rooms are so small there’s no room to swing a rat, the Bayou is populated by swarming cockroaches, curtain-twitching perverts, angry swarms of feral children, and the Caretaker – a miserable fellow whose only goal in life is to save up for a one-way ticket out of Redherring Street.

When attractive art therapist Agnes Eames and her daughter Evie move into the Bayou Mansions, the Caretaker suddenly finds himself with a new goal in life – especially when Evie Eames goes missing.

Like poor Evie, the Caretaker is swept up in the piratical plots of Zelda, the leader of a particularly anarchic gang of Redherring Street children, and the counter-plots of the city’s Mayor, whose nefarious plans are intended to quash Zelda's revolution utterly.

British performance troupe 1927 (writer/director Suzanne Andrade, designer/animator Paul Barritt, costume designer/performer Esme Appleton, and composer/performer Lillian Henley) last visited Melbourne in 2008, when the Beckett Theatre played host to the company’s award-winning debut production, the internationally acclaimed Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Like their first show, The Animals & Children Took to the Streets is an ingenious and imaginative production featuring white face-painted performers who act out the melodramatic plot in front of digitally animated and interactive backdrops, accompanied by silent-movie inspired piano music played live by Henley.

Unlike Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea however, which was a series of short gothic sketches, this new production sees the company embracing a sustained narrative. While it lags a little in the middle third of the show, the evocative story admirably displays the company’s mordant wit and deliberately stagey performance style, and especially Barritt’s startling constructivist-inspired animations, which in conjunction with the performers' perfect timing and their interaction with the projections, bring Andrade’s outlandish story to vivid and remarkable life.

Continuing the social realist tradition of such science fiction classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (released, not so coincidentally, in 1927), The Animals & Children Took to the Streets is a deliberately unsubtle critique of the ever-growing gap between society’s haves and have-nots, and a delightful work of contemporary theatre.

Malthouse Theatre and The British Council present The Animals & Children Took to the Streets

Created and performed by 1927

Beckett Theatre, November 9 – 28, 2010

This review originally appeared on Arts Hub.

Review: BARE WITNESS

2010-09-17T11:55:00.005+10:00

A rare collaboration between two of Melbourne's most important creative spaces, Mari Lourey's Bare Witness is a joint presentation by La Mama Theatre and fortyfivedownstairs, in the latter organisation's bunker-like venue beneath Flinders Lane. The space suits the work admirably, for Bare Witness is an expressionistic exploration of the experiences of a diverse group of photojournalists in three different war zones: Bosnia in the early 1990s, Timor Leste in the dark days before its independence from Indonesia, and contemporary Iraq.

The audience's introduction to this blood, developing fluid and adrenaline-soaked world is Australian photographer Dani Hill (Daniela Farinacci), who in a short space of time goes from snapping hats and frocks at Flemington race course to photographing corpses and grieving widows in the Balkans. Years later, Dani looks back through her old photographs, recalling the stories behind the 11 most powerful shots; stories which are then played out for the audience, counting down slowly to the traumatic revelation behind the final, heartbreaking photograph.

A rigorous development process, and detailed research by Lourey, means that the play never feels less than authentic. The script does not flinch away from detailing Dani's development from a naive photographer to a cynical and battle-hardened photojournalist whose success comes at significant personal cost, but nor does it wallow in melodrama. What details there are about the niceties of Dani's profession - such as the ethics of rearranging the elements of a shoot for maximum impact, even when those elements are the freshly killed bodies of young men - are handled intelligently and without fuss, making such concerns part of the story without glossing over them or giving them artificial and jarring emphasis.

Director Nadja Kostich brings an admirable sense of abstraction to Bare Witness, relying as much on the performers' physicality and the impressive skills of the creative team - composer Jethro Woodward, video by Michael Carmody, and lighting designer Emma Valente - as on Lourey's evocative and fragmented script to evoke Dani's turbulent life and war-torn photographs. Imagination, after all, holds more power than a literal image, no matter the horror and heartbreak such an image conveys. Here, the clapping of hands conveys the click of a camera shutter or the firing of a gun, and the few images we do see are Carmody's projections of wolves, running and howling, evoking both the pack mentality of the photojournalists who befriend Dani, and the concept that they are 'lone wolves', driven for whatever reasons to operate on the fringes of society, far from the comforts of friends and family.

Performances are very good - especially Todd McDonald as one of Dani's colleagues, Jacek, and the aforementioned Daniela Farinacci - and Woodward's live score, created from his position at the rear of the theatre, is fantastic. The most outstanding element of the production to my mind, however, was Emma Valente's remarkable and very physical lighting design, which saw her constantly crawling onto and crossing the stage in order to position fluorescent lights or set bulbs swinging in order to enhance the mood and tone of a scene.

Overall, Bare Witness is one of the most memorable independent theatre productions I have seen this year. That said, it is not perfect. Its reliance on the abstract and the physical distances the audience from the story it tells, so that while I was emotionally engaged by its opening and closing scenes, during the middle third of the play the cumulative effect of the production and the fragmented poetry of the script served to render me an observer, watching Dani's descent into a personal hell but never feeling any sense of her anguish at an emotional level.

That criticism aside it is otherwise an excellent production, and highly recommended.

BARE WITNESS by Mari Lourey, directed by Nadja Kostich, dramaturgy by Michael Carmody, Nadja Kostich & Julian Meyrick.

Composer/musician Jethro Woodward, set and costumes Marg Howell, video Michael Carmody, lighting Emma Valente.

Performed by Isaac Drandic, Daniela Farinacci, Adam McConvell, Todd MacDonald and Maria Theodorakis.

A La Mama Theatre presentation at fortyfivedownstairs. Now showing until Sunday 26th September.

Review: The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum

2010-09-14T14:42:00.004+10:00

An evocative though not entirely successful site-specific work by Melbourne company Peepshow Inc, The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum draws on the history and atmosphere of the Abbotsford Convent, where Peepshow have been based since 2005, to tell a story of hope, deprivation, and religious devotion.

Like the company’s earlier work, The Mysteries of the Convent, this new production is a meticulously researched and historically accurate rendering of the lives of real people: nuns, prostitutes, penitents and others, whose stories have been woven into a theatrical presentation incorporating a range of disciplines. Puppetry plays a key role in a number of scenes, acrobatic skills are also called into play, while lighting and sound design are judiciously employed to enrich the performances of the two players, Teresa Blake and Carole Patullo.

The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum is set in a portion of the former Convent of the Good Shepherd that – unlike other areas of the precinct, which now house studios, galleries, and even a bakery – has not previously been opened up to the public. It is here, in the decrepit dormitories of the Magdalen Asylum, which once housed orphans, wards of the State and girls considered to be in ‘moral danger’, as well as the former industrial laundries where they toiled each day, that Peepshow has chosen to stage their new production.

The echoing halls of the Asylum may have been cleared of decades of pigeon droppings – not to mention cleared as a temporary performance space by WorkSafe inspectors – but its echoing halls are still pungent with a palpable sense of decay and misery which adds significantly to the production as it unfolds.

The opening scenes swiftly and effectively introduce the audience – limited to a maximum of 25 people at a time – to the setting and stories of the Asylum by focusing on the experiences of one Rose Lawler (1875 – 1926), a former Convent resident. We see her trudge towards the Convent doors in the rain, carrying a suitcase from which the narrator’s voice and judicious sound effects play.

In the next scene, and in another room, the scale of the story changes: Rose is a doll trudging up a slope made of heaped dirt, and the Asylum is a birdcage, in which Rose is soon imprisoned. It’s a poignant and beautiful image, heartbreaking in its simplicity, and more than effectively conveying the emotional truths of Rose’s story.

A similarly effective piece of stagecraft is employed in this scene to introduce the four Irish nuns who founded the Convent of the Good Shepherd, and so effective is it that I will say no more about it, so as to avoid diluting its impact for future audiences.

Unfortunately, from this point on, as the audience were awkwardly herded out into a courtyard, and thence upstairs through a progressive series of rooms and scenes, The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum began to lose its impact. It may have been opening night nerves, but the performers seemed uneasy in or unused to their multiple roles, an impression that was not helped by the occasional awkward and clunky lines of dialogue they were forced to spout. A scene presenting the theories of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso about ‘depraved women’ was effectively staged, but its comedic tone seemed at odds with the overall atmosphere of the production; while the final scene, performed outside, beneath the spreading branches of the Separation Oak (planted circa 1850 to mark the separation of Victoria from the colony of NSW) seemed entirely extraneous.

History buffs are sure to enjoy The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum, and with time, and additional polishing, it may yet develop into an engaging work; as it currently stands the work fails to sustain the drama and emotion of its opening moments throughout, save for one or two startling and moving moments of stagecraft in the production’s penultimate scene.

Peepshow Inc presents The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum at Abbotsford Convent, September 11 – October 2

Director: Melinda Hetzel

Writer/Dramaturg: Kylie Trounson

Performers: Teresa Blake & Carole Patullo

Composition: Teresa Blake & & Steph O’Hara

Sound Design: Steph O’Hara

Set/Costume Design: Dayna Morrissey

Lighting Design: Danny Pettingill

www.peepshowinc.com

Melbourne Fringe Festival, September 22 – October 10

www.melbournefringe.com.au

This review originally appeared at www.artshub.com.au

Review: Tomorrow, When the War Began

2010-08-30T13:05:00.004+10:00

First published in 1993, teacher turned author John Marsden’s YA-adventure novel Tomorrow, When the War Began was very much the Harry Potter of its day; an international publishing success story that sold millions of copies world-wide, spawning six sequels and a spin-off trilogy in the process.

Immensely popular among teenage readers, any adaptation of the book must naturally tread carefully in order to avoid alienating its legion of loyal fans, but screenwriter turned director Stuart Beattie (30 Days of Night, Pirates of the Caribbean, Australia) has done a generally sterling job in bringing Marsden’s much-loved novel to the screen.

Set in and around the small country town of Wirrawee (population 3871), the film follows the adventures of a suspiciously photogenic group of teenagers led by the resourceful Ellie Linton (Caitlin Stasey, Neighbours) as they head bush for a camping trip; coincidentally on the same weekend that Australia is invaded by a brutal occupying army. While their families are rounded up and imprisoned at the Wirrawee showgrounds, the teenagers – Greek bad boy Homer (Deniz Akdeniz), cocky jock Kevin (Lincoln Lewis), teen beauty queen Fiona (Phoebe Tonkin), reserved and studious Vietnamese-Australian Lee (Chris Pang) and the quietly devout Robyn (Ashleigh Cummings) spend an idyllic few days flirting in the remote bush.

When they emerge into a dramatically transformed world where foreign soldiers patrol the familiar streets of Wirrawee, they are quickly forced to grow up, and in a remarkably short space of time transform into a highly effective guerilla army who take the fight to the invaders, with drastic and dramatic consequences.

The film opens with Ellie recording the group’s experiences direct to camera via digital video – a logical updating of the book’s first person narrative, which saw Ellie writing down her story – though later sequences of voice-over narration are less successful, and occasionally intrusive. Thereafter we are quickly – and sometimes clumsily – introduced to the main characters, who at first seem little more than broadly-sketched stereotypes, but who gain unexpected depth and definition as the film unfolds.

Performances are uniformly strong, though Rachel Hurd-Wood is a trifle wooden as Ellie’s best friend Corrie, and Andy Ryan struggles as the stoner caricature, Chris. Conversely, Ashleigh Cummings as Robyn brings a steely resolve to her devoutly Christian character, admirably conveying the conflicted nature of someone who steadfastly believes in the Biblical commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ but who also finds herself living in the midst of a war.

Ben Notts’ lush cinematography occasionally veers into tourism territory as the camera swoops over the rugged terrain of the Blue Mountains, where the film was shot, but coupled with Marcus D’Arcy’s crisp editing, admirably captures the spectacle of Beattie’s screenplay, in which muted periods of character development alternate with tense action sequences.

A generally faithful adaptation of Marsden’s book, the film stamps its own mark on the story by playing up the violence which the novel generally avoided. It also unfortunately identifies the invading army, whose origins went unidentified in the original novel.

Beattie tries to avoid playing the race card by presenting the invaders as a coalition of nameless Asian nations, and while this tactic avoids demonising a specific country, it unfortunately also encourages alert viewers to consider the film as a contemporary expression of Australia’s deep-rooted xenophobia. Cleverly, Beattie softens the blow by acknowledging that this isn’t the first time Australia has been invaded, but the notion of an ‘Asian invasion’ is nonetheless an uncomfortable subtext of the film that must be acknowledged in any honest review.

Save for the occasional awkward slab of dialogue the script is solid, and the pacing is near-perfect once the film really gets underway. A clever nod to the challenges of adapting a much-loved book to the screen will entertain the more cynical viewer, while young audiences are sure to be entertained by the combination of an attractive cast and numerous spectacular set-pieces, including a dramatic rescue and subsequent car chase through the streets of Wirrawee.

Other flaws include a moment or two of poor CGI and an occasionally intrusive soundtrack, but for the most part Tomorrow When the War Began is a remarkably entertaining and genuinely exciting movie, rich with dramatic tension and truly spectacular. It deserves to do well at the box office both locally and internationally.

Tomorrow, When the War Began opens nationally on Thursday September 2.

MIFF 2010: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

2010-08-10T10:37:00.003+10:00

The outspoken entertainer Ian Dury was a remarkable and memorable figure on the British music scene; a proto-punk who came to fame in the era of The Sex Pistols and The Damned, and who was quick to lash out at anyone foolish enough to patronise or pity him.

Stricken by polio as a child, he walked with difficulty, with the aid of a cane and callipers, but was never one to let his disability prevent him from living a rich and full life – and a somewhat decadent, selfish and self-obsessed life, if this film is to be believed.

Together with his band The Blockheads, Dury had several hit songs in the UK music charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the 1979 number one, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, as well as the singles ‘Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3’, ‘I Wanna Be Straight’, and the anthemic ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’, which was banned by the BBC upon its release in 1977. Many such songs feature on the soundtrack of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, performed by Andy Serkis, who plays Dury, together with the original members of The Blockheads.

This frenetic film by first-time feature director Mat Whitecross avoids the traditional narrative pitfalls of the biopic genre, which at their worst tend to be a limply ordered progression of key events in the subject’s life from birth through to death; but nonetheless it fails to completely satisfy, primarily due to flaws in the screenplay by Paul Viragh, which keeps any sense of emotional connection with the story at arm’s length until the final, melodramatic act.

Opening with a shot of Dury addressing an empty theatre – a scene that instantly reminded this reviewer of the recent British film Bronson, a fevered biopic about the most violent prisoner in the UK penal system – Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll uses animation, flashbacks, live performances, dream sequences and first person narratives by Dury to tell the story of the man’s ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ rise from sickly child to full-blown rock star.

The supporting cast put in strong performances, especially Olivia Williams as Betty, Dury’s first wife, who gives birth while her husband’s first band, Kilburn and the High Roads, are rehearsing and arguing downstairs; and Naomie Harris as Denise, Dury’s much put-upon younger lover. Young Bill Milner as Dury’s teenaged son, Baxter, also gives an astonishingly accomplished and complex performance.

Williams and Harris in particular excel with their roles, bringing warmth and depth to their somewhat two-dimensional characters. They are ably supported by the likes of Noel Clarke, Arthur Darvill, Ray Winstone (as Dury’s distant but loving father) and Toby Jones as a callous orderly who sparked the young Dury’s earliest rebellions – one of several moments in the film offering pop psychological explanations for Dury’s wild and indulgent lifestyle.

The movie’s energy and good humour are undeniable, and its production design vivid and memorable, but it never really gets beneath the surface to give a convincing depiction of Dury’s complex personality, being more content to observe rather than analyse. Nonetheless, thanks to a magnificent performance by Serkis and the vivid, expressionistic and anarchic style in which Dury’s story is told, it very much entertains.

Rating: Three and a half stars

MIFF 2010: The General

2010-08-10T10:32:00.003+10:00

While this year’s MIFF may have lacked the breadth of international guests seen in previous years, the festival’s program of special events was certainly impressive, including as it did everything from drive-in movie nights at Docklands, a 50th anniversary screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (with a live score performed by the Bates Motel Orchestra) and this very special screening of Buster Keaton’s 1927 classic, The General.

Screened at the Melbourne Recital Centre, and featuring the world premiere of a new score performed live by five-piece band The Blue Grassy Knoll, The General is Keaton’s most ambitious film: a 79 minute epic set in the American Civil War and featuring everything a film buff could ask for, including inventive camera work, vividly realised set pieces, dramatic chases, romance, explosions and some truly spectacular stunts.

The plot sees Keaton’s typically deadpan train driver, Johnny Gray, rejected by his girlfriend Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) when she mistakenly believes him a coward who will not enlist in the Confederate army. A year later, Annabelle is accidentally kidnapped by a group of Union spies led by Captain Anderson (Glen Cavender) when they steal the other great love of Johnny’s life, his steam locomotive, The General. When Johnny commandeers another train and sets out after them, a vividly staged chase ensues, featuring a carefully choreographed and gradually escalating series of train-based stunts that leave even contemporary audiences gobsmacked and amazed.

Despite its spectacular scale and vivid scenes, The General was a flop upon its initial release, with trade journal Variety calling it ‘far from funny’. Today it is considered a classic of the silent era, praised by leading critics and filmmakers alike for its audacity, inventiveness and brio. Indeed, the late Orson Welles said of The General that it was the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.

Friday night’s screening of this silent movie classic was made all the more entertaining by The Blue Grassy Knoll’s new score: a playful composition that highlighted the film’s comic elements and enriched every moment, using such instruments as banjo, double bass, cello, drums, piano accordion and guitar to evoke everything from explosions and thunderstorms to whistling bullets and tender conversations.

Displaying impeccable timing and musical flare, the quintet’s accomplished musical dexterity and striking original compositions added immensely to this already remarkable viewing experience, ensuring that The General remains a vibrant, vital and exciting film 83 years after its original cinematic release.

Film rating: Four stars

Original score: Four and a half stars

MIFF 2010: The Myth of the American Sleepover

2010-08-10T10:27:00.004+10:00

In the 19th Century the world’s population was divided up into adults and children, but with the dawning of the 20th Century a new social strata began to develop, fuelled by novels such as Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen (published in 1916) and films such as 1937’s A Family Affair (starring a 17 year old Mickey Rooney). Together with the social changes wrought by the availability of the automobile and increased retention rates in secondary schools, these expressions of popular culture helped give birth to a gangly new creature: the American teenager.

By the 1950s the teen was firmly ensconced in popular culture, with films such as The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause recognising teenagers as a discrete, separate age group with their own rituals, rights and demands, but also acknowledging their parents’ concerns around issues such as juvenile delinquency and adolescent rebellion.

Parents are nowhere to be seen in David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, a gently paced tale of teenage discovery that’s set, like American Graffiti and the more recent Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, over an eventful, single, summer night.

There are no mobile phones, iPods and computers evident in Mitchell’s debut feature; it’s as if he was trying to make a film set anywhere and any-when; and instead of Larry Clark and Catherine Hardwicke style melodrama, Mitchell has crafted a deliberately anti-dramatic demythologising of the clichés and tropes of Hollywood’s long history of teenage dramas.

Four main characters dominate the ensemble cast: Maggie (Claire Soma), a wilfully independent girl who rejects her compatriots’ slumber party for more adult pleasures; horny heartthrob Rob (Marlon Morton) who cruises the town in hope of meeting up with the mysterious blonde girl he met by chance in the supermarket, and whose obsession blinds him to the fact that his best friend Marcus (Wyatt McCallum) is clearly in love with him; Claudia (Amanda Bauer), the new girl in town, whose presence disrupts her school’s carefully structured pecking order; and the marginally older Scott (Brett Jacobsen), a college student nursing a recently broken heart, who has returned to his home town to heal, and perhaps find new love.

Naturalistic in tone, and featuring a strongly performing non-professional cast, the film suffers at times from some poorly lit scenes and mumbled, inarticulate dialogue. None of the characters are especially well drawn, making it difficult to care about them, and Mitchell is at such pains to avoid and subvert the clichés of traditional teenage movies that he drains any real sense of drama out of his story.

The winner of the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast from the SXSW Narrative Feature jury, The Myth of the American Sleepover clearly resonates with some viewers, who find its slight nature charming and its simplistic characters subtle. I found it meandering, stilted, and quite frankly, a little dull. Perhaps its quintessentially American story simply fails to translate for this Australian viewer?

Rating: Two and a half stars

More MIFF 2010: BOY

2010-08-08T16:54:00.004+10:00

Screening as part of the festival’s Next Gen program of ‘mature, intelligent cinema chosen for the young and the young-at-heart,’ Taika Waititi’s latest feature, Boy is a delightful, engaging and thoroughly charming coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old Maori boy whose heroes are his absent father and pop star Michael Jackson.

When his dad – who Boy imagines as a rugby captain, deep sea diver and war hero – arrives home unexpectedly after spending the last seven years in jail, our young hero is forced to confront the truth about the man he thought he knew and must face the future without the hero he’d been hoping for.

Set in 1984 on the East Coast of New Zealand, and beautifully evoking both period and sense of place, at its heart Boy is a story about families and the nature of love, though it begins as a comedy, and a very funny comedy at that thanks to Waititi’s superb ear for dialogue and strong performances throughout.

Childhood flights of fantasy are brought to life through simple animations to illustrate the interior life of Boy’s younger brother, Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu), and the film perfectly captures perfectly the simple joys of childhood, from the pain of a first crush to the simple joy of sparklers.

The arrival of Boy’s father, Alamein (played by Waititi himself) brings a darker note to the story, for rather than a heroic character, Alamein is deeply flawed: a petty criminal and immature drunkard who is more of a child than either of his sons. The film never loses its comedic edge thanks to the clowning of Alamein and his two feckless mates, and Waititi ensures that Alamein, despite his selfishness and stupidity, is nonetheless still a sympathetic character. Flashbacks to the death of Boy’s mother ensure that the unfolding story, and the development of Alamein’s character are both poignant and profound.

As Boy, James Rolleston is a revelation, bringing charm and cheekiness to the screen in equal measure; and the narrative unfolds beautifully, without lurching too far into sentimentality or contrived comedy despite the many twists and turns it takes.

Boy – which expands on the themes of Waititi’s Oscar-nominated short film Two Cars One Night – is a pitch-perfect rendering of a child’s world that never shies away from harsh truths despite being firmly grounded in a hopeful world of joy and imagination. An absolute charmer from start to finish, it opens in general release on August 26, and comes highly recommended.

Vist the film's website here: www.boythemovie.co.nz

More MIFF 2010: ACCELERATOR ONE

2010-08-06T13:26:00.003+10:00

ACCELERATOR (Part One)

The Melbourne International Film Festival’s Accelerator initiative is an annual professional development program for emerging filmmakers; an immersive environment providing the invited participants with access to exclusive workshops, seminars and networking opportunities.

The Accelerator program also features two MIFF screenings, in which the short films of the current crop of Accelerator participants are screened to an appreciative audience composed of cast and crew members, industry peers, and the general public.

These screenings are always one of my personal highlights at MIFF, providing an insight into the current state of play of the industry and a look at the early works of (theoretically) notable filmmakers of the future. Unfortunately I only made it to one Accelerator screening this year, but it was definitely a rewarding experience.

PINION

A haunting period piece written, directed and produced by VCA student Asuka Sylvie, and focussing on Lloyd, a young boy suffering from a mysterious ailment whose family have shipped him off to a remote medical facility (Barwon Park, an imposing, 42-room bluestone mansion near Winchelsea that was completed in 1871 and is managed by the National Trust). The existence of a graveyard on the house’s grounds suggests that not all the patients admitted to the clinic leave. This short drama’s gothic tone and mysterious storyline were unfortunately undercut by a title and script which telegraphed the mystery far too soon, and by some poor CGI at the conclusion.

THE MYSTERY OF FLYING KICKS

Director Matthew Bate’s cut and paste style-documentary about the tantalising presence of sneakers hanging from the powerlines of seemingly every major city in the world, crowd-sourced its content to great effect. Interviews and footage provided by contributors from around the globe combined in a witty collage of words and images that posed questions about art, culture, crime and philosophy. Visually and aurally striking, and extremely entertaining: a well-deserved winner of the festival’s award for Best Documentary Short Film.

FATSO

From screenplay writer and director Irina Goundortseva comes this wordless, bittersweet comedy about an overweight lift attendant looking for companionship in all the wrong places. Though charming, the brief story doesn’t really go anywhere: it feels more like an opening chapter in a larger story rather than a self-contained piece of cinema. Nonetheless, the luminous cinematography and stylish direction ensured that I enjoyed the ride.

MANUREWA

If Robert Altman were to shoot a film based on the real life shooting of a bottle shop attendant in Manurewa, one of the southernmost suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand, it probably wouldn’t be too far removed from this short, tense drama by director Sam Peacocke. As the film unfolds we are introduced to a diverse cast of characters, including a young mother worshipping at a Sikh temple, whose husband is one of two Indian brothers working in Manurewa’s bottle shop; a Maori teenager, his violent older brother and his brother’s friends; two ambos; two police officers; and a group of bored young Maori women. Over 19 minutes their paths slowly cross, to shocking effect. While not especially original, there is real power to this film, thanks in part to its superb cinematography, naturalistic performances, taut editing and accomplished direction.

OUT IN THAT DEEP BLUE SEA

This short drama by Canadian writer/director Kazik Radwanski is a claustrophobic, composite look at the malcontented life of a middle-aged real estate agent. Extreme close ups give a sense of the choking mundanity of the subject’s life, but isolation and despair are not enough to make a memorable film, and despite its technical prowess, Out in the Deep Blue Sea left me largely unengaged.

FRANSWA SHARL

My favourite film of this package, writer/director Hannah Hilliard’s colourful coming of age story generated real and remarkable tension in telling the story of 12 year old Greg Logan’s (Callan McAuliffe) struggle to win his overly competitive father’s affection and support. Set on a family holiday in Fiji in 1980, this witty ‘coming out’ drama won the MIFF’s Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film, and deservedly so. Rarely has drag ever been as entertaining!

DEEPER THAN YESTERDAY

The final film of this first Accelerator package was former VCA student Ariel Kleiman’s Russian submarine drama, Deeper Than Yesterday, which has already screened at Cannes this year as well as been nominated for an AFI award; so it was eagerly anticipated by many in the audience – though apparently not whoever was looking after the house lights, which were briefly turned on – and thankfully off again – before the film started.

Filmed on and in a privately owned, decommissioned submarine docked near Hastings VIC, the film focuses on a group of Russian submariners who have been submerged for three months, and whose sanity and humanity is slowly ebbing away. Its combination of claustrophobia, violence and misogyny made for uncomfortable viewing, but despite its technical prowess, dramatically I found the film less than compelling – an impression compounded by continuity errors which saw the deck of the submarine bone dry in a scene set only moments after it had supposedly resurfaced.

MIFF 2010: DREAMLAND

2010-08-04T09:28:00.004+10:00

Australian director Ivan Sen first came to prominence with his 2002 road movie about two Indigenous teenage runaways, Beneath Clouds. A contemplative, episodic drama, there are distinct echoes of that film’s style in Sen’s new feature, the moody tone poem, Dreamland.

A low budget black and white feature filmed in the US state of Nevada, Dreamland stars Daniel Roberts (Underbelly: The Golden Mile) as Dan Freeman, an obsessive UFO hunter roaming the desert around the legendary Area 51, a top secret US military base rumoured to house the remains of an alien spacecraft that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Nicknamed ‘Dreamland’, the base’s official purpose is the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems.

Dwarfed by the rugged mountains, driving endless down the so-called ‘Extra Terrestrial Highway’, Dan seems almost hypnotised by his quest for the truth about alien life. Not even the unexpected appearance of his wife April (Tasma Walton, City Homicide) can drag him away from the desert back to his former life – but such is the nature of the film that even April may be an illusion; the embodiment of Dan’s dreams or a riddle from his past.

For Dan’s dreams have a very solid presence in the film, in the form of footage of astronauts and space missions intercut into the modern-day footage alongside quotes from Giordano Bruno (an early astronomer executed by the Spanish Inquisition in 1600 after proposing that our sun was just another star) and former US President Harry Truman.

Written, directed, shot and edited by Sen, Dreamland is nothing like the standard dramatic features with their three act story arcs that screen at your local multiplex. Virtually silent save for fragments of radio broadcasts, ambient noise and Sen’s evocative steel guitar and cello-based score, it is more a contemplative work of video art than a traditional film; as much a meditation on humanity’s place in the world as it is about Freeman’s quest for the truth.

Some audiences will no doubt find Dreamland to be a frustrating, vague exercise in self-indulgence. I found it an enthralling, almost hallucinatory experience, with its breathtaking time-lapse landscape photography reminiscent at times of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, and Daniel Roberts’ intensely focussed performance ripe with possibility. My only real complaint is that I felt the running time could have been trimmed back by 10 - 15 minutes without impacting on the film overall, but that's a small qualm in light of what is otherwise a bold and beautiful film that gently but firmly rejects commercial movie-making orthodoxies.

Rating: four stars

MIFF 2010: I Love You Phillip Morris

2010-07-31T11:28:00.004+10:00

The old saw that real life is stranger than fiction is confirmed with remarkable cinematic dexterity in this charming rom-com about conman and serial prison escapee Steven Russell, currently serving a 144 year prison sentence in a Texas penitentiary for charges including felony escape and embezzlement.

Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who also co-wrote the screenplay for the scabrous comedy Bad Santa), I Love You Phillip Morris is a frenetically paced, deviously plotted, blackly comic, and deeply romantic account of Russell’s love-fuelled life of crime. That its overt gay content has caused it to be shelved by its US distributors for months – a similar situation exists here in Australia, where it will probably go straight to DVD – is a crying shame, for I Love You Phillip Morris is truly one of the funniest comedies I have seen in years.

When we first meet Steven Russell (played with exuberant flair by Jim Carrey) he is lying in a hospital bed, apparently dying, and reflecting on the vagaries of his life. Thereafter, a series of flashbacks illustrate the many twists and turns of Steven’s story: his formerly straight-laced life as a father, policeman and churchgoing husband to the devout Debbie (Leslie Mann); the highly comic revelation that he is living a secret gay life; and the motor accident-induced epiphany that leads him to live life as an openly gay man.

But as Steven notes, “Being gay is really expensive”. Thus he turns to a life of crime to support his handsome Latino boyfriend (Rodrigo Santoro) and their lifestyle of clothes, accessories, holidays and poolside cocktails. It’s not long before his many frauds and cons land him in jail, where Steven meets the love of his life: the shy, softly-spoken naïf, Phillip Morris (a truly charming performance from Ewan McGregor).

As befits a conman, Steven is an unreliable narrator, and the film’s many twists and turns – mirroring Steven’s increasingly elaborate cons and frauds – are truly startling. He escapes from prison numerous times; gains a job as Chief Financial Officer for a major corporation and siphons off tens of thousands of dollars to fuel an increasingly lavish lifestyle for himself and his beloved Phillip; in short Steven does everything in his power to provide his own off-kilter version of stability and security for himself and his boyfriend.

Gleefully and explicitly crude at times, I Love You Phillip Morris is also unabashedly romantic. There is a palpable chemistry between Carrey and McGregor, and a scene in which the two men slowly dance together in their prison cell as warders beat a prisoner in the neighbouring cell is both heartwarming and hilariously funny.

When the film takes an abrupt U-turn into tragedy late in the piece, it manages the shift in mood without ever being jarring. Dialogue is crisp and sparkling, and the sound design is used to excellent effect without ever being intrusive.

If the film has a fault it is that Carrey is occasionally more over-the-top than the role requires, but for the most part his performance shows remarkable restraint. He may lack the dramatic capabilities of McGregor, whose Phillip Morris is a truly marvellous creation, but Carrey is impressive throughout, by turns sympathetic, outrageous and charming.

In short, I loved I Love You Phillip Morris.

Rating: Four and a half stars

More MIFF 2010: From drag queens to Dante

2010-07-31T10:59:00.002+10:00

TO DIE LIKE A MAN

The latest film from Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues is, like his first two features, O Fantasma (2000) and Odete, a queer-themed drama that borders on melodrama; but unlike his earlier films, To Die Like a Man is filmed in such a stylised and fragmented way as to drain almost all emotion from the story in progress.

It opens with a group of camouflage-clad soldiers on a night-time training exercise in a forest. Two of the men creep away from their comrades, and once alone, fall into a passionate embrace which leads quickly to sex, and then to violence.

Next we meet Tonia (Fernando Santos), an aging drag queen dealing simultaneously with two major dramas: his loss of status in the nightclub where he has worked for years, and a highly strung junkie boyfriend, Rosario (Alexander David), who is young enough to be his own son.

At Rosario’s insistence, Tonia is contemplating having a full sex change; a procedure which is explained to viewers in detail early in the film through the inventive use of origami, but we are given no indication that gender reassignment would bring any form of stability to the pair’s relationship, even once Rosario gives up using heroin. Instead we explore the petty details day-to-day of Tonia’s life: her falling out with an old friend, her fights with an up-and-coming young drag queen at work, and her infected, pus-leaking left nipple.

Just when it seems we are going to be witnessing a mundane domestic drama (well, as mundane as any drama can be whose main character is a highly strung drag queen), the film takes a twist by reintroducing the murderous young soldier we met in the first scene. He is, of course, Tonia’s son.

Before we have even had a chance to process this revelation, the film swiftly enters road trip territory – and very trippy territory it is, with Tonia and Rosario encountering a reclusive transsexual couple living in the forest who take them snipe hunting (despite the fact that snipe are apparently extinct). It’s at this point that things get seriously fragmentary, with a sepia-toned, magic-realist musical sequence by an Antony and the Johnsons sound-alike sweeping up the characters for several minutes, after which we’re back to the action, and indeed, back to melodrama.

Of all the films I have seen at MIFF to date, To Die Like a Man is the most baffling and frustrating. Like a deranged cross between Fassbinder and Almodovar, Rodrigues introduces plot elements only to discard them minutes later; embraces melodrama only to abandon it in favour of formal abstraction; and coaxes both magnificent and scenery-chewing performances from his cast.

There is a heartfelt and poignant drama buried somewhere in To Die Like a Man, but unfortunately it is lost – no doubt deliberately – amidst the fragmented, arch and dry film that Rodrigues has crafted.

Rating: Two and a half stars

HOME BY CHRISTMAS

A fascinating, beautiful and affecting film based on the memoirs of the filmmaker’s father, the New Zealand film Home By Christmas is a docu-drama utilising a judicious blend of archival footage and re-created scenes to explore one New Zealand family’s experiences of World War II.

In 1940, on his way home from rugby practise, 28 year old Ed Preston (Martin Henderson) and his teammates joined the army, with Ed telling his pregnant wife Tui (Chelsie Preston-Crayford, the filmmaker’s daughter) not to worry, he’d be home by Christmas. Instead, after only a month’s active service in North Africa, he was captured and made a prisoner of war, spending the next two years interned in Italy, and a further year following his escape in neutral Switzerland. Eventually Ed returned home to New Zealand’s South Island, but in his absence, Tui had fallen in love with another man...

Shortly before he died, an older and wiser Ed Preston told his story to his daughter, veteran filmmaker Gaylene Preston, who has now turned his reminiscences into this charming film, employing Australian actor Tony Barry to play her father and bring his words to life.

The artifice of this framing device – having an actor play the now deceased narrator of the story we’re watching unfold – is quickly forgotten thanks to excellent performances throughout and the pitch-perfect production design by John Harding and costumes by Lesley Burkes-Harding. Vintage steam trains and carefully dressed existing locations are employed to recreate the look and feel of wartime New Zealand, while Ed’s experiences overseas, and the parallel narrative of Tui’s anguish as she waits at home for news of her husband, are brought to life via a wide array of family photographs, and archival footage sourced from a range of institutions including the Istituto Luce Film Archive, Italy; the Australian War Memorial; and the National Army Museum, New Zealand.

Preston’s 1995 documentary War Stories (Our Mothers Never Told Us), in which the director’s mother provided her own account of her wartime experiences, informs this already remarkable story, which is all the more powerful for being subtly underplayed, focussed on small details rather than epic events.

Life on the home front in wartime is rarely explored on screen; and nor are we accustomed to such an honest look at the misery and banality of war as depicted in Home by Christmas. Subtle, gentle and powerful, this is a remarkable cinematic achievement.

Rating: Three and a half stars

HOMECOMING

Screening as part of Dante’s Inferno, the festival’s retrospective celebration of the work of US filmmaker Joe Dante, Homecoming was commissioned as part of the 2005 Showtime cable TV series Masters of Horror, which also featured works by such master genre filmmakers as George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), John Carpenter (The Thing), Stuart Gordon (Reanimator and Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

Despite being only an hour long, Homecoming was praised by the New Yorker as the ‘best political film of 2005’, and deservedly so. It’s a biting satire in which the presidency and policies of George W. Bush, and the self-serving attitudes of outspoken Republicans such as Anne Coulter and Karl Rove are mercilessly satirised, via a plot in which the bodies of soldiers killed in Iraq return to life as zombies in order to vote Bush out of office: their revenge for being sent to war based on a false premise.

Unlike traditional zombies, these reanimated soldiers are strangely peaceful, but that doesn’t stop the government – frightened that it might lose power at their decaying hands – rounding them up and interning them, in Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits no less. “Why don’t we treat them like normal veterans,” one character protests: “Ignore them?”

The satire of Homecoming is admittedly heavy-handed, but for this left-leaning film reviewer, it’s an absolute delight. After all, who needs subtlety when you have zombies?

Screening on the same bill are two other Joe Dante shorts, the mediocre Lightning (1995), a cautionary tale of greed and gold-lust set in the USA’s Wild West; and the far more successful It’s a Good Life, Dante’s segment from the 1983 film anthology Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Based on a screenplay by Rod Serling (which was in turn based on an original short story by Jerome Bixby, voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1970 as one of the 20 finest science fiction stories ever written) this entertaining tale of a mutant child with mysterious powers who terrifies his family is most notable for its crazed chiaroscuro lighting and some delightful special effects.

Homecoming: Four stars

It's a Good Life: Three and a half stars

Lightning: Two and a half stars

MIFF 2010 Day 3: More reviews

2010-07-26T09:28:00.010+10:00

SPINE TINGER! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY

In 1950s’s Hollywood, horror film maker William Castle fancied himself as a low-budget Hitchcock; a larger-than-life personality whose suspenseful movie titles – including The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts – were marketed with originality and flair.

Unfortunately for Castle, while his movies were hugely successful at the box office, the showman-like gimmicks he employed – buzzing seats, flying skeletons, life insurance policies to cover the possibility of his audience members dying of fright – totally overshadowed his directorial flair. The Hollywood establishment snubbed him, and history relegated him to the B-list – until now.

Director and producer Jeffrey Schwarz’s loving tribute to William Castle features a wide range of interviews with Castle’s friends, family and fans – including the likes of directors John Waters and Joe Dante, whose love of Castle’s work influenced their own filmmaking careers later in life – as well as enough archival film clips to satisfy the most dedicated of fans. Everyone interviewed is full of praise for Castle as a showman, and as a human being, even while admitting that his films were not of the highest calibre; a fact that Castle himself recognised, and attempted unsuccessfully to remedy later in life, when he tried to bring Rosemary’s Baby to the screen before the studio gave it to Polanski to direct instead.

Spine Tingler! is a bright, cheerful and thoroughly accessible documentary, and while it may lack a little in critical analysis and contrary opinions – surely there must be someone out there who liked neither Castle or his work – for film fans generally, and especially for devotees of the horror genre, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Rating: Three stars

COWBOYS IN PARADISE

Sex tourism versus holiday romance: where does one draw the line, and are such financial transactions always exploitative? That’s one of several questions raised in Amit Virmani’s entertaining but not especially rigorous documentary about the ‘beach boys’ of Kuta, Cowboys in Paradise.

The permanently tanned and smiling gigolos of Bali’s Kuta Beach who appear in the film claim to make a living from temporary romances with women tourists from Australia, Japan, France and elsewhere. While the men never charge for sex, they are emphatic that the women they service provide financial support in the form of meals and gifts in return for flirtation, attention and sex.

Given that the daily salary of a Balinese farmer is approximately $1, and $3 for construction workers, it’s hardly surprising that a percentage of young Balinese men prefer the easy life of a ‘beach boy’, where they can make at least $5 a day according to one interviewee. Others speak of conducting on-going affairs with regular tourists each time the women return to Bali, claiming to have received enough money over the years to purchase motorbikes and even houses. According to one outspoken newspaper columnist who crops up regularly as a talking head throughout the film, such financial transactions are a key part of the Balinese economy.

A frank and often funny film, Cowboys in Paradise includes interviews with numerous locals, including current ‘beach boys’ Rudi (31), Roy and Wayan (both 25), as well as an older gigolo now aged in his 50s, and even a 14 year old who aspires to the lifestyle. The women, too, get their say, including several young tourists, and even the wife of a ‘beach boy’ who seems perfectly content with her husband’s professional affairs.

While the documentary touches briefly on the issue of sexual health, with one ‘beach boy’ confessing to not using condoms with regular partners and admitting that he has never been tested for HIV, the realities of life in Bali, where the HIV-related death rate per capita is 84 times higher than Australia’s, are quickly glossed over.

The film also fails to explore the issue of economic exploitation of the residents of a developing nation by affluent westerners from a critical perspective, with Virmani seemingly preferring to amuse his audience rather than analyse the issue in any great depth. Of more concern is the fact that the film’s release has caused considerable controversy in Indonesia, including a government crackdown on Bali’s ‘beach boys’ earlier this year.

Ultimately, Cowboys in Paradise is an entertaining film but lacks the intellectual rigour one expects from the best documentaries.

Rating: Two and a half stars

GREEN DAYS

A uniquely personal exploration of the bloody violence that exploded in Iran following the hijacking of the country’s 2009 election by defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hana Makhmalbaf’s striking but frustrating documentary combines the personal, the political and the poetic to craft a harrowing but sometimes surprisingly insubstantial story about hope, change and despair.

Green Days was filmed in Tehran in the lead-up to Iran’s 2009 election, when the green-clad supporters of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in massive numbers to promote their candidate, as well as in the aftermath of the coup and the shocking violence which accompanied it.

Familiar footage of riot police beating and shooting unarmed civilians is interspersed with direct-to-camera monologues by an almost-hysterical theatre-maker, Ava, whose tearful interventions and symbolic theatrical interrogations of the documentary footage quickly grow repetitive.

Thankfully, in the second half of the film, Ava stops talking about herself and her cynical view of Iran’s internal politics, and begins to engage people on the streets in discussions about their hopes for the election, many of whom are considerably more articulate than Ava herself. The film is at is most effective in these scenes, especially when the filmmaker abruptly cuts away from shots of jubilant Mousavi supporters waving green scarves to familiar scenes, days later, of bloodied bodies being carried aloft by wailing crowds, and of masked militia members clubbing and shooting at unarmed protestors.

A large contingent of Iranian-Australians turned out for the film’s first Melbourne screening at ACMI; within five minutes of the film commencing, the young woman next to me was sobbing loudly, nor she was not alone. Clearly, despite its flaws, Green Days struck a deep chord among much of its audience.

Rating: Two and a half stars

WINTER'S BONE

My personal highlight of the festival to date, Debra Granik’s second feature film is a vivid exploration of the lives of the USA’s working class, and a chilling and compelling slice of rural noir set in the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri.

When 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers her methamphetamine-cooking father Jessup has put up the family home and their 300 acres of land to make bail after his latest brush with the law, she has only a week to find him before the courts take possession and evict her and family: two dependent young siblings and her heavily-medicated, virtually catatonic mother.

Ree goes in search of her Pa amongst his criminal cohorts, where asking questions is, as one neighbour puts it, “a real good way to end up et by hogs”, but refuses to be put off her search by the many gaunt-faced thugs she encounters along the way, including her violent uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) – who memorably tells his wife in his first scene, “I already told you to shut up with my mouth”.

Every scene breathes authenticity on rank, whiskey-scented breath; this is a film where barely restrained violence and grinding poverty infect every frame, whose characters are forced to hunt and shoot squirrels for food, and where drug-dealing and violent retribution are an every day part of life.

Granik avoids exposition at every turn, preferring instead to tell her story through mood and landscape and powerful, subtle performances coaxed from her cast. As the resourceful, implacable heroine Ree, Jennifer Lawrence is a revelation, while Michael McDonough's cinematography is virtually another character in the film, so strong is its presence.

A grimly powerful Southern Gothic family crime drama, Winter’s Bone is compelling, confronting, and a more than worthy winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for drama.

Rating: Four stars

MIFF 2010 Day Two: FIRST SQUAD and THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

2010-07-25T14:59:00.005+10:00

FIRST SQUAD: MOMENT OF TRUTH

Screening as part of MIFF's animation program, this Japanese-Russian-Canadian co-production was an odd beast indeed: an occult retelling of the Nazi war machine’s 1942 invasion of Russia as seen through the eyes of a teenage psychic and her dead best friends.

Nadya is the sole survivor of First Squad, a group of psychic soldiers trained by Russia’s mysterious Division 6 (a military branch dedicated to winning the war by magical means). Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and amnesia in the wake of her friends’ deaths, Nadia is sent to Moscow by a mysterious, Obi-Wan-like monk, where she is re-recruited by Division 6’s leader, General Below, and charged with an important mission.

It seems that the Nazis too have a psychic division, the Ahnenerbe, whose dark sorcerers have summoned the spirit of an evil warlord from beyond the grave: Grandmaster Baron Von Wolff, the leader of a terrifying undead horde.

Despite being under constant attack from a pair of voluptuous Nazi assassins, Nadia must somehow enter the spirit world and convince the souls of her dead First Squad companions to help her defeat Baron Von Wolff. Unless he is stopped, Mother Russia is doomed.

This fascinating blend of war movie and ghost story is brought to life through a combination of live action and animation. A series of talking heads – purportedly Russian and German war veterans, as well as modern-day historians and psychologists – discuss the brutal conditions on the Eastern Front and the history of Division 6; their monologues intercut between the unfolding story of Nadya and Baron Von Wolff.

While the animation is vivid and memorable – a fascinating blend of Japanese-style anime techniques and almost photo-realist depictions of the destruction wrought by World War II – the live action moments unfortunately dilute the drama and tension of the story. Without them, the film would be far more effective, but it would also be much shorter: in total, the running time is only 70 minutes, making it feel more like the first episode of a TV series rather than a movie proper.

Nonetheless, as an original look at the Russian experience of WWII, and with its bold direction and striking supernatural imagery, First Squad: Moment of Truth is certainly worth a look for genre fans.

Rating: Two and a half stars

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Director Lisa Cholodenko seems drawn to stories of family conflict. It’s a theme she previously explored in her second feature, Laurel Canyon (2002) as well as her Showtime-produced telemovie Cavedweller (2004). In her latest film, The Kids Are All Right, Cholodenko once again explores conflict and drama within the family unit, while also revisiting the lesbian themes of her debut feature, High Art (1998).

The result is a warm, witty and accomplished film about a lesbian couple – Annette Benning as the heavy drinking, control-freak doctor, Nic, and Julianne Moore as her considerably more chilled but less focussed partner, Jules – navigating the difficulties of a long-term relationship, with all the joys and stress that any such relationship entails.

The drama starts when Nic and Jules’ two teenaged children, Joni (young Australian actor Mia Wasikowska, Alice in Wonderland) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson, Journey to the Centre of the Earth) decide they want to get in touch with their previously unknown biological father, sperm-donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo, playing a more together version of the disruptive man-child role that brought him acclaim in You Can Count On Me (2000)).

A free spirit, organic gardener and restaurateur, Paul is an exotic prospect when compared to the children’s decidedly down-to-earth ‘Momses’, and tensions arise when Nic takes an instant dislike to him. Additional complications ensue when Paul hires Jules, who is starting up a gardening business, to landscape his new home, and Nic grows jealous of their growing friendship.

A genuinely delightful domestic comedy, The Kids Are All Right finds a perfect balance between drama and humour, thanks in part to its richly drawn characters and a screenplay co-written by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg. It also manages to subtly argue that same-sex couples, due to their lack of societal recognition and official support, are perhaps more vulnerable to external disruption than most heterosexual marriages; but while its politics are always gently present on screen, this is not a didactic or a preaching movie. Instead, it is a richly told film that allows all of its characters to share the spotlight one by one (though I would have liked to see a little more of Laser’s story), and which is as touching and engaging as it is laugh-out-loud funny.

Saturday’s screening at the Forum had some framing problems, but they were not enough to distract from this sympathetic, sincere and heart-warming film about love, family, trust and betrayal.

Rating: Four stars

More on MIFF from other local sources (updated)

2010-07-25T10:20:00.005+10:00

If you've come here looking for my thoughts and impressions of some of the films screening at MIFF this year, as will probably be the case for new visitors who have come here via Google searches (and welcome! Feel free to comment, provide me with links to your own blogs, etc), I thought I'd take this opportunity to point you in the direction of a few other folk who are blogging the festival also.

My very dear friend Cerise Howard (who joins me on 3RRR every second Thursday to discuss screen culture events in our 'Fistful of Celluloid' segment) has just recently joined the blogosphere. Very recently indeed, in fact. You can catch her MIFF impressions - as well as a very handy list of films that are getting a general release, whether at the cinema or on DVD - at her new blog, A Little Lie Down.

Critic and raconteur Thomas Caldwell is detailing his MIFF adventures over at Cinema Autopsy - expect informed decisions and insightful analysis from him.

Over at Screen Machine you'll get some feisty opinions and discussion from a range of critics and reviewers; while Glenn Dunks is detailing his festival adventures - and his cinema passions and obsessions generally - over at Stale Popcorn.

Two new links for y'all to peruse: the charming Ms Emma Westwood is writing about MIFF (and other cinematic subjects) over at movie (a)musings; and Tara Judah expounds on her festival experience at Liminal Vision. Enjoy!

I'll add more links as I find 'em, so feel free to leave suggestions and links in the comments below!

MIFF 2010 Day One: PIGGIES and RED HILL

2010-07-24T10:09:00.007+10:00

A gentle start to the first real day of MIFF due to my hungover state on Friday - I really shouldn't have had that glass of absinthe at the after-after-party, damn it.

I watched two films on Friday night, the first a restrained Polish/German co-production about teenage prostitutes, the second an unrestrained western set in small Australian town.

PIGGIES

Set in the early 1990s on the border between Poland and Germany, this surprisingly subtle but sometimes clichéd film from director Robert Glinski tells the story of Tomek (Filip Garbacz), a skinny 14-year old with an interest in astronomy who falls into a seedy world of teenage rentboys when he tries to earn money with which to impress his gold-digging club kid girlfriend, Marta (Anna Kulej).

The film is grittily realistic thanks to the screenplay by Joanna Didik, who lived for 20 years in the same town in which Piggies is set. Glinski has wisely chosen to underplay this potentially overblown material, crafting a film that is cool and reserved instead of an overblown melodrama.

Focussing predominantly in an adolescent millieu, the adult characters in the film are either ineffectual or brutal, save for Tomek's caring but helpless German teacher; while the story arc reminds us of what cruel beasts teenagers can sometimes be. It also points out how easily the oppressed can become an oppressor.

The majority of characters - such as Tomek's soccer-obsessed father (Bogdan Koca), his preening, shallow sister (Katarzyna Pysznska), the leering pimp Borys (Tomasz Tyndyk), and Tomek's handsome but unhappy best friend Ciemny (Daniel Furmaniak) - are, alas, sadly one dimensional, but as the complex Tomek, Garbacz is tremendous: a deserving winner of the Best Debut Actor award at the Polish Film Festival.

Piggies (dir. Robert Glinski, Producers Witold Iwaszkiewicz & Eike Goreczka, Germany/Poland, 2009)

Rating: Three stars

RED HILL

The debut feature from Australian director Patrick Hughes is a robust contemporary Western, set in a dying small town in Victoria's high country and starring Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) as the appropriately-named Shane Cooper, a young cop whose first day at a new posting is violently derailed when an escaped murderer (Jimmy Conway, played with excellent menace by Tommy Lewis) rides into town.

An enthusiastic crowd - the first sold-out session at MIFF this year - gathered for the film's Melbourne premiere, following excellent word of mouth from previous screenings in Berlin and Sydney, and judging from the responses of those around me, it seems most enjoyed Red Hill immensely.

I liked it a lot, but despite its kinetic direction, strong performances and beautiful cinematography, I wasn't entirely blown away. Like all good genre films, part of the fun comes from seeing how familiar tropes are handled, and on this account Hughes does well - traditional elements of the Western film are very inventively presented in the startling terrain around Omeo in East Gippsland - but other elements of the story, such as a nod to the traditional legend of the Gippsland panther, are distinctly jarring, and as a metaphor for the damaging effect of colonialism in Australia, heavy-handed in the extreme.

That said, as a story about vengeance and redemption that gives the nod to such diverse cinematic classics as Shane (1953) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and as a calling card for Hughes' obvious grasp of dramatic tension, screen violence, atmosphere and mood, Red Hill is great fun indeed.

Red Hill (written, directed and editor by Patrick Hughes, produced by Al Clark, Australia, 2010)

Rating: Three and a half stars

MIFF 2010: Opening Night

2010-07-24T09:36:00.007+10:00

Pre-screening drinks with two lovely girlfriends in the city, a stroll to the opulent Regent Theatre in the light, misting rain, walking the red carpet completely and appropriately ignored by the media throng, and settling into my seat to await a new Australian film: my 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival experience has begun.

This year I've gone slightly crazy and booked 54 sessions on my media pass - I may not get to them all but I'll have damned fun trying. Well, fun until exhaustion and/or hysteria set in. In which case you'll find me hiding behind a couch, shivering in abject terror at the very mention of the words 'choctop' and 'popcorn'. But until such time, let the MIFF madness begin!

The festival kicked off on Thursday night with the world premiere of a bland new Australian film by debut director Amanda Jane, The Wedding Party, a Melbourne-based romantic comedy about family, love and the choices we make in life. The movie focuses on the gormless Steve Thompson (Josh Lawson) and his dysfunctional suburban family, including his kinky brother Colin (Geoff Paine), sister Lisa (Nadine Garner) and her husband Tommy (Adam Zwar), and their separated parents, Roger (Steve Bisley) and Rose (Heather Mitchell).

On the verge of financial ruin, Steve agrees to marry a residency-seeking Russian waitress, Anna Petrov (Isabel Lucas) in return for a hefty sum of cash. The only problem is, Steve is still in love with his girlfriend, Jacqui (Kestie Morassi) who he has separated from until he can sort his finances out; and Anna is in love with Vlad (Nikolai Nikolaeff).

Further complications ensue when the Thompson family discover Steve's impending nuptials. His plans for a quiet registry wedding are scotched as his family take on organising an extravagant church ceremony, setting the stage for what should be a delightful rom-com romp.

What a pity then that the end result is instead a laboured movie populated by two-dimensional characters whom it's difficult to care about; a romantic comedy that is neither touching nor witty save for the (very) occasional funny line.

Despite a talented cast who do their best with the material to hand, The Wedding Party is never more than sporadically entertaining. Characters lack depth and detail - for example, it's never clearly established what Steve's business is, nor why he is bordering on financial ruin - and we care so little about them despite the hoops the plot makes them jump through, so that by the time the climax arrives there is no sense of dramatic tension to engage the audience in the proceedings.

The screenplay by writer Christine Bartlett is thinly constructed and cliché-ridden, and a monologue by teenager Eve (Nikita Rover-Pritchard) which bookends the film is gratingly unnecessary. Indeed, her whole character - and her fledgling relationship with a teenaged boy - feels superfluous; were it cut from the film, it would definitely assist the story's pacing.

The plethora of subplots seems strangely underdeveloped (though points must go to Adam Zwar and Nadine Garner for at least investing their protagonists' subplot with some real chemistry) and at 115 minutes, due to uninspired direction from its first-time director, the film definitely feels too long, rendering what should have been a sharply observed rom-com flabby and weak.

I can see why MIFF chose to open the festival with The Wedding Party – it’s a very Melbourne film, replete with familiar images of suburban life, and it was in part financed by the MIFF Premiere Fund – but I can’t see it enjoying much in the way of box office success once it finds an Australian distributor.

'Deeply underwhelming' was the average reaction from friends and colleagues after the film; a very poor start to what promises to otherwise be an excellent festival. That said, the after-party the followed (and the after-after party!) was great fun; so much fun that I didn't crawl out of bed until midday on Friday, and didn't feel human again to much later in the afternoon!

The Wedding Party (Dir. Amanda Jane, produced by Nicole Minchin, Australia, 2010)

RICHARD'S RATING: two stars