The Oscars and art - a wonky affair

Below is a brief extract from my discussion piece on yesterday's Academy Awards, published today on the ABC's Unleashed website:

"As their eight decade history repeatedly bears out, the relationship between the Academy Awards and art is stumbling and wonky, in which any step towards credibility is inevitably matched by one back and several sideways. The awards were launched in 1927 as a tool of the studios during an anti-union push but also as a way of polishing Hollywood's tarnished public image and making it feel good about itself - wise, artistic and benevolent towards fellow man.

"These days this feel-good factor is important but remains secondary to the primary goal: marketing the harder-to-sell movies - often, though not exclusively dramas - made by the Hollywood studios' boutique, or so-called "independent", divisions.

"It's no accident therefore that the awards are always focused around new and upcoming releases, movies that most people have not even heard of, let alone seen, when the nominations are announced..."

(image: nytimes.com)

Oscar live blog, spoilers ahead

(image: current-news.org)

To all those penning comments suggesting the Oscars are irrelevant, I point to my (I hope) more considered piece on the Academy Awards, due to go up on the ABC's Unleashed website sometime tomorrow (Wed).

First though I have to write the thing, so goodbye from me for this afternoon while I juggle this task with the penning of a feature on the talented and alluring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. How? Left hand tapping one story on lap-top, right-hand the other on desktop - a balancing act to rival Phillippe Petit's high-wire feats in Man on Wire (hope you are appreciating this).

Here are the 81st Academy Award winners - backwards:

(4pm) Best film Oscar goes to (come on, you haven't figured it out by now?) Slumdog - total of eight. Ceremony clocks in at under three and a half hours. Thank flaming christ for that.

(3.54pm): Mild surprise, best actor is Milk's Sean Penn (his 2nd after Mystic River), and not to Mickey Rourke who, quoth Penn, "rises again and he is my brother". Rourke had to be the sentimental fave, what with being a triumphant comeback perf. and all .

Penn praises Americans for electing an "elegant" president. So hang on, that's why they turned on the Republicans - their lack of sartorial elegance?

(3.50pm): Five previous winners - Robert DeNiro, Ben Kingsley, Michael Douglas, Adrien Brody and Anthony Hopkins - take the podium to announce the best actor nominees. Clearly an attempt at giving the TV broadcast - trending downwards in the ratings over recent years - a boost with some heavyweight celeb heft.

(3.43pm) Yet another predictable win - Kate Winslet for The Reader, best actress. Her sixth nomination and first win. Apart from making the obligatory nod to fellow nominees, who include Saint Meryl, Winslet said she had been rehearsing a version of this speech since she was eight-years-old. Which is either disarmingly honest of her or rather alarming. It's certainly a contrast to the usual line, 'hey this is great, glad you liked what you saw, though of course I never actually set out to win an award, it's all about the work.'

(3.35pm): Best director - Danny Boyle. Tally of 7 now to Slumdog and probably 8 by the end as best picture is still to come.

(3.30pm) Foreign language award goes to Japanese title Departures and not to favourite, Waltz with Bashir from Israel (which also walked away from Cannes empty-handed, despite being one of the most crticially acclaimed films at the festival that year). Yojiro Takita's Japanese tale is about a young man in a small town who think he's working as a travel agent but really has a job in a mortuary, says Hollywood Reporter.

Did Bashir suffer from an anti-Israeli sentiment in the wake of the Gaza bombing campaign? If so, it would be ironic given Bashir's expicitly anti-war theme.

(3.29) Best song, Slumdog (6 awards)

(3.09pm) Sound mixing, film editing and original score to Slumdog (bring its tally to 5). Sound mixer Resul Pookutty is the first Indian technician to be win and first to be nominated for an Oscar.

(2.44pm) 2nd award to Dark Knight - sound editing.

(2.37pm) Will Smith - "Sometimes action movie doesn't get the respect they deserve," It's almost like producers are apologizing for the "Dark Knight" snub - H.Reporter's Risky Biz.

Visual effects to Benjamin Button - the third for this technically well-crafted snore-a-thon

(2.35pm) Doco feature to Man on Wire. Phillippe Petit, the high-wire artist the film is about, balances Oscar on chin. Short documentary to Smile Pinki,

( 2.25pm) Heath Ledger wins supporting actor , as predicted by just about everyone.(second posthumous actor winner after Peter Finch for Network, also an Australian of course)

(1.58pm) Best live action short film to Spielzeugland (Toyland)

(1.44-pm) Cinematography to Slumdog (2nd award)

(1.40pm) Art direction and make-up - both to Benjamin Button Costumes - The Duchess.
Best animated short film, La Maison en Petits Cubes.

(1.20pm) Animated feature: "WALL-E". Quel surprise.

(1.15pm) Well it didnt take long to expose that "leak" from the Academy containing the supposed Oscar winners as a hoax (see post below). The "leak" document predicted best supporting and original screenplays going to The Reader and In Bruges. Those awards have already been announced and they have gone to Slumdog Millionaire and Milk (effectively snubbing Wall.E). And supporting actress, instead of going to Amy Adams for Doubt, went to Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona....

BBC: Last year's event watched by just 32m viewers in the US, down from 40m in 2007 and the lowest figure since 1974, when the current ratings system began.

The Big Picture blog, LA Times: "Even though awards telecasts have been in a steady ratings decline, the Grammys made a surprising rebound, drawing a 10% bigger audience, with an even higher ratings spike among the key 18-to-49 age group. If the Oscars' ratings drop again, the academy won't be able to pin the blame on a showbiz-wide audience decline."

Glover's freaky Letterman appearance

In the light of the recent clip I posted of Joaquim Phoenix on Letterman having a nervous breakdown/ scamming the audience (delete according to conviction) , this clip of Crispin Glover's bizarre interview on the show in 1987 makes for resonant viewing.


The same goes for Glover's comments in this clip, recorded several years after the incident:



Nice commentary on the Phoenix episode from Chris Willman in The Huffington Post, who calls it "potentially one of the greatest performances any modern actor has ever given - or at least one of the most baldly courageous.

"The closest comparison would have to be Andy Kaufman's utter commitment to his obnoxious Tony Clifton persona, but Phoenix is going Kaufman one braver here, by not slapping a fake name on the alter ego bur rather inviting the audience to mistake his damaged doppelganger for himself, over an indeterminate length of time that could leave his 'real' career hanging in limbo."

If he is right, then indeed this is an astonishing performance.

Golden oldies - the sequel

In this blog I have occasionally raved, nay, virtually slobbered in appreciation of performances by accomplished older actors such as Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Elah); Philip Gleinister (the original UK version of teleseries Life on Mars in a role taken by Harvey Keitel in the US remake currently screening); and Frank Langella (sadly not being tipped as a likely winner in tomorrow's Academy Awards for his virtuosically powerful yet subtle turn as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon).

Add another name to the list. Peter Firth plays the MI5 department chief Harry Pearce in the long-running BBC spy series Spooks. When I discovered the series during the ABC run of series one a few years ago, my attention was focused on the younger cast members. Matthew McFadyen radiated an arrestingly dark intensity in the lead role of senior agent Tom Quinn (which he of course quickly parlayed into a film career) , with David Oyelowo and Keeley Hawes lending flawless support as Quinn's closest subordinates, Danny and Zoe. I can't recall ever seeing such a charismatic and accomplished array of new actors in a new TV series.

But with all three characters being written out during series three, my attention drifted to the extraordinary characterisation skills that Firth brings to Harry Pearce. With his puffy face and cropped bullet-head, Firth has the look of a man who has been middle-aged long enough to have forgotten what it was like to be young. Pearce's flashing eyes, in-command demeanour, his barely suppressed anger and sheer presence, consistently suggests a lifetime of determination and ruthlessness tempered by pragmatism and stoicism. The role does not appear to be acted so much as lived.

It came as a surprise to realise Firth was playing young men as relatively recently as Roman Polanski's Tess (where he played Angel) and Equus (for which he received an Oscar nomination for the lead role of Alan Strang. (Note that I say "relatively" recently - since I'm aware that these films will appear to belong to the Paleolithic period to many younger readers, who will no doubt cast me into a similarly prehistoric era).

The earlier series of Spooks had a number of outstanding strengths. It's not so much the acting or the script, so much as the way both fused to create fascinatingly complex and seamless characterisations, something necessary for any memorable fictional film or TV role.

Peter Firth IS Harry Pearce, as that favourite old copyline of marketing hacks used to run - a sentiment that this time is utterly appropriate.

Ultimate Oscars spoiler?

So here they are - this year's Oscar winners,"leaked" on line by, well, who knows?

This may well be a hoax but if so it's a remarkably authentic looking one. Not only because of the look of the document itself, but because the results look exactly right - not just the favourites winning in every category, which never actually happens, but a few surprises - and credible ones at that.

If you don't want to "know", don't click.

Thanks to Veronica for the tip
(image: weeklyreader.com)

Good news story - just for a change

"ABC TV’s budget has more than trebled for independently-produced documentaries to in excess of $8 million this year, said Kim Dalton, ABC TV Director of Television, at the Australian Independent Documentary Conference in Adelaide last night.

“In 2008/09, we expect our independent documentary slate to total $30million of production. We have embedded Australian documentaries as a central and successful part of our primetime schedule..."

Thanks to Australian Directors Guild for this item from its e-news bulletin.

(image: nla.gov.au).

New claims: Dr Strangelove "a documentary"

If Eyes Wired Open has been a bit quiet this month it is doubtless because I've been up to my neck in the shadowy world of espionage, having worked my way through Spooks Series 1 to 3 on DVD and ploughed through Thomas Powers' compelling Intelligence Wars - American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda (New York Review Book, 2004) from whose pages the following scary extract is taken:

It was in a "climate of heightened fear and apprehension late in the (Jimmy) Carter administration that the American command and control structure was upset by a series of false alarms - erroneous reports from technical systems that an attack (by the Russians) was underway. In the most dramatic of these episodes the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) , from its bomb-proof post deep beneath the Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, informed Colonel William Odom, military assistant to Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the Soviet Union had launched 220 (nuclear-armed) missiles targeted on the US.

"Odom, at three o'clock in the morning, called Brzezinski, who prepared himself to notify the President in time for the US to retaliate - that is, within three to seven minutes after the Soviet launch. Soon Odom called again to confirm the bad news, adding that the revised, now-correct number of attacking Soviet missiles was 2200 - the long-dreaded, all-out, pearl Harbour-style first strike intended to destroy American missiles in their silos.

"Brzezinski did not wake his wife; he was convinced everyone would soon be dead. But just before he was about to call President Carter, Odom called a third time to say it was all a mistake - someone at NORAD had loaded the computer-controlled warning system with exercise tapes used for simulating war games. Nothing to worry about! Brzezinski went back to bed."

"The Soviets quickly learned of the incident and ought to have been angry that some glitch in American technical wizardry nearly destroyed their country. " But Powers adds, the CIA later learned that "the Soviets had concluded the false alarms were nothing of the kind, but rather part of a diabolical plan to lull Soviet watchers and lay the ground for an eventual surprise attack." Leading to another near all-out nuclear war in 1983 when the Soviets came precariously close to mistaking a US nuclear commands exercise called Able Archer for a real first strike nuclear attack by the Americans.

Counting bums on seats

On Friday I met Ruth Harley, still fresh-in-the-job Kiwi head of Screen Australia, at drinks following the annual awards of the Sydney-based Film Critics Circle of Australia (prize-winners listed below).

Apart from saying she really enjoyed Straya (I believed her, though if she didnt enjoy the film it would probably be diplomatic in her position not to bluntly admit to it) , she also made admiring noises about The Combination, the David Field-directed film, set in Sydney's Australian-Lebanese community, released this month (see post label below for link to my review). Good to see she isn't defensive about films made outside the official screen agency funding system.

It was also encouraging to hear that she agrees with the way the French announce their box office results - not by quoting box office grosses (the American habit that we slavishly ape) but by the number of admissions, the more accurate and honest yardstick for measuring a film's performance.

Saying a film attracted x million dollars box office and comparing it to that of another film made several years ago is of limited use. The figures are never inflation adjusted. This means that Titanic is not the biggest film of all time. Its earnings hit a record US dollar value but did so during a period when the dollar was not worth much compared with its value in 1939, when the perennially popular Gone With the Wind was released. Surveys that canvas the highest number of admissions make it immediately clear that Gone with the Wind remains the most popular film of all time - and by a long chalk.

It impressed me very quickly while interviewing French actors and directors in Paris in November that they always knew how many people had seen their films. The number of Euros they might also have earned was never quoted.

Harley said the New Zealanders (and I assume she meant the New Zealand Film Commission, which she headed for an extended period) had moved to using admissions as a measuring stick during her tenure, though it had taken a while to make the change.

The Age ran an interview with Harley at the weekend in which she admirably made references to filmmakers as artists and cinemas's need for poetry while still recognising that the box office results for local films have not been good enough.

Extract: "Harley rejects the view that filmmakers should talk only about what is happening in their own backyard. 'We don't say that about novelists and painters — we allow them to do whatever they like which is, after all, the job of an artist.'

"Harley believes that an industry such as Australia's needs scripts that can transcend the obvious limitations of small budgets and non-Hollywood stars: 'The metaphor at the heart of a film is its poetry and is what enables it to arrive on a big screen without all those other big-screen elements and that's what I'd like to see…' "

The full list of FCCA award winners:

Best Film -- The Black Balloon, Producer Tristram Miall
Best Director -- Elissa Down, The Black Balloon
Best Actor -- William Mcinnes, Unfinished Sky
Best Actress -- Noni Hazlehurst, Bitter And Twisted
Best Actor (Supporting) -- Brandon Walters, Australia
Best Editor -- Suresh Ayyer, Unfinished Sky
Best Music -- Antony Partos, Unfinished Sky
Best Adapted Screenplay -- Peter Duncan, Unfinished Sky
Best Original Screenplay -- Matthew Dabner, Joel Edgerton, The Square
Best Cinematography -- Mandy Walker, Australia
Best Actress (Supporting) --Toni Collette, The Black Balloon
Best Festure Documentary -- Not Quite Hollywood, Director Mark Hartley
Best Documenatary Jury Prize – Bastardy, Director Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Producer Philippa Campey
Best Documentary Short -- Rare Chicken Rescue, Director Randall Wood. Honorable Mention, Spirit Stones, Director Allan Collins
Best Foreign Feature in English -- Slumdog Millionaire, Directors Danny Boyle, Lovleen Tandan
Best Foreign Language Feature -- The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Director Julian Schnabel
Special Acknowledgement – Producer Richard Brennan

Berlin rewards hot new women directors

On the international film festival circuit in 2006-6 I saw two debut features by women directors that were clearly the work of major talents whose careers would be worth closely watching.

They were Peru's Claudia Llosa, pictured above (with the wittily imaginative and quasi-Bunuelesque Madeinusa) and Maren Ade from Germany (with Forest for the Trees, an amazingly accomplished graduation film I was happy about securing for the '05 Sydney Film Festival).

Good then to see that both have produced follow-up films that have won major prizes at the Berlinale (Berlin Film festival). Llosa scored the top prize, the Golden Bear, with the Milk of Sorrow, about a 20-year-old woman in the cpital city of Lima dealing with the death of her mother.

Ade picked up the Grand Jury prize for her second feature, Everyone Else (about a relationship's disintegration), sharing it with Gigante from Argentinian-born director Adrian Biniez.

Let's hope they get picked up for Australian distribution.

Full list of winners at Hollywood Reporter.

(image: monstersandcritics.com)

Phoenix falling

The audience laughs, and David Letterman cruelly laughs at him . Meanwhile YouTube commenters line up to proclaim "hey, it's all a put-on". But Joaquin Phoenix clearly isn't joking and as far as I'm concerned this is painfully uncomfortable viewing. Kind of like watching Ricky Gervais's David Brent in The Office, only far worse because it's real.

Phoenix obviously doesnt want to be there in front of the cameras. Look at his hand twitching. He's clearly going very publicly through his own private hell - and whatever is causing that only he can tell.

Clip tip - Variety's Thompson on Hollywood (ditto the Tarantino trailer below - what, you expect me to go looking for my own clips?)

Inglorious Basterds - the Furst Traylor

Inglorious Basterds is looking more like Mel Brooks's To Be or Not to Be than a Tarantino movie - a very broad piss-take, in other words.

Maybe the supermouth has been watching my collection of Funny Hitler clips from June 21 last year.

There but for the grace of God....

Thought one: the usual blog subjects - film, art music - seem a bit trivial in the wake of the fire disaster. I'm sure many Australians are thinking, 'there but for the grace of God...' Can there be many worse ways to die than being burned alive or suffocated in a blind panic?

Thought two: the firefighters, many of them volunteers. How do they do it? Extraordinary feats of selfless heroism.

Thought three: on second thoughts, yes, film is relevant to these events. In this age of cynicism, heroism still makes a powerful film subject. The only firefighting film I can think of is Backdraft - an overheated (if you will pardon the pun) Hollywood action melodrama. There has to be a powerful Australian story with this topic at its centre.

A reader of The Australian also makes a good point about the lack of documentaries on bushfires. "Many of us have seen documentaries on Tornados, Monsoons, Avalanches and so on, " comments Max on-line. "But even at 47 - and I’m sure I’m not alone - I am yet to see my first documentary on Australia’s greatest threat. We are hearing one sad story after another about people who were unable to respond in time and lost their life. Surely, these people would have stood a better chance if the unpredictable nature of fire had have been known..."

(Images: smh.com.au)

A great artist in our midst - Cressida Campbell

If you live in, or are visiting Sydney during February, make sure to visit the stunning exhibition of wood cut paintings and woodcut prints by the local artist Cressida Campbell at S.H. Ervin
Gallery on Observatory Hill in The Rocks.

The reproductions on this page are intended to do nothing more than whet the appetite. Next to the exhibited works they look feeble - not only in size (in the exhibition the picture of Sydney harbour above takes up about half the width of the room) but in detail and impression.

Campbell has closely studied Japanese woodcut techniques and adapted them to her own, very individual purpose. The results - in which lines are gently etched into wood before being painted - have a vividness not only of colour but sheer presence, seeming to leap out at the viewer. The level of detail is extraordinary, no subject too complex or multi-faceted for Campbell to fully explore, whether the patterns of an elaborate flower-patterned fabric in a room full of art and domestic objects, or the fronds of a plant in a rainforest.

Three surprises: I immediately wandered why I wasn't already aware of this work. Secondly, that most of the works exhibited
have been created roughly between 1990-2009- there is something both timeless about the work and decidedly out of kilter with contemporary art world's inward-looking concern with abstract conceptualism and social and political position-taking.

The third surprise is personal: only after returning home and going on-line do I discover that I know her husband - the long-standing film critic for The Australian Financial Review, Peter Crayford.

Christopher Allen, reviewing the exhibition in The Australian: "She has never worried about the tribe of curators and catalogue-essay writers and the art establishment has consequently ignored her. The paucity of her bibliography is striking, especially considering the quantity of verbiage heaped on far less significant artists.
Curators have no idea what to make of her: on the face of it, she should have been an outstanding candidate for an exhibition on the theme of optimism, and there was a touch of irony in the fact that she had a commercial show at Philip Bacon's gallery in Brisbane at the same time. But the functionaries of contemporary art are guided by brands and slogans, not by visual appreciation.

"Campbell's work belongs to a different world altogether: it is quiet, self-possessed, entirely confident in its own vocation; the stillness and lucidity of her compositions speak of sustained attention and an almost perfect harmony between her vision and her craft..."

The Sydney Morning Herald's art critic, John McDonald, proclaimed that "less than three weeks into 2009 it is very early to be nominating the show of the year, but this exhibition will prove hard to dislodge. "

Indeed it will.

Bale : now the inevitable public apology

"I was out of order beyond belief. I acted like a punk, I regret that. There is no one who has heard that tape that's been hit harder by it than me... I'm not comfortable with this notion of being a movie star. I'm an actor... I put so much into what I do and care so much about it and sometimes the enthusiasm just goes awry. I'm embarrassed by it. I ask everybody to sit down and ask themselves, have they ever had a bad day and have they ever lost their temper and really regretted it immensely...I've seen a rough cut of the movie and it looks fantastic and Shane did a wonderful job. Please don't allow this incredibly embarrassing meltdown to overshadow this movie."

- Well I guess it was inevitable that Christian Bale would issue some kind of apology (which was made on an LA radio station), what with even his mother making a less than flattering statement about his four-minute rage, including a threat to get DOP Sandy Hurlbut fired, on the set of Terminator Salvation (see post below for clip). What a pity - and how predictable - that it came immediately after the affair had become a YouTube phenomenon and not close to when the incident happened, ie at least six months ago.

Springtime for Hitler

In The Weekend Australian I examine the latest wave of Hollywood movies with Nazi and Holocaust themes, including The Reader (released on Feb 19) and trace them to the stream of films and telemovies emanating from Germany this decade.

Extract:
"Christian Buss, film critic for Der Spiegel Online, observes that "Hitler -- sorry for being ironic -- is still a bestseller. It's a paradox. On one hand there are many (German) voices complaining that they've seen enough Nazi movies. On the other hand every year there is a bunch of new big-budget Nazi movies produced for German television, which get extremely high ratings. The reason is that there are still parts of the history of the Third Reich that were not shown in fiction until now -- and maybe for a good reason. These new movies deal with the suffering of the ordinary German people." As a result, he says, they tend to show Germans in general as victims..."

John Martyn RIP - the death of a musical genius

Only heard today about the death of January 29 of British singer-guitarist-songwriter extraordinaire John Martyn, aged 60 - too late for a legend's death, too early to be fair.

Martyn is one of the greats of his era - certainly up there with Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and his old friend Nick Drake (for whom he wrote the title track of his most celebrated album, Solid Air).

I've long felt Solid Air to be without exaggeration one of the great albums of the last 40 years - up there with Morrison's Astral Weeks for its effortlessly ground-breaking and deeply soulful blend of folk,jazz, blues and rock.

But it was far from an only child: Bless the Weather, Inside Out, Sunday's Child, One World (recorded with dub wizard Lee Perry in Jamaica) were also exceptional recordings, each touched with magic.

A special mention too for Live at Leeds - the only album to accurately display the mind-spinning Echoplexed guitar excursions that made Martyn's stage performances so mesmerising (I was lucky enough to see him play live on at least a couple of occasions). The early 1980s output was mellower, the gentle ferocity toned down, yet still full of rewarding moments.

I suspect many regular readers of this blog, especially those younger than this wizened scribe, may not even have heard of Martyn, though I think I know why. If you will forgive me a note of cynicism at such a sad occasion, I've long felt his major career error lay in keeping himself alive. This did not appear intentional: his prodigious alcohol and drug input suggested a desire to emulate the likes of Gram Parsons, Drake and the Buckleys, Tim and Jeff - musicians whose stature, considerable during their lifetimes, was massively reinforced by early death.

Martyn seemed to me cruelly taken for granted by British rock critics (though some, like the NME's Ian Penman, remained lifelong fans). Not obscure enough to allow for rediscovery a la Drake, his tragedy was a living one, the kind that gets stamped as ugly or sad. Right from the start of his career he was frequently pissed on stage. In recent years he lost a leg in an operation, was overweight and in poor health. His output in recent years - I kept up with none of it - seemed to excite few, if any, of his fans.

What would Jimi Hendrix have ended up like, had he lived? Corpulent, bald and releasing mediocre material with none of the spark of his youthful genius too? An image to ponder.

Extract, Guardian obituary:

"His debut album, London Conversation, recorded in a few hours, had a somewhat conventional approach that did not reflect the true Martyn, who was soon introducing elements of jazz and experimental electronics into his music. 'I didn't like that finger-in-the-ear stuff,' he said later. 'I've never been the morris dancing type. I'm a funky, not a folkie.'

His 1970 album Stormbringer! found him collaborating with his new wife, Beverley Kutner, and taking an innovative approach using phase-shifting and Echoplex devices with which he could create a one-man wall of sound.

The Road to Ruin (1970) and Bless the Weather (1971) marked the start of Martyn's long musical relationship with jazz bassist Danny Thompson, and he was beginning to perfect a slurring, impressionistic vocal style that complemented the rich ambiguities of his music. He often cited the avant-garde saxophonist Pharoah Sanders as an inspiration..."

Christian's baleful

How I love the internet. More than half a million views in only two days and nearly 6000 comments for this sound recording of Christian Bale chucking an apparent roid rage on the set of Terminator 4 - Terminator Salvation.

Can't wait to see how Mr UK-American Psycho will explain this one when he's doing the media junkets to promote the movie.

The crew member on the receiving end is DOP Shane Hurlbut, who, having wandered into Bale's field of vision during a take, appears to have been displaying a bizarre death wish.

You can buy the tee-shirt at despair.com

Handy hint: watch the Germans

With all the attention paid to the pitiful failure of Australian films to find domestic audiences last year (less than one per cent if you exclude Baz Luhrmann's US studio production Australia), it's interesting to see Germany's equivlent figures.

Figures released this week - on the eve of the Berlinale (Berlin film festival) - show German films taking a very healthy 27% of that country's box office earnings last year, the highest share since 1991.

Top performers include The Baader Meinhof Complex, The Wave and the most successful of all, Keinohrhasen (Rabbit Without Ears), which earned a almighty US $52 million at home, reports Variety.

The lesson for Australian filmmakers: study closely what the Germans are doing and get to know their producers and funding mechanisms wherever appropriate. Encouragingly this has already started to happen. I've recently been doing some work for German cultural organisation the Goethe-Institut in Sydney on a terrific initiative aimed at encouraging co-productions between the two nations' filmmakers. More on this later in the year.

Juana Molina closes Sydfest Spiegeltent program on a high

"SHE may be from Argentina but Juana Molina could readily be mistaken for Brazilian, being blessed with one of those bossa-nova-ish voices that float effortlessly into the air like feathers in a light breeze."

Comedian-turned one-woman-band Molina ended the Spiegeltent program at the Sydney Festival on a high note. See my quickie on-line review at The Australian for the full verdict.

I'll be following up with a look at the debate that's been swirling around retiring Sydfest director Fergus Linehan's music program, and the musical policies of his successor, very soon.