Eyes Wired Open

Megan Washington at Sydney Festival: my verdict

2012-01-30T11:06:00.000+11:00

Continuing the female performer theme (see post on Anna Calvi and Laura Marling below), my review of last week's Sydney Festival show by Megan Washington is up at The Australian.

I'd been non-plussed by her recordings but this stage show, dubbed Insomnia and inspired by an emotional crisis behind her last two years in the public spotlight, was a different story.

Extract:

"SOME artists can't be properly appreciated until seen live. So it is with the ARIA award-winning singer Megan Washington.

"Her recordings appear to reveal a voice lacking in truly distinctive colour, and while her video clips show an appreciation of visual ingenuity, her eyes can look oddly lifeless as she gazes into the lens.

"It's fitting then that a sense of personal disengagement and emotional turmoil should provide the singer - stage name Washington - with a theme for this live performance, which is due for one-off repeats in New York, Paris and London only.

"Described in the program as a conceptual work, it is more intimately adult cabaret than spectacular pop concert, closer in theatrical spirit to Ute Lemper than Lady Gaga..."

Marling and Calvi hit Australia - the interviews

2012-01-27T18:01:00.001+11:00

Two of the performers in my top albums of 2011 list are about to tour Australia, both of them insanely gifted young British women - Laura Marling (pictured directly below) and Anna Calvi. This week I interviewed both of them for features in The Australian. Extracts below:

LAURA MARLING

THE idea that popular musiciansnaturally react against the culture of their parents took root in theearly-to-mid 1960s. But while that notion might have been seductive enough tolast several decades, it's now essentially meaningless.

For evidence you need only turnto interviews with some of Australia's top new year's musical visitors fromoverseas. Fleet Foxes lead singer and songwriter Robin Pecknold, for instance,talks intently about getting his inspiration from his folks' Crosby Stills Nashand Young and Fairport Convention albums, while Britain's Anna Calvi is openabout how much she gained from her Italian father's love of music.

Now Laura Marling, named bestsolo female artist last year in the Brit Awards, tells The Australian how muchshe gleaned from her musical parents in Hampshire in the south of England."I was quite lucky," says Marling, 21, who last year released ACreature I Don't Know, her widely acclaimed third -- and predominantly acoustic-- album. "My dad used to run a residential recording studio..."

ANNA CALVI

Callas and Piaf may be singinglegends but they are not often name-checked by rock performers. Calvi -- whogrew up in West London and takes her name from her music-loving Italian father-- clearly doesn't occupy their respective genres of chanson and opera.Nonetheless she doesn't see this as a barrier. "If you take Edith Piaf, I love her because therewas such a rawness to her voice," she says. "In a way she was veryrock'n'roll. She was a tough woman. MariaCallas, a lot of people complained that her voice was really ugly, becauseit was very distinct. That's something you get in rock music as well."

These stated influences are bestthought of not as literal touchstones -- she doesn't really sound like eitherof them -- than the inspiration for a stirringly theatrical approach. In weakerhands, a desire for heightened dramatic effect in song so often leads tosentimental melodrama, hence the dreaded power ballad. In key Calvi songsDesire and Suzanne and I, the intensity is unmistakable yet the performance neveroverwrought. There's always light and shade, and plenty of atmosphere, much ofit inspired by Calvi's reverence for the music in David Lynch's films(particularly Angelo Badalementi's scores) and Ennio Morricone's writing for theSergio Leone westerns...

Filmfests team up with distributors to support niche releases

2012-01-24T14:25:00.003+11:00


Stephen Sewell

This media release just hit my in-box. The initiative it announces immediately hit me as a very positive and interesting one.

"The Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane Film Festivals today announce a new partnership which will see the festivals working together with distributors to support the national release of niche and art house Australian films, both online and theatrically.

"The organisations will undertake targeted marketing for the releases in each territory, collectively mobilising their extensive networks of Australian cinephiles. Combined, the festivals have over 95,000 e-newsletter subscribers, and the partnership will tap into this valuable resource to support new release Australian films.

"The first project to receive mega-festival support is Andy X, developed and directed by Jim Sharman from a script by Stephen Sewell, featuring original music score by Basil Hogios and lyrics by Sewell and Hogios, which is scheduled for an online release on 22 February 2012."

The festivals already give selective support to independent commercial releases through their e-news bulletins for subscribers and members, so the initiative is not entirely new.

But in co-ordinating the support of the four major festivals across the board it ensures more targeted and effective marketing for those more creatively lively but harder-to-sell titles that festivals instinctively support. In other words, those films designed to leave us thinking as we leave the cinema, to quote Iranian director Asghar Farhadi in yesterday's post (see immediately below).

More here.

Farhadi: there are only two types of movies

2012-01-23T14:15:00.002+11:00

I love this (partly indirect) quote in The Washington Examiner from Asghar Farhadi, Iranian director of A Separation - named best film by Berlin and Sydney film festivals last year and best foreign movie last week in the Golden Globes.

"There are two types of movies, he argued: those that leave audiences thinking afterward, and those that let them go to bed without a thought afterward. He wants to make the former.

"'Maybe your answers are different from my answers and the other audiences'. It doesn't matter. It matters that you think. Today, the world needs thinking'." My review of A Separation, which finally gets Australian release on March 1 via Hopscotch Films, is up at SBS Film.

Kids films: where the magic is

2012-01-22T15:53:00.000+11:00

After viewing Scorsese's magical ode to silent cinema, Hugo, the delightful The Muppets and now the latest Studio Ghibli, Arrietty, in a short period, I have decided to apply to officially be declared a child. I can't remember the last time three such wonderful kids films were released so closely together.

My full review of the last-named is at The Australian here , and a couple of extracts are below:

Introduction: "THE latest film from Japanese animators Studio Ghibli is an enchanting story of a family of little people living secretly beneath the floorboards of a house inhabited by humans.

"Like the studio's 2004 film Howl's Moving Castle, it's adapted from a popular English children's novel, in this case The Borrowers, written by Mary Norton and first published in 1952....

Conclusion: "Nearly all Studio Ghibli films to date have been directed by either Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away) or Isao Takahata (Grave of the Fireflies), who are now getting on in age. This film is the work of a new, younger director, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has served a long apprenticeship as one of their key animators. Judging by the results, the studio's creative future is assured."

Review Round-up - from Pedro to Payne

2012-01-16T00:06:00.001+11:00

I've put together a series of links to some of my recent reviews published in The Australian and Limelight. The Australian content requires registration - which doesn't take long and so far it's free. (Postscript Jan 19: it seems you may have to sign up to read some content on the Australian site. It's complex though. Some items are open to everyone for free. I've no idea which, since I signed up for a free 3 month trial a while ago and therefore get access to everything without paying).

Almodovar's The Skin I Live In: "a luridly macabre melodrama with enough outlandish plot developments to fuel three separate movies...offers up a fascinating meditation on beauty, sexual obsession and the putative
male desire to mould, gaze upon and own the female body." Review online and in print at Limelight. See also my musings on female star Elena Anaya and screen beauty in this Eyes Wired Open post from August.

The Muppets: "Exactly the bunch of reprobates we've come to love, and that is cause for celebration." Review at The Australian.

Guy Ritchie's sequel, Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows: " as a characterisation it (Robert Downey Jr's Holmes) fails to add up. Downey again ditches the deerstalker, all the better to show off his long, tousled locks – an affectation that makes him look more like a dissolutely Byronic hero than any previous incarnations of Holmes.

"This master detective retains the dazzling mental ability familiar from previous interpretations but adds a new layer of sadism that makes a mockery of the character. In line with Conan Doyle’s Holmes, he’s also a genius at disguises, giving the film its best running gag, especially in the delightful final scene. Less traditionally, he mumbles at great speed - a long-standing affectation of Downey Jr's." From original draft, edited from published review for space reasons - The Australian review here.)

We Bought a Zoo, Cameron Crowe's family film starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson: "Sentiment is milked; the characters often behave in obvious ways. Motives and thoughts are spelled out in a literal-minded fashion." Review in The Australian.

The Descendants, Alexander Payne's drama-comedy starring George Clooney: "The film’s appealing use of Hawaiian locations dovetails perfectly into its themes of cultural identity and family versus public responsibility. " Review published in Limelight print edition only.

The Iron Lady: "The deeper issue is narrative-related...it's as if Maggie's Greatest Hits...is playing in "shuffle" mode." Limelight, print only.

How to direct comedy: try serious

2012-01-15T22:58:00.002+11:00


Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.

I've never cared for comedies that look as if they're bending over backwards to make me laugh. With truly effective comedy, you never see the gag coming. The director and writer don't seem to be striving to get laughs and neither do the characters on screen.

The most extreme examples can be found in the silent comedies of Buster Keaton (The General, Sherlock Jr. et al), but Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin displays the same principle in The Naked Gun films - mayhem is all around yet Frank never notices.

I'm not saying all great comedy has to be deadpan - that's just one approach among many - but filmmakers and actors should decline to underline the humour. Viewers want to feel they've discovered it themselves.

Howard Hawks, whose great Hollywood comedies included Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire, put it well in a 1976 interview:

"You don't find a good comedy so easily. There are a lot that are made that are supposed to be funny, but aren't. There's another thing about making comedies - they start out with funny main titles and with ridiculous gags, this attitude of 'Look, we're going to be funny and we want you to laugh at it.'

"I try to start it as if it is all serious then all of a sudden surprise them. It's much easier to do it my way than to do it their way. If I go to see a movie and they start off trying to be funny right from the beginning, I get up and walk out."

10 lessons for aspiring film critics

2012-01-06T18:25:00.000+11:00

Jim Hoberman

The Village Voice's retrenchment of its senior film critic Jim Hoberman was the big news in the world of film criticism this week - yet another sign of the decline of paid film criticism in the US. I thought the whole point of a magazine like the Voice was to display informed criticism on the arts among other vital aspects of New York life. It's hard to imagine who it now sees as its readership.

On the positive side I note that Hoberman, a deeply knowledgeable writer always worth reading, including when you found yourself disagreeing, lectures on film at NYU, so it's not like the Voice was his only paid gig. Plus I'd be surprised if he didn't crop up somewhere else, just as Todd McCarthy was picked up by Hollywood Reporter after being dropped by Variety, where he'd been the senior film critic for ages.

While in the short term this is obviously bad news for smart film criticism and for the appreciation of cinema as art, in the longer term I think it's merely part of an upheaval and re-arrangement in the way things are done.

For an example of the way the net has enabled smart film writing, it's hard to beat David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson's site, Observations on Film Art. It's an unpaid blog, ultimately supported by academic work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their various books.

I find it interesting, in this context that they've been able to use the blog as the basis for their most recent collection of writings, Minding Movies (University of Chicago Press). I think this kind of model, where the barriers between paid and unpaid work start to break down, is something we're going to increasingly see more of. The one major problem for this is that it's going to make it harder for newcomers to break in though.

In the meantime, thanks to music and literary critic Bruce Elder for drawing my attention to Hoberman's 10 pieces of advice for aspiring film critics, posted by one of his former students this week on the website of theIndependent Film Channel. All the points are valuable. My comments appear in italics.

On the fundamentals:
“Ask yourself the question, ‘What do people want to know about a movie that they’ve never seen?’”

On plot:
“Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.”

Detailed plot synopses, yes. It's almost impossible to write about a film without giving something away , but try to keep those restricted to the earlier scenes that set up the story. Be sensitive to the moments you personally found surprising and try to preserve their mystery.

I'd add: good film writing is never just about plot. It's about the totality of elements that go towards making a film, from music and sound design to performance and everything else between.

On brevity:
“Watch for excess words. If there’s a shorter word, use it.”

Indeed good advice for all writers, not just film critics. I'd add: be aware of your readership. "Mis-en-scene" makes sense to a sophisticated, cine-literate audience - film students or readers of a serious periodical. If you're writing for a general audience, most people won't get what your point is. If you can't find a concise way to explain mis-en-scene, perhaps you shouldn't be writing about film.

On editors:
“Work with them for the good of the piece. Don’t have ego. Don’t compete.”

One of the most valuable reactions I ever had from a section editor was when he handed back a piece and told me it wasn't what he'd asked for and that I could do better. I went away. I did do better.

On interviewing filmmakers:
“If you’re thinking about it, ask them about it.”

Obvious, perhaps, but there's no point being shy. Spit out what's on your mind.

On digressions:
“The longer the em dash, the weaker its impact.”

Great rule. In general, it's a good idea not to let your sentences get too long. At the same time, don't fetishise short sentences. Sometimes you need to contrast sentences of different lengths to create a more dynamic rhythm.

On taste:
“Always ask yourself why you like what you like.”

That's what good criticism is: the reviewer exploring their reactions, finding out why they felt the way they did, and bringing their knowledge and personal insights to bear.

On bad movies:
“Vent your spleen. In criticism, it’s better to be angry than depressed.”

Can't argue with that.

On the competition:
“Never read other critics’ reviews. They cloud your judgment.”

"Never" is a bit harsh. Reading critics you admire is immensely stimulating. But in general it's better not to read them on a particular film until first you've written your own review. The exception: writing on older films, you might want to hold upearlier critical reactions to scrutiny. You may want to argue with them. You may even want to agree with them.

On deadlines:
“Never miss a deadline.”

Can't emphasis that one enough. If you mess around editors, they won't invite you back. Can't blame them.

I'd add a personal piece of advice missing from Hoberman's list:

Don't run with the crowd. Just because your peers loudly declaim a film you've just enjoyed as banal rubbish or pretentious tripe, it does not mean you have to follow sheepishly. The best critics are leaders. At the same time, don't go the opposite extreme and be perverse. An opinion doesn't become invalidated just because it's widely held.

My Top Albums - 2011 (Now with notes)

2011-12-20T11:08:00.341+11:00

Lykke Li

Dec 22: Below I've added notes to the list I posted a few days ago. Those of you who said they hadn't heard of some of these artists - now you have no excuse...

Favourite Albums 2011

In no particular order, these are the albums that fired me up this year. I'll put up notes and clips later. Happy Christmas shopping.

1) The Low Anthem – Smart Flesh

On their second album the Rhode Island ensemble capture the kind of hushed, magical ambiance that helped make the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session a landmark recording of the late 1980s. That’s partly due to the way both recordings were made – live, in large, makeshift spaces, the Junkies’ in a church, the Anthem’s in an abandoned factory that gives the spare folk and country arrangements a very special warmth and spectral resonance. My October post on the album is here.

2) Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) - Tomboy

Another solo album from Animal Collective's Lennox that, if anything, surpasses the experimental brilliance of 2008's Person Pitch. Lennox weaves pure melody and rhythmic persuasiveness in a wash of sonic bliss. The influence of Brian Wilson is here, of course, but there's something else warping the sound. It's like a Bizzaro World album in which Phil Spector somehow wandered into a recording session with Germany's classic minimalists Can.

3) Lindi Ortega - Little Red Boots

Toronto based singer-songwriter Ortega has been dubbed “alt country”, but there’s nothing particularly alternative about this magnificent debut album of contemporary country and country-rock at its very finest (other than alternative to mediocre). Ortega, who comes from a part Mexican, part Irish background, has a voice that’s immensely captivating, marrying Dolly Parton’s room-filling sweetness with the occasionally abrasive edge of a Martha Wainwright – wrapped in a pronounced vibrato that’s never overdone. Her frequently upbeat songs are spiritedly melodic and performed by one hot chilli pepper of a band. (Review first appeared in Limelight)

4) Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo

Whether with a band, where he becomes a slightly weirder Wilco, or just alone with his acoustic, Vile 's intense atmosphere comes bearing down on you as he slurs his way through his often eccentric lyrics, stretching out the syllables into some weird new folkie melisma ("society is my frie-eh-eh-nd"...."I was a peeping to-oh-oh-ohm..."). Sometimes listening to Neil Young or late-period Bob Dylan, you find yourself wondering how they manage to create such a pungent effect using so little. That's what I wonder here. I don't know how he does it.

5) Tom Waits – Bad as Me

Much as I adored 2004's Real Gone, it ploughed a narrow furrow, all barking electric blues. This ones is Wait's most satisfyingly balanced studio set of new material since 1999's sublime Mule Variations. Everything Waits can do, he does here, and he does it blindingly well. Backed by, among others, Keith Richards and Marc Ribot on guitars and Primus's Les Claypool on bass, which probably tells you all you need to know.

6) Paul Simon – So Beautiful or So What

A glorious album from start to finish. If you liked Graceland, you need to hear this. Seriously. I only just found out Simon is 70 years old, which makes this album even more miraculous, for it displays the joie-de-vivre - and the purity of voice -of a young man.

7) Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi

An extraordinary first album of theatrical drama and shadowy desire. Brian Eno has compared her with Patti Smith, which didn't occur to me but they do share a certain presence, especially if you think of the latter's Because the Night. But Smith didn't play flamenco-style electric guitar, nor flambe her songs with the musical fires of A Fistful of Dollars. Coming to Australia soon for Laneway Festival. if I were 20 I'd be hopelessly in love with her.

8) Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

I love the way girl-group pop of the Sixties - the Crystals, the Ronettes et al -has been revived and remodelled so smartly by this fiercely talented Swede. She really knows the value of a big drum sound. If I were 16, I'd be hopelessly in love with her.

9) Ry Cooder – Pull up Some Dust and Sit Down

As good a Ry Cooder album as he has ever delivered, this is strewn generously with filthy blues-rock and soulful vocals and post-GFC lyrics sending up the bankers and empathising with the poor.

10) Trio Chemirani - Invite

This virtuoso Iranian zarb drum trio deliver the best all-instrumental release I heard all year. While liking much of what goes under that label, I tend to be wary of the term 'world music', but here it means something real. This is a glorious series of duets with master musicians from different cultures, including west African kora player Ballaké Sissoko and France's Titi Robin. In each case the players find the shared language to make a meaningful and beautiful collaboration.

11) Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know

The UK singer-songwriter displays a maturity that makes it hard to believe she is only 21, the same age as Dylan when he recorded Freewheelin'. Her third album contains the hushed troubadour sound we've heard from her before, matching Leonard Cohen's acoustic finger-picking style with the lyrical influence of a Dylan and the rising vocal cadences of a Joni Mitchell. The big surprise is The Beast, where she not only moves into rock but does it with a drama and commitment that suggests the world is her oyster. She's returning to Australia in the New Year. If I were 21 I'd be hopelessly in love with her.

12) June Tabor and Oysterband – Ragged Kingdom

With the early death of Sandy Denny, Tabor assumed the crown of England's finest living female folk singer. This second collaboration with Oysterband mostly takes her away from the dolefulness found in her solo work with a series of punchy and insanely catchy anthems, though there's no denying the glorious melancholy of their slowed-down Love Will Tear Us Apart, almost unrecognisable as the Joy Division song. If I were 64 I'd be hopelessly (etc etc)

Runners Up

JuJu (Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara) – In Trance

Other Lives – Tamer Animals

Karsh Kale – Cinema

The Unthanks – Last

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues.

___________________________________________________________

Hollywood vs. Chinese cinema: Game On

2011-12-19T15:30:00.001+11:00

"SOMETHING often missed in discussions of the Chinese economy's dramatic continued expansion is that it has the world's fastest growing film sector," I wrote this year in a piece centering on an interview with Wendi Murdoch.

The wife of Rupert Murdoch has moved into film production, starting with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, directed by Wayne Wang of Joy Luck Club fame, and has active plans to develop more Chinese co-productions. (See here for my review of the film for Limelight magazine.)

For me the interview was a good excuse to examine the broader context, which is the extraordinary rate of growth in the Chinese cinema and film industries.

As I observed, China's domestic movie box-office earnings of $US1.5 billion last year represented a 64% increase from 2009. If that growth continues, in four years it will have become the world's second largest movie market after the US."


Snow Flower & The Secret Fan

In November Variety reported that in the first nine months of this year, 630 new cinemas opened in China. That's an average of nearly two new cinemas every day, resulting in 2,563 new screens.

"This spectacular growth has different aspects," my September piece continued. "First there is the attempt by Hollywood to take advantage of this huge market: Avatar was a smash hit and Kung Fu Panda 2 this year broke box-office records.

"But domestic Chinese film production is also growing at a rapid speed: the country produced more than 500 films last year, compared with 754 in the US. And much of last year's bumper box office can be attributed to the popularity of local blockbusters such as Aftershock, about the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, and If You are the One 2.

Since then, however, the outlook for Chinese production has started to look far less optimistic. "Facing tough competition from Hollywood tentpoles, even bigger-budgeted local pics such as The Lost Bladesman have failed to ignite at the Chinese box office," reported Variety on November 4th.

Kung Fu Panda 2

"China's B.O. continues to storm ahead and is expected to top 13 billion yuan ($2.05 billion) this year, after exceeding $1.5 billion in 2010," it added. "But senior Chinese biz figures are fretting that domestic movies are not doing well enough to hold their own against fierce competish from Hollywood, despite quotas on overseas pics and various other hurdles facing foreign movies.

"Avatar made $210 million in China, while Inception did $69 million, and even though the studios' cut of takings in China is half what it is elsewhere in the world, the figures are appealing enough for Hollywood to take notice."

Gao Jun, vice president of the exhibition circuit New Film Association said that 90% of Chinese movies were losing money. Variety added that all cinema chain operators were complaining about falling box office.

The manager of the Guangzhou Jinyi cinema said that during the National Day holiday, the number of people watching movies was down 30%. This has been blamed on the less-than-stellar performances of local pics"

Thanks to Twitter's @TLPSPodcast for drawing my attention to this piece on Chinese multiplex expansion published on Slate on November 30, titled We’re Going To Need More Popcorn - Inside China’s quickly multiplying multiplexes.

"At nearly every theater I visited, there were an equal number of American and Chinese films on offer,": wrote the webzine's Eric Hynes in reference to Beijing. "But look closer at the schedules and a pattern emerges: While The Green Lantern or Limitless would play eight times per day, Chinese domestic product like Love On Credit would screen only twice.

"In these instances, marquee equivalence was basically symbolic. A local film blogger alerted me to reports of a shadier tactic for protecting national pride. Earlier this year, theaters were caught printing out tickets to the propagandistic Chinese epic, Beginning of the Great Revival, when patrons had asked for Kung Fu Panda II—greatly padding the box office for a film that the Internet generation roundly mocked."

50 years of Amnesty International

2011-12-19T13:36:00.000+11:00

Screamin' Jay Hawkins: The Man Who Ate Nick Cave

2011-12-17T18:54:00.003+11:00

The excellent UK website Rock's Backpages recently posted this story of mine published in the NME in 1986, based on an interview with the great Screamin' Jay Hawkins (of I Put a Spell on You fame) at his Bondi beachfront hotel. (Most of the site's huge archive of popular music writing is behind a paywall, though some material is free).

I'm grateful to website founder Barney Hoskyns and his team for reviving the piece. I lost my print copy years ago - stored inside the sleeve of my vinyl copy of Hawkins's Greatest Hits that was borrowed and never returned. Of the 100s of features and reviews I wrote for the British rock press in the 1980s, this is the one of which I'm most proud - for reasons I hope will become apparent.

But then, in Hawkins, who went on to appear as the hotel receptionist in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, I had a gift of a subject. With interview material as colourfully hilarious as this, the writing was an absolute pleasure.

The delight Hawkins took in belittling Nick Cave ("I'm looking to drive the great Nick Cave CRAZY!") after finding the Australian had top billing on the tour they were sharing certainly puts into context Cave's later claim to have had contempt at the time for Hawkins as an artist.

In the ABC documentary on the making of Cave's Murder Ballads album, Cave claims he and the Bad Seeds were unhappy to find they were sharing the bill with a figure they considered but a cheesy vaudeville artist. The piece below is a reminder some history was busily being rewritten, since at the time of the tour Cave had been singing Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You on stage. Performing the most famous song of an artist he had no time for - in what universe does that even begin to make any sense?

Screamin' Jay Hawkins: The Man Who Ate Nick Cave

Lynden Barber, NME, 19 July 1986

The bats screech, and inside a rockin' coffin, something stirs...up fly the nails and out pops SCREAMIN' JAY HAWKINS, longtime voodoo swamp beast back to roost. Fresh from, in his own words, "teaching that Nick Cave a lesson" on tour in Australia, he picks a few bones with LYNDEN BARBER.

THE MAN IS just about getting into his story-telling stride when the maid, committing the gravest error of her previously uneventful career, sticks her key in the lock, swings the door open and enters the hotel bedroom uninvited.

"NO, MAAAM!!!! And Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaase, maam, pur-leeaase in the name of The Dear Lord In Heaven Aburve, I coulda bin standin' here nekkid. KNOCK on the door!"

Slightly bemused, the woman objects. "You were speaking too loud, I thought you were the TV."

The man is not looking pleased. The man is becoming angry. The man is furious...
"*@*@*@*%*+1/3???&!&I&V8****!!!!"

Sweet Screamin' Jesus! Who'd be a housemaid for a living?

TO ENTER the realm of one Jalacey Hawkins Esquire is to mix with the very same demons who were present at the birth of rock'n'roll itself. This man – Screamin' Jay Hawkins, to give him his full and honourable title – possesses a voice that is Beyond Thunderdome, beyond Sound itself.

When the mouth of this mighty figure opens, the walls of the universe begin to shake, rattle and roll. The owner of a set of stentorian pipes that seem tapped into the earth's very core, Screamin' Jay is the man who put his signature on the whackball blues classic 'I Put A Spell On You' over two decades ago and instantly entered the annals of the legendary. Believe this, kiddy cats: Screamin' Jay is the Grandfather Of Groove, the Guru Of Voodoo, and if that ain't your hoodoo, prepare to DIE.

But this isn't yet another crusty old-timer, dug up from history so that a few past-it hacks can pay their respects. Right now SJH is in the middle of a well-deserved revival.

The person to thank is Jim Jarmusch, formerly a member of the most unfairly neglected New York group of the'80s, the Del-Byzanteens, and now better known as the director of the widely-acclaimed cult movie Stranger Than Paradise. One of the delights of this wryly observed film is the attempt of an East European emigree to turn on her spectacularly disinterested US relative to the sound of "Screamin' Jay 'awkins", inadvertently turning on a new audience in the process.

Has Hawkins seen the movie, I enquire innocently?

"Twelve times," comes the reply, without a microsecond of hesitation. The soundtrack, he reckons, got his music across "to the young kids who weren't even a gleam in their Daddy's eye when I started all those years ago, they weren't even a smile on a man's face when he knows he's gonna get involved in horizontal recreation."

"I look at Nick Cave the same way," he says, referring to the man he's recently supported on a tour of Australia. "This man should have payed his dues to be on the same show as me. He wasn't even born when I was paying dues. And this is why I said I'm gonna make him suffer."

Sat here in the Bondi Continental, Screamin' Jay Hawkins isn't just doing an interview, he's conducting a performance, and having the time of his life in the process. The idea of pairing Hawkins and Cave came from a local promoter after the young whippersnapper had begun to include a version of 'Spell' in his stage act. Trouble is, Hawkins says, his agent didn't tell him anything about this Cave character. Imagine arriving in a new country expecting to top the bill and finding your name in small print beneath some upstart you've never heard of. Why, the insult.

Very soon it becomes obvious that the only person to feel sorry for was Cave.

"Yes, I've had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Nick Cave," intones Jay, with all the mischief his gruff Howlin' Wolf voice can muster. "Now, if it sounds like I dislike the man, let me make it clear to you and to all who hear my voice. I do NOT dislike Nick Cave. I have no bones to pick with the man. I RESENT youngsters, barely in the business long enough to get their own fingers dry or to develop any kind of knowledge of showbusiness, being put before me in the headline position in the show. BUT, as I said, it's a new day, it's a young world, it's an atomic age...Jay Hawkins is an olllldddd table, been around for YEARS."

Their first meeting is recalled by Jay, warming to the theme; "I rolled the car window down and I said, HEY, NICK!!!!" A titanic bark fills the air.

"I said, C'MERE... C'MERE!!!! and he came over to the car. And I said, I JUST WANNA GET A GOOOOOOD LOOK AT THE MAN I HAVE TO WORK WITH FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS. And he said in his accent, part-Australian, British or whatever he is, 'Ah, wha, who, uhh, duurrr, who are you, wha, durr, ugh?'

"I said, what other black man would you be working with for the next month?" A perfect impersonation of an inarticulate, wallyish voice rolls from Jay's wickedly satirical tongue: 'Oh! You must be...I shoulda known, Screamin' Jay, oh yeah!"

Looking at this commanding presence, shoulders as big as his voice, it's hard to believe that any body could fail to recognise that this is a personage of impeccable pedigree.

Atop eyes that could hypnotise a frog balances the kind of coif that Teddy Boys would kill for. It's kind of shiny and wet-looking, stacked up like an oil slick breaking in waves over a stony beach. Down below. Jay wears a bootlace tie, knotted at the neck with a brooch made from a scorpion in perspex ("My wife gave me this instead of a wedding ring," he later confides. "If she caught me without this thing on, she'd kill me"). Somewhere between this lot lies a most dapper pencil moustache, and it's moving rapidly up and down.

"I was given a tape cassette, which I played of Nick Cave. I HEARD a man trying to sound like Muddy Waters. I said, I'm going to have to teach this little youngster a lesson. A lesson in showbusiness. The lesson is. You don't put youth against experience, it just don't work.

Before the tour started, he had said: "I'm looking to have a good time, I'm looking to upset the Australian people, I'm looking to change a lot of people's minds – and I'm looking to drive the great Nick Cave CRAZY."

One night Cave was spotted peering down from a catwalk into the hordes that Hawkins has managed to whip up into an orgy of maniacal pleasure. Jay transcended the mundanity of his rock'n'roll pick-up band by employing a combination of rip-roaring voice, white Cab Calloway suit, Henry the skull on a stick, the zaniest personality this side of Mars and a general mastery of vaudevillian trickery. Cave looked troubled. The ovation Jay received was so loud, it was painful to the ear-drums.

HAWKINS STANDS loosely among company that includes Calloway and Louis Jordan – he has performed with both – and the great master of Vouterounie, Slim Gaillard. These are the loose marbles of the black music tradition (Sun Ra, beneath that placid exterior, probably shares their goofy sense of humour too), the terminally flipped lids of jazz and the big band era.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, Jalacey Hawkins shares a similar background. A pianist and former saxophonist, he's played with the likes of James Moody, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Milt Buckner and Nat King Cole. Like Louis Jordan – who's widely credited for inventing the backbeat (though Hawkins claims it was due to Alan Freed) – he's one of the progenitors or rock'n'roll, one of the people who stirred up the music and made it happen before whitey put up a young hillbilly called Elvis to front the show.

What made Screamin' Jay different – apart from a voice that owed something to Big Joe Turner, only more akin to the Red Sea parting in stereo – was his gimmick: the macabre. If the idea of climbing out of coffins, letting off smoke bombs and setting up joke-shop props on stage now appears mildly old-hat, that's because it's been done to death by people who've ripped off Hawkins' act. Jay reels off names like a shopping list: David Bowie (?), Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, Nick Cave, Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, the appalling Screaming Lord Sutch...

"If it wasn't the coffin they stole, it was the smoke. Everybody has stolen part of me one way or another. Kiss stole the make-up I used to use, when I used to come on stage dressed as an African with a bone through my nose. I feel MARVELLOUS. It's a COMPLIMENT. What they're doin', they're remindin' people about Screamin 'Jay Hawkins. I HATE it, because I feel sorry for 'em – should I drop dead, they ain't got nobody to do their thinkin'."

What prevents Jay from being just some ham my vaudevillian with a good croak, it has to be said, is a stomach-tightening sense of humour. His stage craft is to start weird, stay weird and upset 'em.

"I do a lot of songs by other artists and I do 'em Screamin' Jay Hawkins' way," he confides. "I don't sing 'em – l DESTROY 'em."

The coffin is now relegated to his kitchen in LA, "which my wife don't like, 'cos it stops her from getting to the ice-box." The reason? The Drifters once decided to play a jolly jape and lock the coffin lid with our Jay inside. He managed to get out – with only three minutes of air in total – by rocking it off its stand onto the stage floor.

"I tried to kill 'em for that, I tried to commit murder," he says, recalling the five years of sleepless nights that followed. "MURDER!!! I wanted to break all the Ten Commandments, right on their head."

And the story about him punching out Atlantic supremo Ahmet Ertegun for trying to make him sound like Fats Domino during a recording session is only partly true, he says. It wasn't Ertegun, but producer Jerry Wexler who received the fury of the former 1947 Golden Gloves boxing champ. The record, Screaming Blues, was never released. Now, ain't life full of surprises?

IN PERSON he lives up to his legend as a man who doesn't expect contradiction. Given a hostile question, the high-energy showmanship could tilt over into a more forceful expression of intent, the interviewer often feels – with one eye on the medication Jay has to take during the conversation to ease his high blood pressure.

"There are some artists who don't realise their own worth and they'll go anywhere for peanuts," he thunders, hurling down another hefty declamation for the world to chew on. "And I despise them – the John Lee Hookers, the Champion Jack Duprees, in case you wanna know who I'm talking about. I'll name them, they're there. I call 'em Uncle Tom niggers. That's my word for 'em, y'understand. I like people like Tiny Tim."

Whaaa???

"I like people like Boy George, Boy George ain't got nooo talent whatsoever, but Boy George dares to be different. AND IF YOU DARE TO BE DIFFERENT IN SHOWBUSINESS, YOU CAN MAKE IT.
Liberace ain't that great a piano player, but he's flamboyant, and I like that. Singers are a dime a dozen; anybody can stand up in front of a microphone and sing their hit record, but if you don't have anything to offer after that, it's kind of a let-down."

Far be it for me to suggest that Hawkins' biographical anecdotes should be treated with caution, but let it be said that his life has been a tapestry embroidered with wild colours. His craziness, he says, comes from the days when his mother used to beat him with a strap. "I was screamin' to make sure everybody in the neighbourhood could hear it when I got beaten. Figured maybe they'd come and bust her for child cruelty. DON'T HIT ME, DON'T HIT ME! In the end I found out I was preparin' myself for Screamin' Jay Hawkins – unbeknowin' to myself."

An inquiry about his taste for sorcery yields the information that he was taken out of an orphanage at the age of 18 months and raised by spirit-worshipping Red Indians. Hence the books at his bedside: Curses, Hexes And Spells and Witchcraft, Past And Present.

"Those books are almost my bibles. I just about know every page by heart. I got about 50 or 60 other books even worse than that."

Coming from Cleveland, Ohio, turned out to be fortuitous for the young Jalacey Hawkins. It was also the town where Alan Freed came to notice, playing black R&B to white kids on a radio slot called The Moondog Rock'n'Roll Show. Freed got to know Hawkins and told him to bring in any record he made anytime; first he broke I Put A Spell On You in Cleveland, then did the same thing all over again when he moved his show to New York.

The association is commemorated in a brief appearance in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, a moment of glory that Jay isn't about to let us forget.

"What brief appearance?" he demands. "I had three brief appearances and I cut six." Okay, so the scenes were small ones, he admits, "but the money I received was FAAAAAN-TASTIC."

Arthur Brown

Money is something he doesn't have to worry himself with too much these days. The man may act cuckoo, but when it comes to greenbacks he's strictly on the ball. Thanks to an astute business sense he manages to live very nicely off the royalties of the 28 cover versions of 'Spell' (including Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Nina Simone, Alice Cooper, Manfred Mann and Alan Price, he says, reciting the names as if they were grandchildren, "and Nick Cave... Heh heh! Heh, heh, heh!!!").

If this engrossing fruitcake has one major regret in life, it's that he never got into the world of opera, never became as great as Caruso or Mario Lanza.

"The records I make, I've got to make macabre, metaphysics, cult science. I'm like a prisoner in this world, 'cos no matter where I go, on my back or my front it says, I Put A Spell On You. It's not a curse, it pays the rent, it makes my wife happy. But I still have dreams of being able to do just one opera. I'd like to go to Carnegie Hall and do Figaro."

Roll over Beethoven and tell Rossini the news!

© Lynden Barber, 1986

Great start - but where next for Garai and Cotillard?

2011-12-11T00:05:00.001+11:00

Romola Garai in The Hour

Thanks to Guardian contributor Anne Billson for her Multiglom blog post on 10 actresses she has girl crushes on. I was delighted to see someone else shares my enthusiasm for Romola Garai.

The mention of the UK actress prompted me to dig out the piece I wrote below for The Australian four years ago on a new generation of European screen actresses then emerging. Garai was one of them.

She's gone on to greatly impress opposite Ben Wishaw and Dominic West in the British teleseries The Hour, currently screening on ABC1, but has yet to land the kind of killer lead film role that would push her into the same elevated sphere as Cate Blanchett - her most obvious soul-peer in the generation immediately above.

Garai and Wishaw in The Hour

Marion Cotillard has continued to make an impact (most recently in Little White Lies) yet has lacked a follow-up role to her Oscar-winning Edith Piaf turn in La Vie en rose that's equally worthy of her gifts.

Disappointingly, Carice van Houten has largely disappeared off the radar, though she has continued to work. This quote from her Wikipedia is germane: "I have seen Hollywood, and although I have nothing against it, it's not my kind of life. My agent is shocked that I want to stay in Europe. If Hollywood offers me a great part, of course I'll take it, but I just don't want to live there."

WOMEN ON A ROLE - By Lynden Barber, The Australian, September 01, 2007

IF 2007 is destined to be remembered for anything in the cinema, it is for great female acting. This year a clutch of lead performances by relatively little known women has made this viewer, at least, leave the cinema feeling drunk with the excitement of a new discovery.

I'm not talking about merely bright turns from promising newcomers, but the kind of tour de force performances from which significant decades-long careers are forged. Intriguingly, they're all from Europeans.

First came France's Marion Cotillard, incandescent as singing legend Edith Piaf in La Vie en rose, followed closely by Dutch actor Carice van Houten, who effortlessly dominates virtually every scene of Paul Verhoeven's Black Book as a Jewish undercover agent for the anti-Nazi resistance in The Netherlands during WorldWarII.

The third, Britain's wonderfully named Romola Garai, takes the title role as a best-selling, early-20th-century English novelist in French filmmaker Francois Ozon's Angel (to be released on November 1), where she turns in the kind of feisty, a-star-is-born performance that makes you wonder whether Vivien Leigh would have had such a sure chance of bagging the Scarlett O'Hara role in Gone with the Wind had Garai been around at the time.

All these performers have racked up several previous film and television appearances but this year's roles amount to the kind of surprising breakthroughs that give those of us who love cinema reason to keep returning in optimism. Despite the best efforts of Hollywood to drag us into a maelstrom of increasingly tired sequels and comic-book adaptations, European writers and directors are giving women the chances of alifetime.

For further evidence see Angelina Jolie's eye-opening performance as Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, in Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart (to be released here on October 18); Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar's Volver; Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth in Stephen Frears's The Queen; Judi Dench facing off against Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal for British director Richard Eyre.

Monica Vitti in L'Avventura

The recent deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni should remind us that this is nothing new: think of Monica Vitti in the latter's early 1960s films and the haunting performances of Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Liv Ullmann in the work of the Swedish director.

Hollywood, meanwhile, seems largely to have closed down its possibilities for telling powerful women's stories, corralling actresses into the occasional romantic comedy or, in a shallow nod towards sexual equality, making them one of the boys as action heroines.

Women wanting fulfilling roles usually have to turn to the independent sector or look to non-American filmmakers: Charlize Theron in Monster, for example, or Blanchett and Nicole Kidman in countless titles. It's 33 years since feminist film critic Molly Haskell first bemoaned the decline in the quality of Hollywood's women's roles since the '30s and '40s, and nothing much seems to have changed.

But back to our newcomers. Notable about this trio is that they're each able to take difficult, unruly or compromised characters -- people who on the page may have threatened to turn off audiences -- and make them, if not always likable, then compelling.

Van Houten's undercover agent is a Mata Hari figure whose work requires an extraordinary degree of duplicity and sangfroid. In Verhoeven's revisionist take on the Dutch resistance, few -- including van Houten's character -- are without moral compromise, but the actor has the viewer on side throughout. Certainly van Houten is strikingly attractive, but she lends her character not only beauty but extraordinary strength of character, making the plot's many implausibilities easier to overlook.

Garai displays a similar strength as the title character of Angel, but does something quite different with the role. She somehow finds the warmth, humour and high spirits that make an egotistical, impetuous woman into something of a proto-feminist heroine whose rudeness and cheek is fascinating and often amusing.

Ozon, here working entirely in English for the first time, observes that Garai "wasn't afraid of the more grotesque aspects of Angel's character, and she brought naivety and charm to the part, with her big, dreamy, childlike eyes. Plus, she really liked Angel. Not all the actresses (who auditioned for the role) did. Many of them found her monstrous and mean, an anti-heroine, a liar, a failure; she frightened them. Whereas Romola played it straight, she approached Angel with no disdain whatsoever."

Like van Houten, Garai has striking looks, but there's something mysterious and intriguing about them, a quality that makes us wonder about the woman to whom they belong. She looked completely different in the title role of the ABC miniseries Mary Bryant (for which she won an AFI award) and was transformed into a magnificently orange-coiffed beauty in this year's Amazing Grace, about anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce. She's equally hard to recognise from the stills of her next project, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement.

Marion Cotillard as Piaf

Cotillard also has a chameleon quality; she is, in real life, an attractive woman with little resemblance to the plain and tiny Piaf, who became increasingly bizarre-looking as she aged. Cotillard's Piaf is on a short fuse: often demanding, arrogant, coarse, noisy and self-centred. Yet she provides human complexity by blending these traits with vulnerability, passion and determination to rise above her difficult everyday surroundings.

To achieve this, a performer has to stop worrying about whether the audience will love her and concentrate on what the character needs to become fully human. It requires, in other words, a lack of vanity.
Are there young European men capable of matching these women's achievements? Perhaps Romain Duris (Inside Paris and The Beat that My Heart Skipped).

As for the young Brits, Ben Whishaw (Perfume) and James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland): the jury is still out. For now, it's the women who are dazzling. Will Hollywood guzzle them up? Unlikely. Van Houten is filming opposite Tom Cruise in the plot-against-Hitler movie, Valkyrie.

But Cotillard's role as Russell Crowe's French love interest in Ridley Scott's A Good Year was hardly a career highlight. Further high-profile US roles may come these women's way, but when it comes to big acting opportunities, they'll continue to look to European filmmakers for some time to come.

How the Swedes tried to bury Let The Right One In

2011-12-09T15:27:00.002+11:00

There's a terrific interview with Swedish director Tomas Alfredson on Rotten Tomatoes I urge everyone to read in full. Two extracts are worth sharing here.


Director Tomas Alfredson

The first concerns his startlingly good vampire film Let The Right One In, the veteran filmmaker's first international hit after it became a succes d'estime on the global film festival circuit. I can't think of a better illustration of screenwriter William Goldman's catchphrase about the industry side of the biz: Nobody Knows Anything. Nor a more vivid tribute to the important role still played by film festivals.

"The making of Let the Right One In was very demanding, and in many ways very unhappy, because back home it was a film that nobody would touch when it was finalised," says Alfredson. "The distributor wasn't interested; the theatre owners didn't believe in it; the financiers disappeared. It was sort of put away in a cupboard for 10 months, so it was like... I thought I did a flop. And I loved it; I had invested so much time and love into it, so I was so disappointed about that. And then it started -- before it actually opened in Sweden -- it was shown in festivals here and there, and the success story of it started."

(See here for the piece I wrote the film for the SBS website ahead of its screening on the channel earlier this year.)

The second quote concerns Alfredson's follow-up to that success, a new adaptation of John le Carre's espionage novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set mainly in a spectacularly drab Britain in the 1970s (it's to be released in Australia on January 19).

Alfredson's comments on how to capture the essence of a period in a way that makes it look lived in should be pinned on the fridge door of every director and production designer planning to make a screen drama set in an earlier era:

Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

"It's too easy to put sideburns on everyone and play hit records, you know -- all those cheap ways into the hearts of people," says the director. "I think the period was so much about, not '73, as this is set in, it's about the '60s and '50s and '40s -- all the periods before that. Because if you would visit someone in a home in 1973 there would be one chair that was bought last year and the rest would be stuff from the '40s or the '50s. Too often people always sort of push the volume to 10 when they're doing period stuff."

Why Dylan was right on Obama

2011-12-07T17:43:00.001+11:00

Looking back through posts I put up here a couple of years back, I was intrigued to find this comment by Bob Dylan dating from April 2009.

Asked by Newsweek's Bill Flanagan for his thoughts on Barack Obama, Dylan came up with this reserved response: "He'll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men. Johnson would be a good example of that … Nixon, Clinton in a way, Truman, all the rest of them going back. You know, it's like they all fly too close to the sun and get burned."

The thing to remember is that at this point Obama had been inaugurated as US President only three months earlier and was still the blank screen upon which all progressive, small-'l' liberal and George W. Bush-hating Americans were projecting their wildest hopes and dreams.

It seemed clear to relatively few at the time that all this Obama-mania - encouraged by the man's own soaring rhetoric - was bound to result in chronic disillusion. That's not to disparage the man, who I'm sure has had good intentions all along. But after promising the Sun, there was no other place top go other than back down to Earth, as Dylan so perceptively noted.

Conclusion: sometimes the most perceptive statements about politics come from artists, whose field of expertise is outside of the political system. Having begun as a protest singer, Dylan started to question his youthful certainty as early as 1964 with the song My Back Pages, with its "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" refrain - as memorable and profound as anything found in Shakespeare.

It should be no surprise that Dylan related more to Obama as a writer than as a politician. "His writing style hits you on more than one level," he told Flanagan re. Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. "It makes you feel and think at the same time, and that is hard to do. He says profoundly outrageous things. He's looking at a shrunken head inside of a glass case in some museum with a bunch of other people, and he's wondering if any of these people realize that they could be looking at one of their ancestors."

Asked by Flanagan what in the book would make Dylan think Obama would be a good politician, he replied: "Well, nothing really. In some sense, you would think being in the business of politics would be the last thing that this man would want to do. I think he had a job as an investment banker on Wall Street for a second, selling German bonds. But he probably could've done anything. If you read his book, you'll know that the political world came to him. It was there to be had." (see here for more of the interview).

Dylan's reluctance to jump aboard the Obama-is-God bandwagon at the time would have appeared suspiciously apolitical to many Americans at the time. In retrospect, his assessment, while supportive of Obama's intentions, seems not only realistic but uncommonly wise - a note of pragmatic sense at a time of jubilation verging on hysteria.

Who now recalls that Obama, whose drone-targeting of Taliban operatives has resulted in the deaths of 100s of innocent Afghanis and Pakistanis, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 9 October, 2009 - only two years ago?

None of this is to condemn Obama so much as to draw attention to the limits of presidential power in a liberal democratic system. Real power resides elsewhere. As Dylan implicitly recognised.

Four troubadours - the new female wave

2011-12-04T22:30:00.004+11:00

The new generation of British folk and neo-folk singers makes the fuss made about the pleasant but slightly prissy Kate Rusby a decade or so ago look rather silly.

While below I've embedded clips of two of the highest profile younger acts, I'm kicking off with Emily Portman, who was born in Glastonbury and raised for the most part in the North East and whose utterly bewitching voice deserves to become far better known:

Laura Marling, below, rejects the "folk" label, perhaps because she hasn't come up through the folk circuit, but clearly she has worked her way through piles of early Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen albums and absorbed what it is about them that made them great.

If you need a label - and labels can be useful - then to properly contextualise Marling I'd reach for neo-folk, a handy way of gathering all the contemporary troubadours, regardless of where they stand on the "are you a dyed-in-the-wool folkie or a contemporary singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar?" question. Marling, who won the best female artist title at the Brit awards this year, is coming to Melbourne and Sydney in February (see here for details). Obviously attendance is mandatory.

The Unthanks are distinguished by the gorgeously complementary voices of Northumbrian sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank, and a knack for transforming material that ranges from the unlikely (the above track, Starless, is filched from 70s prog-rockers King Crimson) to the folk music of their North eastern corner of England, the same area as Portman was raised.

As Robert Wyatt, whose songs the sisters cover along with those of Antony and The Johnsons in their upcoming live album, so aptly puts it, "they are like the morning dew that hasn't steamed off yet, they are fresh and new and I really don't think they know how good they are."

In January I wrote a feature for The Australian on the group: "Becky, the younger of the two sisters, explains, 'It's hard to pinpoint when people ask me, What kind of music do you play? But for me, I sing folk songs, and I always have, so I would call it folk music just for that reason. I guess it's presented in not strictly folk fashion.

"Our parents love music and they got into it in the 60s, when they were teenagers, so we've always been surrounded by it. But we also love different types of music. So I think that just naturally seeps in and influences our music and our arranging. We don't think, Lets arrange this in the style of this or that band, we just try to focus on the story of the song and think what instruments we need to bring out the story."

The final clip, below, showcases Derbyshire-raised singer and fiddle player Bella Hardy. Perhaps not blessed with quite the same crossover potential as the acts above, she has an appealing voice and is obviously a fine performer:

We Need to Talk About Kevin's Problems as a Film

2011-12-01T22:57:00.008+11:00

British director Lynne Ramsay has had a relatively easy ride from the critics for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Based on an epistolary novel by Lionel Shriver, the film stars Tilda Swinton as an American mother trying to raise a hateful and evil child with her husband (John C. Reilly), who gets favoured treatment from the boy and therefore displays a more upbeat attitude to his behavioural issues.

Apart from Swinton, whose presence invariably lifts any film (see Erick Zonka's Julia for a mess she makes kind of interesting) I found the film immensely disappointing. I liked her first two films a great deal - Ratcatcher was extraordinary, and Morvern Callar only marginally less impressive. The new film's chief problem is that it's about the workings of fate, and therefore gives the audience nothing to do other than watch a series of preordained events spin to their ugly conclusion.

We Need to Talk has no role for its protagonist to play other than a passive one. Swinton walks around in a daze for the entire film, loving her unlovable son because, as a mother, she has been biologically programmed.

Kevin is not so much a character as an evil stick figure from a horror movie but without the supporting genre thrills to compensate. (Compare Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin to Daniel Henshall's terrifyingly believable performance as John Bunting, the sadistic leader of a gang of South Australian serial killers, in Justin Kurzel's Snowtown and you instantly see the depth of the problem.)

Kevin is fated to commit terrible acts. His mother is fated to be unable to stop him yet to continue loving him nonetheless. Dramatically, that's flat. Ramsay's attempts at jazzing it all up with dream sequences, montage sequences, and endless impressionistic passages are there to distract the audience. Intriguing at first, quickly they outstay their welcome.

Some commentators have pointed to an apparent suggestion in the novel that Swinton is an unreliable narrator, and that the story being spun is therefore not to be taken at face value. Any attempt at achieving a similar effect in the film is, sadly, lost.

One thing I will credit Ramsay for, though, is her choosing three actors to play Kevin at different ages that actually look like they're the same person - as assured an example of casting as Jane Campion's three choices to play author Janet Frame in An Angel at my Table.

Dear Artist: no Skype = no interview

2011-11-29T13:25:00.003+11:00

Dear artist, please don't take it personally. I'd really like to have a chat so I can write up a story about your latest project / career.

But sadly your refusal to do the interview via Skype, despite the fact we are in different cities and can't do it in person, means we won't be talking after all.

Here's why:

1) You seem to expect to talk via long-haul phone call and want me to pay for the call despite my being a freelance without a corporate boss to pay my expenses. Skype is free.

2) Even if your record or film company picks up the cost of the call, that really doesn't solve the main problem. Half the time you have a heavy accent that requires the kind of clear line that is not guaranteed via phone. Skype is invariably clear, especially when run through a hi-fi.

3) Transcribing a recording of a poor-quality phone conversation is maddeningly difficult and overly time consuming. It used to be that was the only way we had of talking, so we had to both struggle through. That time has gone. Let's move on.

4) Blind phone calls with strangers often feel relatively tense and artificial and the conversation can be more strained. When two strangers can make eye contact, it's much easier for them to relax into a conversation and talk freely.

5) Sure, I can take shorthand, but I'm sure you don't appreciate me having to ask you to slow down at times or asking you to repeat things (for the sake of accuracy) and I 'm sure you'll agree that a recording frees up the interviewer to strike up a rapport, engaging in a more of a free-flowing conversation.

Look forward to chatting on screen. Bye...

The Slap's least likable characters - who, US?

2011-11-25T16:26:00.004+11:00

I've yet to catch up with the final episode of The Slap, which ran on ABC1 on Thursday, but I liked what series script producer Tony Ayes had to say on ABC RN today.

In his view, the viewers who make the greatest fuss about the characters being unlikable are reacting to those unlikable qualities in themselves.

He's not denying the characters have unlikable qualities - he's saying we all do, albeit some more than others. I think he's right and that's a large part of why the series, for all its occasional flaws (see earlier post), has struck a chord.

Attention indie filmmakers - how to get your film onto iTunes

2011-11-22T18:25:00.002+11:00

Still from 2011 Australian feature "The Burning Man"

Recently I complained here about the amount of time it was taking to get the Australian feature Snowtown onto iTunes as a rental download, despite the fact that it was already available for hire in the fast-diminishing number of DVD stores. (The film finally went up for hire on iTunes two days ago, ie. November 20).

Now here's an interesting development. I've just received the following media release from ATOM, the Australian Teachers of Media, with news of an initiative that will be of especially great use to independent filmmakers who don't have big distribution support. Scroll to the bottom for contact info.

Media release:

Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) is pleased to announce that it is now able to upload films to iTunes on behalf of Australian filmmakers. iTunes is the world’s most popular and well-known digital distribution platform.

ATOM can offer a complete service for Australian filmmakers and distributors. It is able to put your movie on iTunes and market it within Australia and internationally using its extensive opt-in email lists and social media networks.

As a not-for-profit organisation that aims to support the interests of the Australian film industry, ATOM is shortening the distance between sales and the producer’s pocket and simplifying the transition of film to the digital arena.

The costs for delivery into iTunes Movies are:

For HD encoding, $5.00 per minute and $300 for submission costs

For SD encoding, $4.00 per minute and $300 for submission costs

Producers receive 50% of the income. The other 45% goes to Apple and the aggregator. ATOM receives only 5% of the sale price. Producers will receive monthly reports and returns quarterly.

ATOM is offering a non-exclusive deal to producers, allowing them to also work through other distributors and on other platforms.

Producers need only supply a QuickTime master as ProRes 422, along with typical supporting material such as a trailer, key art and a synopsis.

The master QuickTime file can simply be mailed on a hard disk and will be returned to the producer once encoded.

As well as putting titles on iTunes Movies, ATOM can also embed complete films into apps to play on iPads and iPhones for $890 per title. In this arrangement the producer receives 65% of the gross income, Apple takes 30% and ATOM receives 5%.

Besides the financial advantage to be gained by having ATOM upload your titles to iTunes, ATOM can also link to these titles from its publications, including PDF and app study guides, e-books, and articles dealing with these films in the print and digital versions of its two international magazines, Metro and Screen Education. Both magazines are now available through the Zinio Newsstand, and will soon be available through the Apple Newsstand.

ATOM is also able to sell DVDs of productions on a non-exclusive basis through its online shop, The Education Shop.

For submissions and further information, please contact:
Peter Tapp
ATOM
+61 3 9525 5302
0412 473116
editor@atom.org.au

How to act the role of a famous real life person

2011-11-20T22:46:00.002+11:00

Christian McKay in "Me and Orson Welles"

With the release of The Iron Lady coming up fast (Boxing Day in Australia), it seems a good time to dig out this story I wrote last year for The Weekend Australian (28 August, 2010). Hooked on what was then news about Meryl Streep's role as Margaret Thatcher, I went on to examine the increasing popularity of films that require actors to play real life people who are often still alive, and asked what it took for an actor to pull off one of these roles. (Hint: it's not about physical resemblance, and neither is it really about impersonation, but a more subtle and complex blend of factors).

'MERYL Streep to play Margaret Thatcher", ran the headlines in late June. The internet lit up with Oscar predictions and commentators worldwide went into overdrive.

Never mind that Streep was merely in talks and had not even agreed to take the role: the prospect of the Iron Lady being played by Hollywood royalty was too potent a combination to resist. One sex-starved headline writer hyperventilated that "British politics are sexy again".

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher (L) and the real thing (R)

This kind of biography has long been ratings fodder for telemovies: think Kurt Russell's Elvis Presley, Poppy Montgomery and Catherine Hicks's versions of Marilyn Monroe, or Judy Davis's hosanna to her namesake, Judy Garland. Now depictions of the living or clearly remembered are becoming commonplace on the big screen, too.

The list of cinematic biographies from the past few years is long, including singers Ray Charles (Ray, starring Jamie Foxx); Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose, Marion Cotillard); Johnny Cash (Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix); Bob Dylan (I'm Not There, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger and others); John Lennon (Nowhere Boy, Aaron Johnson); and Ian Curtis (Control, Sam Riley).

It goes on to take in dictators Adolf Hitler (Downfall, Bruno Ganz) and Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker), guerilla leader Che Guevara (Che, Benicio Del Toro), and the Queen (The Queen, Helen Mirren).

For good measure the list rounds up rock impresario Tony Wilson (24 Hour Party People, Steve Coogan), television interviewer David Frost (Frost/Nixon, Michael Sheen), British soccer manager Brian Clough (The Damned United, Sheen again), and US presidents George W. Bush (W., Josh Brolin) and Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella, and Nixon, Anthony Hopkins).

For years the surest way to Oscar success was to play a character with an obvious physical or psychiatric disability, but that route has been supplanted by dramatic impersonations of people who are well within living memory.

That requires special artistry, to convince viewers they are watching a character they feel they already know. Note the number of performances listed that went on to Academy acclaim, as nominations or wins, among them Cotillard who, in La Vie en Rose, had to overcome the considerable disadvantage of being a French actress playing in a French film in her native language.

In the past few weeks the trend for biopics has intensified, with figures such as Bill Clinton, Orson Welles, Tony Blair and rock singers Joan Jett and Ian Dury being incarnated by actors on cinema screens.
The Special Relationship - about the bond between Blair (Sheen tackling the role for the third time) and Bill Clinton (Dennis Quaid) -- benefits not only from convincing portraits of the two leaders but strong supporting performances from Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton and Helen McCrory as Cherie Blair. While the project originated as a TV production, its distributor clearly thought it suitable for the big screen in Australia.

We've also had an uncannily lifelike performance from unknown British actor Christian McKay as the young Orson Welles in the Richard Linklater film Me and Orson Welles. The film is about the staging of the actor-director's celebrated 1930s theatre production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Watching McKay - who had previously played Welles in a New York one-man stage show - I was immediately struck by the physical resemblance, right down to the hypnotic eyes and baby-fat jowls. As the performance continued I became amazed at the authenticity with which McKay had also managed to capture Welles's voice, phrasing and mannerisms. He also produced something that is difficult for a performer unblessed with immense charisma to fake: Welles's toweringly large personality.

Although the film is set in 1937, before Welles launched his movie career both behind and in front of the camera with Citizen Kane, cinema buffs are bound to approach the Linklater movie with deep familiarity with Welles's image and voice. Yet McKay achieves the kind of total transformation that is likely to meet the standard of even the most sceptical viewer.

We've also recently had The Runaways, the story of the 70s female rock band, with Twilight star Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as the less well-remembered Cherie Currie. And the film chosen to close the Melbourne International Film Festival in August was Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, a warts-and-more look at the life of cockney rocker Ian Dury starring Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films).


Kristen Stewart and Joan Jett

While biopics of the living or recently dead are certainly nothing new, cinema's true forte is the historical biography. Kings and queens, artists, writers, composers and political leaders more readily lend themselves to the distortions and poetic licence needed for the creation of cinematic spectacle and myth.

The theatre has long depicted historical personages - Shakespeare's plays are full of them - and Hollywood kept up the tradition: think John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), or Bette Davis, one of many actresses to tackle Queen Elizabeth I, in Essex and Elizabeth (1939) and The Virgin Queen (1955). Because we can't possibly know what the personalities of these historic leaders were like in reality, actors and directors are free to interpret them any way they see fit.

In the past, contemporary entertainers were sometimes irresistible subjects for big-screen treatment, such as band leader Glenn Miller, lionised by Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story a decade after his 1944 death , or Jimmy Cagney's embodiment of Broadway entertainer George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, released in 1942, the same year its subject died.

Jimmy Stewart as Glenn Miller

But in the pre-TV era most viewers would not have been familiar with a character such as Cohan. In general Hollywood preferred its biographical subjects to have long been a-mouldering in the grave.
Today's greater willingness by Hollywood to depict living people may simply reflect the greater role of celebrity in our culture. You may be a star but you're not really a star until someone turns your life into a movie.

Isolating the quality that makes a great screen performance of a real person, well known to the audience, is not as straightforward as some may assume.

Is it an act of impersonation or is something else going on? Does the actor need to come to the role with a natural resemblance to their character or do make-up and costumes do most of the work? Indeed, do the actors need to look like their character at all? Is being as famous, or even more famous, than the person portrayed a plus or a minus? How important is accent and voice? Why do viewers so often buy these performances when they can clearly see the actor is, in effect, an impostor?

Tanya Gerstle, head of acting at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, points out that the actor makes a contract with the audience, which has to agree to suspend disbelief. There are certain things the actor has to do, and if they don't deliver the viewer finds it hard to go with them.

Gerstle says that star quality - a famous actor's own persona, carried from role to role - can be a disadvantage.

"If you've seen an actor many, many times, it gets harder and harder for that actor to create the illusion," she says. "Almost inevitably when the actor is very well known you're aware of them for a while before you start to accept the portrayal. You can't not know the actor. Various people don't have the ability to morph."

Gerstle feels it's easier when we don't know the actor at all or not very well. McKay echoes this view when discussing his portrayal of Welles. He told the SBS website recently that "it was a great help that no one had actually heard of me, so they're not distracted by any 'persona'. People say I look like Welles and sound like him, and in life I don't at all. People will project their own image of Welles on to the performance, if they have one already."

Star quality need not be fatal to impersonation, though. Gerstle greatly admires Judy Davis's Emmy award-winning lead performance in the telemovie Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), despite Davis's familiarity. And Tony Knight, head of acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, observes that Blanchett's star status did no harm at all to her Oscar-winning portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.

A physical resemblance between actor and subject may not be important. That may sound counterintuitive, but consider actor Sheen and former British PM Blair: the resemblance is less striking when photos of them are placed side by side. What makes people think Sheen looks remarkably like Blair is a certain fresh-faced quality: a boyish demeanour that everyone associates with the politician. So what are we to make of the critical praise Sheen has also attracted for playing Frost and Clough, despite a distinct lack of resemblance to either man?

Neither of the actors who has portrayed Nixon in the past 15 years looks anything like the former US president, yet both give powerful and convincing performances.

Hopkins in "Nixon"

In the first five to 10 minutes of Oliver Stone's biopic Nixon, Anthony Hopkins seems a strange choice to play the US president, yet the actor finds the key to unlock the character. Very early on there's a shot of Nixon standing with his arms folded awkwardly. Hopkins had found that the man's stiffness was the characteristic that most readily defined him: a reserve and apparent sense of discomfort in his body that also reflected Nixon's inner character. From that point on, Hopkins proved an effective Nixon.

Real Nixon and Langella as Nixon

Langella emphasised the body language less obviously yet managed to use his eyes to suggest the mixture of wariness and cunning that many believed to be at the heart of Nixon's complex persona. He was aided by a canny script that allowed these traits to be brought to the fore.
Physical likeness, says Knight, is not essential, though it helps the audience invest in the transformation process.

"Do you go about an impersonation or an impression?" he says. "Most actors will go for an impression, which is more of an internal process and more dependent on the character in the script, rather than the real-life person.

"You're making a drama, not making a documentary. With the Queen, we can't possibly know what happened between Tony Blair and [Prince] Charles, so the filmmakers have gone for something dramatic. All these people who have spoken out about [TV crime series] Underbelly and said, 'It wasn't really like that' -- well, of course it wasn't." Knight says "the actor will be looking for the psychological gesture -- an old acting term -- which may reveal something about the inner life of the character."

But if gestures and body language can encourage the audience's suspension of disbelief, so can hair, costumes and voice. Weight too.
Chris Edmund, head of acting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, points to Blanchett's startlingly unlikely, multi-award-winning role as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Apart from being the wrong sex, ordinarily Blanchett looks nothing like the singer-songwriter, but she "lost a lot of weight to inhabit that wiry 60s Dylan and somehow she got that wild energy", he observes.

Gerstle stresses the difference between impersonation and a sustained performance. "An impersonation is more like a mask; you put it on for a moment and take it off," she says. "A performance is more mercurial."

As McKay puts it: "It's amazing when people talk about actors doing impersonation - if you do that, you'll never embody that character."

Bradbury's Paul Cox doco sees light of day

2011-11-18T17:11:00.001+11:00

Back in April I conducted a public interview with Australian filmmaker Paul Cox at Sydney's University of Technology to celebrate his career following his successful liver transplant.

One of our topics of conversation that night was the documentary that David Bradbury had been making about Cox's struggle with cancer - I recall Cox drolly remarking that Bradbury might have been a bit disappointed that he ended up surviving, since it ruined the climax of his film (This, I stress, was delivered as a mordant joke and not as a complaint about Bradbury.)

Cox at the time seemed a bit uncertain as to whether the film would ever see light of day, but here is, completed under the title of On Borrowed Time.

The film has just screened twice at the Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF), once at the Nova in Melbourne, and has just begun a limited season at Hobart's State Cinema (November 19, 20 and 23, starting at 8.30pm).

Next Wednesday (Nov 23) it screens as a one-off at the Chauvel in Sydney's Paddington, starting at 6pm, followed by a Q&A with Cox and Bradbury hosted by David Stratton. Cinephiles of NSW and Tasmania, put those dates in your diary now. (How interesting to see the film is being given four sessions in the least populous state, Tasmania, but only one each in Melbourne and Sydney.)

Bradbury tells me he is paying for the hire of the Chauvel himself "to try to show there is an audience still for such a film if the usual suspects with the dosh get behind it and give a push with some P&A monies and their weight. Otherwise it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that 'nobody' wants to watch an Australian doco on the big screen."

In a media statement Bradbury tells us the the film "documents Coxʼs reflections on Life and Death, Love, Art and Beauty – major themes that run through Paulʼs films, stretching over a remarkable 40 years. Clips from Paulʼs films illustrate these major themes as Paul waits for his own mortality to claim him.

"Narrated by David Wenham, On Borrowed Time includes interviews or
moments with some of Australiaʼs best known actors and Paulʼs regular
collaborators including John Clarke, Julia Blake, Isabelle Huppert, Bob Ellis,
Werner Hertzog, Phillip Adams, Jackie McKenzie, Derek Jacobi, John Hurt,
Chris Haywood, Aden Young and Wendy Hughes.

The SLAP - time to start writing Series Two

2011-11-14T18:02:00.001+11:00

Melissa George as Rosie and Anthony Hayes as Gary

Suggestion to Tony Ayres and rest of the crew behind ABC teleseries The Slap: you've spent so much time establishing the main characters in depth that it would be a waste not to produce a second series. Imagine if The Wire or Six Feet Under had only one series each? I'm sure Christos Tsiolkas, who wrote the novel, could be persuaded to play along.

I've been following the progress of The Slap since before the start of filming, starting with an attempt at reading the book. I liked a lot about it, especially the structure (each chapter has a different character at its centre), but never finished it. Not because I found the characters too dislikable, a complaint many readers seem to have had, but because it would have been a much better read at half the length.

I think that about a lot of books - fiction and non-fiction alike.

Complaining that you dislike the characters seems to me a totally wrong-headed reason for disliking the book or the TV series. The characters were obviously deliberately written to have major flaws in order to break down any notion that here are heroes and villains; to complicate the morality of the tale, making it harder to decide whose side you're on. That's what real, adult drama does.

In November last year I interviewed series script producer Tony Ayres at Friday on My Mind, the weekly talk session at the Australian Film and Television School (AFTRS) in Sydney, a fascinating conversation later published in the AFTRS quarterly journal, LUMINA.

Since the series began screening I've been an avid - though not uncritical - fan. Episode One, showing the slap of Hugo, the spoilt brat, at the backyard BBQ around which the rest of the story revolves, was far more vivid than what I remembered from the book.

The casting has been largely inspired, especially the female roles: Melissa George has been a revelation as the appalling - yet somewhat sad and pathetic - Rosie, the revenge-fixated mother of slapped kid Hugo.


Essie Davis as Anouk

Essie Davis, as Anouk, showed exactly why she became so revered on the London stage after disappearing from the Australian film and theatre scene early in her career. And Sophie Lowe has been a perfect embodiment of the sexually forward yet immature teenager, Connie.

The only weak casting choice is Jonathan LaPaglia (Anthony's brother) as Hector. He plainly lacks the charisma needed to make an immediate impact as the protagonist of the all-important first episode, especially up against Alex Dimitriades in the role of his cousin Harry, the kid slapper.

Britain's Sophie Okonedo, whose heritage is Nigerian and Ashkenazi Jewish, was a surprising casting choice as Aisha, Hector's wife, given her character's Indian extraction in the novel. Not sure what was going on here. Aimed at making the series more approachable to a British audience (the series has been sold for screening in the UK)? Still there's nothing wrong with Okonedo's performance, so it's not really an issue.

Episode Five, featuring the court room scene, was a humdinger. Melissa George has come a long way from her former soapie sexpot image, giving a deeply affecting performance as Rosie, the mother determined to get vengeance on the Greek Australian Harry for slapping her out-of-control little boy at a BBQ.

Lex Marinos as Manolis (right)

After this I found last week's Episode Six, centered on Hector and Harry's Greek-migrant father Manolis, anti-climactic, even allowing for Lex Marinos's strong performance. There were too many flat spots, especially in the first half. The giveaway was the way the William McInnes voiceover was laid on with a trowel - seemingly to overcome the material's essentially literary, rather than, dramatic nature (it sought to give the viewer access to Manolis's interior thoughts by telling us, rather than revealing his character through action). In the first part at least. The final part of the episode worked better in dramatic terms.

And enough with the cliche of bazouki music and Greek folk dancing already. Do Anglo characters need to do Morris dancing to prove their heritage? I know at this point any Australian with Greek heritage will point out that this older generation of Greek migrants hold firmly onto their old culture. But in film and TV terms, it comes over as trite and cliched.

Film piracy: the case for

2011-11-13T22:14:00.004+11:00

Update: 15.11.11. Madman Films has just told me via Twitter that Snowtown will be available to rent on iTunes on November 20 (ie five days time).

Tonight I decided to watch Justin Kurzel's Snowtown. I was overseas when it came out earlier this year and I've been waiting for it to be released on DVD so I could rent it on iTunes. Quaint, I know; most people would just watch via torrent these days, but I've always been reluctant to "pirate".

So off I went to iTunes to download only to find the film is not available for rent. Only for sale, at $24.99.

What?!

OK, film industry, give me one good reason, apart the threat of legal action, why I shouldn't 'pirate' a copy, given the distributor is clearly unable to meet my interest in accessing a copy legally? Whatever happened to "consumer is king"?

Why have you been unable or unwilling to make it possible for film lovers to access films in the medium they want to watch them in, at the time they want to watch them, when the technology makes this possible and has completely revolutionised consumer expectations and your old business model and modes of distribution are falling away?

When will you wake up to the fact there has been a paradigm shift and that by standing in the sea, Canute-like, trying to hold back the tide by legal fiat, you are not only failing but making yourselves look incompetent?

I've been invited to come along to the following session at the SPAA ( Screen Producers Association of Australia) annual conference to speak from the floor. Should be interesting:

Tuesday 15th November, 11.15am 12.30pm

Your Underground Audience
360
Level 2 Meeting Room 4, Sydney Hilton.

"It has been said that one way to determine whether your piece of content has a chance of achieving greatness is how many people want to steal it.

"Piracy represents hefty illegal profits for some perpetrators, a free ride for others, many of whom are the biggest fans of that content. With only some of the revenue going back to where it should, the back-handed compliment of piracy is propelling independent filmmakers to search for better ways to mitigate the risks of their content being stolen. Join industry mavens and mavericks at the cutting edge of technology, policy, legislation and law enforcement to review current research and debate this crucial issue."

Moderator Lori Flekser - Managing Director, Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia
Speakers:
Neil Gane - Executive Director, Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft
Mark Lazarus - Producer, The Loved Ones. Investment Manager, Drama, Screen Australia
Anton Andreacchio - Director, Convergen
Joel Pearlman – Managing Director, Roadshow Films

Modern Euro crime thrillers: The Killing vs The Silence

2011-11-12T14:12:00.000+11:00

Update on my October 31 post on acclaimed German crime thriller The Silence:

Having now screened on SBS2 the film is now available for free viewing online here, at SBS On Demand. You have 11 days left.

Watching Swiss-born director Baran bo Odar's film last night I could see where the comparisons with the brilliant Danish teleseries The Killing (Forbrydelsen) and its US remake came from, while being struck by how significantly it differs from them.

It's true that both film and the two teleseries revolve around the murder/ disappearance of girls several years apart, and share some common plot details including the discovery of items belonging to the victim in a field preceding discoveries of their bodies in a nearby lake or canal.

But unlike the German film, The Killing is essentially a conventional police procedural/ whodunnit puzzle. Knowing a murder has been committed, we follow the police as they pursue their various leads and red herrings, mostly emanating from municipal politics and all its dirty dealings. The story just happened to have been done in unusual depth and with great dashes of intelligence and visual style.

With The Silence (original title Das letzte Schweigen - literally "The Last Silence"), there's never any mystery about the identity of the killer/s. We see a rape and murder of a girl in the golden wheatfields of the Bavarian summer.

We clearly see who did it before being introduced to the detectives assigned to a later, parallel case - the discovery of a missing 11-year-old girl's abandoned bicycle in the same spot as the first girl's cycle was found around 20 years ago.

The story then see-saws between the two men involved in the original murder, seen in both time frames, and the latter-day investigation into the second girl's disappearance.

While The Killing and The Silence focus strongly on loss and grief - surviving relatives of the disappeared/ dead are given prominent roles in both - the German film is much more an exploration of the way the past hangs heavily on the present, not just for the victim's families but for the guilty party.

And where the original The Killing suffered in its final episodes from having to tie up too many of its complex plot strands, offering a solution that seemed regrettably contrived and not entirely believable, The Silence builds with inexorable logic to a downbeat finale that is as chilling as it is utterly credible.

Mussolini's Greatest Hits

2011-11-07T23:09:00.028+11:00

Italy's fascists stay true to Mussolini's ideology
That's the headline on a Guardian story on the activities of today's fascists in Italy.

"Left-wing associations have frequently accused supporters of CasaPound (a fascist organisation) of violently attacking their members at demonstrations, and have claimed the group acts as a cover for young men looking for trouble.

"In Rome, fascists assault people but are protected and unpunished," Pierluigi Bersani, head of the opposition Democratic Party told a rally on Saturday..."

This reminded me I'd never gotten around to posting these photos of a CD of Mussolini songs I found openly for sale in a cafe in a small Umbrian village in May.

I was a bit taken aback. You don't see CDs of Hitler's Top 10 speeches or Favourite Stormtrooper Hits in Germany. It would be illegal. Not to mention outrageous.

Odd country, Italy. Totally idyllic place to visit (see picture below, taken outside the cafe where the Mussolini CD was for sale). And yet.... Berlusconi? The Sicilian Cosa Nostra? The Vatican and the Pope books on every newstand in the country? Mussolini-mania? The Neapolitan Camorra? Gadzooks, man. That's a lot crosses for one nation to bear.

Mark Sarfaty RIP

2011-11-03T12:21:00.003+11:00

Shocked to hear of the sudden death of my former Sydney Film Festival colleague Mark Sarfaty, a festival board member during my time at the festival in the mid-2000s who became chief executive after I left.

A former head of Dendy Cinemas, he went on to become SFF chief executive for a year before becoming CEO of the Independent Cinemas Association of Australia (ICAA).

Screen Daily reports:

"Most recently he has been one of the key people negotiating a visual print fee (VPF) scheme for Australia’s independent cinemas.

“Mark fought tirelessly for independent cinemas, with a vision and perseverance seldom encountered,” the ICAA board said in a statement. “He was a fierce competitor and talented, intelligent leader.

“He has inspired us greatly. We are thankful to have had his leadership during the challenges of recent times and we will continue his work in improving the future competitiveness of independent cinema in Australia.”

Screen Daily adds that "in recent months Sarfaty was was caught up in a court case relating to but not directly involving ICAA. In the case Digital Cinema Network (DCN) accuses it’s former chair, Michael Smith, of breaching his fiduciary duties to DCN by handing documents he shouldn’t have to the Omnilab Media Group, which is ICAA’s partner in the scheme.

"He told this journalist repeatedly of his concerns that the court case was distracting attention away from the main game of ensuring independent operators could make the move to digital in an orderly, timely and cost efficient manner. Many of these operators are arthouse chains or based in regional communities.

"The cause of death is not yet known. He is survived by his daughter Matilda."

Why Nash Edgerton's The Square is worth revisiting

2011-11-01T16:00:00.001+11:00

Nash Edgerton's Australian noir, The Square, won a lot of justifiable raves when it was released a couple of years ago but sadly failed to get much of a mojo working at the box office.

Back then the public's faith in the Australian film industry was at its utmost low point. Which is not to say it was deserved - the widespread perceptions that "all Aussie films are depressing" reflected a certain reality that was much more complex and at that point already out of date.

To say that Edgerton's film is dark is to say that it has the same downbeat view of human relations as all great film noirs, from Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once to Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past and beyond.

I like the way the film successfully translates the language of what was originally a kind of American tragedy into something that resonates against the sunlight and greenery of the Australian suburbs, a quality that enables it to escape the trap of pastiche to which neo-noirs (films in the style produced outside of the classic 1940s-50s period) can be prey.

See Dennis Hopper's The Hot Spot (1990) for a neo-noir that manages to be more a film about a genre than about the humans at its centre. (Let's leave aside the time-worn debate over whether noir qualifies as a full-blown genre like the western or the musical).

My notes on The Square have gone up at the National Film and Sound Archive's website Australian Screen Online. The entry includes three short clips and my thoughts on what makes these sequences interesting.

I've watched the clip I've linked here many times and it just keeps getting better, from the calm bookend shots of a tragically misconceived arson at the heart of the plot, to a view of the chaos at the scene of the burning house.

I love the way Edgerton captures the latter in Steadicam, getting a vivid sense of the panic of the Anthony Hayes's character, who realises his mother's in the house, without resorting to the cliched and so often trite language of rapid cuts and rampant wobbly-cam, which too often sever any sense of what's actually happening in the scene.

And as I observe in the ASO notes, the two brief hilltop scenes "not only provide a sense of symmetry but also a God’s eye viewpoint, both literally (God is usually understood to be on high) and metaphorically – giving a sense that Ray, Carla and Billy have been playing God with another person’s life."

Image: Claire van der Boom as Carla, The Square's femme fatale.

Now Canberra gets into the filmfest spirit

2011-11-01T14:11:00.001+11:00

The fast-growing Canberra International Film Festival opened last Wednesday and runs until this Sunday (November 6). I'm heading there tomorrow for three days of screenings and will file reviews of some of the program to SBS Film website, which has just published my overview of this year's event:

Extract:

"Outside of the ACT the festival seems to be a well-kept secret, getting so few mentions in the national film and entertainment media that it’s likely many film lovers would be surprised to learn that it even exists.

"But in Canberra, it’s increasingly a different story. Since being taken over by artistic director Simon Weaving three years ago and moving into the Dendy Cinemas from its former home at the Electric Shadows, the festival has undergone serious audience growth. Two years ago CIFF managed to sell double the number of tickets it had sold in the previous year, while last year saw a year-to-year increase of 18%, says Weaving..."

Story continues here.

Image from King of Devil's Island, best film at this year's Norwegian Film Awards, and on the program at CIFF.

German "buzz" film, The Silence, on SBS this month

2011-10-31T15:45:00.003+11:00

November is a rich month for German film programming on Australian TV, with SBS Two running a focus on relatively recent films from there throughout the month.

I’ll skip over the most well-known title, the Oliver Hirschbiegel-directed Downfall (9.30pm, Tuesday 1 November), about the last days of Hitler in the bunker, since it’s been the subject of a truckload of commentary and debate already, likewise Chris Kraus’s Four Minutes (9.30pm, Tuesday 15 November), which I wrote about back in May.

Of the three remaining films, the one I’m keenest to see is Swiss-born director Baran bo Odar’s 2010 serial killer movie The Silence (9.30pm, Tuesday 8 November), which opened in UK cinemas this week to strong reviews with both London’s Daily Telegraph and The Guardian finding similarities with the acclaimed Danish crime teleseries, The Killing.

“Terrifically acted by an ensemble cast,” writes The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw in the UK, where the film has just opened theatrically, “this film twists its knife relentlessly in the wound. The atmosphere – weirdly chilling in the high summer of southern Germany – is oppressive. It's the worst of cliches … but I was on the edge of my seat until the very last.”

The above is taken from my monthly blog on German cinema at the Goethe-Institut Australia website. For the full post, go here.

For Craig Mathieson's overview of the season at the SBS Film website, see here.

Retromania: How everything old is new again

2011-10-14T23:38:00.009+11:00

Below I've posted my review in The Weekend Australian of Simon Reynolds' new book, Retromania - Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past:

TO make notes for this review I retire to the cafe on the corner of my street that serves as an alternative office.

Here the under-30 hipster baristas serenade the customers with the retro sounds of Bill Haley and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones and Canned Heat; recent artists are notable by their absence.

Returning to my desk, I download a new compilation devoted to 1960s TV pop sensation the Monkees, while playing over my speakers a new compilation of obscure Nigerian bands from the 70s, followed by an album by Frank Fairfield, a young man acclaimed because his banjo and fiddle playing sounds like something you'd hear on an Appalachians cabin stoop circa 1948.

Later I continue the long-term task of transferring my CD collection -- mostly old stuff -- to hard disc while the iTunes shuffle setting keeps surprising me with musical juxtapositions often decades and even centuries apart. In the evening I'll watch a new movie, Drive, whose soundtrack is sewn together not from current pop hits or now-sounding orchestral writing but from pastiches of 80s-style electropop and a kind of chilly electronica rooted in the 70s.
That these time-jumping experiences are normal in 2011 is something that concerns British-born, US-based critic Simon Reynolds, the most stimulating contemporary popular music critic in the English language for the past 25 years. Reynolds exhibits the usual fan's obsessiveness with wide-ranging interests and relentless curiosity, but the key to his consistent readability is a keenly analytical mind that recognises the importance of sometimes coolly stepping back from the fashion and the passion to make sense of what's driving it all.

His latest book sprang from the dawning feeling that after several decades of his immersion in waves of innovation -- from post-punk through hip-hop to rave and beyond -- the 2000s seemed to have ground to a halt.

Where earlier decades, the 60s in particular, were underpinned by a sense of forward momentum, pop culture now, Reynolds thinks, is set in permanent shuffle mode: suffocating in endless reissues, band reformations, boxed sets and endless free illegal downloads. We are caught up in an over-abundance of choice and a self-awareness that has bled all the obsessiveness and belief in the immediate present that made the the 20th century so vital....

"Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present's own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel," he writes. More playfully, Reynolds suggests that "this is the way that pop ends, not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university".

Much of this is spot-on, as my opening paragraph makes clear. Today our consumption of recorded music is marked not only by its relatively long and rich history but also the technological means to bring that history into our ears at the click of a mouse. Not that this is new; pop has been eating itself (to paraphrase the name of a British band from the 80s and 90s) for a long while. For evidence that anxiety about missing the excitement of the 60s and 70s youthquakes predates even the world wide web, see the 1990 film Pump up the Volume, in which Christian Slater's pirate DJ complains about his generation's born-too-late dilemma.

So have we really come to the end of musical development; will there be no more new scenes such as rave culture or hip-hop, no new equivalent of punk or psychedelia? Reynolds's exhaustively researched, sometimes maddening and immensely stimulating book leans towards an end-of-history hypothesis that sounds persuasive until you consider the music that doesn't fit its arguments.

While the tiredness and second-hand nature of much contemporary music goes without saying, there's plenty that does not fit this description. Reynolds appears deaf, for example, to the vital Brooklyn scene (Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors et al) that has turned reverence for Brian Wilson, among others, into a thrillingly urban and strikingly urbane new set of sounds. Has the writer, at the age of 48, become jaded?

The book's saving grace is that Reynolds is clearly conflicted in reaching his dour prognosis. His concluding chapter underestimates the way all former musical sub-genres rested on an often flagrant worship of the past (think of the Woody Guthrie-fixated Bob Dylan or the late 60s blues-rock boom). That's odd, given the rest of the book goes over this ground in obsessive detail.

Some of the most rewarding sections concern retro-based phenomena such as Britain's trad-jazzers of the 40s and 50s and its revivalist northern soul movement of the 70s (devoted to upbeat soul obscurities and popular in the north of England only). That this contradicts his sour conclusions does not seem to worry him, but it makes the book a highly rewarding read.

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own PastBy Simon Reynolds
Faber & Faber, 458pp, $35

Image: Brooklyn's Animal Collective

In memoriam: Bert Jansch

2011-10-05T23:28:00.002+11:00

Sad to hear that Bert Jansch, the great British acoustic guitarist, has died.

Jansch was one of three great folk guitarists to emerge from Britain in the 1960s, along with John Renbourn (with whom he played in the group Pentangle) and Davey Graham, whose tune Angie - or Anji - Jansch helped to popularise via his own recording. Neil Young was a huge fan, as was Johnny Marr and, more controversially, Jimmy Page (see below).

I'm republishing this brief tribute, which I first posted on 22 November, 2008:

I fell in love with Bert Jansch's version of the traditional English folk tune Black Waterside as a teenager and it still sounds every bit as bewitching and mysteriously beautiful.

Many will of course know the tune as Black Mountainside, Jimmy Page's acoustic guitar excursion on the first Led Zeppelin album - infamously credited to Page. About the only difference between the two versions is Page's addition of tablas and disinclination to sing the haunting melody line, as you can hear on the following clip:

Jansch didn't sue for the simple reason that the song is traditional - he learned
it from Anne Briggs, whose glorious version uses the same melody with a more simple guitar part:

Why The Low Anthem have made the best album of 2011

2011-10-03T21:29:00.001+11:00

The finest album I've heard in 2011 is Smart Flesh, by Rhode Island outfit The Low Anthem. It's one of those rare recordings that makes the heart skip a beat every time you hear it; that weaves a special magic you can never hope to define but feel instantly in your bones from the moment you first hear it.

You can take this music apart and examine it but that won't give you any answers because on the face of it's simple and shouldn't be so affecting. The band's modus operandi is slow country and folk-tinged songs that go from world-weary to sad to tragic, and if that sounds like a downer, it would be if the results weren't so damned soulful.

There's one track I'm less than enthusiastic about - Boeing 737, inspired by the events of 9-11 - largely because its turn-it-up-to-12 assault shatters the carefully built mood - but it's a minor complaint, given the genius of the two preceding tracks.

The first of these, a cover of George Carter's Ghost Woman Blues (YouTube clip above), is achingly sad, its harmonies so Fleet-Foxes perfect (without the occasionally cloying sweetness) that it's hard to keep your eyes dry, while the second song, Apothecary Love, is so moving and catchy it's almost mental - a stripped-down country classic I'd love to hear Emmylou Harris tackle one day.

In August Limelight magazine ran my review, which I've republished below:

THE LOW ANTHEM

Smart Flesh

Nonesuch B004H1Z6E8

Four stars

Continuing the upsurge in acoustic American roots music sparked by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack , The Low Anthem display something of the sincerity and vocal harmonies of neo-folk contemporaries such as Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver while ploughing a furrow of all of their own.

On their second album the Rhode Island ensemble capture the kind of hushed, magical ambiance that helped make the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session a landmark recording of the late 1980s. That’s partly due to the way both recordings were made – live, in large, makeshift spaces, the Junkies’ in a church, the Anthem’s in an abandoned factory that gives their spare folk and country arrangements a very special warmth and spectral resonance.

Leonard Cohen and Gram Parsons emerge as touchstones, the latter an especially prominent influence on the insanely catchy Apothecary Blues – a song that deserves to enter the canon as a country music classic.

Elsewhere they deploy musical saw, harmonica, jew’s harp, banjo, harmonium and even, on the instrumental Wire, nothing but twin clarinets. The pace varies between slow, very slow and nearly-stopped, but the emotions are always keen, resulting in an achingly beautiful album from start to finish._ Lynden Barber

New Afghan War doco is a "tour de force"

2011-09-28T00:36:00.002+10:00

I don't know if any Australian dustributor has picked this one up yet, but if not, I hope they do soon. If this New York Times report is to be believed, Hell and Back Again is a punch in the ribs of an Afghan war documentary:

"As the Afghan war neared a decade’s worth of combat, casualties and headlines, the photographer and filmmaker Danfung Dennis was looking to jolt people’s consciousness.
'I was frustrated with photojournalism, and I was frustrated with society back in the U.S. being indifferent to the war,” said Mr. Dennis, who had covered Afghanistan as a still photographer in 2006. “I moved into video and new media to try to shake people up — to show the war’s brutal reality in an honest way.'

"Did he ever. Hell and Back Again, his new award-winning documentary film about the war, is a tour de force that breaks new ground in the documentary tradition, combining chilling reportage with sometimes dreamy or drugged-up sequences. The film – with clinical precision – peels away the daily headlines to expose the reality of the Afghan war and the devastating burden carried by American service members back home..."

Full report and trailer at NYT Lens section.

Wall Street trader blurts the truth: Goldman Sachs rules the world, not governments

2011-09-27T16:19:00.007+10:00

Postscript, Sep 29, 11.15pm PST: Despite claims by the BBC that this interview was no hoax (see addendum below), apparently it was: the UK Daily Telegraph has found that Rastani is not a trader but a public speaker.

"In the interview Mr Rastani described himself as an independent trader. Elsewhere he claims he's an "investment speaker".

"Instead of operating from a plush office in Canary Wharf Mr Rastani works and lives with his partner Anita Eader in a £200,000 semi in Bexleyheath, south London. The house, complete with a mortgage from Royal Bank of Scotland, belongs to her not him. He is a business owner, a 99pc shareholder in public speaking venture Santoro Projects. Its most recent accounts show cash in the bank of £985. After four years trading net assets are £10,048 - in the red.

"How a man who has never been authorised by the Financial Services Authority and has no discernible history working for a City institution ended up being interviewed by the BBC remains a mystery."

(Not to say that what he had to say wasn't true, of course - but it does explain his apparent bluntness)

My original post:

This makes Gordon Gekko look like a left wing hippy - easy to see why it's going viral (love the bit where the BBC reporter comments that her floor staff were standing there with jaws dropped in amazement). Every stereotype about evil Wall Street traders confirmed - but with an honesty that is almost disarming.

Or is it? If this guy is salivating at the prospect of a major economic crash because he'll be making a lot of money out of it, then perhaps this apocalyptic rant is merely a cynical ruse designed to heighten the market fears that might bring about that collapse.

Addendum:

Statement on BBC News channel interview with trader Alessio Rastani

Date: 27.09.2011

The BBC have today issued the following statement regarding an interview with trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC News channel yesterday (Monday 25 September):

"We've carried out detailed investigations and can't find any evidence to suggest that the interview with Alessio Rastani was a hoax. He is an independent market trader and one of a range of voices we've had on air to talk about the recession."
BBC Press Office

Documentary Discovers Print Media in Crisis Shock

2011-09-26T15:24:00.003+10:00

The documentary PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES has opened in NSW, Queensland and ACT in limited release. I can't see it staying around for long, but I wouldn't recommend anyone - even journalists or media junkies - rushes out to see it before it disappears. You really won't miss anything seeing it at home on DVD or download, and in any case, it's not nearly as compelling as it should have been.

Here's an extract from my review in The Weekend Australian

Page One: Inside the New York Times is not the most inspiring of titles for a documentary. Why not call it “Mediacide”, or “Black Print”? How about “Paper on the Precipice”? None of these would exaggerate the contents of a film that tells of the deep crisis of old media through the lens of one of its most famous institutions.

Director Andrew Rossi sets the tone immediately with a roll call of recent US newspaper closures before going on to explore the economic crisis engulfing The New York Times – widely regarded, of course, as one of the most influential newspapers not only in the US but the world. The paper is but one of one of 100s of inky titles with no apparent long term future thanks to the crumbling of its business model amid the continuing revolution in digital communications.

There’s something else that’s odd about the film’s long-windedly prosaic title: while it purports to be accurately descriptive, it lacks precision. The film spends a year not so much inside the paper in general as just one of its sections, the media department.

That’s a smart strategy for examining the broader story of the crisis facing newspapers in the western world, but in tackling it the film often disappoints. Surely one of the chief reasons many of us enjoy watching documentaries is that we gain new insights, have our curiosity piqued and learn something new. This film, while moderately engaging, tells me hardly anything I didn’t already know.

Over the past five or so years the topic of falling newspaper circulations, staffing levels and revenue and the rise of social media and aggregate news websites has been so thoroughly reported upon – on the internet, and to its shame, somewhat belatedly by the newspaper industry itself - that a film on this topic needed to come up with a particularly searching analysis. What we get here is more like a ticking of the boxes...

Screen beauty and the power of attraction

2011-08-09T12:41:00.021+10:00

I'm holding back my views of Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, until nearer the release date. In the meantime I can't resist sharing some images of the film's female lead, Elena Anaya, who plays a woman held captive by a leading skin surgeon. Her captor is played by Antonio Banderas, returning to the director for the first time since 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! - in which, intriguingly enough, he also imprisoned a woman (played then by Victoria Abril).

Elena Anaya

Anaya has an astonishing screen presence - her looks are the kind that stop you in your tracks. And she can act.

Elena Anaya

If you saw Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia, she played the extraordinary looking young woman with the dangerously vicious dog. In Skin she plays a woman so beautiful that she scarcely seems real - but in just saying that I'm already in danger of wandering into an act of spoiler crime. Her looks - and the remarkable quality, in this film at least, of her skin - dovetail exactly into the film's major theme and plot, which revolve around surfaces, appearances.

Angelin

Hollywood's idea of female beauty - or perhaps its audience's - often leaves me feeling cold though I think I understand what drives them. Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, two of the biggest icons of beauty, seem not so much attractive as freakish. Jolie in particular often projects a voracious cartoon of "sexy" womanhood that can too readily detract from her roles (those weird lips). The most European screen women still seem to have an elegance, style and poise - something that went out of Hollywood with Audrey Hepburn. Yes, another European. As were, in earlier eras, Greta Garbo (Swedish) and Marlene Dietrich (German).

Elena Anaya

Anne Hathaway

When I call Jolie and Roberts "freakish", I do not intend an idle insult. The notion of beauty depends on some statistical deviation from the norm, a physical quality that immediately marks out a person as unusual - lips, eyes and cheekbones more prominent than average. Anne Hathaway scores well in all those departments.

Julia Roberts

To become a film star, the person has to possess not just intense charisma, but also unique features that mark out their face as instantly recognisable (acting ability is an advantage but time and time again has proven inessential). Idiosyncrasies are a blessing: in Jolie's case, pronounced lips and wide eyes; with Roberts, an unusually wide mouth (so that when she smiles, the effect can not help but be infectious - regardless of whether the viewer finds her looks attractive or not).

With Anaya, the size of the eyes is quickly noticeable. In the Almodovar film, the flawless quality of her skin is also readily apparent - something the director highlights via make-up and lighting and possibly post-production techniques (colour grading and possibly digital imaging).


Elena Anaya

Her character's habitual wearing of a flesh-coloured body stocking - a second skin - also encourages viewers to pay close attention to her real skin.

Apart from being a luridly macabre melodrama, The Skin I Live In is a meditation on beauty, as well as an examination on sexual obsession and the male desire to mould, control, gaze upon and own the female body in contrasting ways - the wild (rape) and the rational and scientific (Banderas's surgeon). Feminist film theoreticians of the post-Laura Mulvey "male gaze" school will have a field day, as will queer film theorists - the latter for reasons I'll leave readers to discover when they get the chance to see the film in December.

Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In

Did I tell you the one about the conjuror, the beaver and the jingoistic superhero?

2011-08-08T23:21:00.004+10:00

I don't appear to have updated this blog for several months.

To save ourselves all a lot of pain and tedium I won't go into the reasons and instead jump straight back in with a few links to some of my recent film reviews, starting with French animator Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (pictured above), based on a previously unfilmed Jacques Tati script. Over at the Limelight website, I observe that it "succeeds exquisitely, capturing the spirit and feel of Tati’s understated, silent-era-inspired comedy, with its digs at the modern world, yet reinterpreting in the light of the animator’s distinctively stylised vision." Review here.

In The Australian I find that Jodie Foster's The Beaver, starring Mel Gibson with his hand up a toy beaver's backside, falls between two stools ("the ludicrousness of the puppet device makes it hard to take the character's problems seriously, yet neither does it work as black comedy").

But I was pleasantly surprised by Joe Johnston's Captain America: the First Avenger, noting the influence of Johnston's mentor Steven Spielberg - especially Raiders of the Lost Ark - and even Howard Hawks. Full review here.

Osama: the Movie - the casting begins

2011-05-03T22:44:00.006+10:00

It didn't take long. Within not much than an hour after news of Monday's dramatic killing of Osama Bin Laden, speculation was hitting the net over potential movie versions of the US raid.

And no wonder: instead of hiding out in a cave in the rugged mountain borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, as we'd been repeatedly been told, there was Osama putting his feet up in a massive and hugely suspicious fortress-like walled compound in the middle-class suburb of a verdant Pakistani town called Abbottabad, only a few 100 yards down the road from the country's premier military academy, and a mere two hours drive out of the capital, Islamabad.

You couldn't make this stuff up. If you scripted a movie along these lines, you'd never get greenlighted in a million years. Too unbelievable!

Maybe that's why the first Osama project, news of which surfaced shortly after President Obama's media announcement of the killing, is not about the raid as such but the hunt for the terrorist figurehead in the Tora Bora mountains several years ago. This is to be directed by Kathryn The Hurt Locker Bigelow, and was already in the planning stage.

Even before the Bigelow project was announced, my Twitter feed was buzzing with suggestions for the role of Osama. One wit floated the name of Alfred Molina, which I have to admit was inspired. This is not because Molina looks anything like Bin Laden - he's too rotund and jowly - but because he's always being tapped by studios to play "swarthy Johnny Foreigner" roles.

My own choice, however, I consider to be unarguable. Think The Wire. Think sad but heartily lovable junkie with shopping trolley full of gewgaws. Think Bubbles, aka Bubs. Step this way, actor Andre 'Osama' Royo.

My 2008 interview with Sonny Rollins, here again in June

2011-04-30T13:59:00.001+10:00

The great US saxophonist Sonny Rollins is returning to Australia to play Sydney Opera House on June 2nd as part of the city's Vivid Live winter arts festival (details here).

In May 2008 I interviewed Rollins for a feature that ran in The Australian, republished below. He was happy to stay on the phone for nearly an hour and eager to share his thoughts and memories:

WHEN Sonny Rollins, the jazz world's greatest living tenor saxophonist, steps on to an Australian stage for the first time, audience members may be surprised when he launches into Half as Much, a tune by country legend Hank Williams.

To say this is hardly standard jazz repertoire would be an understatement, yet for Rollins it's all of a piece. After all, when he released his trio album Way Out West, in 1957, he raised eyebrows with a track listing that included the Bob Crosby ditty I'm an Old Cowhand.

Still, it's a safe bet that Half as Much will feature little of Williams's twang and sound very much like Rollins. He is almost the archetypal tenor saxophonist. Think of a deep, warm and richly textured sound at the lower, sexier end of the instrument's register, a sound as capable of communicating tenderness as truculence. Then try to imagine a constant line of surprises in the choice of notes and phrasing. As British saxophonist John Surman puts it, "You can wait for 20 minutes or so before you even hear one of his own favourite phrases, let alone a cliche."

To judge by his conversation and his latest album, Sonny Please, Rollins is an unusually robust and energetic 77-year-old, so why have Australians had to wait so long to see him in concert? He has had plenty of offers through the years, he explains from his home in upstate New York, in a voice not so far removed from the sound of his saxophone.

"Sometimes we're supposed to go Australia after Japan, but usually we have such a hard tour in Japan that we've said, 'Well, we can't do any more,' so we come back to the States. But I have been anxious to get to Australia for quite a long time."

Whether by coincidence or alignment of the planets, Rollins is the second great jazz saxophonist of his generation to make his first visit to Australia this year. (He is performing for one night only at the Sydney Opera House.) In February, iconoclastic alto player Ornette Coleman - like Rollins, born in 1930 - played in Adelaide and Sydney.

But next to Coleman and the other great tenor player of his era, John Coltrane, Rollins's music remains comparatively accessible while being harder to define or pin down. He has been associated with two important jazz movements, bebop and (more briefly) free jazz, but has never been contained by them: a deliberate decision, as he makes clear.

"I feel that music is a unifying force and there's nothing I like better than playing for people of different backgrounds and finding they like my work," he says. He loves it when people tell him they don't like jazz but they do like his music, "because the music I'm trying to play, I don't want it to be in a box and 'It's got to be hard bop or straight-ahead jazz.' These are great musics, but my aim is to use music as a positive unifying force."

Born Theodore Walter Rollins in Harlem, New York City, he was mentored by eccentric piano genius Thelonious Monk and played with Miles Davis before the age of 20. After a spell with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Rollins established his name as a band leader and improviser with unusual powers of invention.

Taking an unexpected tune, such as How are Things in Glocca Morra from the musical Finian's Rainbow, he could turn corn into gold. His approach to unlikely material has been called ironic, implying emotional distance, even parody. But, as Rollins says, "when I play these disparate songs from different cultures, I do it with love. I do it because, No.1, I like the melodies and so on, and also because I think that jazz is such a worldwide music that it should be used as a way to bring people together.

"I've played songs associated with the old south, like Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody. Now people, critics and so forth, realised I was playing it very seriously but with a real jazz sensibility. I wasn't playing it as if I was somewhere in the deep south. I think they found that ironic, that I could use this material and turn it into something that was very definitely jazz music, and serious jazz music, and at the same time this song would represent something else in its original incarnation."

Rollins's eclecticism has included a taste for Caribbean tunes, most famously his calypsos St Thomas and Don't Stop the Carnival, and from the mid-1970s through the '80s a leaning towards electric and fusion stylings. Yet to paint him as populist would be simplistic given that he also has played with symphony orchestras (in Japan and Italy) and explored free-form expression in the '60s with Coleman's sidemen.

His take is that he's aiming for a form of jazz improvisation that everyone can appreciate, regardless of individual taste. "I'm interested in getting to a place where the music is getting back to be the music that it should be ... Jazz to me is the greatest music because you have the possibilities of utilising all sorts of music: European classical music, folk music. So this is what my improvisation is trying to get to."

This explains his sanguine views on the state of contemporary jazz. There has been much discussion in the past decade about whether jazz has stopped progressing and become backward-looking. Pondering the issue, Rollins cites Art Kane's celebrated 1958 photograph for Esquire magazine of great jazz players from different generations, in which he can be seen alongside elder statesmen such as Roy Eldridge and Lester Young.

"In that picture you see so many great artists from different periods that were together," he says. "So one could look back and say: 'Jazz had its golden age in the '50s, so now there's no place for jazz to go.' Of course, I wouldn't subscribe to that view. For one thing, I feel that hip-hop and all of these modern musics are under the umbrella of jazz. To say that jazz has reached this apogee and is looking back, no, I don't think so. I think jazz is so much of a vital, contemporary, spontaneous form of music that it still has to be discovered. I'm trying to do that myself."

He says movements such as swing, bebop and free jazz are passe as a way of thinking about jazz. "Now is the time to blossom and be the music that transcends everything and includes everything. Jazz is like nature. Every day a different sky, a different cloud, a different rainbow: this is something that jazz represents. I'm trying to exemplify everything in jazz. It's something that takes in the bigger picture."

I ask about his perfectionism, illustrated by the sabbatical he took in 1959 to practise every day on New York's Williamsburg Bridge. "Well, quite frankly I am very critical of myself because I have very high standards," he says.

"I've been fortunate in my life to appear with some of the great musicians of my time and I know what good music is: you know, my resume is amazing! And in my case, I came into the music as the youngest person of my group. I consider myself a work in progress. Even today I still practise every day, I'm still composing, so I haven't reached my ideal, what I want to do yet as a musician."

That sounds a lot like the perpetually searching Coltrane, who seems to exert a surprising posthumous influence on the intense title track of Sonny Please. "Oh sure, I'm unashamedly influenced by everybody!" Rollins exclaims.

"At the time we were playing together, it was harder (to take on Coltrane's approach) because we were looked on as contemporaries." But since then, he says, he has been able to incorporate into his playing aspects of Coltrane's style as well as that of Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Young. "I'm still getting it together. The idea that 'this is Sonny's style', I don't want that. I always want to be searching."

Tonight: An Evening with Paul Cox

2011-04-28T11:11:00.001+10:00

Tonight at UTS I will be speaking with Paul Cox, director of some of the finest films to emerge from Australia in the last 30 years including Man of Flowers, Lonely Hearts, Innocence, A Woman's Tale and The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Following his recent struggle with cancer we're lucky to have Cox still with us, and for that we can thank a liver transplant. All of this he has documented in a wonderfully wise and beautifully written new book, Tales From the Cancer Ward (published by Transit Lounge).

There's still a few tickets left, so go here to register.

The following is taken from the event's UTS webpage - see here for details of start time and venue.

"On behalf of Theo van Leeuwen, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, you are cordially invited to celebrate the career of Australia's renowned filmmaker on this special night: An Evening with Paul Cox.

"The University of Technology Sydney is privileged to award Australian filmmaker and director Paul Cox with an honorary doctorate for his illustrious contribution to the Australian and International film industry. While in Sydney, Cox will also make a rare public appearance at UTS, joining us for a screening of Cox' work The Remarkable Mr Kaye (2005), followed by in a conversation with Lynden Barber, film critic, journalist and Artistic Director of the Sydney Film Festival in 2005 and 2006.

"With a filmmaking career spanning over 35 years, Cox is a respected director and filmmaker whose groundbreaking films have been honoured with awards such as Best Film at the 1982 Australian Film Industry awards (Lonely Hearts), Best Director at the 1984 Rio de Janeiro Film Festival; and Best Director, Actor and Screenplay at the 1984 Australian Film Industry Awards (My First Wife).

"Cox's highly acclaimed feature Innocence (2000) won massive audience and critical acclaim including the Grand Prix of the Americas (Best Film) and the People's Choice Award at the 2000 Montreal World Film Festival. Famous for his penchant for humanism in his films, Cox has also worked with the most respected of Australian actors including Claudia Karvan, Wendy Hughes and Jacqueline McKenzie."

For my commentary on Innocence, see the entry on the film at the National Film and Sound Archive's Australian Screen Online

Painting a brothel with light - Bonello's L'Appollonide

2011-04-20T20:48:00.005+10:00

It would be hard not to be bowled over by the utterly gorgeous painterly compositions and lighting in these stills from Cannes competition title L'Appollonide (Souvenirs de la Maison Close), known in English as House of Tolerance. Click on the pictures to make them bigger. Some come up even larger with a double click.

Directed by France's Bertrand Bonello (The Pornographer), the film is set, if this isn't already obvious, in a turn-of-the-century brothel. The central character - pictured seated in the still below - is a prostitute left with a smile-like scar after being assaulted by a man. Will the film live up to the quality of its imagery? That remains to be seen, of course, but if it's anywhere as strong we're in for a treat.

Above: one of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's fin-de-siecle Paris brothel paintings. Remaining images are still photographs from the film

Are we seeing an Australian cinema renaissance?

2011-04-19T13:16:00.001+10:00

Sleeping Beauty from Pollen Digital on Vimeo.

Tonight I'm off to an advance screening of "erotic fairytale" Sleeping Beauty. This debut feature of Australian novelist-turned-filmmaker Julia Leigh has the official imprimatur of Jane Campion and has just got into Cannes in the Official Competition alongside Malick, Almodovar, Ramsay, von Trier and the Dardenne brothers.

This of course doesn't guarantee a positive reception - you only need think of the rude Cannes reaction against Campion's debut, Sweetie, back in the late 1980s. Nonetheless to even be accepted into such august company is a considerable honour.

Judging from the trailer, which I've posted here,the film looks to be surrealistic and at the very least deeply intriguing - perhaps akin to one of Catherine Breillat's films about perverse sexuality and female desire directed in the style of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut or Lynch's Mulholland Drive (references that a viewing of the film may of course soon prove redundant). The use of music alone makes me look forward to seeing it.

Two other local films screening in Cannes next month are Ivan Sen's Toomelah (in Un Certain Regard) and, announced today (Tues. April 19), Justin Kurzel's very bleak-looking "bodies-in-barrels" true murder tale Snowtown (in Critic's Week - see here for trailer). Director's Fortnight selections are still to come.

Last July I reviewed Claire McCarthy's second feature, The Waiting City, for The Australian, and wondered whether we would look back a few years hence and see the previous 24 months as the start of a golden period for Australian cinema.

"I raise the question, while not yet being certain of the answer," the review continued. "What I'll say for certain is that the release of films as strong as Samson and Delilah, The Square, Balibo, The Last Ride, Beneath Hill 60, The Black Balloon, Animal Kingdom and The Boys are Back within a relatively short time frame has made it hard for any informed cinema-lover to argue that Australian filmmaking is still in the doldrums.

"It's true that, for a while, local filmmakers were producing too many middle-of-the-road family dramas and coming-of-age stories, excessively tasteful art films where most of the art had been surgically removed.

"But local filmmakers are at last working in a wider variety of styles and genres and the energy of a new wave of younger filmmaking talent is making itself felt. We still produce a few failures, but no national film industry has ever had a 100 per cent strike rate and right now our cinematic glass is looking more full than empty.

"With The Waiting City, the story of a young Australian couple who travel to Calcutta to finalise the adoption of an Indian baby, Sydney-based writer-director Claire McCarthy joins this new creative surge, showing a level of maturity that makes it hard to credit that she's still only in her 20s."

See here for full review.

Master storyteller Bob Connolly triumphantly returns

2011-04-17T15:01:00.005+10:00

After a 10 year absence documentarian Bob Connolly, one of Australia's finest strongest cinematic storytellers, is back with a gripping new documentary, co-directed with Sophie Raymond. Mrs Carey's Concert is being released on August 28 in most Australian capital cities, and in Brisbane on May 5.

As I wrote for SBS Film website in February after interviewing Connolly and Raymond, the film traces the epic struggle of a group of female school students from Sydney girls’ school, MLC, to stage a biennial classical concert in the intimidating setting of the Sydney Opera House.

It shows that none of Connolly’s powers of observation and innate sense of drama have diminished since his previous documentaries co-directed with the late Robin Anderson - Facing the Music, Rats in the Ranks and The PNG TrilogyFirst Contact, Joe Leahy's Neighbours and Black Harvest). For full interview go here; the official website is here. (

In the meantime I'm looking forward to reading Connolly's book, Making Black Harvest, a Walkley Award winner and finalist for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction.

On April 21 you can read another feature on the film and a review by my colleague Fenella Kernebone in the May issue of Limelight - a special edition focusing on film soundtrack music including an interview with leading Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer (Inception; The Thin Red Line) on the work of Ennio Morricone, and the top soundtrack picks of David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.

Wenders creates a masterpiece in Pina - the world's first 3D art film

2011-04-13T17:14:00.001+10:00

Just came back from seeing Wim Wenders' Pina - an absolute knockout. I've blogged on the film over at the Festival of German Films' website (see here).

Extract:
The word “masterpiece” is best used with caution with regard to new artistic works. That said, Wim Wenders’ dance film Pina may well be the first genuine masterpiece of digital 3D cinema.

In this new film devoted to the innovative and highly influential “dance theatre” of the late German choreographer Pina Bausch, the director has mapped out exciting new expressive possibilities for the medium of cinema...

Take me to the Casbah - Pepe le Moko on DVD

2011-04-08T13:19:00.000+10:00

Without Julien Duvivier's Pepe le Moko, a masterpiece of French poetic realism of the 1930s set in colonial Algeria's dense Casbah district, there would have been no Casablanca, no Algiers, possibly no Battle of Algiers -and definitely no Pepe le Pew!

Over at SBS Film, I review the Madman DVD release.

Extract:

Graham Greene wrote at the time that he couldn’t recall a film “which has succeeded so admirably in raising the thriller to a poetic level” and there’s no question its poetry still hits a chord. A dreamy and visually heightened sensibility suffuses the entire film, with its evocative recreation of the Casbah’s labyrinthine alleyways and backyards..."

What did McCarthy, John Hillcoat & Kurosawa know that we didn't?

2011-03-19T15:01:00.000+11:00

The Road (dir. John Hillcoat)

Sunrise over Japanese tsunami wreckage

The Road


Tsunami/ earthquake wreckage


Dodes'ka den (Akira Kurosawa)

The terrible, almost unbelievable images of disaster from Japan's earthquake and tsunami have struck me during the past week as looking uncannily familiar. It became a commonplace 10 years ago to say that watching video footage of 9/11 was "like looking at a movie". But what kind of movie? The implication was "Hollywood special effects blockbuster".

But the latest images don't remind me at all any big budget disaster movie such as 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow. Instead they bring to mind John Hillcoat's poetic and haunting adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic American novel, The Road (2009), and Akira Kurosawa's 1970 feature Dodes'ka den, which was set on a giant rubbish tip.

The difference between this pair of apocalyptic visions and the typical Hollywood disaster epic is that the former invoke a sense of compassion for the human individual in a world turned upside down, whereas the blockbusters aim to give their audiences a cheap thrill that entertains for as long as viewers are in the cinema - and then evaporates the moment the film is over.

Why corporate gender-equality quotas are rubbish

2011-03-17T13:35:00.002+11:00

Below I've extracted a terrific, brave piece by Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald. When I say "brave", I realise of course that nothing here is outrageous - it's what the majority of women and men who are honest about their personal experiences and feelings know to be true; little more than a series of truisms. Women are biologically constructed to have babies and nurture them and this affects the way they approach life. A simple fact of blinding obviousness.

(And no, that doesn't mean they can't be high achievers like Liz Farrelly. It doesn't mean they have to stay home and have babies and give up any idea of having careers. We left those ideas behind in the Mad Men era, where they belong.)

That won't stop her being pilloried by ideological feminists, who are agitating for quotas for higher representation of women on boards as we speak - never mind asking how many women actually want to make the selfish sacrifices to family and personal life that success in the corporate world entails.

Extract:

'...Lets us pretend women are just men with breasts. Oh, and babies...
Ignore the fact that, despite decades of educational and statutory equality, women are still seriously under-represented at the pointy end of every profession except the oldest. In architecture there's Zaha Hadid and Kazuyo Sejima, and after that it's down to ''first female'', ''first black female'', ''genius behind the throne'' stuff. We blame conditioning (us) and the boys' club (them). Women, we're told, want what men want; sex, money, power. Anyone who suggests otherwise is accused of ''essentialism'' and women's literature is packed with ''my right to happiness'' stuff.

'For the boys-with-breasts mob, "50-50 by 2020" is a self-evident good goal, and unequal achievement simply further proof of the need for affirmative action at the top. Quotas. Mentors. Assisted childcare. But there is an inherent contradiction here.

'Positive discrimination presumes not just that gender balance is good for women, but also that it's good for the professions; that women bring something special, something extra.
In architecture, for example, it is tacitly assumed that women are ''greener''. Eco-conferences don't do specials on Men in Architecture. Other standard Guardian-reader assumptions are that women listen and talk better, intuit better, are more client-responsive and collaborate better. This last is clearly rubbish.

'Men collaborate - I give you football, war, organised crime, the boys' club. But even if female communication superiority is, as I suspect, real (unless we're putting this, too, down to conditioning) there's still a contradiction. Women are either different from men or they're not.
And there's still childcare. For yes, it's unfair. But what's to be done? Perhaps the Dutch have this sorted, what with state childcare and parental leave.
But how to manage it?

'Clearly we can't require bosses to reward those who, for whatever reason, achieve below their colleagues. Paid paternity leave is a gesture, but little more since, in truth, the first few months of a baby's life are much the easiest.

'But there's something else. Even if childcare were fully funded; even if it ran all hours - all night, if necessary; even if it weren't so often run by cretins and shysters, is that what we really, deep down, want? In the end it's about love. Sure, men love babies. But (tell me I'm wrong) women love them more. Essentialist, perhaps, but god help us if it ever changes.

'So the issue is not whether women ''want it'' as much as men, but whether they want it as much as they want to nurture their chicks. I'm as ambitious as anyone I know, male or female. I put both my kids in childcare as littlies, and wept each time I left them.
Yet I'm conscious of having made deep and ongoing career sacrifices for their sake. Yes, it's hard. And yes, it still makes me furious.

'Yet I cannot regard it as the fault of some system - unless it's a system called nature. In all honesty, even if I had a 24/7 nanny, I'd give him the housework, the secretarial, but not the kids. Because that stuff matters...'

The 10 Rules of Music Appreciation

2011-02-21T18:19:00.004+11:00

1) Always avoid commercial radio. They're only interested in music as aural baked beans (Occasionally something good slips through viz. Amy Winehouse a few years ago, but you'll hear that anyway.)

2) Listen to what's cool, but never avoid music just because it's uncool. These categories are fluid over time

3) Avoid acts who rely on expensive, corporate video clips. (Cheap inventive clips are more than OK, of course)

4) Avoid anyone who consistently uses bad or painfully lurid artwork (with the exception of The Isley Bros.' and Ohio Players' album sleeves during the '70s)

5) If your 14-year-old daughter or son likes it, you should make sure you never let them play it over loudspeakers. That's what ear-buds/ headphones were invented for. If they claim to have found something earth-shattering, let them first advance the arguments as to why you should listen. If they are passionate and articulate, they probably have good reason. (Once they've reached 17, listen to them all the time - they've reached the age where they realise just how exciting music can be and have started to make their own discoveries.)

6) Never restrict your listening to 1 or 2 genres. Always make an effort with something you find uncomfortable at 1st.

7) If you think classical music is (a) too hard to get into, (b) snobby, (c) too straight, you're being close-minded and haven't given it a proper go. Probably most of the artists you most admire like at least some classical music. (Admittedly if you don't like Sibelius's Intermezzo from the Karelia Suite, played loud, there is probably little hope for you).

8) With jazz, the rhythm always comes 1st. So stop worrying that you don't 'get' what the sax or trumpet player's doing. Just feel the groove. Everything else gradually falls into place with increased familiarity.

9) Follow critics and bloggers you like and follow up their suggestions, but never trust them blindly. (Even if they're me.)

10) Never allow others to dictate what you listen to. That means never being embarrassed to like something your friends sneer at.

Film Critics Circle of Australia 2011 award nominations

2011-02-08T12:29:00.020+11:00

The FCCA unveiled its 2011 nominations today.

Male actor nominees Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom leads with 10 nods, with Beneath Hill 60
and The Waiting City each with eight nominations. Tomorrow When the War Began
received five, while Bran Nue Dae and South Solitary received four each. The winners will be announced on March 13.

BEST FILM

ANIMAL KINGDOM (PRODUCER: LIZ WATTS)

BENEATH HILL 60 (BILL LEIMBACH)

BRAN NUE DAE (ROBYN KERSHAW, GRAEME ISAAC)

TOMORROW WHEN THE WAR BEGAN (ANDREW MASON, MICHAEL BOUGHEN)

THE WAITING CITY ( JAMIE HILTON, CLAIRE McCARTHY)

BEST DIRECTOR

STUART BEATTIE - TWTWB

CLAIRE Mc CARTHY -TWC

DAVID MICHÔD - AK

RACHEL PERKINS - BND

JEREMY HARTLEY SIMS -BH60

BEST ACTOR (female) - LEADING ROLE

LILY BELL-TINDLEY (LOU)

RADHA MITCHELL (TWC)

MIRANDA OTTO (S. SOLITARY)

JACKI WEAVER (AK)

BEST ACTOR (Male) – LEADING ROLE

BRENDAN COWELL -(BENEATH HILL 60)

JOEL EDGERTON (THE WAITING CITY)

JAMES FRECHEVILLE - ANIMAL KINGDOM

RYAN KWANTEN - RED HILL

BEN MENDELSOHN - ANIMAL KINGDOM

BEST ACTOR (female) – SUPPORTING ROLE

EMILY BARCLAY (Lou)

MORGANA DAVIES (The TREE)

ESSIE DAVIS (SS)

DEBORAH MAILMAN (BND)

BEST ACTOR (male)– SUPPORTING ROLE

JOEL EDGERTON (AK)

STEVE LE MARQUAND (BH60)

GUY PEARCE (AK)

KODI SMIT-McPHEE (MATCHING JACK)

BEST SCREENPLAY

STUART BEATTIE (TWTWB)

BELINDA CHAYKO (LOU)

CLAIRE McCARTHY (TWC)

DAVID MICHÔD (AK)

DAVID ROACH (BH60)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

DENSON BAKER (TWC)

ANNA HOWARD (SS)

BEN NOTT (TWTWB

TOBY OLIVER (BH60)

BEST EDITOR

DANY COOPER (BH60)

MARCUS D’ARCY (TWTWB)

LUKE DOOLAN (AK)

PATRICK HUGHES (RH)

VERONIKA JENET (TWC)

BEST MUSIC SCORE

MARY FINSTERER (SS)

ANTONY PARTOS and SAM PETTY (AK)

CEZARY SKUBISZEWSKI (BH60)

CEZARY SKUBISZEWSKI (BND)

MICHAEL YEZERSKI (TWC)

BEST FOREIGN FILM - ENGLISH LANGUAGE

INCEPTION

THE KING’S SPEECH

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

WINTER’S BONE

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

FATHER OF MY CHILDREN

A PROPHET

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

THE WHITE RIBBON

How to annoy a Sydney music fan - give them something fabulous for free

2011-02-01T22:53:00.002+11:00

Thanks for all your comments to the post below on the music program at this year's Sydney Festival, which has just finished. And via Collins - thank you for putting this all into perspective. I'll repost his comment here: "I'm a very happy Melbourne resident, but if there's one Sydney even that gets me furiously jealous year in year out, it's the Sydney Festival music component.

"I'm 100% with you Lynden, the talent and diversity demonstrated across the 2011 edition is top echelon. You can see a couple of them in Melbs, at crippingly high prices. I opted for Stanko, and he was fantastic, as were his young band of ice-cold Scandinavians, but to get what you lot get up there in Sydney - and lots for free - is a gift from the gods. Long may it continue..."

I find our Melbourne' friend's comments about being jealous of Sydneysiders very telling. I think the real problem is this: the festival now puts on so much that's free that many Sydneysiders are getting complacent and accruing an ugly sense of entitlement.

The other day I was astonished to read a letter in the SMH complaining about a roped-off sponsor's area at Opera In The Park. How the heck did he think they could afford to put this on without any sponsors? Mate, you have every right to whine about the opera so long as you don't mind ponying up for the true cost. Stingy git.

Might I suggest that much of the whingeing is coming from a position of insufficient knowledge of the acts on the program? I don't think anyone who witnessed the Unthanks live would be complaining about a 2nd drawer band - their last two albums are in my view (and that of many other critics and musicians) one of the finest folk outfits the UK has produced in years, and live they added an extra dimension of warmth and personality that made the evening very special.

Last year the festival put on Grizzly Bear (pictured top - ha ha). They're not just another hip New York indie band. They're one of the most inventive and innovative rock bands for many years. I'm still seriously pissed at not getting hold of a ticket before they sold out. Maybe some folks just don't realise what they're missing.

Particularly impressive is the way the programming of some of the lesser known music artists at the Spiegeltent manages to get fast-rising talents just before they break out. I was so kicking myself for missing Laura Marling (pictured) in 2010 after hearing her 2nd album, which came out a few months after her visit. It's one of the most impressive albums I heard last year - from anywhere.

Philip Glass not your cup of tea? Fair enough, but there's only a handful of top living US composers. If Kronos hadn't accompanied his Dracula score, I guess you'd be complaining that you'd been served up some 2nd drawer string quartet instead.

Sufjan Stevens? Well the show I caught was mixed, but with some wonderful moments and certainly memorable. But perhaps he shouldn't return under a Sydfest banner for a few years. Point taken. Ditto The National.

Before anyone complains about Owen Pallett (who played at the Spigetent as well as supporting Stevens at the Opera House) I'd suggest they stream the clip I posted below and check out his album, Heartland. It's amazing. In a couple of years you're all going to be pretending you saw him in Sydney in 2011.

Re. Stanko - yes, he's no stranger, as I observed in my review. I went along not being a particular fan. I'm a bit over ECM's stable of airbrushed Euro chamber jazz, which I think has become predictable and generic - but I was blown away by the fire displayed by his new band, which, I emphasise, has never played here before.

Re. Los Lobos - I can't believe someone is complaining about this. I went to the concert by David Hidalgo and Marc Ribot last year and it was great. But it was NOT a Los Lobos concert - much more of a fusion between Hidalgo's Tex-Mex and Ribot's Cuban leanings. A Los Lobos concert is a different event.

Major mis-steps? Well I'm not interested in every single music act that's been booked over the last two years, but that's the point of festivals - you're not meant to go to everything (who could afford it or have the time anyway?). The point is to provide a wide number of entry points for folks of differing tastes and interests.

I'm sure someone will bring this up if I don't: last year's Rogue's Gallery was widely seen as a flop. I reviewed this at the time and counted 1 hour of great music out of two and a half hours that was mediocre or scrappy. The audience rebelled because of the high ticket cost ($180 each), the producer/ host Hal Wilner was drunk and seemingly under-prepared, and it rained most of the night (it was staged outdoors.

It should have been done better (ie. indoors) and with a greater proportion of well-rehearsed local talent, but the festival took a calculated chance and on paper it looked a winner. It was mixed on the night but c'est la vie. There were enough great moments to make it all worthwhile. (And yes, I did buy a ticket).

So who isn't the festival bringing out that you'd want to see? Jon Hassell, maybe? He came here in the first Vivid Festival - the one curated by Brian Eno. It was pure magic - a very special evening. Hardly anyone went. You can lead a horse to water...

Is there room for criticism? Absolutely. But let's keep it constructive - and informed.

Sydfest gets the music program right - again

2011-02-01T15:50:00.001+11:00

The Sydney Festival is over for another year and yet again proved that whatever the complaints about large-scale theatrical events (or lack of them), its music selection continues to be inspired. This year I saw Emmylou Harris, Sufjan Stevens supported by Owen Pallett, The Tomasz Stanko Quintet and the fabulous contemporary/ trad UK folk sisters The Unthanks. All were memorable, notwithstanding a few personal qualms about some of the material drawn from Stevens's most recent album, The Age of Adz.

For reviews of the first four and a feature on The Unthanks (all published in The Australian), see extracts and links below:

Emmylou Harris:

"It was initially tempting to divide the concert into pre-and-post Wrecking Ball, especially after the opening songs, which emphasised her more explicitly country side, yet by the time Harris returned for encores, such distinctions had evaporated. The epic yet unsentimental melancholy of her 1995 rendition of Gillian Welch's Orphan Girl (played earlier in the evening) was not so recent at all. It was there all along in the much-loved Boulder to Birmingham, which she wrote in direct response to Gram Parsons's early death in 1973...."

Sufjan Stevens and Owen Pallett:

Pallett and the better known main act, Sufjan Stevens, exemplify the trend in North American independent music towards experimentation and conceptual ambition, though they employ distinct approaches...Pallett's approach is fresh. Having apparently studied (the music of Terry Riley and) other minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, John Adams and Michael Nyman, he successfully twists their hypnotic sensibilities into a pop song context. A revelation...

"Stevens proved both annoying and inspiring, mixing up Play School campiness and adult sincerity with paradoxical abandon. Encased in DayGlo outfits, the US singer and his band looked like the cast of a cheesy 1980s sci-fi flick putting on a pantomime..."

Tomasz Stanko:
Stanko is often compared with Miles Davis but what he's taken is not so much the sound as the American's modal concept (that is, scale-based tunes, using minimum chord changes), anchored by Anders Christensen's hard-toned Fender bass and lent rock-style urgency by guitarist Jakob Bro..."

The Unthanks - feature:
"Britain's Unthanks, about to make their third Australian visit, have a sound and sensibility as instantly recognisable as their strikingly unusual name: a regional surname that originally referred to claimants of disputed land in the northeast England and Scotland border regions.
That distinctiveness is most obviously present in the voices of Rachel and Becky Unthank, one of the most complementary blends of sisterly vocal prowess since the emergence of Canada's Kate and Anna McGarrigle many years ago. Just as distinctive is the lilting Geordie (Northumbrian) accent in which they sing..."

Oscars outrage!

2011-01-26T18:45:00.001+11:00

Inception in the act of being snubbed

For my take on the 2011 Oscar nominations, see the ABC's Drum website.

Extract:
"My favourite headline for the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations arrived yesterday morning courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter: “Christopher Nolan's Snub Sparks Twitter Outrage.”

Not mere disappointment, nor scepticism, criticism or disapproval, but no-holds-barred, let’s-load-up-our-shotguns outrage. Genocide in Darfur, world corruption, political executions and imprisonment? Forget it. There’s a very complicated film – Inception - whose director didn’t get nominated for an Oscar. Start screaming on the internet now!"

On Black Swan and 127 Hours

2011-01-24T02:50:00.000+11:00

<p><a href="http://video.theaustralian.com.au/1755387033/Black-Swans-Oscar-push">VIDEO: Black Swan's Oscar push</a></p>

My Tehran for Sale - my review

2010-12-20T13:01:00.000+11:00

My Tehran for Sale, the first Iranian-Australian feature collaboration, is now available on DVD in Australia - my review is at the SBS website.

Extract:

A few years ago the animation Persepolis offered an eye-opening look into lives and values of middle-class secular Iranians, showing the common idea of a nation of Islamic fundamentalists to be mistaken.

The live action My Tehran for Sale – which is billed as the first Australian-Iranian feature collaboration – gives a comparable, albeit less dramatic, glimpse into the everyday life of educated young Iranians living under an oppressive regime. Marzieh Vafamehr plays Marzieh, a young actress whose pleasures and freedoms are eked out illegally, where there is always the possibility of discovery and punishment.

Wings of Desire re-examined

2010-12-01T21:23:00.000+11:00

This month offers a valuable opportunity to revisit and re-examine an acknowledged German cinema classic of the past 25 years with World Movies broadcasts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire on December 3, 19 and 20.

Over at the website of the German cultural body, Goethe-Institut Australia, I kick off a new monthly blog with a post looking back at the 1987 film and the divided Berlin it so poetically captured.

Extract:

Scarcely none of the film’s locations still exist. Not only the Wall (now almost entirely demolished, as many tourists are surprised to discover), but also the unkempt spaces that pockmarked the old West Berlin. Real estate would finally get its act together and notice the waste ground that hosted the circus where Bruno Ganz’s angel fell for Solveig Dommartin’s angelic trapeze artist, and the elegant old theatre serving as a venue for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. No longer markers of a terrible recent history, these became valuable properties, ripe for redevelopment as supermarkets, blocks of flats, service stations - artefacts needed by Berliners, though possibly not by Berlin.

Most dramatically transformed today is Potsdamer Platz on the border between east and west. Now a glitteringly sterile complex of postmodernist office towers, a symbol of western consumerism and pleasure-seeking packed with shopping malls, luxury hotels and cinema megaplexes, the Platz displayed here is a terrible reminder of history, a bleak and almost unimaginably vast no-man’s-land bounded by the Wall and its guard towers. Wenders’ camera tours through the devastation, using as his guide a Holocaust survivor unable to make sense of history’s erasure of the lively and elegant café scene he recalled from his youth inthe 1920s and '30s.

Thanks to the remarkable and (mostly) black and white camerawork of France’s Henri Alekan (who had shot, among many other films, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and Wyler’s Roman Holiday), even the film’s ugliest locations, such as this, retain a striking beauty, reflecting the affection with which Wenders regarded the city to which he had just returned following eight years living and working in the United States. Note that Wenders names the circus after Alekan, his way of dedicating the film to the veteran cinematographer (who died in 2001)...

For the full post, see here.

15 reasons to take Twitter seriously

2010-11-22T00:04:00.007+11:00

Just watched The Guardian's editor Alan Rusbridger deliver this year's Andrew Olle Media Lecture and was impressed by everything he said in general but particularly about Twitter - that form of social media at which I once foolishly snickered before signing on as @lyndenbarber and becoming an overnight convert.

Here's an extract - the full speech is up at the ABC website.

Rusbridger:

Here, off the top of my head, are 15 things, which Twitter does rather effectively and which should be of the deepest interest to anyone involved in the media at any level.

It's an amazing form of distribution: it's a highly effective way of spreading ideas, information and content. Don't be distracted by the 140-character limit. A lot of the best tweets are links. It's instantaneous. Its reach can be immensely far and wide. Why does this matter? Because we do distribution too. We're now competing with a medium that can do many things incomparably faster than we can. It's back to the battle between scribes and movable type. That matters in journalistic terms. And, if you're trying to charge for content, it matters in business terms. The life expectancy of much exclusive information can now be measured in minutes, if not in seconds. That has profound implications for our economic model, never mind the journalism.
It's where things happen first. Not all things. News organisations still break lots of news. But, increasingly, news happens first on Twitter. If you're a regular Twitter user, even if you're in the news business and have access to wires, the chances are that you'll check out many rumours of breaking news on Twitter first. There are millions of human monitors out there who will pick up on the smallest things and who have the same instincts as the agencies - to be the first with the news. As more people join, the better it will get.
As a search engine, it rivals Google. Many people still don't quite understand that Twitter is, in some respects, better than Google in finding stuff out. Google is limited to using algorithms to ferret out information in the unlikeliest hidden corners of the web. Twitter goes one stage further - harnessing the mass capabilities of human intelligence to the power of millions in order to find information that is new, valuable, relevant or entertaining.
It's a formidable aggregation tool - You set Twitter to search out information on any subject you want and it will often bring you the best information there is. It becomes your personalised news feed. If you are following the most interesting people they will in all likelihood bring you the most interesting information. In other words, it's not simply you searching. You can sit back and let other people you admire or respect go out searching and gathering for you. Again, no news organisation could possibly aim to match, or beat, the combined power of all those worker bees collecting information and disseminating it.
It's a great reporting tool - Many of the best reporters are now habitually using Twitter as an aid to find information. This can be simple requests for knowledge which other people already know, have to hand, or can easily find. The so-called wisdom of crowds comes into play: the 'they know more than we do' theory. Or you're simply in a hurry and know that someone out there will know the answer quickly. Or it can be reporters using Twitter to find witnesses to specific events - people who were in the right place at the right time, but would otherwise be hard to find.
It's a fantastic form of marketing - You've written your piece or blog. You may well have involved others in the researching of it. Now you can let them all know it's there, so that they come to your site. You alert your community of followers. In marketing speak, it drives traffic and it drives engagement. If they like what they read they'll tell others about it. If they really like it, it will, as they say, 'go viral'. I only have 18,500 followers. But if I get re-tweeted by one of our columnists, Charlie Brooker, I instantly reach a further 200,000. If Guardian Technology pick it up it goes to an audience of 1.6m. If Stephen Fry notices it, it's global.
It's a series of common conversations - Or it can be. As well as reading what you've written and spreading the word, people can respond. They can agree or disagree or denounce it. They can blog elsewhere and link to it. There's nothing worse than writing or broadcasting something to no reaction at all. With Twitter you get an instant reaction. It's not transmission, it's communication. It's the ability to share and discuss with scores, or hundreds, or thousands of people in real time. Twitter can be fragmented. It can be the opposite of fragmentation. It's a parallel universe of common conversations.
It's more diverse - Traditional media allowed a few voices in. Twitter allows anyone.
It changes the tone of writing - A good conversation involves listening as well as talking. You will want to listen as well as talk. You will want to engage and be entertaining. There is, obviously, more brevity on Twitter. There's more humour. More mixing of comment with fact. It's more personal. The elevated platform on which journalists sometimes liked to think they were sitting is kicked away on Twitter. Journalists are fast learners. They start writing differently. Talking of which...
It's a level playing field - A recognised 'name' may initially attract followers in reasonable numbers. But if they have nothing interesting to say they will talk into an empty room. The energy in Twitter gathers around people who can say things crisply and entertainingly, even though they may be 'unknown'. They may speak to a small audience, but if they say interesting things they may well be republished numerous times and the exponential pace of those re-transmissions can, in time, dwarf the audience of the so-called big names. Shock news: sometimes the people formerly known as readers can write snappier headlines and copy than we can.
It has different news values - People on Twitter quite often have an entirely different sense of what is and what isn't news. What seems obvious to journalists in terms of the choices we make is quite often markedly different from how others see it - both in terms of the things we choose to cover and the things we ignore. The power of tens of thousands of people articulating those different choices can wash back into newsrooms and effect what editors choose to cover. We can ignore that, of course. But should we?
It has a long attention span - The opposite is usually argued - that Twitter is simply a, instant, highly condensed stream of consciousness. The perfect medium for goldfish. But set your Tweetdeck to follow a particular keyword or issue or subject and you may well find that the attention span of Twitterers puts newspapers to shame. They will be ferreting out and aggregating information on the issues that concern them long after the caravan of professional journalists has moved on.
It creates communities - Or, rather communities form themselves around particular issues people, events, artifacts, cultures, ideas, subjects or geographies. They may be temporary communities, or long terms ones, strong ones or weak ones. But I think they are recognizably communities.
It changes notions of authority - Instead of waiting to receive the 'expert' opinions of others - mostly us, journalists - Twitter shifts the balance to so-called 'peer to peer' authority. It's not that Twitterers ignore what we say - on the contrary (see distribution and marketing, above) they are becoming our most effective transmitters and responders. But, equally, we kid ourselves if we think there isn't another force in play here - that a 21 year old student is quite likely to be more drawn to the opinions and preferences of people who look and talk like her. Or a 31-year-old mother of young toddlers. Or a 41-year-old bloke passionate about politics and the rock music of his youth.
It is an agent of change - As this ability of people to combine around issues and to articulate them grows, so it will have increasing effect on people in authority. Companies are already learning to respect, even fear, the power of collaborative media. Increasingly, social media will challenge conventional politics and, for instance, the laws relating to expression and speech.

Now you could write a further list of things that are irritating about the way people use Twitter - it's not good at complexity though it can link to complexity, it can be frustratingly reductive, it doesn't do what investigative reporters or war correspondents do, it doesn't, of itself, verify facts, it can be distracting, indiscriminate and overwhelming.

Moreover, I'm simply using Twitter as one example of the power of open, or social media.

Twitter may go the way of other, now forgotten, flashes in the digital pan.

The downside of Twitter also means that the full weight of the world's attention can fall on a single unstable piece of information.

But we can be sure that the motivating idea behind these forms of open media isn't going away and that, if we are blind to their capabilities, we will be making a very serious mistake, both in terms of our journalism and the economics of our business...

Rusbridger extract ends

Wasted on the Literal-Minded

2010-11-14T13:29:00.003+11:00

Writing recently on the Stephen Fry imbroglio, in which the web exploded with righteous indignation over the polymath entertainer's comment to a gay's men's magazine that men seemed to be more sexually driven than women, I observed:

"Fry is a comedian and all-round literatus who likes to employ hyperbole. IT'S A RHETORICAL DEVICE, PEOPLE. IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY."

Now here's Fry, addressing the matter on his blog, The Fry Chronicles:

"I should have known that comic exaggeration, so much the chief mode of a humorist, can easily be made to look bad when wrenched from context and nailed up as a proclamation.

"I admit that I do have a sometimes disastrous tendency, when asked a question, to answer it, often jokingly, or in the interests of ventilating a new thought that has struck, or more or less as the mood takes me but certainly too much without any consideration of the possible consequences.

"I am not, after all, a politician who has to weigh every syllable and its chances of giving offence. Maybe I should be more aware that those who wish me ill are always likely to seize on such instances and use them as a fly-whisk with which to spank me."

Next week: volunteers working on behalf of disadvantaged youth crucify Oscar Wilde for his "grossly insensitive", "clearly reactionary" and "idiotic" remarks that "youth is wasted on the young."

Jafar Panahi's Defence Statement

2010-11-11T22:25:00.007+11:00

Jafar Panahi's Defence Statement - presented this week at his first court appearance since leaving jail.

In the past few days I have been watching my favorite films

again, though I did not have access to some of them, which
are among the greatest films of the history of cinema.

My house was raided on the night of March 1st, 2010 while my
colleague Mr. Rasoulof and I were in the process of shooting
what we intended to be a socially conscious art house film.

The people, who identified themselves as agents of the Ministry of
Intelligence, arrested us along with other crew members without
presenting any warrants. They confiscated my collection of
films as well and never returned them to me. Subsequently, the
only reference made to those films was by the prosecutor in
charge of my case, who asked me: "What are these obscene
films you’ re collecting?"

I have learned how to make films inspired by those outstanding
films that the prosecutor deemed obscene. Believe me I have
just as much difficulty understanding how they could be called
obscene as I do comprehending how the activity for which I was
arrested could be seen as a crime? My case is a perfect example
of being punished before committing a crime.

You are putting me on trial for making a film that at the time of our arrest was only thirty per cent shot. You must have heard that the famous creed "There is no god, except Allah” , turns into blasphemy if you only say the first part and omit the second part. In the same vain, how can you establish that a crime has been committed by looking at 30% of rushes for a film that have not been edited yet?

I do not comprehend the charge of obscenity directed at the
classics of the film history, nor do I understand the crime I accused of. If these charges are true, you are putting not only
us on trial but the socially conscious, humanistic, and artistic
Iranian cinema as well, a cinema which tries to stay beyond
good and evil, a cinema that does not judge nor surrender to
power or money but tries to honestly reflect a realistic image of
the society.

One of the charges against me is attempting to encourage
demonstrations and incite protests with this film. All through
my career I have emphasized that I am a socially committed
filmmaker not a political one. My main concerns are social
issues; therefore my films are social dramas not political
statements. I never wanted to act as a judge or a prosecutor. I am
not a film maker who judges but one that invites other to see.

I don’ t get to decide for others or to write any kind of manual for
anybody; please allow me to repeat my pretension to place my
cinema beyond good and evil. This kind of belief has caused
my colleagues and my self a lot of trouble; many of my films
have been banned, along with the films of other filmmakers
like me. But it is unprecedented in Iranian cinema to arrest and
imprison a filmmaker for making a film, and harass his family
while he is in prison. This is a new development in the history of
Iranian cinema that will be remembered for a long time.

I have been accused of participating in demonstrations. No
Iranian filmmaker was allowed to use his camera to capture the
events but you can not forbid an artist to observe! As an artist
it is my responsibility to observe in order to get inspired and
create. I was an observer, and it was my right to observe.olitic conside

Eyeswired interviews Isabelle Huppert

2010-11-07T19:37:00.008+11:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.theaustralian.com.au/1633906740/Super-Huppert"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;VIDEO: Super Huppert&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Above I give a brief overview of Isabelle Huppert's fabulous and fascinating career in a video recorded as a plug for my interview with her which ran in The Australian this weekend. Thanks to Christine Nestel for her clip selection and editing.

The article was granted to mark next weekend's Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) premiere of her latest film, Copacabana (the film will screen in major cities in limited release towards the end of the month).

Due to a production error, only part of the a feature was initially posted but the entire story is now online here.

A brief extract:

Her Copacabana character, Babou, adds a glorious new side to the Huppert screen persona. Apart from being upbeat, this woman is indomitably extroverted, a word we're not used to seeing in the same sentence as 'played by Isabelle Huppert'. Where the actor's signature roles have tended towards introversion and passivity, Babou is a riot of colour and minor outrage...

....while Huppert's delicious performance is in a strikingly new register, the character's extremes are very much of a piece with her body of work. They're just different extremes.

Asked about her approach to her performance when she gets a role such as this -- her process, to used a favourite actor's term -- she initially insists that she never thinks too much about the character. 'I think much more about taking the decision to do it (the film). This is the most thinking part of my work.

'Once I have established the reasons why I really want to do a movie, you know how you are going to do it. Then comes the good part, which is more intuition. It's like a whole series of images starts to build up in my consciousness, and then when I have to do the film these images are there, and they just have to come out.'

Yet that is slightly at odds with the observation of Copacabana writer-director Marc Fitoussi that reading through the script with Huppert the first time was very helpful because she was so analytical; it was almost as if she were a professional script doctor...