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The Amen break
To talk fascinatingly about 40-year-old drum break you don’t know that you know. Brilliantly oblique! This is the apparent subject of a fantastic youtube recording of what amounts to an art project, but which is also a dissertation or argument for open copyright as an essential ingredient in the health of culture. Nate [...]
On my morning surf, I found buried deep in The Age’s website this fascinating article by Paul Kalina. (Micro-rant, rhetorical query: Why are the arts sections [not even dignified by the word "Arts"] of Fairfax websites so shite?) Kalina has written about the indie doco Into the Shadows, recent joint winner of Best Australian Film [...]
NB: Includes mild spoilers to Inglourious Basterds, Violence and Language.
Here’s the big joke: eight vengeful Jewish American soldiers roam the fields of France between 1941-44 killing German soldiers, and under the direction of their hillbilly Lieutenant (Brad Pitt), scalps them. Literally. In close-up technicolor. If they are allowed to live, for propaganda purposes, a large [...]
Whenever anyone says they don’t care for fashion I think of Meryl Streep as an ash blond, looking down her nose – and I wish (like Woody Allen with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall) I could just call out Streep from the crowd to give her speech.
In The Devil Wears Prada, Streep plays Miranda Priestley, [...]
Photography v painting. That hoary old argument*. Naturally enough, photography wins, with hands tied behind its back. The density of detail, that magical documenting of evidence – today was fine, there was no wind, the sun was brilliant, the shadows were dark, she was smiling etc. (We have to trust that no photoshop was applied [...]
Brüno. Yes, well, here’s the thing. I laughed myself sick in some parts of the movie. And other parts dumbstrike with a sensation between gobsmackedness and speechlessness. Agogness, maybe. For a few days I had no idea what to think about it – it is, as Nietzsche might say, beyond good and evil.
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Locally it’s attracted [...]
These two crazy cinematic mindbombs have been doing the rounds for a while now. One of them for thirty-eight years. But they do linger – they’ve been ticking in my head for weeks.
These dinkum films made decades apart have much in common: they’re both set in red Oz a long way from the City; they [...]
A friend said it was “fun” so we eventually saw State of Play. Rattling along, it did turn out to be a kind of sophisticated, adult fun – just don’t follow the plot too closely or ask why the core interest swings from military industrial complex to single villain simplex. It also makes the case [...]
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