As with Ari Folman’s movie-length cartoon Waltz with Bashir, this film is most commonly viewed as a confession, by a former Israeli soldier, about his part in the 1982 Lebanon War. My personal view is that whilst both Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon are most certainly products of a personal and collective process of redemption, in Lebanon Samuel Maoz makes three aesthetic choices that violently differ from those made by Ari Folman in Waltz with Bashir.

a) Why, it’s kicking off everywhere… except Melbourne It’s been a wild year. After two to three years of seeming paralysis after the GFC, things kicked off. Indeed, as Paul Mason’s timely canvassing of the issue says, it appears to be kicking off everywhere. Everywhere except Australia. A pedal through Melbourne’s leafy north-east the other [...]

The lack of agreement on the question of whether undue criticism of Gillard is sexist boils down to how we think about sexism. Is sexism something we view at an individual level or a wider social structural level? Is it still sexism, when gender discrimination occurs at a structural level? Before addressing this, I’d just [...]

We know how yoga can wreck your body. But I wonder: isn’t it more that we’ve wrecked yoga? In other words: ask not what your yoga is doing to you; ask what we are doing to our yoga. Responding adequately to that question would require knowing about how yoga ought to be, ideally. I have [...]

Airing on Sunday nights is a new TV drama, Homeland, which explores the phenomenon of ‘sleeper cells’. Understandably, this show seeks to position itself as something other than an alarmist Bush-era program about terrorists. In this case the potential sleeper agent is a serving marine. Ultimately, however, this plot innovation is really just an elaborate [...]

Last week, comedian Stephen Colbert announced his entry into mucky world of American electoral politics with a satirical bid for nomination in the Republican South Carolina primary. In this short space of time Colbert was able to momentarily overshadow the deep banality of the Republican nomination process and cast attention on the absurd system of [...]

By this stage in January, your resolutions are probably in the process of being sorely tested. Especially when the tennis is on, the sun is shining, and the afternoons are just so dreamily endless and given to, well, drinking beer. Well, I speak for myself… I just finished an introductory course at a yoga school [...]