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 [...]

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 [...]

Amidst an increasingly nasty lead-up to the upcoming South Carolina Republican primary, yesterday saw the release of an attack ad accusing the overwhelming favorite candidate Mitt Romney of being a serial killer. If this campaign ad seems a little bit odd or over the top it is because it was released to support Stephen Colbert, [...]

It says a lot about a major political party when their shadow spokesperson for ‘Citizenship’ comes out with a statement about migrants predicated on offensive racism. Gambaro attempted to reignite national debate over Australian multiculturalism with a statement about migrants on skilled working visas needing ‘cultural awareness training’ on hygiene and social etiquette, including being [...]