And while we’re on the subject of Barrie Kosky, I should add that his production of Poppea at the Opera House was excellent. Most of the reviews have pointed out that Monteverdi’s audience would have known that Poppea came to a bad end. But so would Mel Brooks’.
Skip to 6.20 if you don’t have time to watch one of the funniest scenes ever filmed.
A vision of Hell where the demons are a bunch of blokes who all look exactly like my great-uncles. It made me feel a very peculiar mixture of nostalgia and dread, and is one of the few films I’ve seen which actually gave me a hangover. When I came out I wanted a beer and also never to touch a drop of alcohol again.
The role of kangaroos in the film is interesting. Nowadays we find the idea of shooting them much more abhorrent than eating them. I think it was the reverse in 1971.
In 1986, a pretty girl who I wasn’t exactly friends with struck up a conversation with me about “this English band called The Smiths who I heard you were into” and asked if I would tape any albums I had, so of course I made her a copy of Meat is Murder and The Queen Is Dead. In hindsight, this odd level of interest in both Smiths and myself was probably due to the influence of John Hughes, although I hadn’t seen any of his work at the time and was merely annoyed at him for the fact that my 7″ copy of New Order’s “Shell-shock” had the words “From the Pretty In Pink Motion Picture Soundtrack” printed on the label. For some reason I found this a bit embarrassing. I can’t remember the girl’s name.
Get a pen or pencil and some paper and write down the titles of all the Star Trek films, in order, from memory.
(You have to use a primitive mechanical inscription device because otherwise you might look them up on your primitive semiconductor-based computer terminal.)
Once you’ve done that, you can see how I did.
The new Star Trek film is great fun, and full of subtle references for long-time fans. How many of these did you spot?
Nero’s face tattoos actually a highly stylised alien script spelling “KISS ME, I’M ROMULAN”
The new film’s title, Star Trek, is exactly the same as the title of the original series
Uhura shown wearing strange “feminine under clothes” long hypothesised by male Trek fans
Time travel plot device used in full accordance with Starfleet Regulations 109.223(xii-lxiv) governing the permissible use of continuity engineering
Spock and Kirk are, like, totally hot for each other
Nero’s ship’s interior decorated in traditional Musty Dank Lair style
Older viewers will notice “time dilation” effect in which mid-20th century franchises live on for so long that it seems as if pop culture itself were slowing down
Sound of shuttle engines is a digitally processed version of Harlan Ellison screaming
Ever since a particular morning visit to a park with my daughters in St Peters in 2001, when I caught myself contemplating the layer of pine-bark soft-fall in the children’s playground, thinking how awful it was that the bark was just sitting there slowly rotting, and that it would eventually have to be scooped up and thrown away and replaced, and how futile this all was – and, yes, I was already taking antidepressants, they were working just enough for me to be aware of how ridiculous I was being – ever since that moment, pessimistic artists have, for me, been divided into two groups.
On the one hand, there are those artists who seem to be comically or grotesquely unaware of how much their mordant and penetrating vision of the tragic nature of existence is contingent upon their own outlook or personality. Examples include W G Sebald, most of Pynchon, Infinite Jest, the Joy Division of Closer, The The, Michel Houellebecq and H P Lovecraft.
And then there are the ones who I still enjoy: Beckett, Cioran, Kafka, Swift, Flaubert, Ballard, The Crying of Lot 49, most of the rest of David Foster Wallace, the Joy Division of Unknown Pleasures and The Smiths.
Straight after seeing Synecdoche, New York I wasn’t sure whether Charlie Kaufman fell into the first or second categories. I won’t be entirely sure until I’ve seen the film again, but I think he’s one of the good ones. It’s a shame that one of the film’s best jokes seems to have been lifted from an episode of The Simpsons. There’s an elegiac playfulness to the film which reminded me of Barthelme.
The question of how much of the action is actually taking place seems to be answered by the appearance of a zeppelin, following the Hindenburg Uncertainty Principle. In fact, this film made me wonder whether the uncanny and infantile weirdness of airships – at once breastlike and unaggressively phallic, dreamily floating – is why they are only possible in fantasy worlds. If the Hindenburg hadn’t been going to crash it probably would have been sabotaged by guerilla psychoanalysts.
I’m glad I didn’t see this 2004 ultra-low-budget science fiction film till just now, because it works so well as a parable about Wall St and quants.
Two engineers accidentally build a time machine in a garage, and what’s the first thing they do with it? Day trading. Very soon afterwards (well, technically, even sooner than that) things start to not make much sense at all. Even if you watch the film again the next day like I did.
Applause (1930): sex, chorus girls
Frankenstein (1931): horror
When the Kellys Rode (1934): against the public interest
Ten Days That Shook the World (1936): communism
The Duke of Windsor Skis in Austria After the Abdication (1937): against the public interest
All Quiet on the Western Front (1939): pacifism
Love on the Dole (1941): realistic scenes of poverty
Indonesia Calling (1946): criticism of the Dutch
Violence (1948): violence
Children of the Wasteland (1953): criticism of treatment of Aborigines
Creature With the Atom Brain (1955): horror
The Werewolf (1956): horror
The Art of Rubens (1956): nudity
The Fly (1958): horror
The Fall of the House of Usher (1960): horror
Viridiana (1962): blasphemy
The Leather Boys (1963): homosexuality
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1964): horror
Kitten With a Whip (1964): violence
Naked as Nature Intended (1965): sex
Hit the U.S. Aggressors (1965): propaganda
Ulysses (1967): sex
The Trip (1967): drugs, violence
Detail of a list of repressed films with official justifications, excepted from Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris (eds), Australia’s Censorship Crisis, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1970.
Almost ten years ago I posted the foregoing to my old web-thing big tank (a blog avant la lettre, if you will) as a sort of comic tribute to Sen. Brian Harradine. The Dutton and Harris book was a fascinating eye-opener. I had not realised just how well-protected the Australian public had been from such discreditable foreign concepts as sex, chorus girls, pacifism, homosexuality and criticism of the Dutch; among the democracies, only Ireland came anywhere near us.
At the time, I assumed that the post-censorship Australia I had grown up in was a permanent state of affairs, but the Government’s Clean Feed plans have made me realise, with a kind of dawning horror, that I was wrong. For all our self-congratulation about how tops and democratic we are, such freedom of speech as we have in Australia is only about forty years old, and we are going to have to fight to maintain it.
One thing I’m certain of is that this is my generation’s fight. The boomers grew up under censorship and only a minority of them fought against it at the time. Somehow I doubt that they have grown less amenable to being censored with age.
Further info:
nocleanfeed
Background Briefing 15th March
Categories: australia · censorship · film · nocleanfeed
This is the default login background for both my work and home computers, but now that I’ve seen Watchmen it’s taken on a whole other set of connotations. I’m only a fanboy-wannabee, because I read the comic for the first time only a month or so ago. This might be why I found the film a bit draggy – I wasn’t exactly bored but I still remembered the plot and imagery too well for me to just sit in the cinema and get carried away with the story. That’s just a quibble, though – it was really excellent. The other people I saw it with hadn’t read (or in one case even heard of) the comic and they still liked it as much as I did.
Look out, here comes another gritty realistic graphic comic superhero action novel movie with lots of articles to explain all the characters to you!
Splotchface
Endearing character trait: psychosis
Namtab
Elaborate backstory: took up fighting crime as a day job “just till my writing career takes off”
Pantyliner
Superpowers: heterosexuality, girl germs
The Streak
Humanising foible: likes to show off his physique
Robert Downey, Jr
Source of deep-seated angst: 100hrs community service for firearms and narcotics charges
Gaydar
Vulnerability: missed the point of that Shelley poem
