Watchmen

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.

Venus & Adonis

Sydney Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare. Directed by Marion Potts, starring Melissa Madden Gray and Susan Prior

Venus is played by the two leads; her attempted seduction of Adonis is mostly addressed directly to the audience. This is a very effective dramatisation: sexy, funny and moving. The live music by Felicity Clark, Michael Sheridan, Bree van Reyk was great. It was so good it made me feel a bit bad about my lampoon of the poem last week. I read it to prepare for the play, not as part of the Auden on Shakespeare project. The Auden lectures don’t cover any of the long poems, which is a shame.

Frost / Nixon

Frank Langella’s performance is excellent and the whole cast is very good. Mention should be made of the always entertaining Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon revisits his character from Animal House with a pleasing sort of dignity.

Reading around the web I find some critics were grumpy with the film because they think that it lets Nixon off the hook, but it seems a bit unreasonable to expect Ron Howard and Peter Morgan to do more in this regard than the legal and political system of the United States of America. To expect that would be to fall into the same trap as one of the film’s characters does when he describes the interviews as “the trial Nixon never had.” One of the best things about the film is that it illustrates exactly what the difference is between a trial and a chat-show appearance. Criminals don’t get paid six-figures up front and a percentage of the profits for standing in the dock. And chat-shows always exonerate their guests by turning them into television magic.

Note that the film omits to mention that Nixon got points, when it really should have. The grumpy critics are right on that score.

It should also be noted that the process depicted in this movie – being slightly interrogated by a Man Without Qualities in a nice suit and then zoom-to-closeup *TRAGEDY* – is the very harshest punishment our society inflicts on serious criminals at its highest levels. So, Bush, Cheney, Greenspan: watch out. I think Andrew Denton should be trying to line up contracts.

Career opportunities in global drama

A review in verse of Lipsynch, directed by Robert Lepage, produced by Ex Machina and Théâtre Sans Frontières

Something commanding, with a dash of Art,
And lots of opportunities for travel.
Opera’s good. Not sport: we want you smart
And tragic when your life starts to unravel.
A judge or doctor? Brain – no grosser part -
The stethoscope is better than the gavel.
For neurosurgeons can pontificate
On Mind and Soul, Mortality and Fate.

Third class? ¿Habla Inglese? I’ll be brief:
Your role is taken from the hordes of Others.
A sex-trafficked illegal or a thief,
Junkies and alcoholic single mothers.
Your never-ending suffering and grief
Will prove that men (and women) are all brothers.
You’ll be the dark incursion of the Real
Who teaches the commanders how to feel.

The rest of you: this way, please. Cloak your bags,
And switch off any video devices.
Your part is small, but crucial: you’re the dags
With boring jobs and no alarming vices,
Not high enough to plummet from the crags,
But not so low you can’t afford our prices.
This is all for your benefit, you know:
Sit back, relax, and just enjoy the show.

Some films recently

Hunger

Not as transcendental as I’d been led to believe but still very good. It stayed in my head for an uncomfortable length of time afterwards, and is perhaps the worst date movie in the history of cinema. I would like to disclaim responsibility for the following joke, it was stolen and repurposed from an old Black Eye compilation and after that billboards post I’m censoring it anyway.

Q What was the working title of Hunger?

A F*cal Sharkey

The Wackness

On the other hand, this was much better than I was expecting, if I ignored the fact that the two female leads are basically cyphers with no character or motivation other than that required to torture the guys. Aside from that, and, hey, what hip hop film would be complete without some sexism to sweep under the carpet, it was a very enjoyable coming-of-age film.

Man On Wire

I don’t get on well with heights. It’s not like I object to them on principle, they’re obviously needed to prevent the place being cluttered up with birds and aeroplanes and the tops of mountains and so on, but it’s better for everyone if we are kept apart.

Fig 1: a Height

Fig 2: my involuntary Reaction

So I was expecting to have to watch most of Man On Wire through my fingers, since it’s about an enterprising French fellow who wirewalked between the towers of the Word Trade Center, but it wasn’t quite as excruciating as I thought it would be, although I swore more often than I usually do when watching a movie. The relief when he finally got to do the walk, after lots of agonising preparation and hiding from guards, was pretty exhilarating, and the walk itself was incredible. I would have liked more info about his co-conspirators, and how he felt in the months afterwards, but it was still worth seeing on the big screen.

In addition to fear of heights I also have fear of Gymnopedie no. 1 but unfortunately this didn’t lead to any tension-release exhilaration, just annoyance that people are still using it as a cheap way of adding instant poetry to a soundtrack.

The Convict’s Opera

Adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera by Stephen Jeffreys. Directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Sydney Theatre Company

Saw this in previews a couple of weeks ago but forgot to review it. The conceit is that a group of convicts bound for Botany Bay are staging The Beggar’s Opera to pass the time on the voyage: this is a great concept which the adaptation generally carries off well. The to-and-fro between rehearsals on ship and the plot of the original are a bit creaky sometimes but in general it stops the show getting too bogged down and some of the transitions are sublimely funny.

The musical numbers are about half-and-half modern pop standards and what I suppose are songs from the original show. The cast are about half and half Australian and UK, and about the same mixture of opera and theatre performers, I think, and all the singing (and live music performed on stage by the cast) was terrific.

Overall it was much more fun than a 17th century musical, even one as roguish as The Beggar’s Opera, has any right to be.

The staging was great, except that I’m sure I saw a FILING CABINET. ON A SHIP. A SAILING SHIP IN 18-OH-WHATEVER.

The Women of Troy

Euripides, adapted by Tom Wright and Barrie Kosky, directed by Barrie Kosky. Sydney Theatre Company, with Robyn Nevin and Melita Jurisic

First Kosky production I’ve ever seen, and it was pretty astonishing. Robyn Nevin and Melita Jurisic were brilliant, especially Jurisic’s psychotic Cassandra. The glossolalian rendition of her madness was one of the highlights of the adaptation. Pitiable and terrifying, like the man said.

The only thing I didn’t really like was the set design, but that’s because it seems like every play I’ve been to for the last couple of years has had a set full of old steel furniture and stained institutional carpet and harsh fluorescent lighting. “We must have gone through the wrong door. Wow, the STC have a really crap green room, Cate should like give them an old lounge or something… oh no, we’re in the third junior sub-inquisitor’s office again.”

Sorry set designers, I totally get it, I know that evil is banal and everyday and Kafkaesque and that the fight directors love this stuff because you can get great crashing sounds when you pretend to bounce people off them but I just don’t find filing cabinets scary any more.

Holiday

I’m at home with the girls for the last week of the school holidays. Horton Hears a Who is much better than other recent Seuss movies, but that’s not saying much.

The combination of grotesque scale mismatch, consequent fear-of-smashing-a-microcosm paranoia and interminable-task anxiety makes this film like a map of my childhood neuroses. (The scene where Horton has to find his own sprig of clover in a boundless sea of clover was particularly unwatchable.) Katie, the cute but spooky yellow fluffball, steals the movie.

The Great Outdoor Fight

The Great Outdoor Fight isn’t even my favourite Achewood storyline – I prefer the spooky ones like Magical Realism or Cartilage Head, or the A-grade dope humour of Nightlife Mingus or Ray’s Toilet Party, or the ones that are just cack-yourself funny, like Beef’s Magic Underpants. And Phillipe at the Transfer Station combines all three.

But the GOF is still very good, and it really shows off Chris Onstad’s talent for comic fantasy, so I ordered the book when it went pre-release on Amazon because it looked like it was really handsomely bound, and it is. It’s odd reading something in print that I’ve come to love on the web: paradoxically, the print version seems more like it was done with a computer, I suppose because on the higher level of detail provided by paper, all the curves look much more like splines. The print-only features are good value – essays and recipes and profiles of past champions.

Earlier this week I was wondering if David Foster Wallace was any kind of an influence on Onstad, or if the similarities of style tone are just down to coincidences – of sociocultural background, education levels, mood disorders and preferred recreational substances. So it was nice to find a panel in the GOF where Ray refers to ‘Cody Travis, that country dude who sells CDs to Kmart people,’ which looks like a direct reference to Wallace’s fantastic 1994 article about the Illinois State Fair, “Getting away from already being pretty much away from it all”, although maybe the term has wider currency.

I’m going to have to start buying all the other books now. I think I’ve mentioned that all my girls, and especially Grace, are keen comic artists. She’d love Achewood but I’m afraid that for now it’s going to have to stay on that shelf where, as Alison Bechdel says, the parents keep the good stuff.