2013/03/22

The ALP Circus

Shooting Yourself In The Foot With Blanks

After weeks of destablising, it's come to this. The clamouring for a leadership change became intolerable so Simon Crean decided there ought to be a spill; Julia Gillard called for a 4:30pm meeting for a ballot and at 4:21pm, Kevin Rudd said he's not going to contest. So, Simon Crean ended up losing his ministry and going to the backbench without getting to contest anything, and Julia Gillard unanimously stayed Prime Minister.

And we the people of Australia sat and wondered how on earth this hellish turn was supposed to end. This is torture. Torture! The United Nations prohibits torture and here we are suffering at the hands of our own politicians we elected. It's a bit of a quandary what this is supposed to mean, "moving forwards", as Julia Gillard is wont to say.

None of this is new. This was the way it was last year. Kevin Rudd didn't and doesn't have the numbers to return as Prime Minister. This might even be the end until after the next election where the ALP will be belted out of Parliament by an angry electorate. The worst thing is that Tony Abbott... yadda yadda yadda... you know the rest. We're so brutalised by all this we're letting the hung Parliament turn into the dying days of the Weimar Republic when Hitler made his move. It's a hideous prospect, but it's true. There's nothing reasonable about Tony Abbott. He's going to be a disaster. And the ALP is decidedly going to continue sending out Julia Gillard as their Leader - all with her 31% primary vote support - to try and stop Tony Abbott.

Am I meant to feel pity? Is this their ruse?

Look, I'm still going to Donkey Vote on 14th September. The only choice I can think of is whether I draw a smiling pig on the ballot paper or an ejaculating penis. I cannot in all conscience bring myself to vote for any of these mongrels. The only way I would consider voting for the ALP is if they removed Julia Gillard - which is what the polls have been saying for weeks; and now that they've unanimously decided they're keeping her, I'm left with the artistic choice between the pig and the penis drawings.

2013/03/19

News That's Fit To Punt - 18/Mar/2013

Tin Ear Drum, Tin Ears, Tone Deaf

It's a new week and a new poll says Julia Gillard's got to go. As far as the electorate's concerned, she's a Dead Leader Walking.
The Prime Minister conducted a live-in campaign tour of western Sydney, announced $1 billion for the WestConnex expressway, promised a brace of benefits for workers, pledged $1 billion for aged care staff, attacked foreign workers on 457 visas and championed ''Aussie jobs,'' and presided over strong growth in the number of people in jobs.

All for no electoral gain. The only movement in Labor's primary vote was a 1 per cent rise, which is within the poll's margin of error of 2.6 per cent. Neither offers to meet voters' needs nor appeals to their prejudices made any discernible difference. The evidence of the last month is that, as a campaigner, Gillard is ineffectual. So if Gillard can't do it for Labor, who can?

The poll tested the standing of four alternative leaders - Kevin Rudd and the three Gillard ministers most commonly touted as leadership material, Bill Shorten, Greg Combet and Bob Carr.

Asked whether they would prefer Gillard or Rudd, respondents chose Rudd by exactly two-to-one, 62 per cent to 31. His edge over Gillard on this measure has risen by 5 percentage points in the last month. Asked to choose between each of the other three and Gillard, respondents chose Gillard every time.

''The voters are saying, 'if we can't have Kevin Rudd, we'd rather have Julia Gillard over any of the alternatives','' Stirton concludes. In short, there is no realistic option of a ''third candidate'' to lead Labor.

That's sort of the problem, though, isn't it? It's too late to go back to Kevin Rudd because even if they did, they're not going to win. That choice was way back in February 2012, so as far as we can tell, the ALP is accepting it's going to go down with all hands, thank you very much Captain Improbable.

Julia Gillard defiantly says she won't flinch. Well, neither does a corpse, so I don't know how not flinching is going to help.
''I'll just keep getting on with it and dealing with the issues that actually matter and all of this kind of side-commentary can do whatever it does. It's not going to deter me - or distract me.''

Ms Gillard has just emphatically ruled out any prospect of her stepping down before the election, insisting Labor made its decision on leadership when it rejected Kevin Rudd's challenge last year. ''I haven't revisited it since and I won't be revisiting it. The decision's made.''

But, in an expansive exclusive interview with Fairfax Media, Ms Gillard said Mr Rudd would play a prominent role in the election campaign, saying he would be ''asked to participate in the campaign more broadly than his own electorate''.She also indicated she would not resist a return by Mr Rudd to the front bench after the next election, saying: ''It would obviously be a matter for him that I would deal with in the circumstances of the time.''

Good heavens! After the next election when the ALP gets decimated in the polls, it might be only Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard remaining. She sure as heck won't be keeping the leader's seat after she presides over a mess that is likely to go down in history as the mother of all drubbings.

One of the more awful trends in the last few months has been the growing acceptance that come 15th September, it's going to be Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. It's like the 5 stages of grieving. We're done 'Denying' it. We've been 'Angry' for 3years now. Some people are trying to 'Bargain'.
The optimistic conclusion is this: Life under Tony Abbott may not be as bad as we fear. Perhaps. If we're lucky. Assuming he's fair dinkum and his mates don't succumb to the power aphrodisiac.

I forgot to mention the other finding from the German research was things never turn out as well as optimists predict.
Such is life …

This is what we have been reduced to. I guess I'm going straight to 'Depression'. It's going to be very hard to accept Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. There's something so insidiously  wrong about that - but what can you do? Vote of Julia? Puh-lease!

How Rotten Is NSW Politics?

If anything has been busily hammering the nail into the coffin of the Federal ALP, it's been NSW ALP with all the horrible bits and pieces coming out of the ICAC inquiry. For a start, the Morbid Obedity that is being explored doesn't just cover coal; it turns out it covers Ron Medich and the Michael McGurk murder. It even goes far back as Offset Alpine. Eddie Obeid's right in there with Rene Rivkin. (In fact, that mess of course leads to the Caroline Byrne thing but we won't go into that here.  The point of all this is that there was a cabal of people in and out of each other's deals, cleaning up on the scraps left over by government; and Eddie Obeid made sure that he left big scraps on the table and that a sizable portion of the scraps went into his own pockets.)

I seriously wonder if the ALP will survive this scandal. They may not come back for over a decade, both in NSW and Federally. We may be witnessing the end of the ALP. And they would only have themselves to blame.

Oh, let's never forget that Eddie Obeid's support and sway over the NSW Right Faction swung the numbers for Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib to oust Kevin Rudd. Julia Gillard may well wonder why she does so badly in NSW. If she could get her head around our deep disgust, then she might even get her head around flinching in revulsion and resigning.

'Seven Psychopaths'

Combining Two Gimmes

I've pointed out recently that psychopaths make for great characters for writers because they remove the need to have rationales that are rational. I guess you can say they have irrationales instead. The other easy thing for a writer is to write about the film making business because alas, it is true, it is writing about what we know best. Cue the writer with writers block story and Bob's your executive producer.

So I don't know what else to say about the conception end of this thing but that the writer gave himself two 'gimmes' in choosing to have seven psychopaths and a writer with writers block in LA. Otherwise this film could interpreted as 7 plot fragments in search of a proper story. Each one might have been a good film, but here they are, mashed together like some movie mash up. Maybe it is for the best - after all, it's only the movies - why be so precious?

Here's the obligatory Spoiler Alert moment!

What's Good About It?

I know I'm bitching about it, but the disjointed narrative is good. It keeps you guessing and it's very nice of the film makers to set up a game like that. Also, the interplay between the various psychopath scenarios do add up to a tapestry of tales that makes for interesting viewing. The cinematography switches between a kind of prosaic flat white LA light and a more poetic desert thing which works quite well.

The performances are hammy, but the film is so off kilter it doesn't seem to matter. There's Colin Farrell putting in his Irish expat routine, there's Christopher Walken playing yet another psychopath, with Woody Harrelson paying yet another, and so on. Sam Rockwell sort of reprises his 'Dangerous Mind' psycho and Tom Waits is... well, he's Tom Waits. It's the dead opposite of 'The Master' where you're not sure of what importance anybody has by their looks or name. Even so, the film manages to keep you guessing

What's Bad About It

I don't know if self-referential films really work as first order fiction. Meta-textual stuff is always going to lead a film to not being serious about itself. Films about film making are inevitably ironic because they reference the film business as well as film as a medium so they really have no shot at being a first order text. All comparisons to movies happen not in a vacuum but on a pressure cooker of meaning fragments. In the case of this movie, you feel you could do with less of the impulse to take jab at other movies.

Some of the writing is pretty ordinary. You can almost follow the plot without watching the movie which means it's radio-with-pictures in parts. The set up is corny and I don't know if having the bitchy girlfriend from Australia is particularly pertinent. It's a total waste of an Abbie Cornish.

What's Interesting About It

This is tough. In some ways it's all interesting because the cliches slosh around like a fruits in the fruit punch bowl, and yet like 'Argo' there is something very ordinary and tedious about this misadventure. My suspicion is that this thing is miscast between the nihilist psychopath played by Sam Rockwell and the sensitive drunk writer being played by Colin Farrell. My sneaking suspicion is that it might have been cooler with the other way around.

Anyway, here are some things that popped out.

Rewriting Vietnam

The Vietnam War seems to have some kind of informing effect to this narrative, as one of the psychopaths is an ex-Viet Cong, Vietnamese officer who is hell bent on revenge against Charlie Company who wasted My Lai. It's a cute bit of twist that this is made to weave back into the burning monks protesting the war. The film strives towards leaving violence behind, but in doing so it has to go through copious amounts of carton violence to get there.

The thought that popped into my mind was "what would Ingmar Bergman make of this?"

Bergman's film 'Persona' centres around the moral abjection and horror to the image of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire, as it happened in the 1960s and seen on the TV news in Sweden. Liv Ulmann's character goes into a state of aporia and shock as she tries to cut herself off from a world that horrifies her. You sort of wonder if Bergman would accept the contention that the self immolation as a selfless act really leads us to a world that is post-violence. Fromwhat I can recall, 'Persona' seemed to posit that violence in society stems from our indifferent practice of hypocrisy. I wonder if Bergman would have understood the irony of indifferent cruelty leads to enlightenment and laughed - or whether he might have simply spat the dummy.

The Zodiac Killer

One of the victims of the psychopaths turns out to be the Zodiac Killer. He is incorrectly murdered in 1975 in this film. It got me thinking about the prevalence of psycho-killers in popular imagination to the point that we sort of accept that there is a certain space they occupy in our cultural imagination. Even the Talking Heads song 'Psychokiller' has a weird anecdote where the woman who inspired David Byrne with the phrase 'Psychokiller' was herself brutally murdered by a random psychokiller.

It seems a shame that this film comes after the magnificent Fincher film because, while the killing of the Zodiac Killer in this film is funny, it seems like an exhausted subject, and the resulting laugh is dry and tired. It's hard to imagine a higher point of psychokiller craziness than what we have in something like 'Silence of the Lambs', so having seven of them running around merely becomes an attempt to substitute quality with quantity.

now that I reflect on all this, I do wonder if the Zodiac Killer got to see 'Dirty Harry'.

Seven Go Around Town

Seven anything is the makings of an epic. One of the story tropes in fiction is the seven who by some chicanes in fortune come together to accomplish a task. It's 'the Seven Samurai', it is the 'Magnificent Seven' - and when it's sold cheap it's the 'Three Amigos' or 'Ocean's' 11, 12 and 13.

Even the script laughs at this construction of its own film, when Rockwell's Billy says, "Maybe we should make it Seven Lesbians and two of them are black, which would at least get it made". That's an odd line that suits an environment where film funding is driven by arbitrary political correctness routines, rather than Hollywood. One suspects the script was set somewhere else before it was moved to LA.

The fake climax described by Billy is intriguing in that all the generic cliches of other films are put together haphazardly, but being a movie about movies it leaves you wondering if there were more gags to be had just there.

2013/03/18

'The Master'

Hello Goodbye Cockatoo Island Film Festival

This film had the dubious distinction of opening what is likely to be only and last time the Cockatoo Island Film Festival was held. Was it a worthy opener? People were oversold tickets so not everybody got to see it. Probably not good to be remembered for things that had nothing to do with the film itself or the circumstances of the making of the film.

The film also had some scuttlebutt about it being about L. Ron Hubbard and the early days of Scientology, so it already has an interesting edge to it, even before you sit down to watch it. There's already a whiff of something funky about a film with this much chatter surrounding it.

In any case, it's just appeared on the Fetch TV box, so with a bit of delight I decided to download and watch. Here's the obligatory spoiler alert. Don't read on if you hate surprises being ruined. I might let one out by mistake.

What's Good About It

Here is a film by a film maker who is not afraid to take risks. I envy the film maker for the backing he gets to make such exploratory films. The only other American film maker I can think of who is working this close to the wind of cinema and ignoring the narratologists like the McKees of the world is Terence Malick. This film powers on with the economy of shots and deft story telling that has dropped off the lexicon of post-Speildberg Blockbuster film making.

In amongst the brisk misc en scen are some gorgeous shots to die for that not only look good but provide so much insight into the subtext of what is happening. Even if it weren't for the subject matter, script or performance the cinematography alone drives the narrative like a juggernaut. It's a rare achievement and entirely commendable.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes with a film where ambiguity is implicit in the telling, it's not surprising the film becomes cryptic in parts.  It is not entirely clear how Freddie ends up on the particular boat with Lancaster Dodd and his outfit. Equally, it is unclear at first that Freddie absconds from the group by simply riding off with the motorcycle. Because of this, the film requires a bit of story reconstruction as you go along.

Comparisons have been made between the Lancaster Dodd character and L. Ron Hubbard, and hence Scientology, but it's better not to approach the film with those ideas floating around. If anything, this has nothing to do with Scientology as such, and is a better film by forgetting about that notion.

What's Interesting About It

The film is consciously not endowed with pretty people Joaquin Phoenix of course is a rare leading actor who has a hare lip, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is nobody's idea of a stud; Amy Adams is pregnant for the better part of the film - as if she is perpetually pregnant - and is particularly so in her nude scene. Now, Amy Adams is pretty, but the whole cast looks like they've decided to go "no make up". Others, simply pass by and add to a layer of ordinariness with their less than actorly-good-looks. The net effect is actually a heightened sense of the particularity of the characters that draws you in. It's the opposite of watching a star-driven vehicle and decoding the roles. It makes you pay attention to the actors and what they are doing.

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is an extraordinary performance. He looks thin, gaunt, awkward, and yet like a coiled spring, ready to leap into violent action. He spends the whole film with a pained expression as he wrestles with metaphysics with a mind that is not capable of digesting the words to describe the metaphysical. He frowns, he laughs bitterly, he lurches, he punches and generally staggers through the scenes with a strange aplomb.

Amy Adams' Peggy Dodd is also a revelation. The best scene might be the bit where she slaps Freddie awake to tell him he has to stop boozing, but also notable is the scene where she reads out passages of sadistic pornography with a straight face. It's all very strange and you wonder how she kept a straight face through all of it. I was squirming with laughter in my chair.

Laura Dern makes a brief appearance as a cult member convening a scene in Philadelphia. Her performance is also notable in that you're left with no uncertainty that some people just want crazy metaphysics to be true so much, they'll believe anything and dedicate themselves to it with wild abandon. She's not in it for long, but when she's there, she's riveting with the craziness.

The Inner Sanctum Of Crazy

Paul Thomas Anderson has mapped out enough of an oeuvre to reveal to us something of his work. he likes ensemble pieces, but the ensemble inevitably goes towards describing a court. In Boogie Nights, it was a court presided over by Burt Reynolds' porn king, while 'There Will Be Blood' was about the mining patriarch played by Daniel Day Lewis, and 'Magnolia' gave us insight into the court of the Tom Cruise cult leader. This film lines up nicely with that trend.

The figures in each of these courts creates a miasma of neuroses and personality disorder, but it also forms a tableau of grotesquery unlike any other director's work. His films actually remind me of Tod Browning's 'Freaks' and its wedding banquet scene where all the circus freaks sing "You're one of us, gobble-gobble, gobble-gobble.". It's a jarring accusation at the world and one wonders what drives Paul Thomas Anderson to make movies about these crazy courts. His films are great because you know you're gong to see some extraordinarily outrageous characters doing some outrageous things.

Philip Seymour Hoffman Has Come A Long Way

Yes, he's won that Oscar for playing Truman Capote, but I can remember Philip Seymour Hoffman being the guy who plays the lackey or the miserable, or the miserable lackey. Here, he is playing the alpha male, dominating the conversation and delivering a performance that scares the bejesus out of you as this cult patriarch. This is a disturbing alpha male if you ever saw one on screen. It's the kind of performance that leaves you having nightmares afterwards. The character of the Master Lancaster Dodd is so memorable you feel like you've witnessed something so wrong. An this is the actor who was so prominent in 'Happiness'.

The fullness of his red, ruddy cheeks and cold piggy eyes with a faint smile all forms parts of this beguiling, insanity-charged, quixotic, charismatic cult leader.

The Sexual Animal

Any film where I have to talk about it by referencing 'Freaks' and 'Happiness' shows you just how edgy the film gets. Almost unrelated to those impulses is also Anderson's penchant for grotesque depictions of sexual behaviour. there is the scene where all the women are nude, and they are shot under an unflattering flat light. This segues into a scene where Amy Adams' Peggy gives Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster a handjob. The sexual subtext in the film is ever present and yet none of the depictions of sex are attractive or glamourised. There is an anti-romantic impulse running right along with a Freudian disdain for convention.

Indeed, one aspect of the story is Phoenix's Freddie Quell's great quest to get laid. Freddie goes from a perpetually frustrated state being in the Navy to a self-defeating drug-abusing state to a cult-controlled eunuch state and eventually runs away in search of his sweetheart. The need for sex is the dirty big aching sorrow inside Freddie but the whole film involves him in a process that doesn't get him there, but instead gives him spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

The film is unambiguous about sex, which is perhaps the most important thing to realise given the strange polyvalence of meaning in the rest of the film.

America The Grave Of Souls

One of the other subtexts from Paul Thomas Anderson's oeuvre is the insight that America is some kind of spiritual black hole where even the yearning for the spiritual comes with a price tag. This film is slightly different in that Lancaster and Peggy are not doing it for the money or the desire to hoodwink people out of their cash - they genuinely believe their mumbo-jumbo and their conviction drives the metaphorical train of destiny.

The America that Lancaster and Peggy see is a barren place full of lost souls or the walking dead. Their solution is to invoke the spiritual wherever they go, and yet somehow they manage to surround themselves with the material trappings of this world. They even renounce America to start their weird school in England. There, we find Lancaster in a massive office behind a tremendous oak desk with grandiose ornaments. Not only are Lancaster's exhortations empty, they are hypocritical; but this hypocrisy comes from America being a fundamentally materialist society, and Lancaster cannot shed that cultural spine.

The America we see in this film is physically beautiful. It is hauntingly sunny and bright, yet there is a tiredness crawling in through the drawn faces of the people - I'm thinking of Laura Dern, who is playing the full crazy in this film.

Cults As DIY Spirituality

The film gives us an up close view into the circle of people who believe in Lancaster's patter. What's made clear is that these people want spirituality to be there because they want to invest in a meaning beyond the life they live. They dress up the process as 'work' because it  beats going to Church and listening to a sermon. That kind of spirituality would be too consumerist for these people - they want a custom-made, personalised spiritual experience and that is why they're so invested in 'the process' as depicted in the film.

I don't know if this is really how it goes, but it seems to be a very well put together idea with some moving parts that fit. It's a great insight this film offers.

2013/03/14

Doing Things By Quarters

Crying Poor Again

This link came in from Pleiades. It appears the Federal Government has watered down the screen quota for Australian productions.
The Minister for Communications Senator Conroy announced that the Government will bring forward a Bill – in addition to other media reforms – making permanent the 50 per cent reduction in the licence fees paid by commercial television broadcasters, conditional on the broadcast of an additional 1490 hours of Australian content by 2015.

“These measures are worthless,” said Australian Directors Guild Executive Director, Kingston Anderson. “For close to $150 million the free to air networks will be able to sit on their hands and screen more and more cheap overseas content. This is no quid pro quo. This is selling Australian audiences out to fatten up the bottom lines of the commercial broadcasters in an election year.”

The Convergence Review Committee produced its final report in early 2011 and recommended a 50 per cent increase in drama, documentary and children’s subquotas as well as developing a plan for a new uniform content scheme to support increased levels of Australian content on all content service providers.

Anderson said: “If this is the sum total of the Government’s response to the Convergence review then this is, to put it frankly, a disgrace. The Convergence Review Committee put two years’ worth of careful considered thought into developing a roadmap for the future of the content industry. The government’s response is visionless.”

First of all, Stephen Conroy is a joke. You don't want to say for a politician who probably means well on many fronts, but he's also the author of internet censorship filter plan. So in the balance of things, you can't really hope he's going to be all that effective in putting laws that help Australian production. He's not in the least bit artistic or musical or culturally sensitive except for banging on about his Catholic views so it is coming from a figure who is unsympathetic to begin with. Most sensible people would describe Stephen Conroy a s a party hack, or a jumped up apparatchik. It doesn't bode well for the ALP they have him as this kind of unremovable Senator.

All the same, I do wonder about the quota system because it seems to me it's there to prop up production entities that have entrenched themselves with the various networks and broadcasters. The same names making TV have been doing so for a very long time, and it's not exactly the burgeoning growing industry it's portrayed to be.

After all if the stations can run reruns of old shows and still attract an audience that supports the practice, doesn't that sort of undermine the argument for the need for fresh content? As in, if the old stuff's better than the new stuff, what's so valuable about having new crappy stuff over old good stuff? The MEAA and the Director's Guild are thundering about these changes not being in line with the Convergence Review, but I'm trying to see how this is different from say, the gun lobby crying uncle every time there's a hint of a change in gun laws. The entrenched powers in Australian TV are very entrenched, and it is in their vested interest to keep the oligopoly going.

You can colour me unimpressed by all the arguments put forward by the screen lobby. We do this every few years where we demand more money and more opportunities, and somehow it ends up that there's less money and it's going to the same old people. I sure as heck am not going to sign the AWG petition - in fact they sent it out by email and I sent it to the trash without opening it.

2013/03/13

News That's Fit To Punt - 12/Mar/2013

Cockatoo Island Film Festival Bows Out

It's sort of tragic that the grand visions of an alternative film festival taking root in Cockatoo Island has crashed and burned. Now we find they've burned so bad it's singed to a stump a lot of good will.
Late last year Zitserman and Kazantzidis admitted being devastated by the looming collapse of the festival and stood to lose seven years of work and much of their $500,000 investment that included equipment purchases for subsequent events.

They say there were 34,000 admissions - with both paid and free tickets - to what they hoped would become an internationally recognised festival.

Their company, Cockatoo Institute Ltd, subsequently went into administration. The administrator's report found debts of $1.77 million, with creditors including the trust ($272,000), TriPoint Rigging Services ($91,000), Coates Hire ($72,000), the Australian Taxation Office ($65,000) and Hoyts Cinema Technology ($62,000). It also said the company had ''likely'' traded while insolvent.

A trio of companies associated with the organisers - Cockatoo Enterprises, Cockatoo Film and Dungog Film Festival - were creditors for more than $500,000. Zitserman and Kazantzidis have agreed not to claim these debts under a deed of company arrangement.

At an emotional meeting, creditors voted to accept up to 9¢ in the dollar.

I'm not surprised by any of this given how chaotic and insane the lack of organisation was at the festival. I'm particularly not surprised given that the whole thing was the brainchild of Stavros Kazantzidis.  Still, I sort of hoped it would find some legs and run instead of crash and burn so badly as it has. The interesting bit is perhaps in the numerical description of the failure:
''So why did people not come? My personal view is they didn't come because they didn't know about it - it was badly publicised. It was undoubtedly the worst organised event that has ever happened on Cockatoo Island.''

Bailey says the organisers vastly overstated the attendance.
''The directors were assuring us right up until the last couple of weeks that 53,000 people would definitely be there.''

Instead of the claimed 34,000 admissions over five days, Bailey says that laser counters on the island wharves indicate less than 16,000 came to the island.
This included 5000 for the concerts and 1900 staff and festival volunteers.

''That leaves you with 9000 and, of those, the vast majority were complimentary tickets. Take 2000 on opening night and you're down to 7000.''

Bailey says the trust lost more than $500,000 because of the festival, having paid six ferry operators for a shuttle service to the island every 20 minutes from 8am to 2am to cater for the expected 53,000.

''We were very concerned that we honoured those contracts with those ferry operators because we didn't want to be putting them out. So it's been a very unhappy experience.''

Wow. What a disaster.

There's Incompetent, And Then There's Criminal
The Cockatoo Island Film festival might go down as the biggest disaster in Film Festivals, but Peats Ridge Festival might go down as the biggest snatch-and-grab in the history of festivals in this country.
Mr. Grant’s issued statement reads that despite “an incredible 2012 Peats Ridge Festival… that the income from ticket sales and other sources fell below that required to meet the costs of the event.”

Attendance figures for the 2012 festival are not currently available, but in a simple maths equation, to meet the $1.2 million figure owed to creditors, a little over 3,500 of the $340 Adult 3-day season pass would need to be sold, yet the original creditors report indicates that Peats Ridge declared only $140,000 of its own money on the books, which equals a little over 400 Adult season pass tickets sold.

Surely Peats Ridge were expecting more than that if they had risked booking headliners John Butler Trio for $95,000, and those ticket sales figures do not account for the money earned from the bar; for which Sorted Events, the beverage catering company who provided the bars onsite, are owed a whopping $283,726.

“You can do the simple math from the gate and the bar… and the numbers just don’t add up. This is a job now for the liquidators to do a forensic examination,” says Mal Tulloch of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) – the union representing the artists, performers, and crew still vastly out of pocket who mobilised the decision to re-appoint new administrators.

They are talking about creditors getting about 3cents in the dollar. Peats Ridge Festival has been a dosgy affair for some years now. I've even heard a drummer who played there tell me he didn't get paid and swore he would never play there again. Lots of people have been ripped off for years, and each year they would bankrupt the company and 'phoenix' it to run the festival again and not pay anybody.

The thing is that there's so much of this sort of thing going on and with ASIC never investigating any of these corporate pea-and-shell games, it's not surprising that a guy like Matt Grant's decided it's cool to make it an annual event. They keep talking about tightening laws surrounding phoenix-ing companies, but it never seems to come to pass, and these entities just keep on keeping on. The miracle in this case with the Peats Ridge Festival is that they've managed to dislodge the administrator appointed by Matt Grant.

Wow What a Catastrophe.

Try Connecting This One

Remember that lady who wet missing from the Kings Cross hospital a little while ago and became a kind of social media cause? yes, Belinda Burcham. It turns out she's linked to the Obeids.
Belinda Burcham, the 40-year-old whose week-long disappearance from St Vincent's Hospital earlier this year sparked a massive social media campaign, is alleged to have procured crucial proxy votes which helped Moses Obeid avoid paying a $16.6 million debt to the City of Sydney council.

On August 9 last year, the Herald revealed Moses Obeid, the son of ALP kingpin Eddie, had his debt to the council wiped out after smaller creditors - who included family, friends and associates - voted to accept a Deed of Company Arrangement which meant they would receive only between 1¢ and 3¢ in the dollar for the debts owed to them by his company Streetscape Projects.

So it would seem her disappearance at the time might have had something to do with the small matter of the ICAC investigation into the doings of the Obeid clan.
Peter Gosnell, from website Sydney Insolvency News, who attended the hearing before Justice Paul Brereton, reported that the council contended Ms Burcham advised the former cleaner that the $690 debt owed to her by Streetscape would be paid in full if the cleaner agreed to direct her proxy to vote for the deed of arrangement.

The court also heard that before the meeting Ms Burcham also met creditor Maria Costa, who was told by Ms Burcham that Costa Enterprises' $1000 debt would also be paid in full, rather than the $30 she might receive as a creditor, if she agreed to direct her proxy in favour of the arrangement, Mr Gosnell reported.Moses Obeid has disputed the council's claims in documents filed with the court.Ms Burcham, a long-time friend of Mr Moses and his wife, Nikki, has been employed as the office manager at the Obeid headquarters in Birkenhead Point. Ms Burcham will face Waverley court on Monday charged with several break and enter offences.

Am I the only one that thinks this city needs a thorough cleansing?

2013/03/12

'Middle Men'

Seedy Business Is Still Business

This thing cost me $8.99 at JB Hi-Fi and sat in my box of unwatched movies for like 3months thanks to Fetch TVs parade of offerings. By the time I got to it, I'd forgotten what it was supposed to be about. It's some kind of independently produced film with a US$20million budget that returned less than US$1million at the box office. I have to say sometimes that's where you find the interesting films.

If 'Boogie Nights' was a romanticised portrayal of the end of the porn industry based in film, then 'Middle Men' must be the picaresque celebration of internet porn. As usual, anything with Luke Wilson is surprising, but this film might take the cake for being a bigger surprise than 'Old School'. This is a pretty gripping, interesting film. I know the critics don't agree, but hey, that never stopped me endorsing a bit of movie.

I want to talk about this film a little bit, so here's the obligatory spoiler alert.

What's Good About It

This is a great cast doing some seriously amped, energetic stuff. Giovanni Ribisi does his unhinged person act which is pretty close to the unhinged act he had going in 'The Rum Diary', but you also have James Caan as a dodgy Vegas lawyer; Terry Crews as the trusty muscle; and cameo-like entries from Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Pollack and Robert Forster. It's like a character-actors-on-parade effort that keeps you entertained through the muddled switching and the bizarre twists of events.

The directing is reminiscent of Tony Scott's 1990s feel, which given the recent suicide of Tony Scott, makes you think about this kind of film making in a more nostalgic light. The shooting style is shot through with whip pans and tricky moves as well as long lenses and polarised filters. It's a beautiful looking piece of work.

What's Bad About It

At points, the idiotic duo of Buck and Wayne as played by Ribisi and Gabriel Macht get very annoying. If it were a Martin Scorsese film, these characters would've died in the second act. The longer they hang around, you feel like the film is just going to go off the rails at any moment.

The big flashback narrative style doesn't work as well as it should, and in some ways ruins the surprise and humanity of the abduction exchange. The moralising that creeps in towards the end of the film is also a bit sad, given the bravado of disdain the voice over possesses at the start of the film. The more the film runs towards the moralising, the less energy it seems to have.

What's Interesting About It

Surprisingly, there's quite a bit that is interesting with this film. James Caan's dodgy lawyer Haggerty mounts an argument as to why Luke Wilson's Jack can allow himself into being involved with people who deal in porn. He cites hotels that have porn channels in their rooms. "Are hotel owners pornographers?," is his rhetorical question. Why is this even interesting? It's interesting because the rhetoric posits that in a fully commodified society, at some point our transactions impinge on porn, even without us knowing or thinking about it. You check into a hotel, never use the pay-for-porn channel, but you know it's there. By staying in the room, you've actually validated the porn for which you never watched or paid - and you weren't even aware of it.

People draw lines all the time. I used to know a guy who loved saying that he may go so low as to do certain sexual acts, but he would "never be a purveyor of porn". Society draws the line in a way that suits itself - as Kelsey Grammer's District Attorney shows as he tries to use the porn business against Jack, only to have the tables turned on him quickly. The line society draws in the sand, trying to separate out porn and pornographer is shaped like their own hypocrisy.

All Business Is Seedy


The biggest bit of hypocrisy of course stems from Jack's steady denial that he's in porn. For this facade to work, Jack essentially abstracts out porn into a kind of service industry and his part in it as the billing service businessman. You can of course abstract any number of things until you don't recognise what is being discussed. This is possibly why, say sabermetrics gets such a bad rap from baseball scouts.

Still, overlooked in all this is the ability of money to simply blow away social meaning and contextualisation. If Jack can make 100million dollars simply billing on behalf of pornographers, the weight of the money lends a legitimacy and purpose and social meaning all of its own. What might be surprising is that the sex industry in general doesn't flex its muscle more than it does, by hiring lobbyists, especially given the potential to really effect the kinds of changes they want. At the same time, there is a certain level where illicit-ness of the sex makes for the price to be made higher.

The great irony of course is that America - where most things do get commodified and there fore abstracted into almost unrecognisable transformation - is busy trying to drive porn away from legitimacy precisely because the other institutions won't be able to handle a legitimated porn. It's bad enough that you can put a price on sexual pleasure. If a price is put on sexual pleasure, then how can there not be a price put on all transactions? And what separates any transaction from the kind of transaction that takes place with the 'consumption' of porn? These kinds of ugly questions are not that far way.

The Objectification Of Everything

The chief complaint of non-religious anti-porn people about the porn industry is that it is exploitative of women. This is true. But it would not be true if the symmetrical drawing power of women's sexuality were not so powerful over men. The feminist discourse runs that porn objectifies women. From what we can gather from the way markets move, it's not only women who get objectified, and it's not porn alone that does the objectifying. There are plenty of objects sold on fetish value an this is not marketed to men alone.

If this film is anything to go by, it is that desire in anybody runs at objectification in order to latch meaning. The transaction of meaning is bolstered by transaction of monies, and if the transaction involves pleasure - and sexual pleasure at that - then effectively everything that can be bought and sold - commodified - is ergo objectified.

The Issue Is Monkey, Not Pussy - Version 3

This film is pretty radical in the beginning, because the voice over posits that the raison d'tre of masculine gender is not to procreate through coitus, but masturbation. It's a heck of claim that zings past you in a montage, but it is radical all the same.

The film's opening contention is that men do not live for procreative sex, they live for pleasurable sex and at best this is masturbation. The formulation of the montage is such that it is clear that to the mind of the narrator, sex exists as a variant of masturbation and not the other way around. Fancy that. Sex with a woman is only an elaborate variant of wanking, is what the film is positing as an explanation why porn thrives so much.

It's a perverse theory that comes and goes through out history and Freud of course thinks that people who dabble in these thoughts are sick/demented, but from a relativist point of view, who can refute the contention conclusively? It's only absolutists who can say with certainty anything to do with sex and historically speaking they've been wrong more often than the relativists. The facts are, the porn market is a very strong market place. The film maker is saying this is why.

I only point this out because it was surprising to see it from a film that is ostensibly mainstream. The fact that it is ironic is not the point - America's changed quite a bit this last decade.

Guns Germs Steel Porn

One of the more farfetched ideas in the film is when the FBI use the porn accounting system to track terror targets. It's hard to say if something like this happened, but if it did one would have to conclude that the sum total of human experience is much smaller than we thought. The obscenity of the 'War on Terror' is dealt with in a manner that reminds us that maybe the military solution to take out terrorist cells is a kind of overkill At the same time, the notion that child pornography in particular is the unforgivable crimes seems really out of kilter with the way the 'War on Terror' is handled by the state. The cognitive dissonance shows us the gulf between values and hence American hypocrisy on many issues relating to guns, commerce and sex.

In a really sad way, what the terror targets have in common with the West is the masculinity defined by testosterone, and that leads to the need for porn. If the US government is using this as a backdoor into blowing them up with say, Drones, then we're really living in the Orwellian nightmare where the state has invaded your libido and set up an observation station.

Russian Mafia

There are a number of films that posit the Russian mafia as the bad guys. It's remarkable how similar they are from film to film. This might be due to an absence of imagination on the part of the filmmakers or it might be because the stock-standard Russian mafia is exactly the kind of brute that fits the villain-identikit for the movies. If you swapped out these Russian mafia dude from say, a 1990s Steven Seagal movie or 'Lethal Weapon 3' or 50cent's recent boring effort 'Freelancers', you simply wouldn't notice the difference. I guess the long and short of it is that they're here to stay for some time.

What I'm really waiting for is a kind of 'Godfather' movie, but set with the Russian Mafia operating in the west. It may actually turn out to be a real winner. In any case, the film persists with the stereotype Russian mafia dudes in black and all the brutal business that goes with it. It's interesting that there's no evolution with this subset of movie villains, when even vampires can become the object of lust.

That being said, it's interesting how the FBI agent says Jack is okay because he assisted the US government in stopping terrorists and in the balance the FBI is quite happy to let slide an accessory-to-murder charge on account of his patriotic contribution and the fact the victim was a Russian gangster. Talk about getting away with murder.

2013/03/07

'Lawless'

Moonshiners As Heroes

If there's one kind of Americana that gets a real bad rap, that would be hillbillies. It's mostly unfair that the mountain folk get so much hazing from cityslickers, Hollywood is decidedly hostile about the denizens of the woods and rivers. Just think of 'Deliverance' with a naked Ned Beatty on all fours being yelled at, "squeal like a a pig!"

Surely it's a kind of stereotyping that you worry about. So it is totally against the grain of American cinema culture that a film gets made where the hillbillies are the good guys. Of course the script is by Nick Cave and it's directed by John Hillcoat (which is enough to make my heart sink based on 'The Road') so it explains the decidedly counter-to-the-mainstream ethos.

This one is peculiar all the way through. The action cues just don't seem to happen where you might expect them. Don't expect Al Capone and the Valentine Day Massacre, just because the title says 'Lawless'. It's more like a study in the hillbilly ethos. Unsurprsingly, it has a few Aussies in it.

What's Good About It

The cast is pretty good in this nugget. Tom Hardy in particular puts in a really nuanced performance. He's very interesting in this film because we know he's an Englishman and here he is doing his best hillbilly. Shia LaBeouf is also good, perhaps with too much baggage already and Jessica Chastain remains the 'it girl' of difficult movies.Gary Oldman does a kind of cameo as a city gangster boss, which is cool.

The landscape of West Virginia is breathtaking in parts and deeply evocative of a way of life with its rich greens and dark shadows. The period feel is excellent.

What's Bad About it

With all the good stuff going on in front of the camera, you get the feeling it just doesn't rise to the kind of volcanic action it ought to. Tom Hardy's Forrest tells Shia LaBeouf's Jack that a man has to know how far he will go, but Jack spends the whole film not really getting to any kind of place until the very end where he stands over the villainous Charlie Rakes played by Guy Pearce at his death. If that;s going all the way, then we sure wait for it for a long time, and if it is, it sure seems like not much of a molehill to climb.

The la men are pretty gormless and dumb all around, while Pearce's OCD Charlie Rakes is a peculiar villain who doesn't really blossom into the kind of evil you'd expect. The other thing is that we're more familiar with this kind of dynamic as a result of 'Boardwalk Empire' so it doesn't quite deliver on the promise.

What's Interesting About It

All the different guns, all the different cars. Surprisingly, it's a very prop heavy film, which is always fun to watch. the production design might be the best part of this film in some ways as it delivers the most enjoyment. Well, that and Noah Taylor getting clubbed in the head with a spade by Gary Oldman.

The music is downright weird because it's Nick Cave doing bluegrass covers without being a bluegrass kind of player. It's not without merit but all the same it sounds weird, and pokes out at you from the sound track as being not quite right, which in turn adds to the interest.

Other than that, it's really not that challenging a film.

2013/03/06

'Argo'

The Joy Of The Known

The deal on 'Argo'  was that it won 'Best Picture' at the Oscars without even getting nominated for 'Best Director'. I don' often agree with the Motion Picture Academy, but in this instance I could see the good sense in the outcome.

Like it or lump it, the singular beneficial feature of this film is that it is an ode, a love song in praise of Hollywood. How can the Academy not lavish praise on a film that praises Hollywood so? It's hardly artful in its direction, so it is no surprise it didn't get nominated in the directing category. The Academy it seems retains a little bit of pride about what it does.

What's Good About It

Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Dire Straits, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin. Pulling one over the Nasty Iranians.I believe the Iranians are particularly insulted by this picture. Clearly they don't understand that they're not meant to like it seeing that they are the butt of the joke. In some ways, anything that gets up the nose of that horrible Theocracy is good fodder.

What's Bad About It

The suspense is hardly exciting once the premise gets under way. We know they get out, so it hardly seems the process is all that suspenseful. It seems to be missing a couple of really difficult obstacles to make it a truly riveting film.

What's Interesting About It

Watching this film was like getting plugged in the Gen-X memory machine. I remember the days when the Iranians stormed the US Embassy and held those hostages fr 444 days. I'm sure it s a proud moment for the likes of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad - who it turns out wasn't there after all - but it's one of those moments for which Iran has not paid its price. So it seems fitting that they cop a bit of retcon-humiliation from Hollywood. There's nothing like the ridicule from Hollywood as Saddam Hussein found out.

Still, the Iranian complaints seem entirely motivated by hurt pride that they should be portrayed as being so backward and craven and abusive masters of torture. Their claims that the film distorts history is probably true but I'm yet to see any film that doesn't distort history so that's not saying anything special in the context of this film. You accept that it probably didn't go down the way Ben Affleck directed it (and thank goodness for that).

Fortunately, they're not the only ones put off by the movie. The Canadians are also upset that they don't get a good enough credit for their role. What's really interesting about the outrage about the rewritten history is that New Zealand gets a mention in the list of people upset by the picture. Anything that upsets so many people must have something artistic going for it.

All The Best Lines Go To LA (and so do the chicks)


The most insightful lines in the film pertain to Hollywood and not the real world at all. The best character for the best lines was the fictional producer Lester Siegel played by Alan Arkin, followed by John Goodman's John Chambers. The line about the bullshit coalmine and fitting right in with the superficial and fickle LA set pretty much define the tone of the film: Hollywood is *it*.

In some ways this is a film that probably belongs in the genre of films about film making, without there actually being a film. The way they get the diplomats out of America almost is an adjunct to the story of faking a film production convincingly.

This is what the Iranians don't get. Young, beautiful women don't exactly travel to Tehran to become good Muslims anywhere near the same rate as they go to Los Angeles hoping to become a superstar. Los Angeles might be a toilet of a city but its allure is still streets ahead of Tehran, the capital of a country that is in massive deficit of Gross National Cool. All the great films they make are not going to change this international perception.

Is it really Zionism? Or is it that Iran has made itself firmly into an unattractive nation? 'Argo' hardly seems to be the problem.

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