View From The Couch - 27/Mar/2016

Propaganda And Nothing But Propaganda

Some days you just don't know what to make of the government's views on the arts and entertainment industry. Other days, it's pretty damn clear what they want from its workers. And so today we find that the immigration department dropped $6million to make a Telemovie about what a bad idea it is to be an asylum seeker from Afghanistan or Pakistan, hoping to trek to Australia by water.

Government tender documents reveal the Department of Immigration and Border protection paid the Sydney-based Put It Out There Pictures $4.34 million to produce the movie. It paid a company called Lapis Communications a further $1.63 million for to promote and advertise it, bringing the total to $5.97 million. 

By contrast, Priscilla cost less than $2 million, Wolf Creek about $1 million and The Castle just $750,000. Even adjusted for inflation, the total budget of all three films works out at about $5.8 million in today's terms. 

Filmed across three countries, the ninety-minute drama tells the story of a small group of Afghan asylum seekers trying to get to Australia by boat. A trailer available on YouTube – which has about 1000 views – shows scenes of asylum seekers talking, arguing and crying in Afghanistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I guess the obvious thing about this is that this government views propaganda films as being more important than any film that gets made with government assistance through Screen Australia. When the government has a point to put across through film, it actually has a bit of financial wherewithal to make its point forcefully. 

I know it wasn't intended but there probably isn't a bigger insult to the film makers of this country than a production where the budget provided by the government is bigger than anything it would normally hand out to a local production; where the content is purely political; the funding came out of a department that has zero involvement with the arts and entertainment sector, and the production money went out to a foreign production entity. 

One would think - rather cheekily - that the department of Immigration should have been forced to go through the process every other producer has to go through to secure government funding, and tried to set up its own distribution deals overseas. 

The production also brings up some interesting issue like, who in Australia might have undertaken such a project. I'd imagine the vast majority of film makers are pinkos. Some are even heavily Regressive Left types. There would be a lot of people who would object to this project for being propaganda and for such nefarious intent. All you have to remind people is 'Leni Riefenstahl', and they would've run screaming. As such, the government would have had immense trouble getting any kind of creatives going on in Australia. It kind of illustrates just why it was made out in Afghanistan:

Put It Out There company director Trudi-Ann Tierney declined to be interviewed. However she has in the past had some interesting things to say about her own work, describing her films as "propaganda". 

The former Australian TV executive and actress moved to Kabul to manage a bar but fell into the local TV industry and found herself producing a highly popular soapie, which she wrote about in her book Making Soapies in Kabul. 

In the book she said she was ostensibly head of drama "but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant". She also says her work was part of the "psychological operations" NATO and its allies used to influence the values and behaviour of its Afghan audience in a way that supported the war effort.

It's all about the war effort boys and girls! There's always more money for that. 

Rejoice, It's Joyce Season

The interesting news is that the "vengeful micro parties" are going after Barnaby Joyce. 

The Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is to be targeted by "far right wing" micro parties directing preferences against him in the seat of New England, according to the preference expert Glenn Druery. 

Mr Joyce holds the seat by 19.6 per cent but the micro parties revenge for being bundled out of the Senate is expected to greatly enhance independent Tony Windsor's campaign to retake New England. 

Mr Druery said on Friday the right wing micro party candidates would also direct preference against sitting Coalition members in at least 10 marginal seats.

The fun part of the news is that these are "far right wing" micro parties. These micro-parties are presumably for people to whom the current Coalition is not right wing enough. That's right, more right wing than the climate-change-denying', Coal-seam-gassin', asylum-seeker-hatin', gay-marriage-equality-resistin', Johnny-Depp-baitin', cockamamie Barnaby Joyce.

You wonder what the world has come to when a right ole rightwing nut like Barnaby can't rely on the far right wing nut vote.

A House For This Sinodinos

It's truly strange how political operators go about doing things and how money seems to swirl around the things they do.

Key Liberal fundraisers sounded out major donors to the party about chipping in to buy a house for Senator Arthur Sinodinos after the collapse of a potentially lucrative money-making venture. 

The audacious plan originated in early 2013 after Senator Sinodinos relinquished a 5 per cent stake in Australian Water Holdings, a company that later became the focus of a landmark corruption inquiry. 

Fairfax Media had earlier revealed Senator Sinodinos' shareholding in a company that employed Eddie Obeid jnr, the son of controversial Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.
At the time Senator Sinodonis said that although his shareholding was recorded on his parliamentary pecuniary interest declaration it was not publicly registered with the corporate regulator "because it was on a gentleman's agreement".

How does that even work? Could, say, Terri Butler the current ALP shadow cabinet secretary go to the unions and ask for them to find money to buy her a house? Wouldn't Malcolm Turnbull and his ABCC bill jump up and down and point to such shenanigans as exactly how the unions and the ALP were corrupt? Isn't that what Sinodinos is being accused at this moment? This is some really weird stuff - especially because you see names like Obeid thrown in there, and we know "Obeid" can only mean "corruption" in this part of the English speaking world.

At some point they have to just 'fess up and admit that corruption is corruption is corruption.
And then there's this:

How Deep Does This Rabbit Hole Go?

Here's a doozy. The same ICAC inquiry that dug up the dirt on Sinodinos has also dug up the name of Peta Credlin. Yes, they tried to suppress that name, but it's out in the open now.

The documents were suppressed last week by the head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption after lawyers acting for Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos raised concerns they could be subject to parliamentary privilege. 

But the suppression order was lifted on Monday after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, advised the commission that no claim for privilege would be made. 

The emails reveal that, in March 2011, while the Coalition was in opposition, Ms Credlin used a major donor to the Liberal Party, Brickworks, as part of Tony Abbott's campaign against the carbon tax.

Oh doesn't that look like a bucket of writhing corrupt worms right there? Turns out Lindsay Partridge of Brickworks - who classifies as a Developer - was donating "illicit money" (The Sydney Morning Herald's words not mine BTW) to the NSW Liberals and Federal Liberal Party through back channels. The emails leave a trail of totally awful illustration of how money buys you so much access you get to put words into the mouth of a Prime Minister. 

Frankly, it's ugly and despicable that this is politics in this country, and how we in the electorate simply have to take it. All we do get is to vote for some person who may or may not get into Parliament, and may or may not represent our interests in that Parliament.It's really vague what the vote gets the ordinary citizen. 

The rich on the other hand, clearly get to dictate terms on a daily basis. 

Remembering John Davis

Adventure Man

I went to the Memorial Service held for John Davis, who died in a helicopter accident last week. It was a crowded affair with a massive turn out. It was nice to see he touched so many lives, but it was also a little weird from the standpoint of us former employees at Classroom Video. He never really let on he had so many friends.

After the speeches were made, sharing the different sides of John, our little contingent started recalling the funny moments where we found ourselves confounded by some aspects of John. Put another way, while we held him in great affection, he was a difficult boss. He wasn't a horrible boss, he was more difficult-to-persuade, once he got some strange fixation in his head. I ventured to my former colleagues that perhaps he was a little Aspergers, to which they concurred and said they thought he was definitely on the spectrum. But such descriptions are too broad to paint a picture of the man.

My first encounter with John was at the job interview. He had his leg in a cast from an accident at a canyoning expedition. He was abseiling and attempted something stupendously difficult and broke his leg - on camera - and ended up having to be winched out of there in a helicopter. The footage, ended up in one of his videos. And so, he sat opposite me with his leg in a huge cast, telling me about what he thought about AFTRS graduates (not nearly as high an opinion as the graduates have of themselves) and the importance of working swiftly and cheaply.

He had a view on film making which was unique in this world - he was the only practitioner I met who wanted projects cheap, fast, and not necessarily the best-best kind of good. He wasn't interested in cheap and good, because fast was too important to be sacrificed; and he sure didn't like fast and good because he hated expensive. He also had the view that he would rather hire an intelligent person and teach them filmmaking rather than hire a filmmaker who couldn't be taught science.

As it turns out, he had hired a PhD in Pharmacology, who through sheer terrible people skills and generally low technical aptitude, failed to be taught filmmaking by John. In her stead, I was brought in, because I had all the skills. But more importantly to John - and  bless-his-sciencey-soul he is the only employer to whom this was a positive - I was a Med School dropout before I had attended AFTRS. He figured I could handle science content. He gave me the once over and said, "you look like a drifter but you also look like you're quite the talent. I'll give you a shot."
"Excuse me, a drifter?" I shot back, incredulous.
"When can you start?" he said, without even registering my shock. And that was John - sort of oblivious to what people thought of how he couched things, but very interested in how soon he could get results.

I know that reads like a terrible way to start, but it wasn't. He gave me a lot of rope to try many different things and many approaches. He gave me all the opportunities in making these educational videos I could hope for; and as I wrote on Facebook, you can't ask for more than that. He had a few rules: no mad scientist in coats, no show-and-tell donkey shows. Other than that, he was open to all kinds of whacky ideas. He liked whacky. He was a big fan of whacky.

He was also a non-stop action man. He would go to the UK to run the production house there, then fly to America and do a 5 city tour of educational facilities, pitch his product, share in ideas, come back on the dreaded LA-Sydney flight and go straight out to bushwalking. Sometimes he would come back with mixed footage of seemingly random things, and then somehow turn it into a programme. It was visionary, it was mad.

John Davis was indeed a man with a vision, as well as method to his madness. He was supportive of wild filmmaking ideas - as long as it could be done on a tight budget - and he loved seeing quality productions come out of his stable of producers. He pushed us very hard for the truth, facts, verification, verisimilitude of presentation, and just generally being able to back up claims. He was down on aesthetics for aesthetics' sake, and nuanced cultural discourses of the variety you find on university campuses. The vagaries of the arts were lost on him, but I was the one doing the arts & humanities programs, so naturally our discussions were "somewhat contentious" through to "difficult". They were difficult because he so wanted the arts to have black-and-white answers like science. Ironic then that what I had to offer him was a 3 programme series on 'Othello'.Yet together, our films won awards overseas. Even if it was a fringe area of filmmaking, collectively we did good work together.

The one thing I picked up working for John that I treasure, is that you have to come at most things, not just with a theory, but a method. In the sheer number of productions we churned out, we were forced to figure out how to do multiple projects on the fly, in parallel, and not lose the thread and make our deadlines. Sometimes it was better if you just had your method, and just forgot about theory. The Classroom Video production environment was conducive to figuring these things out. How to quickly bash a script into shape; how to quickly bash out a shotlist on the fly and make sure there's going to be enough to make sense in the edit; how to bash out a performance worth keeping, and how to judge when to move on to the next shot and work fast. And cheap! And make it look good.

That is sort of how I ended up working for John for nearly 6years, doing the thing that I loved, but at the same time fighting day-in-day-out for space and budget. In the final 18months of Classroom Video running as a production house, you could see him get tired and distracted. He wanted to develop software, he wanted to broadcast over the internet. In short, he wanted to invent iTunes, Youtube and Netflix, all rolled into one at the same time in one product and was wondering why he couldn't get it to work (pity the lone programmer working on this quixotic venture). Given the choice of continuing production and working on his pet project, he chose the latter; he sold up his business to a bunch of sharks, took their money and ran into retirement at the age of 60.
Thusly we got our redundancies and were shown the door. Shortly after that, he even gave up on the software thing.

At the memorial service, some of my former colleagues stated unequivocally that Classroom Video was the best work environment they had experienced in their entire career. I won't contradict them; It certainly was a lot of fun and learning for me as well. In retrospect, they were good days. After we went our separate ways I saw John only a couple of times. Time and distance did its thing as we drifted apart in life. I only heard through the grapevine that he ran for the local seat as a Greens candidate, and how he marvelled at the cut-throat nature of politics. At the time of his death he was working on a documentary about the terrible impacts of a coal mine and how we should all just drop using fossil fuels.

He's been gone now for over a week, and I can't help but keep casting my mind over my time with John Davis. My mind goes around and around like a zoetrope, with flickering memories of this moment, that conversation, this image, that argument... I can't switch off the memory machine in my head. Half of it is shrouded in the mists of time before 9/11 changed our world. I can reach back and remember how I felt about things and people; how differently things felt before 9/11.

I remember the time John and I went up to Newcastle to shoot a programme about electricity. Typical to form, he had no script, just a shotlist. He had a lot to say about the generation of electricity and how privatisation was going to work. We got driven around, shot things that were shown to us, shot an interview, and took the plane home at night. Around the point we were flying over Narrabeen Lakes, we hit an air pocket and there was great turbulence. In all my years of flying it was a pretty frightening moment. I looked to John sitting next to me, and he said without being prompted "when it's your time to go, it's your time to go."
That matter of factness was also John.

I can't imagine what the last moments on the fateful helicopter were like. I do imagine he may have even said that on the way down. I don't know.

Vale John Davis, you were one of a kind.

'The Newsroom' - Season 3

Drowning In Sentiment

'The Newsroom' closes out with season 3. It doesn't even go the distance of 10 episodes; it wraps up at episode 6. As binge-watching experiences go, it feels a little short, but on other ways it feels exactly right to quit right now. For a start the story seemed to have nowhere to go beyond the confines of the fictional network and its corporate context. The characters had family limited horizons on their story arcs so they rapidly coalesced to a finish.

I'm still wondering if it was as satisfying as the way the whole series kicked off. The arguments to do with freedom of press are rather cursory while the sentimentalism flows as if an oil barrel full of the stuff was knocked over the TV screen.

What's Good About It

It's still the same show, the same characters with remarkably little emotional distance traveled for some of them. Others, are developing and changing and bursting out of the storyline. In a nutshell, the series tries to deliver on all the good endings that seem to have been promised in the earlier seasons.

Jeff Daniels remains superb. In between the last season and this one, he had that stint playing Jim Carrey's sidekick in 'Dumb & Dumber To'. It's amazing how broad and deep his acting chops run because he's equally convincing as the cantankerous ex-prosecutor News Man as he is playing an out-and-out idiot. He's equal parts sly charm and bluff in both incarnations but he manages to put so much across with his respective characters. He underlines just how good the casting was to put him in the hot seat of this series. He doesn't let you down, and you forget you're watching Jeff Daniels, an actor.

What's Bad About it

They do lay the sentimentalism on thick. Even with an acceptance that these characters are going to work out their troubles and problems and rise to their best selfs, you're struck by how fictional such an arrangement can be. Maybe it just brings out the cynic in me (which admittedly doesn't lurk too far from the surface) but it seems too pat with the way things work out cleanly in a way that one wouldn't possibly imagine for real life. Of course this is why we do fiction - to fix reality of its faults - but sometimes the seams are showing, the stitching is peeking out, and you don't quite buy the reality in which these characters dwell.

What's Interesting About it

They rushed to the end. Aaron Sorkin ran out of story, and so the show ground to a halt. It's a shame - but it appears that Sorkin got to point and didn't want to break up the dynamic within the show. These characters are so good where it counts, they don't betray one another. And so the whole thing grinds to a halt in the stasis of their situation.

Chasing Edward Snowden

The events surrounding Edward's Snowden's defection to Russia is briefly shown. Edward Snowden is expected to come through Moscow Airport and expected to fly to Havana, Cuba. Of course in real life Snowden found himself in a kind of diplomatic limbo that saw him cool his hellish Russia, which is where he is to this very day. Instead our characters end up on a plane to Havana while completely missing Snowden. It would be interesting if the characters offered up an opinion about what Snowden had to say, but the show never really gets there. It consumes itself on the romantic matter at hand and maybe that's all that's needed for TV to be "TEE-VEE!" but it left me cold.

Considering the big kick off in season one started with the call to do the news properly, somehow the characters got lost in their own space and that made for some tedious story-telling. A newsrooms is probably not so romantically charged in real life so it goes back to the problem of sense of reality. It was beginning to erode pretty quickly towards the end.

Implicit Assumptions About Freedom Of Expression

The most important issue in season revolves around press freedoms and what it means for broadcasters. It's actually thought provoking because the media companies are self-regulating bodies that have rules for going to press or going to air. Facts have to rechecked and sources need to be verified before words are uttered on camera. They do this vigorously because without it, they wouldn't have leg to stand upon. Yet,outing the world of social media and the internet, there is a wave of unqualified, un-vetted people saying and writing just anything -like this blog right here! - and  so this forms another layer difficulty for professional journalists.

I do wonder if this is really true. Julian Assange thinks most blogs are amplifiers of commonly held opinions to reinforce peer groups. In other words, the vast majority of blogs are about doxa (opinion) and hardly about episteme (knowledge). Assange said he leaked important stuff and expected the bloggers of the world topic through the information and see for themselves the horrors of governments. But we/they do not. Thus Julian Assange opted to work with traditional media outlets to release his leaks in tranches. Simply put, the professionals were every bit important and vital to the process. Aaron Sorkin need not have argued so vehemently.

And yet, Snowden came forward in the manner that he did, emboldened by Assange and his Wikileaks. It was (and remains) a historic moment - and season 3 sort of pushes that content into the background while arguing a case for a professional press corps. It is rather ironic.

What seems to be the case is that news networks sit on a lot of information and don't necessarily go public with them for many reasons. Some arena principle, some are impossible to verify, and sombre simply too dangerous. Yet, it is through this professional vetting system that the mainstream media receive their news. This implies the apparent freedom of expression rests explicitly on what is and what is not conducive to the state. And for all the grandstanding, the press is not so powerful as to have it all their way.

The Fear of A Democratised Media

"Citizen journalism" comes in for a heavy pasting by the protagonists. The websites driven by the writings of non-professionals get the most opprobrium. Twitter and Facebook users get a lambasting for what professional journalism is not. Watching the show, one would think the wider public participating in journalism is a terrible thing. It comes across as paranoid, because it's not like individuals out in the public sphere have the kinds of resources of a professional news agency.

And as with Julian Assange's observation above, most blogs are simply amplifiers of previously held opinions and hardly what one would call reportage. It's true enough to put "citizen journalism" into a little box. Sometimes it does well, but its chances of doing it regularly with consistently good results are close to zero. Even if I decided to just blog full time, I doubt my output would be earth-shatteringly profound; and I'd be relying on real news sources to feed me informationIt would just be this kind of cultural echo chamber representing views of a particular stratum of Sydney's denizens - I'd only be collating and editorialising as I already do, but not much more. We bloggers, we're just not much whack at journalism.

Hence it seems incredibly paranoid for the show's characters to constantly deride people who find employment at the edges of traditional journalism working on the new digital media. The real problem isn't that professional journalism's lunch is about to get eaten by bloggers and the Twitterati. It's that the traditional capital is refusing to fund it as thoroughly as it once funded it because profitability has to come into it somewhere. Doubly, this problem makes the media the tacit mouthpiece for the 1%. The people are not happy with this arrangement, but Sorkin seems oblivious to this side of the issue. He's happy to rail about Wall Street and the 1% through his characters in one direction but he won't let them stand trial as part of the 1%'s apparatus of control.

Is Sentimentalism Such A Bad Thing?

I did wonder about this for quite a while watching season 3. The problem with sentimentalism is that it is a kind short hand for actual emotional depth. The mawkishness of some of the characters and their relationships gets us locked in on perhaps the wrong thing. The show raises a lot of interesting ideas, but it is constantly being undercut by the interpersonal to-and-fro that perhaps masquerades as love when all it is, is simply attachments.

The most sentimental show I can think from the top of my head is Ricky Gervais' 'Derek'. 'Derek' comes at you with the sentimentalism dialled up at 11, and the main character is hardly the greatest intellectual. It makes sense that Gervais' character spends his time watching baby animal videos on YouTube. We all like it, and go 'awwwww' at baby animal videos on YouTube. The question is, is it appropriate to build a show with such high aspirations and then back in to a kind of 'awwww' when the going gets complicated? Is Will McAvoy played by Jeff Daniels, such a sucker for sentiment? Does that even fit with his upbringing or professed political leanings?

I think Sorkin could have been tougher with his characters but somehow bugged out from making it tough. The entire series ends on too comfortable a note as a result.

'True Detective' - Season 2

All Those Bad Crits

I'm not sure what to make of all the bad crits season 2 has been receiving. A lot of them seem centred around the fact that it's unlike Season 1 in so many ways. Some have been more scathing than others, but I'm yet to read a crit that makes a defence of the creative choices of season 2. It is a very different animal to season 1 - yes, we all loved season 1 - so the expectations were rightfully high but perhaps largely misplaced.

The most disappointing part of that difference for me is that the over all story has nothing whatsoever to do with the story of Season 1. Season 1 had so many mythic elements that fused into the occult and traditions of American Gothic as well as the Cthulhu mythos which made it resplendent. The continuous philosophical excursions made by Rust made for some delicious cogitation on the meaning of what we were seeing.

To be disconnected from all that wonder is a little sad. But that doesn't mean this season is so bad as to incur the contempt of all these critics. I guess I liked it and appreciated it a lot more than those critics. It's funny how they have jobs writing about TV and have so little idea as to what they are watching. After all, if you didn't get it and didn't like it, it's not much of a crit, is it?

Anyways.... the usual spoiler alert!

What's Good About It

The interesting choice with the series that they opted to completely start up another story with different characters. The casting choices are reasonably weighty, while the change scenery is incredibly stark. If the open blankness of the South in season 1 was haunting and evocative, the industrial sprawl in season 2 is menacing and raw.

The new characters are a revelation. They are in of themselves gripping and interesting figures, loaded with ambiguity. The moral ambiguity of Colin Farrell's detective Velcoro, the sexual ambiguity of Taylor Kitsch's Paul Woodrugh, and the emotional ambivalence or Rachel McAdam's detective Ani Bezzerides makes for compelling viewing. The urban industrial backdrop makes for the most harrowing of landscapes as it builds inexorably to the climax and denouement.

The supporting plot line of the gangster Frank ands wife Jordan is also gripping and full of interesting turns. If it were not for this subplot, we wouldn't get a picture of just how deep the corruption and conspiracy goes in the story. It goes so deep, event the principle outlaw cannot overcome its effects. The corruption is big, the compromised state is a plaything of he moneyed interests, and the little people get squashed. There is no justice, there is only retribution.

As a palimpsest of the post-GFC world, nothing could be more on the mark than the problematic with which the main characters wrestle. If the corruption goos all the way to the top and every stopping between, how can any investigation survive? What moral obligation can a detective exercise, becomes a very pressing issue.

What's Bad About It

Season 1 established that at least in the 'True Detective' series, there is metaphysical evil. In fact, after harping on for most parts of season 1 about the fundamentally meaningless-ness of existence, Rust encounters the sublime darkness that is worshipped by the cultists and he is transformed into  believer in death. It's one of the most amazing turnaround stories on screen. This series comes nowhere near that sublime aporia and awe-filled gaze into the heart of darkness.

In its place in season 2 is a more prosaic piecing together of an unspeakably awful conspiracy that is man-made and thoroughly degrading to humanity. The absence of the sublime drives the story into rather tepid retreads of other noir stories; but it never reaches into the heart of darkness like season 1 does. It's not that the evil isn't spooky in this series; it's that having seen the hint of the spookiest evil, it never comes close to discussing it; and that's the great shame. The missed opportunity to really develop the theme.

What's Interesting About It

Now having seen two seasons, we're getting a better view of the outline of the overall concept. It is in most part, a film noir sensibility played through a discursiveness on the nihilistic impulse in humanity. The characters have fairly primal needs and fears that drive them, and they barely keep it together for the story to unfold. All of the protagonists are like deer in the headlights, stunned at the sudden need to act. The antagonists are many and much less delineated than the protagonists; they remain murky and hard to fathom, their motives constantly shrouded by the apparent randomness of violence.

The patter of Frank played by Vince Vaughan gives us a view into what the world of gangsters might be, post-Tarrantino. Post Modern and self-reflexive, Frank seems to lurch from one state of discomfort to the next while offering expert commentary on his plight. Even his relationship with his wife comes with a commentary, almost in the third person; the self consciousness is oddly compelling as it is deeply ironic.

The night aerial shots over the industrial wasteland are amazing. They evoke  the opening sequence from 'Blade Runner', but it is actual and real. The brutal industrial facade of modernity is at times savagely beautiful and alarming with its barrenness.

Eaten By Despair

You get a lot of downer characterise the detective genres. They have substance abuse problems - most likely alcohol and tobacco products, but this might extend into recreational drugs. Even Sherlock Holmes was an opium addict so there's some insight there about the nature of detective work. Colin Farrell's character Ray drinks, smokes and takes drugs. He enters the series fully compromised, having committed some unspeakable act against the rapist who fathered a child by his wife - or so he believes. Dramatic irony being what it is, it turns out he did not kill the right man, but also, he is the biological father but he never finds out.
In the mean time, he only has this horrible despair eating out this character.

Desire runs deep in Ray precisely because the genre attempts to grapple with the nature of hope, and hope that emanates from illuminating the truth. To that extent Ray has hat in common with Rust from Season 1. Except in Ray is far less articulate and perhaps not as well educated as Rust so as to articulate his sense of hopelessness. He is aware of how deeply bent out of shape he is, by the force of this despair; he' just not good at explaining himself. Both season 1 and 2 hinges on this despair as the axis on which the story turns. If Ray were happily a crooked cop (a kind of psychopath), then the events would take a different turn. His despair marks him out as being vulnerable to the problems at hand.

Ani played by Rachel McAdam is thus like Marty Hart from season 1, where she is loyal to her appetites and not very concerned about the social damage this creates. The wanton-ness is less pronounced, but it is what governs her, and so she makes a good foil for Ray, but it is important to note that this character dynamic is a transplant from the dynamic in season 1. As with season 1, it is despair that provides the key to understanding the mission of these characters. Without their despair, they cannot dig deep down into their existential selves to do the right thing. It is in some ways very harrowing, but the characters are so gripping we keep watching.

Echoes Of Noir Films Past

The corruption plot and how far it extends reminds us greatly of 'Chinatown'. The prostitutes cut by surgeons to look better for a select clientele reminds us of 'L.A. Confidential'. It is some part 'The Long Goodbye' and some part 'Bullit'. All of those films spawned out of the 40s film noir genre, so the narrative is well-marinated in the juices of Californian crime fiction. The concerns are remarkably similar as it divides society into haves and have-nots, inside and outside, protected and unprotected.

The conspiracy in season 2 is deeply structural. It encompasses the criminal underworld money as well as private developers and bureaucrats as well as politicians and corporations. They are all rent-seekers, united in their cause to ilk the public purse for as much money as possible; so the question that gets posited is how are the police supposed to stop a crime of this scope and magnitude?

The story is believable. Variants of this story could be told anywhere, where business interests and government corruption intersect with such force and alacrity. We assume that the police are there to get the bad guys, but we are asked to follow compromised, broken and bent police officers trying to uncover the sort of corruption that is deeply ingrained in to the structure of our state and economy. There is no resplendent moment in season 2 precisely because this hell is man made. There is no metaphysical evil in season 2, simply the world made by bad men. It's not sublime, it's just grime and crime

The Shadow Of Celts, Shadow Of Canada

The characters have Italian and Greek names, but the thing that sticks out about the actors is that they're Irish and Irish extraction: Colin Farrell who is Irish; McAdams; Vaughn; Reilly; form 4/5 of the leading cast, their surnames screaming Irish origins (Kitsch being the exception). It clashes with the underlying Mediterranean heritage evoked by the character names. McAdams and Kitsch are Canadian, so that too adds to the level of seeming weirdness. In any case, none of them seem smooth or comfortable in their skins or in the skins of the characters. it's very strange to watch.

None of the characters strike you as native to the scene. Instead they feel like drifters and loners that blow into the world of the story. There is something angular and not quite right to their placement. Body language and demeanour betrays them as outsiders. As outsiders their characters are superfluous and expendable but also pregnant with potential to change things. It's an interesting dynamic compared to the run of the mill casting.

Coming Out Of Hibernation

Salman Rushdie Speaks At Opera House

It's not everyday you get to see and hear Salman Rushdie speak live, so I went along to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm not so convinced these ideas at the festival are so dangerous - they seem more like ideas that would make great clickbait on Facebook, but I'm not really certain they're so damn dangerous. Mr. Rushdie was speaking to the notion whether Television was the New Novel. He spoke at great length of his experience in development hell for 18months but said "No, it's not."

The conversation could have been more interesting but the panel seemed to favour talking about the process whereby television writers are commissioned to write scripts and whether novelists were good at adapting to that challenge or not. Mr. Rushdie indicated he was surprised to find he was more resistant to it than he initially thought. Hardly earth-shattering. I could've told him that at the front end before he went into development hell.

He did say a couple of interesting things. One of them was that the bigger a TV series gets, the less likely it would end on a satisfying note. All such series should be finished with a comma and not a full stop, was his observation. The other notable tidbit was that novel writing is entirely processed internally, but script writing for television drags that process out into the open so that it can be shared with other parties. That much is true.

He also told a joke featuring two goats.

Short Film Screening

I attended the screening of a short film up at the Chauvel tonight. My good friend Guillermo managed to finish the film we shot last year. All I did was sound record it, but it was kind of gratifying to see my name in the credits. I hadn't seen that in a few years.

Anyway, the DOP and I got into a conversation with one of the producers about film funding in this country and I was surprised to find that there is a widespread belief that the funding system in this country is rigged so the same people keep getting grants, and that the better thing would be to stop the government doing direct funding and go back to a 10BA tax driven thing. Everybody's thinking it. The system is rigged, and it's part of the problem and not the solution. The belief is so widespread that nobody trusts the government to do the right thing. Now, this is just film making - not medical or legal policy. However, if the government was to screw up the medical and legal industries like they have screwed up the film industry, there would be picket lines and molotov cocktails on our streets. The fact that it doesn't happen is merely a reflection of how dejected the film industry is about how the government keeps working to make the business smaller in this country - even if it is inadvertent - and how small the business has become.

I'm just reporting this here because others in the business would want to know. And yes, it is always a bitch-fest when filmies get together.

'Mad Men'

The Nostalgia Machine

I've been away from writing about films for a number of weeks because I've been working my way through the 6 seasons of 'Mad Men'. I had the DVDs piled up all year and sort of traipsed past it because there seems to be a deluge of good TV content that has to be surveyed and unlike movies, they all demand serious time commitments that come in tens of hours. Six seasons consisting of 78 episodes is a lot to digest. That's in the ballpark of the original Star Trek episodes. Consequently it has taken me 6 weekends of binging through seasons to watch the whole damn thing, bringing me up to date.

The other reason I had avoided it is because the world of advertising, even set in the 1960s didn't really seem like a novelty. Having worked for an advertising giant once-upon-a-long-time-ago, I've had my fair share of awful anecdotes that came from hanging with hard-drinking advertising execs. There are some truly awful things that you can witness when you get into the accounts servicing end of the business and layering it on with nostalgia in a bid to explore classic sexism racism and generally unpleasant sexual misconduct didn't seem like a recipe for much fun.   So truth be told, I resisted it as long as I could until I found I had cleared the decks of all other viewing material. Maybe that it is what it takes to be receptive.

We all think we know what the show is about. What is surprising is what it actually is.

In an early season Don Draper is asked to brand the Kodak carousel projector and when he finally explains it, he hits upon the device being a time machine that takes people back through nostalgia for moments. What the show does is effectively service everybody's nostalgia through these fabricated episodes of people that might have been there. The experience of Mad Men is to evoke an era with as much verisimilitude as possible while attempting to dissect the origins of our own mores. In one sense it's a 'Downton Abbey' for 60s fetishists, but on another level, it is a show that boldly goes to a place that brought us our contemporary consumerist culture. It is a 'Back to the Future' trip back to the 1960s where we in the audience are Marty McFly.

What's Good About It

Just about any part of the craft from cinematography and production design through to choice of music and sound mix are extraordinary in this show.

The casting is equally impressive. There are some great actors putting in some extraordinary performances.  The characters they inhabit are filled with unspoken angst and desperation. It is an amazing show that allows us to be Buddha-like, feeling a compassion for all these people for their weaknesses foibles, doubts and self-loathing.

The scripts are always surprising, witty, insightful and compelling. The sense of existential agony sits side by side with the banalities of consumerism, giving rise to a beautiful aesthetic irony.

What's Bad About It

In the earlier series you feel the budget doesn't stretch far enough so you end up seeing a lot of interiors and hardly any exterior shots. It doesn't get claustrophobic, but you get the feeling the limit of the show's misc en scene, is just beyond the frame of the shots. At times this feels quite hokey but as the seasons progress you can see more money being thrown at it and it becomes less of a problem.

Considering all the naturalism in the acting and realism in the production design, you get the feeling that Don Draper's sexual stamina is superhuman. Especially when you watch the episodes back-to-back. As the seasons progress, these sense of the exaggerated sexual stamina becomes utterly laughable that it begins to tear at the carefully crafted fabric of the show's milieu.

Apart from that odd sort of unintended hilarity, the plot lines can meander into the kind of soapiness one associates with things like 'Days of Our Lives' or 'Beverly Hills 90210'. Sometimes the performances are a little spotty and you notice it as the tenor of the performance jumps from one shot to the next. Maybe it's bad editing, but it leaves you a little cold because it takes away from the otherwise perfect, seamless presentation.

What's Interesting About It

Quite simply, ALL of it, actually.

1960s Through The Po-Mo Glass

The year 1960 where the series kicks off is quite a foreign place to us. We think we have a great grasp of what exactly happened in the 1960s thanks to the mass of media artefacts form the 1960s but Manhattan in the year 1960 is closer to Holden Caulfield's hatred of phonies in 'The Catcher in the Rye' than the Manhattan of Lou Reed and then Punk rock - That is all in the distant future and what we witness are the dying embers of the New York City in 'The Age of Innocence'. America is at its peak power, the pinnacle of its omnipotence and New York City is the crown jewel in this prosperity. The city then slowly goes into decay as certainty in social cohesion and cultural unity begins to break up.

The six seasons combined - as we still await the seventh to be fully concluded - traces the fall of Don Draper, white male top executive against the rise of Peggy Olsen, the proto-feminist creative executive into the top offices. And it is against this double dynamic we see all the other characters essentially flower into their full weirdness. Through this process we come to understand what the events we know in the 1960s, such as the Kennedy assassinations and the Martin Luther King assassinations as well as the Vietnam War did to American society. America reached the top, and then quickly turned the corner into a decadent phase just as had the Roman Empire. In one sense, having reached the top America had nothing better to do but to fuck around, which is exactly what Don Draper does as he slowly loses touch with the America that allowed him to succeed. In its place emerges an America with which he can only loosely relate.

It's a curious thing, this change. Over the years white conservatives have unleashed the culture wars against the progressives as if they are the disenfranchised. This has manifested in accusations of 'reverse racism' or 'moral decay' but what the show presents to us is that economic growth happened in such a way to enfranchise the other more rapidly than it presented more growth to the established white demographic. It wasn't the white establishment that got disenfranchised; it was that America grew so fast it enfranchised everybody beyond just the white establishment. When you consider 'the other' as a group, it includes women, immigrants, Blacks, Jews, Italians and eventually the gays. The show doesn't show too many instance of affirmative action. It does however capture the bewildering change, season by season. At first it is like a whisper. By Season 6, the change is like a roar.

Beyond Memory, Beyond Broken Homes

American cinema is decidedly about the formation of families, just as American TV is about the maintenance of families. This is true of things as broad as 'Bewitched' and 'Brady Bunch' through to 'Game of Thrones' and 'Breaking'Bad'. The glaring exception to date was 'Seinfeld', which was revolutionary in the sense that no families were formed, and the central quartet were decidedly not a family but a coalition of disparate single entities. They were disparate single entities because they were in some ways all exiles from the ideological construct of family, trying to avert the mistakes of their parents. Thus, 'Mad Men' arrives as an explication of how American families fall apart.

The trope of 'First Wives Club' is that the husband cashes in his success by divorcing the first wife with whom he has a family, with a much younger wife with whom he just has fun. This is no ordinary trope, because there were many kids I knew through my childhood who were from these 'broken homes' where the "father ran off with the secretary" and other such narratives. It was a phenomenon that silently ate away at corners of our existence - how some of our friends had fathers who would never come home, and their homes would never be whole again. And all the while the engine of desire for being whole or for your friends' families to be made whole is there. The yearning and the pain that gets repressed and folded into interactions is exquisitely rendered. The show goes through the various scenarios on which the classic nuclear family setup is torn asunder by the very consumerist society that purports to support them through wondrous products. It leaves one devastated exactly because failure is more common than success, and so many people fail so willfully in the show. Except you come to realise that this is also true in the people who populate our real lives.

The show sheds a light on why the institution of marriage in the American nuclear family of the 1960s failed so spectacularly, so often. Nothing so schizophrenic can survive without actuating the schism.

The Dream Of The World Of Our Parents

I only have a sense of the 1960s through old photographs. My memory of the 1960s is too far back to make any kind of sense. The Vietnam War was there by the time I had any inkling of the world. Demonstrations and marches were regular news items. The context for the sturm und drang has always sat behind records books and movies. Robin Williams joked that if you could remember the 1960s, you probably weren't there. There's a weird compelling quality to that joke because as a toddler at the time, I hardly remember it. The 1960s I know of lives in my head through the media construction but strangely there is nothing in it that offers a wider view of society. The fragments of first hand accounts that have actually come down to me through anecdotes remain blurry. The Cuban Missile Crisis, day President Kennedy was shot, Beatlemania, and the day Martin Luther King was shot - these events only form a kind of diorama in my head without the context of the world. Thus it is singularly enlightening to see these events at arms length, sitting in the lounge room with these characters.

The 1960s sits at the precipice of the moment when human history goes from having more people dead than alive, to having more people alive than there ever lived. The post modern explosion happens at 1970, necessarily as the ancien regime of hierarchies begin collapsing, disintegrating bit by bit. As such, the rigid certitude in things such as gender roles and social rank that characterises the earlier seasons seem distant and alien to us, but as the show moves through the decade, we sense the accelerating change barreling towards our contemporary awareness. If the world changed this quickly on our parents, then it sort of makes sense why our upbringing for Generation X was so fractured and cognitively dissonant. They must have thought they were raising us for a world that had the certitude of 1960 when in fact we were always going to grow into a world of ever increasing moral and ethical relativism.

De-Witched

The show that kept getting evoked by the earlier seasons was 'Bewitched' where Samantha was the perfect housewife and her husband Darrin was the advertising executive. It's funny because Samantha was played by Elizabeth Montgomery so the name Betty goes to the wife; and Darren was played by Dick York and Dick Sergent, and so Don Draper's secret identity is Dick Whitman. Don has a white-haired boss Roger Sterling, just as Darrin had Larry Tate. The rest of it is completely off the rails that flies in the face of the theme of maintaining a family. Instead of a happy housewife who uses magic to make things perfect, Betty is bored and un-empathic with her kids; instead of  being a bumbling doting husband, Don Draper is a philandering alpha male. 'Mad Men' posits an American household that disintegrates under the very desire stoked by advertising. The irony is that the central characters are deeply committed to the business of advertising and are fully aware that they are there to fan the unending fires of desire.

'Mad Men' effectively posits that the marriage of Samantha and Darrin from Bewitched is doomed to fail exactly because they are in a particular kind of nuclear family arrangement that maximises household consumption but dissatisfies more people than it helps. Darrin, if he were genuinely an ad exec of his times, would have had too may opportunities to philander. Samantha, without magic, would be too vulnerable to the pitfalls of being a suburban housewife, through isolation, boredom and depression. 'Mad Men' is partially a tart retort from the 21sst Century towards the cultural delusions of the 1960s. It is on the whole unsparing and unkind.

Don Draper's Elegant Existential Angst

It's interesting how the character Don Draper is laden with backstory. They place so many extreme situations in his background, he is practically the other even if he is white. On one level this makes sense because in order for a white male character to have insight into the other, they must be laden with elements in their life that would enable them to share empathy with the other. This gap in turn informs the degree of alienation the main character feels from the mainstream of society. As with the Great Gatsby, Don Draper has arrived at the Big Time in the Big Apple, but he has arrived as an imposter. His origins are worse than humble, his identity is fractured, and he is busy covering his tracks.

In order to portray the great sea tide of change in people's attitudes through the 1960s, they had to devise a character who is at once very conservative on the surface but is deeply mutable and given to impulses and therefore endless infidelities. What is peculiar as a protagonist about Don Draper is how he is consumed by a silent self-loathing quite unlike any other character in America TV except maybe Walter White in 'Breaking Bad'. At this moment in history, the most interesting aspect of American masculinity on screen is not self-assuredness, but the depth of self-loathing combined with a troubled existential malaise and affliction.

Jon Hamm is remarkable as Don Draper because he is able to milk the nuance of the character as well as deftly play apart the many, many fractured facets of this man. He seems to have so many different smiles, all of them memorable for suggesting different parts of his psyche. The leery lewd smile, the condescending patronising smile, the genuine seductive persuasive smile, the gimme-five smile; all of these smiles are played differently and with great control. The series is essentially an Odyssey through the 1960s with Don Draper who is a kind of Odysseus of advertising - except unlike the Odyssey, it is not certain just where home/Ithaca is for Don Draper. The vast number of episodes allow the story-tellers to really go into every episode of the man's life, with the sort of detail that would have made James Joyce jealous, for Don Draper is the 21st Century rendition of Odysseus/Ulysses.

Betty Draper, The Emotionally Austere Mother

January Jones' performance as Betty Draper is the other amazing performance in the earlier seasons. The character drops back significantly after the third season and she's not that great in season 3 as she becomes this sort of bitchy harridan ex-wife. What's extraordinary about Jones' performance is how much she loads into a casual glance or a look away. She raises her eyebrows, or wrinkles her forehead to show displeasure, and generally works through a quick array of conflicting emotions. As a kind of latter day Grace Kelly, she gives off the impression of the perfectly manicured ice queen but there is so much ironic layering in what she does. I don't think I'll forget some of the subtle gestures or expressions of disapproval.

The evolution of Betty Draper gives us a sense of how American whiteness preserves itself as an identity. She's a fantastic character in the fist two seasons. It's sad that she gives away the stage to Don's next wife as her 50s kind of beauty gives way to Megan's swinging sixties vibe. It is as if she is forced to retreat off the stage exactly because what she represents belongs in the past that has died.

The show is in many ways quite an exercise in metonymy. Don Draper in our parlance might just be a sex addict, but because we are watching a time and space where such language does not exist we end up witnessing the drama. Similarly with Betty she might just be a classic 'First Wife Club' member, but because she is operating in a time and space without that concept we witness the drama of her emotional disintegration and reconstruction in a different way. Don and Betty as played by Jon Hamm and January Jones are so perfectly matched with their beauty in their scenes in the car as they drive, you almost wish like Goethe's Faust that their time stands still. The grand tragedy of 'Mad Men' - as it is in real life - is that time simply cannot stop for anybody, and all we can have is memory and nostalgia.

'True Detective'

Journey To Carcosa

These TV series that HBO produce are so compelling you can't help but sit there and binge episode after episode. Part of the beauty is that they let the writers take the lead and just let them go. The results have been far more rewarding than your average run of the mill Hollywood Action movie or Crime movie. The expanse of time allows for exposition to occur more naturally while we get to know and understand the characters. The ambiguity and ambivalence of many characters in the HBO TV stable stands in deep contrast for the need to resolve everything in the allotted time in the cinema. It is a little bit like the tables have turned. It used to be cinema that was afforded the time and TV had to rush from one commercial break to the next.

'True Detective' sits on the more exploratory end of story telling as well, with its non-linear narrative across many episodes. It takes its cue from classic buddy cop formats but veers wildly from the normal/standard sort of story lines, leading us into a very dark kind of universe.

Here is the obligatory spoiler alert!

What's Good About It

The standout element is actually the performances of both Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, followed by the script and direction. The directing is notable in that is one person doing all 8 episodes of season 1 and and the consistency is noticeable when compared to something like 'House of Cards' where they had a bunch of different directors handling different episodes.

A lot of the philosophical issues being brought up by McConaughey's character Rust are very germane not only to the events in the script but to the wider world that encompasses the viewer. The film also harks back to the horror episodes of 'The X-Files' while not being as arcane.

What's Bad About It

Sometimes I felt that I wasn't all that interested in Woody Harrelson's character Marty and his impulses towards infidelity. Something has to be there, but half the time it seemed the sexcapades were pretty gratuitous and there to make up HBO's quota for T & A. Marty's marriage as a topic seems there to fill airtime. You can't but help feel they might have had a better thing they could have put in there in its stead.

What's Interesting About It

This is an interesting series because it leads you down a path thinking it's a psychotic serial killer that's doing the killings and then it becomes clear there's something about the symbol and cult that is doing the murders as ritual. The evidence is so grisly at some point, the characters are traumatised by the sight of the video and get very angry that they cannot "un-see" what they have seen. It is immediately reminiscent of the world of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction featuring the Cthulhu mythos and the various evil cults that carry out ritual slayings.

The ambiguity of the cult and whether it is supported by the fictional universe or not is also interesting.  It is not clear for a very long time whether there really is a metaphysical evil to which the sacrifices are made, exists in the fictional universe of these characters. To this end, the show spends a great deal of time with social realism stylings as well as extended speeches by Matthew McConaughey's character Rust where he gives remonstrations to the effect that the universe is essentially meaningless and there is no benevolent God. indeed, in the early going these speeches are so fantastic you think the series is about the bleak existentialism of this character juxtaposed against the existentially stunted Marty played by Harrelson.

The writers make a good deal out of covering their tracks  as to the metaphysical status of the diagetic space. The unknowability is undercut by several factors. One is the structure of the narrative for the most part involves the two main characters being interviewed by police officers in recalling their version of events. In some instances we are shown the recollection presented is an outright lie, which opens the door to the possibility that what we hear from these characters is definitely not the gospel truth. Half the time you are watching to see if the inconsistencies somehow fractures the narrative to reveal that maybe one of the characters is crazy enough to be the serial killer - It's that well-covered, most of the time you're looking at the wrong clues on screen.

There are of course hints along the way, with the mention of 'Carcosa'. The curious thing about it is that you don't know if the cult is acting on the fiction written about Carcosa or whether Carcosa actually exists as an entity within the fiction of 'True Detective'. When they finally track down the last remaining killer, they are led into a space that the killer identifies as Carcosa, but then Rust has a transcendent, inter-dimensional experience that is totally out of tune with his character. He has a fundamental shift in his perception of the universe as a result of what he experiences.

Pulp Fiction Style

It's 20years since 'Pulp Fiction' won Cannes and we are still seeing the far-reaching influences of that film. The relationship between Rust and Marty get introduced to us through a series of conversations in cars which is a technique straight out of 'Pulp Fiction'. The two characters have metaphysical concerns which seem wildly at odds with the apparent evidence on screen. The vagaries of the odd things that happen to people, the coincidences an chains of consequences are tightly wound in this series. It even shares the same concerns - where somebody is concerned with the metaphysical, nattering on and on about it until it is revealed that the metaphysical is of the deepest concern. In this instance, Rust is entirely concerned with Nihilism and the meaningless ness of everything only to come across the darkest secret of the universe and it shatters his sense of reality.

Inevitably Harrelson's Marty is equally imbued with overtones from Harrelson's previous characters as Marty proves himself to be a very unimaginative cop who is way too easy on himself. He is too likeable to be a genuine anti-hero, and he's too dislakeable to be a hero, and so his journey meanders in a way that dots the 'i's an crosses the 't's of cop show staples such as the affair, the drinking, the divorce, the domestic discord. All this is used as a foil for what is essentially a story about Rust's uncovering of the metaphysical mystery.

The back-and-forth narrative structure also lends itself to the wobbly story progression as the audience is led through at various points, the possibility that Rust is in fact the killer on the loose.

'Call of Cthulhu' Sanity Checks

You always have to laugh when a character is shown something and it is so hideous they react violently. The audience never gets to see the contents of the VHS tape, but the people who are shown the tape are never the same again. it's like something straight out of the 'Call of Cthulhu' role playing game where players have to roll for a 'sanity check' every time they come across a hideous fact. While nobody has successfully brought a genuinely sanity-twisting version of Cthulhu story to the screen, it is cool to see the name of Carcosa in the story leading to a truly Lovecraft-ian sanity-bending moment. Especially when you get to the end and realise that what you had been watching was a 'Call of Cthulhu' scenario.

Things I've Been Watching

There's So Much TV To Watch

One doesn't really want to go into a situation where one ends up waiting for the next episode. But once one goes down the alley of 'Game of Thrones', one must then confront the reality that one must wait an awfully long time for this story to unfold so in the mean time one had better get used to it by filling the intervening time with other TV content. besides which, one can be advised most frequently on any number of splendid shows one must ought watch to keep up with the one's discourses with one's friends and family.

So, one must necessarily watch this stuff. And one is amused.

Newsroom

Aaron Sorkin is at once the lauded TV creator and the much reviled target of envy in the world of TV productions. Was 'West Wing' so good? I have friends who thought that was just the pinnacle of political fiction on TV. I guess in the years of GW Bush, people would want to see a liberal riposte to the sorts of challenges GW Bush was bungling. So it's with great interest that Newsroom presents itself as a show about a bustling newsroom that tackles current events and the limits of news media on television.

It's a nice show, with nice characters and if you can get used to the incessant ping pong dialogue of way too many words filling the air, it has its witty and well-observed moments. Jeff Daniels's Will McAvoy is a varied, interesting character around whom they have built the show, and it's nice that he bears watching. On the other hand, his comic foibles place him as a close contender with Will Ferrell's marvelous creation, Ron Burgandy.

You can do worse than spend time watching these characters. They all seem like really nice people that you might like to have as friends. Maybe it's the one show that doesn't lean on personality disorder as a crutch to tell exciting stories.

House Of Cards - US Version Season 1 & 2

In stark contrast to the nice people inhabiting 'Newsroom', the US version of 'House of Cards' is pretty intense and misanthropic. I think the creative team were probably aiming for Machiavellian but end up more in the psycho ward. This show is filled with personality disorder and psychopaths. It's essentially "Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright do some crazy spooky wicked things to get to the top" kind of story.

It's sort of a picaresque, and draws greatly on the device where the character addresses the audience. Kevin Spacey has likened it to playing Richard III. The story of a party whip taking control doesn't play so well in the American context because the American two party system is in some ways more diffuse thanks to the geographic enormity of America itself. All the same, the logic of how things tumble and fall, giving rise to interesting scenarios is eminently watchable.

Having watched two season and seen how it ends up, I'm not so sure there's a whole lot more to this story that it could go beyond Season 3. You hope they finish this thing properly rather than let it bleed and hang on for many a dead season. One of the mercifully great things about 'Breaking Bad' was how decisively they were able to end it.

House of Cards - UK Version

Having watched everything that's available for the US version,it seemed logical to go hunt up and watch the old BBC version. Of course, the machinations of a chief whip makes much more sense in the British Westminster system. Knocking off a Prime Minister who crosses the path of Francis Urquhart is much more feasible in its native context.

It's enough to make me wonder what this might look like in the Australian parliamentary context. I have a hunch we might find out in the coming weeks, what with the dreadful polls for Tony Abbott. Can the Tory pollies really stand not to be loved?

It's a good bloody question. :)

Slack

I've Been Slack, Yeah

The writers' guild called me on my mobile today wondering if it was their administrative error or my lapse that I hadn't paid for my membership this year. I told the lady it was a bit of both - that I decided to let the thing slide while I thought about it. She asked what I had to think about and so I asked her if she wanted the short version or the long version. She said I should try the short one first.

The short version is that I made all of $1000.00 writing a draft for a screenplay this year. This $1000.00 is an advance against if-and-when the film gets up. The rest will be paid if and when the film gets up. Out of which if I paid my GST, and then full guild membership, I'd be left with about $550. Which makes me wonder why I'm handing over so much for my only writing income. Especially when they did nothing to help me negotiate my contract. I wouldn't have and couldn't have called upon them because their standard contract would have been laughed out of the room.

Besides which, the producer was my friend from Film School. I had to help him get the script sorted before he footed a bill to fly to Cannes to try and raise finance, another process in which the guild would prove utterly useless. Thus, it's really hard to justify the guild membership when there's so little to show for it; and a bunch of workshops and discussion groups and a newsletter and a glossy book each year where screenwriters get interviewed about writing... simply isn't much value. For that money I could head to the pub and hang out with people of my choosing, and the ensuing conversation might actually be more interesting.

The industry has changed greatly. It's not the bustling hive it once was where development led to things. Only a handful of films get made - and none of them get made without the government funding production costs. It's really hard to conceive of a guild in the context of an industry that's only there as an extension of the government.

I then asked her if she wanted the long version and she declined. I can't say I blame her much. I told her it's not something I hold the guild responsible for, but really it couldn't be just me, and the industry couldn't be supporting so many writers to call the writers guild a guild. And hence I told her I was thinking whether I should stump up the money for the membership or just spend it on my dentist - which, would have literally palatable results compared to a membership in a clan of writers equally hungry, disenfranchised, and broke as I.

She said she would relay back to management my concerns. I have no idea how 'management' is going to respond to my feedback. I doubt they would have anything to say. I'm not expecting anything, but at least they got a piece of my fucking mind.

The Schadenfreude Budget

Nothing To Delight In But Pain Of Others

This is going to be a mean budget. I was talking about it today with some people and they were saying yes, it's going to hurt but that they hope it hurts other people too. Like Liberal voters who thought voting for Tony Abbott was such a good idea. If you're a left-leaning voter, this budget promises to be a pile of misery heaped upon with fear-and-loathing sauce. The only sweetness will be the bitter-sweet Schadenfreude of seeing others suffer.

In my case, I'm hoping for a big scythe like the one carried by death to hack a swathe through Screen Australia, which may or may not according to leaked information, get rolled into one entity with the Australia Council. That would be cool to seethe perennial same people who always get the funding, go without for once. Screen Australia's a bit of a bug bear because they keep funding the same people and they keep rewriting the rules so nobody else gets a look in for funding. In other words, it's more a rort and a slush fund than a proper funding body these days so... heck Joe Hockey, cut away with impunity. I'd rather see it get the full-arse chop than a half-arsed trim. I really would enjoy those people "having to look for a job in the real world". Screw them.

On a more general scale, you ave to think that Abbott and company are going to make the kinds of cuts that the ALP could not. This would be true, particularly in health and welfare. And while the rhetoric is that this targets the weakest in our society, I think we've all seen a few cases that have made us do a double-take. If you think about it, 6million people are on some kind of Centrelink payment. Then, Julia Gillard's government added Family Tax Benefit B as a bribe to lather through the Carbon Price. It was classic 'Keep it Greasy So It Goes Down Easy'. As a single person who got nada out of that deal because I have a job - even though I'm in the "low income bracket" according to the tax office - it sure wasn't a break that was headed my way.  So, I wouldn't miss Family Tax Benefit B disappearing. heck, cut away, I say.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of things that piss me off  that are mooted in this budget. The wholesale destruction of environmental agencies and science and technology funding seems beyond the pail. I'm just hoping if the cuts hurt everybody enough they'll be motivated at the next election to vote these bums out.

Retiring At Seventy

I didn't know this until the good folks on Insiders pointed it out but 70years old is going to be oldest retirement age in the OECD nations. Most nations are topping out at 67 or 68. The average life expectancy in Australia is currently 81.85 so assuming that goes up a little bit until 2035, one would think the government is hoping to keep the lid on the retirement years at about 15.

The budget is talking about offering $10,000 incentives to hire people over 50. Right now, people over 50 are Baby Boomers. I can't imagine the government could fund such a policy forever into the future, given the logic of how little tax they could get back from such a worker, so once again we see the government trying to feather the nests of the Baby Boomers, just to get this idea over the line.

I keep trying to imagine myself at say, 65 going for a job interview to find work that will take me up to 70. I keep wondering what that job might be and whether there would be a 10k incentive to hire me then (or if that 10k would be worth anything in that future). Having spoken to a number of my fellow Gen-Xers the feeling is "fuck off, we're going for a revolution!" You get the feeling that the inter-generational conflict is going to heat up from here on in. The Treasurer sure lit a fire there.

We're Dumb Ignorant And Uncultured, But We Can Build Roads

The carrot dangled in front of Australia for all this budget pain is that the Federal Government will spend 40 billion on roads for the next 4 years. This is going to be matched by 42 billion from State governments and the private sector. 82billion over 4years is a lot of road building. And the look of smug satisfaction as they've been leaking this bit has been a bit much.

Most countries that try to stimulate their economy by general construction end up building white elephants. This is true of Asian countries and European countries. Bridges to nowhere and ghost cities of apartments with nobody living in them happen exactly because a government thinks a general construction spending spree will stimulate the economy. It would have in the 1950s but clearly in an age when GM, Ford and Toyota are closing up factories, we're entering a post-industrial phase of the economy, like it or not. If you are going to build 82 billion dollars' worth of infrastructure, are roads really where you want to put your money?

Keep in mind that this is the same luddite government that wants to dumb down and dismantle the NBN, another infrastructure project that might be more appropriate for our stage of development.

It's also 82 billion that's not going into education and training because this government wants to get out of tertiary education altogether and make it completely user-pay. It's 82billion that's not going towards building a metro in our major cities, and it's definitely not going towards an inter-city bullet train. What it is, is a decidedly backward looking commitment to build more of the same on the assumption that Australia's economic needs are going to be roughly the same as they were in the 1950s and1960s under Menzies. It's willfully stupid because clearly "more roads" is not what Australian needs more of over the other options that do not even get a look in.

And this is before we even look at the problems of petroleum as fuel for cars, and the economics of crude oil going into the future where we're spending increasingly greater amounts of money to extract the same amount of crude oil. When we cease to be able to afford the oil, we'll cease driving our petroleum-engined cars. When that happens you wonder what good these 82billion dollars' worth of roads are going to be for an economy moving away from moving things around on the back of the petrochemical industry. Nobody in government has even looked at the ramification of higher energy costs on this economy and whether it is a smart move to put all our baskets into roads in anticipation of even greater road transportation. Even with a multiplier effect, this 82billion is going to be money badly spent.

'Anchorman 2'

I'm Completely Stupid And So Are You

Broad comedy has one saving grace - it never has to get too profound so one thing it will never get mistaken for is Critical Theory. We are never going to mistake a film starring Will Ferrell with 'A Thousand Plateaus'. This is a good thing because it shows our understanding of genre protects us from exposing ourselves to ideas and notions we would rather not have. Thus comedy draws the most knee-jerk critics when in fact the comic vision sustains the sharpest critique of our milieu.

That being said there are comedies and there are comedies. Some are more cutting than others while broad comedy has an anodyne quality that makes it seem like it is neither poison or medicine. 'Anchorman' was such a film and became such a hit that many years later, it spawned this sequel.

What's Good About It

The bits that make you squirm in your seat with laughter. This one is probably funnier than the first but in bursts. The awfulness of Ron Burgandy can be pretty intoxicating. The inappropriate lines come flying one after the other. The study of Ron is better when he is on top and commanding more than when he is down and out. When he is down and out, the humour is just too maudlin. When Ron thinks he's in a commanding position, the inappropriateness grows bolder and sillier.

What's Bad About It

The bits that make you cringe in your seat with laughter. Political correctness gets a right bollocking, but it's actually hard to say things have come a long way in 30years. It's not the film's fault, but the gap is uncomfortable.

What's Interesting About It

This is the weird thing. The film is a celebration of network news and around-the-clock news coverage while it posits a problematic that say the demand for 24hour news creates the need for increasingly spurious stories. So, on the one hand you have the glorious 24 hour news channel feeding news to the world non-stop as it comes off the feed, but not everything that comes down the feed is of equal importance. Then there is the problem that Television is more given to sensational topics than thoughtful pieces. It's the nature of the beast as long as it must chase ratings for revenue.

The film is actually quite didactic about this problem. While Ron's desire to get ratings essentially drives down the average intellectual content to the lowest common denominator, it is also true that he drives the stories to their most sensational apex. All the stylistic quirks we know of contemporary news programs are explained away through Ron Burgandy's idiotic need to be sensational all the time. You'd almost think the film was a savage satire instead of a simple, broad comedy. But then it quickly abandons this project in favour of a plot-line where Ron loses his sight and therefore his job. With Ron's eyesight goes any pretension at explaining what made news programming so awful.

The Perils Of Stardom

In the intervening years between the first film and this film, Steve Carrell's star has risen considerably. This has meant his character Brick Tamland has got the B-plot over Paul Rudd, Christina Applegate and David Koechner. The problem is that Brick was such a minor character the first time through, and such a moron that the plot really doesn't go anywhere smart or interesting. instead, Carrell gets to play what can only be described as 'dueling idiots' with Kristen Wiig.

Yes he gets second billing behind Will Ferrell, but brick is such an idiotic character they have tremendous difficulty extracting anything meaningful out of the B-plot.

I am guessing this sequel is going to do nothing to rescue Chrstina Applegate's star. She's really not doing a good job in this film. I never thought I'd say this but, she's actually bad in this movie, when it's exactly the kind of film that should be her bread and butter.

Harrison Ford's cameo is beyond perplexing. He was sort of re-doing his Morning Glory role of Mike Pomeroy, but it was a strange choice.

Liberal Rule Blues

A Bolt Out Of The Poo

Rightwing nutjob columnist Andrew Bolt was in the news today complaining that he was insulted by being lablled a racist by people on 'Q&A', and when the ABC issued an apology, he found it to benot good enough. At which point I think I rolled my eyes. We all know this man; he's the one who got into that court case where he claimed a woman was somehow gaming the system by pretending to be an Aborigine despite the fact she had white skin - and promptly lost that court case. Since then it's metastasised into a cause celebre for the right, with George Brandis vowing to repeal section 18C of the Anti-Descrimination act. George Brandis thinks that somehow a great impeditment to freedomeof expression in this country (the very same George Brandis who is threatening to withdraw Australia Council funding from artists who boycott the Sydney Biennale! Scum and Villainy!).

Anyway, it strikes me as somewhat odd that there is a group a of white men who really want to repeal the bit of the Anti-Descrimination Act which is written so you can't belittle people for their race. But it turns out these people have skin as thin, if not more, than the groups of people who do not want it repealed. Indeed, the various 'wogs', 'chinks', 'gooks', 'kikes', 'spics' 'abbos' and 'boongs' of Australia have asked through their community groups and organisations not to repeal 18C.  If they do repeal it, I'll be the first to congratulate these honky-cracker-skippies by calling them one. But you do get the feeling they just don't quite get it.

It's one thing for 18C to be repealed by a bunch of white men of the dominant mainstream who are taking away the sense of protection from people who aren't anywhere near mainstream in their representation in Australia. It's entirely another thing to see a white man who has a dominant position in the mainstream through his presence in the mass media complains that he is somehow done wrong by being accurately described as a racist. If you talk about people in generalities based on their perceived race and make a pile of judgment calls based on that (faulty) perception, then you deserve to be branded a racist. They're the damn rules, Andrew Bolt, you dolt!

Brain Damage

Apropos of the Ian Roberts concussion thing I've been thinking about our Dear Leader Tony Abbott, who in his youth was a pugilist. We know from reports of the time that his style was 'raging bullshit' and not much skill, just flailing away hard hoping to connect with the other guy. Mike Tyson he was not - and you'd think that as such he must have taken quite a few blows to the head, boxing that way. And you wonder what sort of brain damage he must have sustained, and perhaps that is maybe why he is the way he is. Combined with the fact that the brain of a conservative is already misshapen towards needless fear and paranoia, you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this country is being led by a severely deficient human being.

But then again, the total irrationality of his policy agenda would have alerted you to this fact. The real corker question is what's the rest of the Liberals doing following this madman about?

Literary Types Only

And The Book Show Is Not Literary Enough!

I just wanted to share this lovely little open letter with you from David Musgrave to the ABC:

Dear Producer

I'm writing in my capacity as board member of Australian Poetry Limited (a not-for-profit national arts organisation), as Publisher at Puncher & Wattmann Pty Ltd (the foremost independent publisher of poetry in Australia) and as one of this country's leading poets to request that you change the name of your program to the "Non-Poetry Multinational Publisher Product Show" to accurately reflect the content of your program. I am sure that the several thousand like-minded people in Australia who are my colleagues, peers or customers would agree that the rigorous exclusion of poetry from your program, as well as the extreme difficulty an independent publisher has in having their books discussed on your program, means that the current program title "The Book Show" is misleading, implying as it does that all books are given equal consideration.

Poetry is a vital part of our literary culture, yet your program, as with most of the mainstream media, does not even pay lip-service to this important literary art-form. If changing the name of your program is more difficult than merely changing the content to include poetry, I'd be happy to talk to you about how you might go about this.

Yours sincerely,

David Musgrave

Publisher

Puncher & Wattmann

P.S. You may want to read my blog about this subject.

And if that wasn't tart enough, here's his Blog entry. The middle bit reads thusly:

Poetry is an important part of the press, but not the only part - we're publishing more literary fiction than ever, and in early 2014 we will be releasing the novels Out of Print by Julian Croft and Slush-Pile by Ian Shadwell. A small but growing press like Puncher & Wattmann has to be prepared for the long haul, and to build its readership slowly but steadily. I'm always amazed at how popular poetry readings at the Sydney Writers festival are: every one that I have been involved in has been full to capacity, and I am sure that this is not because I happen to be part of it. The thing about poetry, and interesting writing in general, is that if you present it to a captive audience, they will find it very interesting and engage with it. It's just that in this day and age it is very difficult for the average reader to seek out new and interesting work apart from the small number of titles which are pushed through the mainstream press, largely by multinational publishers. Even people with a lot of time on their hands, retirees who are interested in reading literature, often don't know what is worth reading because reviews don't necessarily help them (even if they do appear in the newspapers) when there might be, say ten books of poetry or literary fiction to choose from in any given month, and they might only really want to read one or two. That's why small presses, those that hang around for decades, are extremely important for literary culture in this country.

So, take that, boring old establishment!

On another note, it's interesting that after years of sneering at this blog for being a blog ("what the hells is a blog anyway?") David has taken to writing his own. :) So, I've added a link to it on the right.

Now. If only I could get him to return my calls...

News That's Fit To Punt - 28/Oct/2013

Foreign Misadventures

The worst aspect of Tony Abbott might not be his stupidity but his inability to represent all of Australia. You expect the Prime Minister of Australia to front for the whole nation when he speaks to foreign media, but not Tony Abbott. He can't resist the urge to put the boot in to his domestic opposition. Here's the offending bit in the Washington Post:

Labor wanted a national broadband network?

It’s a government-owned telecommunications infrastructure monopoly, which was proceeding at a scandalous rate without producing any commensurate outcomes. We are changing the objective from fiber to every premise in the country to fiber to distribution points, and then we will use the existing infrastructure to take the broadband to individual premises.

Is that cheaper and more efficient?

Vastly.

But Labor wanted to extend fiber to every household?

Welcome to the wonderful, wacko world of the former government.

So you believe the former government was doing a lot of things that were bad for the country?

I thought it was the most incompetent and untrustworthy government in modern Australian history.

Be more specific.

They made a whole lot of commitments, which they scandalously failed to honor. They did a lot of things that were scandalously wasteful and the actual conduct of government was a circus. They were untrustworthy in terms of the carbon tax. They were incompetent in terms of the national broadband network. They were a scandal when it came to their own internal disunity. They made a whole lot of grubby deals in order to try and perpetuate themselves in power.  It was an embarrassing spectacle, and I think Australians are relieved they are gone.

Where does one begin with how this interview exchange is so wrong-headed. You all know how I feel about the NBN, so it surprises me none that Tony Abbott is trying to paint the NBN as evidence of how the ALP were "wacko". No evidence, just a straight up assertion as if its some kind of self-evident thing when the opposite is clearly true. This is followed up with this sloganeering assertion that the former ALP government were somehow lying incompetents. No evidence. So when he gets pressed on the points, he makes a whole bunch of blank assertions - none of which are factual - and finishes off with another crappy assertion that I'd like to see tested at the ballot soon.

I don't know about you, but I don't think this "throw the other party under the bus at every opportunity" style of conduct really is becoming of a Prime Minister. It's the dead opposite of what he's supposed to be doing when he is representing our polity. Regardless of our differences in our nation, when he's talking representing Australia, he's supposed to have the common decency to be speaking for the whole nation. Not just for the people that voted for him.

That Tony Abbott was given to talking out of his hat was a known quotient. What was not really understood was how he would use such an interview to keep playing these domestic politics. This has surprised quite a number of people.

Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ''winced'' when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.

''It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,'' Dr Ornstein said. ''It certainly can't help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and - at least implicitly - leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.

''Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.''

Politicians around the world typically refrain from engaging in fierce domestic political argument when they are speaking to an overseas audience.

It's a worry he's gallavanting around the globe like this. Which reminds me of something I learnt way back when: The number one rule after a bad shoot is that you never bad mouth your own production. It might have been hell to work with so-and-so, but if you ever find yourself in front of a camera or a ape recorder, you're supposed to say, "It was great. It was fantastic working with So-and-so."

Grin and bear it for the production so that it has some shot of surviving the market place.That's the golden rule.

Tony Abbott should have grinned and beared it and said, "Hey, the NBN was an adventurous idea in its time but we're trying to be more pragmatic."  Instead he threw the ALP under the bus and made Australia look foolish. I guess you send an idiot to to do a job, you get idiotic results.

While I'm on this one, Pleiades sent me an article, presumably from Crikey which went through the ways in which Tony Abbott flubbed Australia's position with Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Indonesia:

According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.

The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works.

So far, he's been quite adept at making an ass out of himself on the international stage. In that way he is exactly like his mentor John Howard, a man you'd be embarrassed to show anywhere on the planet.

Screen Australia Still Sucks

This one comes from Monologan.

I must confess, I’ve been feeling uneasy about Screen Australia for some time now.

I’ve never been able to shake the impression that the whole thing is something of a club. When announcements come through of the latest beneficiaries of the millions of taxpayer dollars that go into feature and television production, the same names tend to pop up again and again. Even if their films lose money at the box office again and again.

And in part, I’m uneasy because I feel conflicted about whether those millions of dollars should be spent at all, when they as often as not appear to be used to prop up a local film industry incapable of standing on its own feet, rather than in primarily funding the telling Australian stories. The decision to pour millions of dollars into the quintessentially American story The Great Gatsby is a good recent example. If the car industry no longer needs propping up, why should the production sector? But that’s a debate for another day.

The reason for writing this now though is the fact that it emerged last week that Screen Australia had ponied up $50k to get The Conversation writing about the screen industry more regularly.

I say emerged, because normally, Screen Australia holds a board meeting, then issues press releases about the projects it intends to fund.

The trick is that the guy writing this runs Encore magazine:

I’m heartened that Screen Australia now recognises that “arts journalism is under pressure”. Based on our previous experience, Screen Australia doesn’t spend its “sponsorship” money easily. In the four years or so we’ve owned Encore – which is the oldest title of its type with a three decade heritage in the production sector – our sales team have never been successful in persuading them to spend a single dollar on sponsorship or marketing – and indeed they never once put out a brief. A cynic might say that they don’t like some of the things we’ve written so it was never going to happen anyway. But there again, perhaps our sales director, otherwise excellent at his job, just had a series of off days on the five or six occasions he went in to see them. Either way, having closed the loss making print edition last year, I can’t help ruminate on what a difference $50k would have made to the title.

But I can’t help thinking that the explanation is more likely to be that Screen Australia took a liking to the cut of The Conversation’s jib, and decided to find a way of helping it out. If you’re wealthy like Global Mail’s funder Graeme Woods or are a business with a budget for this sort of thing like CommBank, that’s fair enough. But if you’re a public body, you have a duty to do these things in a fair and above board way, no matter how worthy the recipient.

I think The Conversation deserves the money. I just don’t think that Screen Australia can justify how it made the decision.

If you don’t want people to think you’re a club, then don’t act like one.

So, yes. It does look like a club, and it's pretty friggin' awful.