The Missing Review

I Wonder Why It Got Pulled...

Fairfax published the following review on the Sunday Herald, and then it promptly went missing. Pleiades looked for it all over the Fairfax media site but couldn't find it. It hadn't been up long enough for Google to cache it, so it's not in Google cache either. In the end, he and Mrs. Pleiades fished through the rubbish bin to recover this review of Baz Luhrmann's 'Australia':

Australia is a big, gloopy mess of a movie; and overlong, overstuffed production and a prime example of egos gone wild.

Obviously no one had the guts to red-flag the problems to director-creator Baz Luhrmann of a 165-minute patchwork of simple-minded romance, generic World War II attacks, Stolen Generation themes, squirmingly kitsch song replays and flagrant ripping off from – oops, we mean, paying homage to – better epics such as ‘Out of Africa’.

Let’s not forget the many, many slow motion-shots, which make many, many scenes look like men’s aftershave ads.
Watching this is like being hit over the head by a giant glitter-coated marshmallow wielded by a director whose concept of epic romance is like a drag queen’s interpretation of what a woman is.

Except for one saving grace, ‘Australia’ feels like the movie equivalent of the Sydney 2000 Olympics opening ceremony: appropriation o Aboriginal culture blended with bush stockman clichés, to sell an image to the rest of the world. Make that unfinished image.

‘Australia’ should not have been released as is; it needs re-editing throughout and the junking of at least 30minutes. The opening is a disaster; fussily scripted, self-indulgently directed and boasting a soundtrack that never shuts up and seemingly includes every tin whistle and wobble board known to man.

This reviewer sat (literally) open-mouthed for the first hour,.

It didn’t help that, as the English aristocrat who travels to the Northern Territory to claim a remote cattle station is forced to replay the lock-jawed prissiness of ‘Moulin Rouge!’, her last film for Luhrmann.

Meanwhile, Jackman, the most natural and likeable of our actors, is reduced to gruff beefcake as the heroic Drover, who says “Crikey” every other reel in apparent image-branding imitation of Steve Irwin.

Add Bryan Brown (as ‘Strine’ as they come), David Wenham (his villain should have had a black cape), Jack Thompson (odd moments of poignancy) and Ben Mendelsohn (the only decent English Accent), bunched together like stampeding brumbies, they are hurled across the screen to establish, well, the Australian-ness of it all.

However, despite the relentless hyped contributions of ‘The Pianist’ scriptwriter Ronald Harwood and Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, the support cast clearly had nothing to work with.

Midway, ‘Australia’ looked to earn those comparisons with ‘Titanic’ – but with the ship, not the Oscar winner.

And then, amazingly, something real slipped through the mess: incandescent 13-year-old debuting actor Brandon Walters.

He plays Nullah, the child of an Aboriginal mother and white father, and the he makes everyone look good; Kidman delivers her most warmly appealing moments, ever.
They rebuff Luhrmann’s unbearable replaying, in a noxious suck-up to US audiences, of the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ from ‘Wizard of Oz’.

Helped by magnificent ‘The Tracker’ star David Gulpilil, Luhrmann and cinematographer Mandy Walker capture the hallucinatory impact of the Australian landscape and translate (for non-indigenous viewers) a small portion of the rich spirituality of Aboriginal culture.

The rest of the movie might lumber along with fuzzy, computerized Japanese plane attacks and campfire scenes that look shot in the studio.

Only the theme about the Stolen Generations (Aboriginal children taken from their families) produces genuinely tense moments. Luhrmann has been lucky in his timing – and in a new Prime Minster who said “Sorry”.

However, the director deserves kudos for skill and unexpected restraint here.
Walters alone can’t redeem ‘Australia’s flaws. But for viewers who resent being represented by a wastefully expensive, American-pandering production, this one Aboriginal boy’s truthful presence puts soul into the film and justifies the over-reaching title.

And if you thought that was a bit mean, well, so did the editor, we think. Even so, this is a complete shellacking of the film and its pretensions. I'm thinking that I really don't want to see this damn thing at all.

Still, it's a little perplexing to see that it has done a complete and utter disappearance act, so in honor of the article itself, I've duplicated it entirely above. Not nice on my part, but I think it's not nice to smother a bad review, just because it might affect business with 20th Century Fox or Rupert Murdoch. Besides which, if they don't want it I'm entirely happy to present it to the world.

Pleiades also sent in this link:

She’s regarded by critics as one of the great actresses of our time, she’s sought after by the world’s best directors, from Stanley Kubrick to Wong Kar Wai, she commands a king’s ransom each time she steps in front of a camera and glamour mags can’t get enough of her. Yet few people will cross the street to catch one of Kidman’s movies.

Kidman has made big-budget studio pictures (Bewitched, The Stepford Wives, The Golden Compass, The Invasion), high-gloss art-house flicks (Eyes Wide Shut, Birth, The Human Stain), oddball indie comedies and dramas (Birthday Girl, Margot at the Wedding) and head-scratching avant-garde experiments (Dogville). Yet she has a near-perfect record of bombs, even when she gets good notices.

Those persistent failures since her Oscar win for The Hours culminated in Fortune magazine this year putting Kidman on the top of their list of Hollywood’s most overpaid stars.

I wonder which critics it is they're talking about exactly that are regarding her as "one of the greatest actresses of our time"? Isn't it more the case that most critics regard her as a sort of acting non-entity who married into Hollywood royalty and is reaping the alimony from the famous divorce? Sure she's pretty but so are countless other women. The paparazzi obsession simply comes down to the residue of her marriages to Tom 'The-Face-of-Scientology' Cruise and her then subsequent marriage to Keith 'I'm-a-reformed-drug-addict' Urban.

There's even a theory going around that Kubrick hired Tom and Nicole precisely because they were so plastic and inhuman in their pristine Hollywood world. The fact that their marriage broke down subsequent to the film lends some credence to the observation. Certainly if one were to start a 'Hall of The Overrated', she'd top my ballot followed closely by Baz Luhrmann, but what the hey? Simply invidia right?

As if to chime in on the fun, ThatActionGuy sent in this review on slate msn:

It's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann's dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There's not a single music cue that isn't obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn't been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Out of Africa, and various John Ford cattle-drive pictures being the most obvious referents). But to marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment. Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.

There's more, but you get the vibe.

I've now decided I'm going to wait out this one until it's on DVD.

So Much To Blog, So Little Time

Creepiness Of Asian Sex Tours

This opinion piece caught my eye in the Herald last week.

Prostitution in Thailand is comparable to cricket in Australia. It attracts legions of fans and armies of detractors, while an ambivalent majority wonders what all the fuss is about. But the most ardent fans of Thai prostitution are foreigners.

About 10 per cent of visitors arrive to get their rocks off. In 2005 a British journalist used Thai Immigration Department statistics to show between 25 per cent and 30 per cent more men than women arrive as tourists, concluding almost a million single men travelled to Thailand for sex each year.

According to World Vision, Australians account for 9 per cent of sex tourists arriving in the region. This suggests that almost 100,000 Aussies descend every year on Thailand alone.

Why the exodus to South-East Asia? In my view, it is simply a matter of taste. Some men - a lot of men - prefer Asians. What lies at the heart of Thailand's sex tourism industry is the way we sexually stereotype Asians; about the way Asian women perform in the bedroom and act in a relationship.

When I told my squash partner I was going to Thailand, he said: "You lucky bugger. Sure you don't want company?" He then told me about the good times he'd spent with "tight-bodied Asians".

Maybe I'm just ridiculously naive - I have yet to set foot in a strip joint - but I was shocked to learn three people I knew had been to Thailand, paid for sex, and thought their actions were sufficiently ordinary to talk openly about it without fear of recrimination.

Aah, good old sexploitation, no? The rest of it is a fascinating read too. There's a certain mindset that gets explored really well in the film. 'The Beach' starring Leo DiCaprio. It's a really creepy film about creepy westerners who found a colony of pleasure and leisure, sustained on the marijuana trade. They live in a veritable sexual paradise founded on some kind of perverse utopianism. There's something about Thailand and south east Asia that seems to *inspire* (for want of a better word) this kind of behaviour. It's the stuff of songs like 'Khe San'. It just leaves me cold, but it's interesting it's actually getting discussed in the SMH of all places.

There are plenty of these creepy Gaijins wandering around Roppongi in Tokyo, loudly talking of the Asian pussy they're getting, as if nobody can understand their English. There was a mob of these guys in Hong Kong too, in pinstriped shirts, drinking their beer in Lan-Kwai Fong. I dunno what to make of it. It's as if once in Asia, they know no shame.

More On The Screen Australia Criteria Issue

I found this on Screenhub. I'm sharing it here because more people ought to read it. It's probably going to be frowned upon but what the heck. I want to show you something:

Screen Australia: where did these numbers come from?
by: Alex Prior

Multiple senior sources have confirmed to Screen Hub that key numbers Screen Australia’s draft guidelines were not the outcome of research.

Specifically, the sources claim that the eligibility criteria for writers, directors and producers applying under the Project By Project feature drama development were not checked against the evidence, and directly contradict the evidence from previous internal Australian Film Commission and Film Finance Corporation research.

The eligibility criteria, which are based on the amount of experience a filmmaker, determine who can apply for development funding. The program allows for multiple tranches of funding up to $50,000 in each round. Under the proposed guidelines, the only people eligible are:

An experienced producer must have at least one credit as producer on a feature film that has been released on a minimum of 10 commercial screens in one territory, or exceptional credits in other genres such as a primetime broadcast miniseries or telemovie.

An experienced executive producer must have at least two credits as producer or executive producer on a feature film that has been released on a minimum of 10 commercial screens in one territory, or exceptional credits in other genres such as a primetime broadcast mini-series.

A highly experienced writer or director must have a credit in these roles on at least three features that have been released on a minimum of 10 commercial screens in one territory OR one feature that has been selected for either Cannes, Venice, Berlin main sections OR Sundance or at least two network miniseries that have received significant ratings or critical acclaim.

The criteria are intended to ensure that finance goes to the filmmakers who are most able to deliver successful feature films. They have been highly contentious, with the Australian Writers’ Guild in particular mounting a public campaign against the writing criterion. The Australian Directors Guild has also questioned their validity.

Multiple senior sources have told Screen Hub that the level of three feature films for a writer was never checked against the evidence.

These sources claim that the level of three feature films for writers was first mooted in a position paper written by Screen Australia Project Manager Megan Simpson-Huberman, and eventually incorporated into the guidelines.

[Please note that Screen Australia has replied to this as follows: "Revisions to the draft guidelines based on industry feedback are being considered at today's board meeting, so Screen Australia cannot at this stage respond in detail to the comments made in Friday's article 'Screen Australia: Where did these numbers come from'. However, we wish to immediately place on record how inappropriate and unprofessional it was for the article to name Project Manager Megan Simpson- Huberman as the 'author of the '3 previous credits' eligibility criterion' for writers. This is not the case, although Megan, along with other senior staff, has been participating in the thinking and planning behind the guidelines'. The Executive Management team and the Screen Australia Board take full responsibility for the draft guidelines issued for comment last month, as well as for their eventual final form."]

They also claim that a number of other Screen Australia staff questioned the validity of this criterion for predicting the future success of a screenwriter, and requested that it be reviewed. It was not reviewed.

Another senior, former employee of the Australian Film Commission also questioned this level. The source told Screen Hub that internal research conducted by the AFC between 2000-05 revealed that first-time Australian writers, directors and producers had a much higher rate of success than second-time filmmakers. “You have to do it [fund second features],” the source said. “But it’s a great way to lose money.”

This research was confirmed to Screen Hub by a second source who had worked for the Film Finance Corporation. The FFC had also concluded that second-time projects were much more likely to fail financially than projects from less experienced filmmakers.

The Australian Film Commission had drawn a startling conclusion from this research: that the level of experience within the Australian film industry was too low for one, two or even three successful projects to act as a predictor of future success. Experience levels needed to be higher for accurate predictions to be made.

Based on this research, the Screen Australia guidelines actively exclude the filmmakers most likely to be successful.

The FFC reached a related conclusion. Screen Hub’s source claimed that part of the research had been incorporated in a position paper prepared by the former CEO, Brian Rosen, and provided to Screen Australia. This position paper argued that the focus of Screen Australia’s guidelines should be on supporting talent, rather than experience.

Multiple senior sources also confirmed to Screen Hub that no research had been undertaken by Screen Australia to determine what festivals [Cannes, Venice, Berlin main sections OR Sundance] should count towards a writer’s experience. “This list is made up,” one source said.

The Sydney Film Festival has publicly questioned the validity of this test as a predictor of future feature film success.

The Australian Directors Guild also provided a submission that questioned the validity of the experience levels. The ADG submission provided a list of films by their internationally famous members (Fred Schepsi, Jane Campion among others) that could not have been made under the proposed guidelines governing experience.

President Ray Argall noted the problem. “The thing is,” he said, “that within the Screen Australia research data – all ours [research] was taken from the Screen Australia databases. It’s not hard to see that our successful films have been made by directors who have worked on their films for many, many years. Some of them for ten years. These were directors that drove the project. Their commitment and driving of the project is not reflected in the current guidelines.”

Argall noted that there was a tremendous willingness to change, and an acceptance of the need to change, among directors. “But we’ve made too many mistakes in the past. We have to get it right,” he said.

In an interview late today, Dr Ruth Harley, the new CEO of Screen Australia, confirmed to Screen Hub that the level of experience required for eligibility had not been determined by research: “I think that is correct,” she said. All development of the draft guidelines took place prior to her taking up her responsibilities on Monday.

The bold bit is something I wanted to highlight; I'm quoting all this just to say, I'm not the only one saying the stuff I'm saying here on this blog.These film bureaucrats are irresponsible idiots with way too much power over the careers of people, and no accountability for their stupid, moronic, imbecilic, retarded decisions. This Screen Australia business is turning into a nightmare from day one.

Look at it this way. If the Australian Film industry has been producing roughly 15 films a year for a decade, that's 150 films we're talking about. If there was one credit per film we're talking about 150 writing credits. divide that by the requisite 3, and suddenly you're talking about a poll of only 50 writers, assuming the optimal 50 writers who all participated and scored 3 writing credits each. Less so, with shared credits.You're talking about a pool of 20-30 writers at best.

No wonder the Writers' Guild is up in arms: it excludes the vast majority of its members, and that means the very future of the Guild is at stake. It's simply not workable to have the Guild narrow down to a Club of 20-30 and still sustain itself.

The other issue is this: the vast majority of those 150 films would have been market flops. By demanding the 3 credits from that motley crew of misbegotten films, aren't the Screen Australia criteria REWARDING FAILURE instead of success by holding such arbitrary standards?

Try Getting Your Head Around This One

$295 billion Bail Out For Citigroup

Not a day goes by without some drastic news. The stock market keeps going down and occasionally perking up in some kind of mad hallucinatory rush that everything might be okay, only to find out it isn't, and plunges further. It's a dog-eat-other-dog-as-sushi kind of world.

The US government is now bailing out Citigroup to the tune of $500b.

The US government has unveiled a bold plan to rescue troubled Citigroup, including taking a stake in the firm as well as guaranteeing $US306 billion ($500 billion) in risky assets.

The banking giant will also get a $US20 billion cash infusion from the Treasury Department, adding to the $US25 billion the bank received last month under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

In return for the cash and guarantees, the government will get $US27 billion ($43 billion) of preferred shares paying an 8% dividend. That is higher than the 5% the government charges dozens of other lenders under its $US700 billion financial industry rescue package.

The action, announced jointly by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, is aimed at shoring up a huge financial institution whose collapse would wreak havoc on the already crippled financial system and the US economy.

The sweeping plan is geared to stemming a crisis of confidence in the company, whose stock has been hammered in the past week on worries about its financial health.

"With these transactions, the US government is taking the actions necessary to strengthen the financial system and protect US taxpayers and the US economy,'' the three agencies said in a statement issued today.

The decision came after Citigroup's tumbling share price sparked concern that nervous depositors might pull their money and destabilise the company, which has $US2 trillion of assets and operations in more than 100 countries.

"It really was a must-do thing,'' said Nader Naeimi, a strategist at AMP Capital Investors. "If they'd let Citigroup go, that would've been disastrous.''

Citigroup agreed to absorb the first $US29 billion of losses on the $US306 billion portfolio, plus 10% of additional losses, for a maximum total exposure of $US56.7 billion.

The Treasury Department could end up absorbing $US5 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp $US10 billion, and the Federal Reserve the rest.

Talk about a house of cards! After all the bickering over 700billion, they're simply throwing 500billion at this problem. Now, here's something else to ponder in all this mess:

Naomi Klein Cries Foul

Naomi Klein's one of those thinkers that seem to come out of the far left. I liked her stance when she was doing 'No Brands' as a movement, but as that movement blossomed into a global network of activists that seemed to picket the World Bank and IMF meetings, I kind of lost interest.That's just me, and not her message's fault or her fault. I'm just a little JP Sartre in those moments as I've discovered.


Here she is, saying the way Washington is handling the actual bail out is borderline criminal.

In a moment of high panic in late September, the US Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed--a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending--for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc.--is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.

I definitely agree with all that. If you found all that interesting, then here's more.

Naomi Klein: Well, there's a few elements now that are being described as illegal that we're finding out. First of all, the equity deals that were negotiated with the largest banks and also some smaller banks, representing $250 billion worth of the bailout money, this is the deal to inject capital into the banks in exchange for equity. The idea was to address the so-called credit crunch to get banks lending again. The legislation that enabled this was quite explicit that it had to encourage lending. Barney Frank, who was one of the architects of that legislation, has said that it violates the act if the money is not going to that purpose and is instead going to bonuses, is instead going to dividends, going to salaries, going to mergers. He said that violates the acts, i.e. it's illegal. But what we know is that it's going precisely to those purposes. It is going to bonuses. It is going to shareholders. And it is not going to lending. The banks have been quite explicit about this. Citibank has talked about using the money to buy other banks.

Then there's other aspects of this that are borderline illegal. We found out that in the midst of the crisis, the Bush Treasury Department pushed through a tax windfall for the banks, a piece of legislation that allows the banks to save a huge amount of money when they merge with each other. And the estimate is that this represents a loss of $140 billion worth of tax revenue for the US government. Many tax attorneys who were interviewed by the Washington Post said that they felt that the way in which the Treasury Department went about this by unilaterally changing the tax code was illegal, that this had to include Congress. Congress only found out about it after the fact.

There's another piece of this puzzle that is also borderline illegal, which is that in addition to the $700 billion that we are discussing, the $700 billion bailout, there's another $2 trillion that's been handed out by the Federal Reserve in emergency loans to financial institutions, to banks, that actually we don't really know who they're handing the money out to, because, apparently, it's a secret. They could be handing it out to a range of other corporations -- I think they are -- but they're saying that they won't disclose who has received these taxpayer loans, because it could cause a run on the banks, it could cause the market to lose confidence in the institutions that have taken these loans. Once again, that represents an additional $2 trillion.

If that doesn't make your blood boil, I don't know what will. These people are losing your net worth to the four winds as they pocket tax dollars as bonuses and service fees. It's insane. Add on top of it the $295.2billion to bail out Citigroup, and the money used to bail out AIG twice, you get the feeling this is all just one big con... but of course, nobody's talking about it too loud.

A Cool Link You Should Bookmark

This one came in the email today. It's a pretty cool blog. I found this link through their blog.

The G-20 came to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before announcing that they were really serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are doing something. Meanwhile, the former bit player known as reality has taken center stage in the ship's main lounge. It is putting on an act even gnarlier than the Kit Kat Klub show in Cabaret.

This reality show is sending some clear signals to the denizens of the real and really crowded world. The main signal is that the trade and financing rackets of recent decades are over. The extravaganza of economic hypergrowth based on cheap resources is over. The promiscuous swapping around of risk and rewards is over. There is no global institutional framework for managing the impairment left in the wake of this binge. It will be up to the individual nations now to figure out their national lives and livings.

Alas, the financial impairment is still on-going world-wide and has quite a ways to run before it's finished working its hoodoo on the so-called advanced economies. The lame duck US economic posse so far has done everything possible except the two things that really matter: allow the fraudulent securities at the heart of the problem to be exposed to the light of day to determine their actual value; and allow those companies who trafficked in them to suffer the full consequences by going out-of-business. For the moment, they're content to shovel cash into the truck-bed of every enterprise in America that shows up at the Treasury loading dock. This can only have the effect of eventually destroying the value of that cash.

Aiyah. The rest of it's pretty intense too, and his message echoes Peter Schiff who I pointed to a several days ago. While he indicates the US economy and its citizens is about to head for a totally different kind fo economic landscape as a result of this crisis, one gets the feeling that nobody can quite imagine how destrictive and transformative this change is going to be. The unravelling of decades-long assumptions and baselines is going to adversely affect everybody across the globe. It's sobering and depressing, not that I was drunk on credit or happy to be in hock before.

Yankee Hotstove

This Week's Yankees News Brings...

C.C. Sabathia's Big Offer

C.C. Sabathia, the top pitching Free Agent this year found not a horses head but a 6 year $140million contract offer from the Yankees. I think they call those offers you can't refuse. Sabathia's other offer is in the $100million range from the Brewers for whom he did half a season of rental work. Nobody else has put anything on th table, because nobody else needs Sabathia like the Yankees do. C.C. has said he likes the NL, the batting, the Left Coast and whatever else but f the Yankees come calling, do you really turn them down?

If he does and signs with the Brewers, that will be the toughest, biggest call made by an athlete in the Free Agent era. Leaving $40 million on the table is going to be an amazing thing. There's even speculation that the Players Association might just lean on Sabathia to take that Yankee offer if nothing else manifests in the same vicinity.

Fans object too much when players go for the money.It's the only moment where they get to put their talents on the market and have the oners bid for their talents in an unrestricted way. It's not the drfta or the arbitration, and it takes them a long time to get there. At th end of the day, it's "show me the money", but it's also, "only money". If Sabathia went elsewhere for the money, I can't really object.

Heck, I'd go for the money. Well, I'm a Yankee fan, so I'd go for Yankee money any day, but that's besides the point. As the standard joke gos, "sure I'd listen if 20th Century Fox called up and gave me a 3 picture deal."

Hal Takes Over As MLB Point Man

Hal Steinbrenner, the younger of the two 'Steinbratz' has been accepted as the controlling owner of the New York Yankees, replacing his old man George. We've known for some time that George was fading out of the picture, but this announcement pretty much settles it. Hal, the young sane one, has remained reasonable under the press glare. One sort of wonders if this is the beginning of a more sane, corporate Yankees.

Hank for all his bluster to the press, doesn't seem to be the over-riding voice. It really does seem the troika of the Steinbrenner brothers and Brian Cashman are steering the Yankees. The wish of every long-standing Yankees fan - apart from a World Series ring every year - is that the Yankees at least behave a bit more normally than their turbulent years; though the benefit and the harm of the tubulence (and the lack thereof) tends to get over-stated, it's sane management we want.

Other than to note it, I won't eulogise the passing of the George Steinbrenner era. The man is not yet dead, and I do wish him more years with better health. For me, the memories are all golden.

Mike Mussina's Retirement

Moose hung up his cleats. He has told the press that it was always the plan from january this year. I know I'm going to miss Moose. he was always good for a quip or a quote according to the press men. He always struck me as a obsessive, but it's always the crafty pitchers you remember. Him and Orlando Hernandez must be two of my favourite pitchers to watch.

He's also doing the extremely difficult - he's leaving the game on his own terms. He still has a lot left in the tank. The projections on him have him at 3.1 wins above replacement level, making him the 4th most valuable pitcher out there in the Free Agent market.

Just Where Was Joe DiMaggio As A Nation Turned Its Lonely Eyes?


Well, for a start, he was married to Marylin Monroe. There's a cool link here.

He was then 39, she was 27. They had been married in January of that year, 1954, despite disharmony in temperament and time; he was tired of publicity, she was thriving on it; he was intolerant of tardiness, she was always late. During their honeymoon in Tokyo an American general had introduced himself and asked if, as a patriotic gesture, she would visit the troops in Korea. She looked at Joe. “It’s your honeymoon,” he said, shrugging, “go ahead if you want to.”

She appeared on 10 occasions before 100,000 servicemen, and when she returned, she said, “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”

“Yes, I have,” he said.

Ain't that the way?

Quantum of Solace

I Too Refused To See 'Australia' This Weekend

It's the new Bond movie! How can I refuse?

This is the power of a franchise movie. It carries the legacy of former films into the new film's marketing. If there are 22 films and you liked 6-7 of them previously, then you're going to feel a strong pull to see that instead of the latest film about... Australia. Well, I live here so I can't get too excited about that, can I? Or should I? I'll find out next week when I'll attempt to go see it.

In the mean time, the eternal allure of a Bond movie is action, glamour, gorgeous women, bad villains who get their comeuppance, a Walther PPK and an Aston Martin. The world's the stage, the fun should be stratospheric. At least that's always the promise.

What's Good About It

It's like going to a wedding. The same things happen at each wedding but the actors change each time you go to a wedding. A Bond movie is a little like that. It satisfies the essential ritualistic plot requirements nicely: car chase, fist fight, foot race, shoot'em up, sneaking around, bedding lovely ladies, and a building goes up in flames in the climax. Aren't these staples of Bond movies?

They're all there. What's missing? 'Q' and gadgets, and you don't really miss them. There's even a dogfight in the air where Bond pilots a DC3 in this one. It's pretty 'out there'. Otherwise, the requisite content of mayhem takes place as if ticking boxes. It was missing a ski-chase, but it did have a sky-dive. It was missing submarines, satellites and snorkels and sharks but it had a love-interest from Russia.

There's a feeling that the MI6 in the current Bond Movies with Judy Dench as M has been brought up to date in their daily operations. Gone are the stuffy offices from previous Bond movies, and they sport fashionable metallic grey columns and contemporary modern architecture everywhere. I don't know if this is great, but it's good that there's a desire to bring the MI6 aspect into the films. With it comes a plethora of organisational demands on the character of Bond. These are all interesting, as they impact on his decision making.

What's Bad About It

The directing of action. It's godawful.

It's a recent trend where action sequences simply cut to the moment, but in doing so a lot of these actions don't make much spatial sense. One of the first sequences where Bond and an enemy agent Mitchell fall through a glass ceiling and end up hanging from scaffolds is an example, where you actually can't figure out where the fulcrum of the lever sits in the room. As a consequence, it looks like Bond suddenly grabs the gun in the nick of time (which you don't see) and shoots the guy while hanging upside down, without actually seeing the bad guy's action.

It seems to be a new trend where action directors simply abdicate their responsibility as directors and just ignore the basics in order to make it 'look' more exciting by adding confusion. It's a terrible ploy because it makes the action not only incomprehensible, but inscrutable to analysis - because there probably isn't any content. Left to right, right to left, up, down, it's all a jumble in most of these sequences. Some times you can't tell who Bond is punching or shooting.

Put it this way, the plot made sense, the action didn't. If the plot doesn't make sense, you can pin that on the writer, but if the action doesn't make sense, then you can pin that on the director. This film was borderline incoherent towards the end and pretty irrational and idiotic in parts - but that's par for the course for a Bond movie. Complaining about those is a bit like complaining that there's too much sugar in candy.

Now there's an idea. Diet Candy.

What's Interesting About It


It's one of the problems of movies about Superheroes that the first film that explains how they came to be who they are is less interesting than the sequels. So, 'Superman 2' is more interesting than 'Superman 1'; 'Dark Knight' is more interesting than 'Batman Begins'; 'Spiderman 2' is more interesting than 'Spiderman 1'; and the only exception is the Hulk franchise where both Hulk films are just oddly tedious.

Having said that, in each incarnation of Bond, the franchise simply just got to the action at hand. The only time it vaguely addressed the creation of Bond so to speak was the recent 'Casino Royale'. In this instance, the second film achieves nowhere near the intrigue of the first. Olga Kurylenko's Camille Montes is attractive, cool yet sassy, and very athletic, she is nowhere near as interesting as Vesper from the previous film. Rightfully, Vesper was the one woman Bond loved. In this film, we're just working through the process and progress of his revenge.

If Bond has a greater character arc, then I can't imagine there are more than 3-5 films they can make with Daniel Craig as Bond in this incarnation. That story is needing to be paid off. If the previous sins of the Bond franchise was the endless pilgrimage of mayhem with no character resolution, we're finding out the consequences of actually having a real character arc.

Pretty soon, Craig's Bond is going to have to uncover who these 'Quantum' villains are and find the equivalent of Blofeld and visit righteous vengeance upon their sorry posteriors. And that's it. beyond it remains the endless pilgrimage of mayhem as normal - i.e. it would be back to business of Bond. In a sense the Bond movies with Daniel Craig can't get slack on the character arc because they would lose their meaning. We know why Bond moves in a 'brutally efficient' way. He has to pay off that big motivation across the next couple of movies. After which, we'll ask, "then what?" Hopefully it will be a different world by then.

The Spy Genre Today

We keep seeing movies with spies in them, creating some sort of havoc or another. John LeCarre once described the perfect spy as little grey men with little charisma. Yet we keep seeing charismatic actors hurl themselves across adventures with reckless abandon as bullets fly everywhere and explosions colour the background as they do their charismatic stuff.It reminds me of the mid to late 1980s where you suddenly saw a resurgence of what can only be described as Pro-Military films, which culminated in the the Gulf War experience of 1991 where news reporters inserted themselves into the story as they reported 'live from Baghdad'. Pretty weird to think about, even today.

So here's my question: Do you think you're being recruited? Do you feel like you've been recruited to be James Bond for your cause, all these years?

I wonder how effective a real spy can be today, given that the conflict has split out of one racial hegemony. Part of the reason why spy fiction doesn't grow in say, Japan is because it's really hard to write how a Japanese agent might function in the West when it's easy to spot that your main character is Asian. It's hard enough for them to work in China. This is why they have ninja fiction instead, set in a time without westerners wandering around. The hegemony of culture allows the ninja to play the subterfuge.

Conversely it's hard to operate a James Bond in say, Japan without taking into account that the race+language+culture+custom gap puts him on the outer. In 'You Only Live Twice', Connery's Bond essentially gets around Japan with the help of Testuro Tamba's Tiger Tanaka as local guide.

The essence of the spy is to get closer to the object through subterfuge and appearing to be trustworthy. You sort of wonder how close a blonde James Bond (or even Leo DiCaprio's character in 'Body of Lies') could get to Osama bin Laden, ensconced deep in north Pakistan.

Yet, in a time when Europe and North America seems to have overcome its own inner turmoil - they're all allies now, the need for spies within the same hegemony must have diminished somewhat. That means they need spies to operate outside of the hegemony, and one wonders how effective this could really be, and if there really can be a film about spies going on into the future which feature hyper-caucasian dudes and dudettes at the centre of action.

It's not surprising Bond's current enemies seem to be some kind of Euro Terror mob.

What Are the Russian Communists Complaining About Olga For?

I just couldn't see it. Those people just want to complain until they die. Look, USSR is dead. Get over it. Olga's going where the money is. You want to make movies with Olga kicking bad capitalist American and English posteriors, you can fund your own movies and see how far you go. Knowing the Commies, they'll create a funding body with criteria that resembles what we have in Australia, and proceed to produce a string of money-losing, ideologically sound movies.

What a pack of chumps.

Hitler Only Had One Testicle (And Other News Fit To Punt)

Hitler One-Ball

There's not go beating about the bush, because there's only one ball to begin with.

AN extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one ball.
War veteran Johan Jambor made the revelation to a priest in the 1960s, who wrote it down.

The priest’s document has now come to light – 23 years after Johan’s death.

The war tyrant’s medical condition has been mocked for years in a British song.

The lyrics are: “Hitler has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall. His mother, the dirty b****r, cut it off when he was small.’

Until now there has never been complete proof Hitler was monorchic – the medical term for having one testicle.

But the document tells how Johan saw the proof with his own eyes. In the account, he relives the horror of serving as an army medic in World War I.

He died aged 94 in 1985, but had told his secret to priest Franciszek Pawlar, who kept a note of their conversation.

Johan’s friend Blassius Hanczuch confirmed the priest’s account of how the medic saved Hitler’s life. He said: “In 1916 they had their hardest fight in the Battle of the Somme.

“For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler.

“They called him the ‘Screamer’. He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help’.

“His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: ‘Will I be able to have children?’.”

Blassius said that when the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler.

Hitler’s genitals have long caused controversy. Some historians dismissed the “one ball” song as propaganda. But an alleged Soviet autopsy on Hitler backed it up.

Records show Hitler did suffer a groin injury in the Somme.

It is the first time an interview with anyone who treated Hitler during WWI has come to light.

Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer at Newcastle University School of Historical Studies, said last night: “This genuinely new twist is fascinating.”

This must be a hoax, it's just too good to be true. :)

Tame And Lame But Crazy All The Same...

Keith Roy Weatherly, 46, loved his pasta sauce, but not in the normal way.

A MAN caught by police with his penis inside a pasta sauce jar was still pleasuring himself while resisting arrest, a court has been told.

Police drew their weapons after New South Wales man Keith Roy Weatherley, 46, led them on a brief, slow-speed car chase, the Newcastle Herald reports.

Weatherley attracted police attention while he was parked in a no-stopping zone near Nobby's Beach on October 26, Newcastle Local Court was told yesterday.

Police thought he might have a weapon because they saw him doing something with his hands in his lap, the Herald said.

Instead, they found him partially clothed with his genitals in a jar, a police statement said.

That's when the pursuit began, the court was told.

When Weatherley was stopped, he refused to leave his car and four officers used batons and capsicum spray to get him out.

They found a 750mm jar around his penis and said Weatherley attempted to continue "pleasuring himself in between bouts of wrestling".

A search of his car uncovered pornography, a homemade sex aid, women's stockings and a Jack Russell terrier.

Weatherley pleaded guilty to offensive behaviour, resisting police and disobeying a police direction.

He was convicted and fined $600.

Convicted and fined $600? As opposed to what? $500 plus GST?

And what was the Jack Russell Terrier doing there? :)

At Last, A Grand Jury With Guts

Dick Cheney, the outgoing Vice President of the USA is up on charges and not a moment too soon!

A TEXAS grand jury has indicted US Vice President Dick Cheney for conspiring to block an investigation into abuse at privately run prisons.

The three-page indictment alleges that Mr Cheney profited from the abuse because he invested $US85 million ($131 million) in the Vanguard Group - an investment management company that reportedly has interests in the prison companies in charge of the detention centres.

It said this was a "direct conflict of interest'' because Mr Cheney had influence over the federal contracts awarded to the prison companies.

The indictment also accused Mr Cheney of committing "at least misdemeanour assaults'' of inmates by allowing other inmates to assault them.

The indictment further alleges that former attorney-general Alberto Gonzalez "participated by further having used his position ... to stop the investigations as to the wrongdoings which includes the assaults committed in the prison for profit in Willacy County, Texas".

How good is that? Dick Cheney is getting charged with engaging in organised criminal activity. Now, one wonders if Mr Bush is going to pardon him on the last day of his own Presidecy? Don't count it out; it's how Tricky Dicky Nixon got his 'get out of jail free' card from Gerald Ford.

Stars In Their Eyes

The Good News First

Baz Luhrman's Australia made it's debut in the last 24 hrs and nobody has condemned it to death... yet. It's good because so much is riding on the success of this film. Here's the funny thing. If 20th Century Fox made a film set in England using English actors, nobody really bats an eye-lid. If they do so with Australian actors in a film about some portion of Australia's landscape, it turns into a media circus.

The most expensive Australian film ever made is rousing and passionate. Despite some cringe-making Harlequin Romance moments between homegrown Hollywood stars Kidman and Jackman, the 1940s-set Australia defies all but the most cynical not to get carried away by the force of its grandiose imagery and storytelling.

The Reporter noted the film was much less earnest than the trailer suggested.

Even if it does run a butt-numbing two hours and 45 minutes, the film has broad appeal for international audiences with plenty of stirring action sequences to make the blokes more comfortable with a particularly blatant shot of bare-chested Jackman lathering up under the shower.

But other reviews have been considerably more measured. The Age in Melbourne damned the film with faint praise, saying: "In what has to be the most hyped and self-consciously local film since 1984's The Man From Snowy River, the anxiously anticipated Australia is not a bad film. But it's far from a great one, and certainly not one destined to be a classic."

In a review tagged with 3½ stars out of five, The Sydney Morning Herald's Sandra Hall described Australia as much too long at almost three hours, shamelessly overdone an outback adventure seen through the eyes of a filmmaker steeped in the theatrical rituals and hectic colours of old-fashioned showbiz.

In The Australian, David Stratton went for the same rating. He mixed enthusiasm for the film with disappointment. While he praised the sweep, scope and acting, he noted the cliches and familiar elements.

The obvious conclusion to draw from that is that Australia as a country is under-exposed to the world, and perhaps even to itself. At this point in history, the movie-watching audience of Australia (Let's call them MWAA for short) are ready to consume anything if there are Australian stars in it, together in a film about Australia. Perhaps the scale of production that is 'Australia' *should* be the norm, but alas, it's a once in a decade event.

It's a little sad that after all the hoopla, the film ends up with a 3.5/5 star rating, but in many ways, that is exactly what all competent films earn these days. They're the most boring kind of movie! In any case, the fact that the critics have not dumped all over it means that it probably won't be orphaned straight to a DVD release or be available for $7.99 on supermarket shelves too soon. It may even make its money back worldwide - I certainly hope it does.

The Bad News

The bad news is that there's really nothing from Australia to follow it up. If 'Australia' is successful, then you hope that there is a plethora of product so follow in its steps, but there won't be. So for better or for worse, the success or possible lack thereof) will become the de facto litmus test on our ability to make films.

The really bad news is that Australian stars generally don't want to come back and make movies here, so Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman deserve some praise for that fact alone. It kind of makes it even more stark that there are so few films made with our bankable international stars, back home in Australia.

Unfortunately, even after 2 Star Wars movies, 3 Matrix movies and a raft of other Hollywood fare was shot in Australia, none of those films catalysed an equivalent rise in Australian production. Instead, what we've seen is a steady flow of Australian acting talent moving abroad on the back of those films. Production back here by our producers ad writers and directors, has tanked completely. Even 'Australia' is actually an American film which just happens to use our talent.

What is doubly unfortunate for an Australian producer is that to get a film up with any scope of real international success, that is to say, the point is to make a film that will find an audience as readily as an American or English film, the producer needs to get commitments out of A-List actors. Even if they are Aussies, you have to know they are very ill-disposed towards coming back to do something here. Even getting a rejection from these people is very tricky, because usually they throw an agent in the way, who then asks for pre-sales on the project before even showing the project to his/her client.

Here's the catch: Most Australian productions can't get a pre-sale exactly because it doesn't have an international star attached. And there's the agent there saying, "if you don't have some kind of pre-sale arrangement..."

So the International A-list actor gets to say 'no, piss-off' without actually saying no, or taking the negative hit for having said no. It's kind of pathetic how for the sake of their PR, they would want to have 'plausible deniability of their rejection', but that is exactly where we stand with our own talent. I can write a long list of Australian actors who have use this ploy to stiff projects I've been on but I won't; however, I will report that Hugh Jackman and his office is one of them who has played this game.

Thus many Australian projects die waiting to hear from their own stars ho have made it, as do the projects that get hobble, nobbled, crippled and fucked by the various funding bodies. That's still the bad news.

Why don't we make commercial films here? Because the stars of the private sector refuse to, which results in the public sector marketing a line of far, far inferior products. That's it in a nutshell.

Looking At It From Their Point Of View

Imagine you're one of these guys or gals. You grow up in Australia, and you decide to become an actor. You do some crappy films with Australian crews and miraculously something breaks internationally. So you hike it out to London or LA, and you beat out rest of the fame-hungry crowd and make it to the top eventually. You're a bankable leading star, with a limited shelf-life.

You sure as hell don't feel like coming back to where you started to make some crappy under-developed film with crews from Australia when you could be working with world-renown writers, producers, directors and sitting in comfortable, air-conditioned trailers filled with your whimiscal riders, in between changing set-ups as you have some gorgeous assistant satisfy your every sexual impulse and desire?

Why would you give that up?

Or, if you want the baseball-metaphor version, why the hell would a Major-Leaguer come back and play Rookie Ball?

What The Australian Government Must Do

Each time I write an entry about why and how the Australian Film Industry is... err, ...for want of a better word, FUCKED, I am asked to write how it could be different. It could be different in several ways.

1) The Government should get out of development.

2) The Government should create a domestic market for domestic films instead.

3) The Government should facilitate producers, not vet or veto.

The logical extension of this is that they should shut down all government funding agencies.They should all shut up shop. It ain't working, and it never will, and it's high tide they stopped spending money on them.

Instead, the Government should come up with a fund to spend money strictly on advertising and marketing Australian films. They MUST get right out of production and development. It should come up with laws making it mandatory that a certain percentage of Australian screens have to screen works by Australian creatives. This will put an artificial demand on the likes of Greater Union to invest in product that they think will sell in those mandatory blocks, because writing off those empty cinemas will send them to the wall. Right now, it's too easy for them to make a living off showing American films with impunity.

There should be an agency, preferably the Commonwealth Bank of Australia that looks after producers that acts as a 'funding Kiosk'. The producer should turn up with a script and a budget. The Government lends a sum up to a certain dollar for that producer to take and get that film made. The Producer then takes that dollar sum, script, budget and perhaps whatever package, and then goes to an Australian distributor - who by law must get screen product to fit the screen quota - a deal. The Producer then takes that deal overseas and sews up the rest of the deals. When the deal is set up, the producer has to return the loan or have his production shut down. Pretty simple.

Needless to say there should be no assessment criteria for the CONTENT of the script. Just the budget and genre, in terms of feasibility. The CBA must determine if they think the film might be commercially viable.

If the Producer fails to get the picture up, they have to return the money at CPI interest rates.  That means a producer has to be pretty certain his or her movie is going to be internationally profitable before he develops it. In other words, let the market decide what a good Australian film might be - not some funding body run by film bureaucrats who miss far more than they hit, and seem totally unaccountable for their failures.

Will this ever happen? I doubt it. There's just too much convention and tradition and bad habits and acceptance of these terrible choices, all wrapped up in the model of government funding that has existed in Australia for so long. However it needs to happen if politicians really think they want to stop hemorrhaging government money on Australian films that Australians don't want to see.

UPDATE:
This came in from Pleiades who is a fully paid up member of the Australian Writers Guild. The text in full reads:

MEDIA RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SCREEN AUSTRALIA ABANDONS AUSTRALIA’S SCREENWRITERS

OSCAR NOMINATED WRITERS SAYS PROPOSED GUIDELINES SPELL DISASTER FOR INDUSTRY

Wednesday 19 November: The Australian Writers’ Guild has expressed alarm at Screen Australia’s draft guidelines and the impact they will have on the future of Australia’s film industry.

One of Australia’s most successful screenwriters, Oscar nominated Jan Sardi (Shine, The Notebook, Mao’s Last Dancer) says “Far from taking the Australian film industry in a new direction, Screen Australia's proposed guidelines spell disaster for an industry already on its knees.”

If the proposed draft guidelines of Screen Australia are put into practice, future funding eligibility requirements for screenwriters will be so high they will exclude all but a handful of professional writers and force others into potentially unproductive partnerships before the first draft is even written.

Funding for first-time and emerging screenwriters will also be completely abandoned and a total disregard is shown for the basic rights of writers through the proposed early transfer of copyright without any mandated protections.

In initial consultations Screen Australia acknowledged the importance of quality scripts in the creation of outstanding films and television programs, and expressed a commitment to supporting writers with the time and money necessary to write them. Their proposed guidelines however show an abject failure to fulfill these commitments.

“Abandoning emerging screenwriters and inflicting shotgun weddings on experienced writers, directors and producers reeks of a government bureaucracy all too eager to divest itself of responsibility and accountability for where Australian taxpayers money goes - it is not the way forward,” says Sardi.

Australian Writers’ Guild Executive Director, Jacqueline Woodman, says “In their eagerness to establish sustainable businesses and let the marketplace develop and promote projects, Screen Australia appears to have forgotten that before there can be a project to be developed, a script must first be written.”

The Australian Writers’ Guild demands that Screen Australia respond publicly to the proposals outlined in their recent submission and intends to actively campaign against the adoption of the federal agency’s proposed guidelines that attack the status and rights of Australian screenwriters.

The Australian Writers’ Guild full submission to Screen Australia is available from www.awg.com.au.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION OR TO REQUEST AN INTERVIEW, PLEASE CONTACT: DEBBIE McINNES, DEBBIE MCINNES PUBLIC RELATIONS Tel: 02 9550 9207 Mob: 0412 818 071 e: debbie@dmcpr.com.au

Take that, Dr. Ruth Harley, wherever you are! The bit in bold is pretty important - I did that.

This is the sort of government ham-fisted non-help that I'm talking about! Get out of development if you're going to impose dumb rules on who gets to write!

If the Screen Australia policy is to only back experienced writers, then it is a sign that they are looking at the industry top-down. It's understandable in that they think it would reduce their risks; however it flies in the face of the reality where films are developed bottom up by people who want to make something out of ideas, and develop them into stories and then scripts and finally films. That's the bottom-up reality of film-making. If the Screen Australia policy is to exclude those people, then there is going to be no future as they will keep making fewer and fewer films as the pool of 'experienced writers' grows older, smaller, and die; and nobody new gets to replace them.

Doing The Numbers

How Many More Times (...Will You Treat Me The Way You Always Do)?

I started posting songs on iCompositions about 4 years ago. It was Australia Day weekend and I was bored and I thought "why not?". There was a bit more to it, but I'll talk about it some other day.  I've since posted 200 songs and pulled down 100 of those for review and remixes.

The thing about music recording is that I spent a good deal of my adult life wanting to do it without having the means. Now that I have just about all the equipment I need to record rock music in my bedroom and lounge, I've been able to produce all the stuff I wanted to. It's all stuff that has been clogging my mind for years. It's really hard to get creative about things when you have so many unfulfilled ideas, because you start to think, "what's the point of adding another song/script/idea to the pile of unfinished song/script/ideas?" It's just rough.

Having the means of production is no small thing. It makes all the difference for the artist. A painter needs his paints and canvas and easel. It's all they need, but the difference between having and not having is a colossal one. Similarly with music, having the ability to make your own recordings is a great step forwards for the aspiring recording artist. As a result of having the means of production, I've been able to exorcise the huge frustration that used to block my thoughts.

In the process, I've learnt a few things that are probably worth relating to people. No. 1 on my list of lessons is that quantity matters. When I started uploading, I thought I had my own style and execution totally sussed, because I had thought about it for so many years. All I had to do was execute. What I've learned from having recorded the 200+ pieces of bits of music is that I couldn't have been further from the truth. The recording artist and musician that I am today is actually a very different artist and musician to the one I thought I was when I walked into this process.

What's different now? I actually have a different sense for how I ant to engineer and mix my material. I also have a different feel for how I arrange my material, and this leads to a greater sense of freedom to go forwards and do different things. There are more experiments I want to undertake, but I have a better guess as to which ones are likely to yield interesting results while others would be boring.

I've only been able to come to see all this because I have done so many recordings and lived through so many different musical moments of my own devising that it has transformed me.Having done so much, I have a much better understanding of my own music. The delusions are gone, replaced by a sanguine perspective on just how good/not-so-good I actually am. Your own work does not lie. It is pretty descriptive of the limits of your own talent. Nonetheless when you get there, the limits don't bother you so much because the self-knowledge is very empowering and enriches one's artistic life.

The reason I am relating this is not to beat my chest, but because it also relates to how I feel about things I have directed. I've listed the most important things I've directed in my 'Art Neurography' section, but I've also done a lot more. The thing about experience is that it all amounts to something inside your brain. I no longer have crazy impulses to do whacky stuff, I'm actually more interested in coherent ideas and concepts in films, mostly as a result of having worked through enough ideas, whims, fancies and problems.

The lesson to be drawn from this is that the only way a group of works can really be understood as a oeuvre is if there is a mass or volume of work from which salient features emerge - something we can call 'perspective'. And it's a rule of thumb that can be applied to so many creative areas. It doesn't matter how talented an artist is, until they've painted 100, 300, 500, they actually won't have a grip on who they are as an artist and where they are going with their craft and talent. Quantity, and the generation of quantity is vital.

Truth be known, this is actually what is making Australian Film worse. With only 10-20 films being produced a year, there's no way known that Australian Cinema can actually develop a kind of perspective on itself, as a creative endeavor. There just isn't the volume of work from which we can actually draw conclusions or understanding of the salient features of Australian Cinema, let alone getting any much-needed perspective.

And while there is hardly any quantity on the table to survey, we'll never really know or understand what exactly it is that Australian cinema is saying to the world, but all the while those film bureacrats are trying to assess if your script and mine are sufficiently 'Australian'.

It's worrisome, isn't it?

Meet The New Boss...

...Same As The Old Boss

The newly forming Screen Australia is going to get a new CEO, Dr Ruth Harley. Dr. Harley has been in charge of the NZ Film Commission for 10 years and that track record is worth a little bit of scrutiny if only to decipher what she might do with the newly formed SA.Today, Pleiades sent in this link, which might shed some light on her modus operandi, as seen by one of NZ's top producers.

The New Zealand criticism came from John Barnett, the head of South Pacific Pictures, which has produced the film Whale Rider and TV series Shortland Street and Outrageous Fortune, among many others.

He archly questioned the performance of the NZFC without mentioning its CEO of 10 years by name. "There will be some who will say the timing of this article is due to the departure of the chief executive," Barnett wrote in New Zealand screen magazine Onfilm.

"It's not. I've expressed this frustration and these views to politicians and NZFC board members over the past seven to eight years. There is no willingness to even debate. There is a mistaken belief that all is well, and a consequent complacency."

Barnett expressed many views of the NZFC that have been thrown at its equivalent Australian screen agency, the FFC and now Screen Australia: that its development schemes are flawed, funding choices poor and it is unaccountable for its decisions.

He highlighted NZFC's poor track record in developing and funding commercially successful films. He wrote that the highest-earning eight of the top 10 NZ films by box office revenue alone were developed outside the NZFC development scheme.

"Over 80 projects are now being developed for an industry that makes four films a year. One hundred producers, writers, directors are kept on a drip feed from development -- but where are the outcomes?" Barnett asked.

Dr Harley comes to the position with a great deal of goodwill and respect from those Australian producers and bureaucrats who dealt with her at the NZFC.

Hang right there. I've not really looked closely at Dr Harley, but I'm immediately suspicious to find Australian film bureaucrats like this person. Let's be blunt, they probably like her exactly because she is unlikely to change the overall function and modus operandi of the new Screen Australia from that of its ugly and ineffectual predecessors. That fact alone rings alarm bells in my head because if it's going to be business a usual, we can surely expect the same old outcomes as before.

I imagine the Australian film bureaucrats are collectively breathing a sigh of relief that at least they can keep pulling down their Commonwealth Government paychecks as they pay off their mortgages and make their leasing payments for their European cars. If Dr Ruth Harley were anything like a Hollywood exec like, say, a Michael Ovitz, the first thing to happen would be to sack all these incompetents and bring in proper development people from LA - in which case those people would be mounting a public and private war to stop it from happening. The seemingly very placid nature of the transfer from the FFC to the Screen Australia betrays the fact that it's going to be business as usual for these film apparatchiks. *ugh* The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off that they make such a good living out of killing what I chose as my business, my industry.

Indeed, the figure of 80 projects in development limbo while only 4 films get made each year in New Zealand has a very familiar ring to our situation over here. These are not remarkable or good results. I am now convinced that we are going to continue to make crap movies nobody wants to see under this new arrangement.

Count me amongst the depressed.

Space, The Final Frontier

Up In A Space Elevator

Back in the days when I first started blogging, one of the main interest areas for me was space exploration that actually had a commercial basis. This led to extensive blogging about the Space-X prize and the first private enterprise party to get to space. We (it was a collective blog back then) also thought that Australia should look at Space Exploration more seriously.

Another line of interest was the Space Elevator - so much so that one of my co-bloggers at the time 'db' went and joined a consortium called LiftPort who were trying to promote the idea and technologies it would require to build.

So in memory of those times, I want to link to this article today.

AUSTRALIA could play a key role in the 21st century space race, with competition heating up between Japan and the US to build the world's first "space elevator".
As the technology required to create a physical link between Earth and outer space becomes closer to a reality, discussions of next-generation space exploration have been given new life.

Japan announced recently that it was researching plans to build a space elevator – a link to space that could transport cargo and even tourists – for as little as 1 trillion yen ($11 billion).

"Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space," chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, Shuichi Ono, told The Times.

The news is believed to have shaken up scientists at NASA, who have traditionally focused on rockets to reach space but could now be considering following Japan's suit.

The deal for Australia clearly is to join JAXA's bid to build the space elevator.  The reason the NASA boffins are a little surprised is that they have so much invested in rocketry and the shuttle that they're going to find it hard to switch from that line of technology to a space elevator.

As previously researched in many other studis, the Indian Ocean, about 900km turns out to be an optimal place to build the Earth-side platform. The other various reasons listed in the article are nice, but bottom line is, any Federal Government in Australia really ought to look at getting Australia back in the space exploration business.

Some Words About This Recession

1. Peter Schiff Was Right

This link came from Rasterfield. This guy Peter Schiff has been in the media for some time and has been talked down by all these pundits, but guess what? he was right. I'm sure he didn't want to be right about something so awful, but here he is having been absolutely right.

Check this out:

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw


What do they pay these other guys for? One of them was recommending Washington Mutual!! Ha!

Schiff's point is that the US has been reducing its own capacity to produce for a long time, that it failed to go through a proper recession after the tech bubble burst, and replaced it with the current property bubble which led to the sub-prime crisis, and that the government spending is what is going to prolong the coming downturn, because it won't let the proper scenarios of capitalism play out. He's clearly not into John Maynard Keynes or Helicopter Ben.

Here are more Youtube videos with Peter Schiff:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3.

I bet it's not that much to be Cassandra as the world's economy goes and tanks. In fact, the way he feels must be the way I feel about the Australian film industry.

I do think he's over-stating the case that Americ produces hardly anything of worth to the world - it still has Hollywood and Silicon Valley and Microsoft. It's not like it isn't creating new economies where it is productive and exporting products to the world.

2. Depression, Recession, Downturn, Bummer...

Call it what you like, it's not sounding good. It's been a long time coming, and people have been calling it for at least a decade. Yet because it failed to materialise immediately, people simply ignored the people who were saying there's not enough production and too much debt.

In that spirit, Pleiades has sent in these links.

The Coming Depression as seen by Seeking Alpha.

In the last few weeks I’ve heard a lot of discussion about the Great Depression. Jim Cramer has said that if the bailout wasn’t passed, we would experience a second Great Depression. This has led me to try and assess the circumstances which existed prior to the Great Depression of the 1930’s versus the conditions today. The chart below is extremely disturbing. The most recent flow of funds data shows that total credit market debt is $51 trillion versus our $14.3 trillion GDP. Debt as a percentage of GDP is now 356% versus 260% during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This massive buildup of leverage has just begun to unwind. If this is just the beginning of the great leverage unwind, then the pain will be tremendous when it really gets going. The conclusion that I reach when looking at the vertical takeoff of debt in the early 1980’s is that this country has been living a lie of false prosperity. The huge McMansions, luxury cars, high tech gadgets, granite kitchens homes, and exotic vacations were purchased with debt. These “assets” are depreciating rapidly and consumers and companies are desperately selling assets to pay down the debt that is strangling them. The psychology of this country has begun to change from conspicuous consumption to forced liquidation and saving.

It's pretty good when somebody calls it like they see it. The rest of it is just as blunt, but worth the read.

Gordon Brown is a Market Bear according to the Telegraph in UK.

In the past 14 months, Mr Brown has shifted his rhetoric a bit, but always in the wake of events. Rather than doing what the markets call "kitchen-sinking", and putting the whole enormous problem before us, he prefers over-optimistic forecasts, and boasts about how well placed we are. (Our household debt, by the way, is nearly twice as much as the European average.)

If it is true that he has the intellectual capacity required, why does he not share his understanding with us? In their different ways, both Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher reasoned with voters about the economic crises they confronted. In this financial crisis, Mr Brown has not done so. His message is simply "Trust me, I'm a doctor". But it was Dr Brown who for 10 years prescribed the debt drug, and now his patients are dying.

If you talk to the people - banks, regulators, civil servants - who have to work with Number 10 in this crisis, after a drink or two, they all tell the same story. The objective is the headline, they say; and if you do not do what you are told, the headline (© Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy) makes sure that you get the blame. There is no more trust among those dealing with the problem than there is in the financial system itself.

Which shows, I suggest, that the Government does not really believe that Everything Is Different Now.

The consequences are already bad enough. They could be truly terrible. There could be a complete collapse of the banking system, many millions unemployed, a return to barter, "self-sufficiency" (a Green word meaning poverty), extremist riots, looting. It seems an odd thing to say to our joke-free Prime Minister, but please, Mr Brown, get serious.

That doesn't sound too good.

Naked Capitalism

In particular, check out this bit:

"We are now starting to see the contagion effects of the current liquidity crisis feed through to the real economy...

The recent 93 percent collapse of the obscure Baltic Dry Index – an index of the cost of chartering bulk cargo vessels for goods like ore, cotton, grain or similar dry tonnage – has caused a bit of a stir among the financial cognoscenti. What is less discussed amidst the alarm is the reason for the collapse of the index – the collapse of trade credit based on the venerable letter of credit.

Letters of credit have financed trade for over 400 years. They are considered one of the more stable and secure means of finance as the cargo is secures the credit extended to import it. The letter of credit irrevocably advises an exporter and his bank that payment will be made by the importer's issuing bank if the proper documentation confirming a shipment is presented. This was seen as low risk as the issuing bank could seize and sell the cargo if its client defaulted after payment was made. Like so much else in this topsy turvy financial crisis, however, the verities of the ages have been discarded in favour of new and unpleasant realities.

The combination of the global interbank lending freeze with the collapse of the speculative, leveraged commodity price bubble have undermined both the confidence of banks in the ability of a far-flung peer bank to pay an obligation when due and confidence in the value of the dry cargo as security for the credit if liquidated on default. The result is that those with goods to export and those with goods to import, no matter how worthy and well capitalised, are left standing quayside without bank finance for trade.

Adding to the difficulties, letters of credit are so short term that they become an easy target for scaling back credit as liquidity tightens around bank operations globally. Longer term “assets” – like mortgage-back securities, CDOs and CDSs – can’t be easily renegotiated, and banks are loathe to default to one another on them because of cross-default provisions. Short term credit like trade finance can be cut with the flick of an executive wrist.

Further adding to the difficulties, many bulk cargoes are financed in dollars. Non-US banks have been progressively starved of dollar credit....

The ramification of the credit crunch may be that the entire system of food import/export around the globe might stop, and then there will be whole parts of the world that will starve as a result. Talk about a total disaster scenario.

More On The Comatose Australian Film Industry

Whipping A Dead Horse Some More

Pleidaes sent in some links to do with the recent Antony Ginnane comments.

Here's the article in the Australian and here's the readers' responses.

The reasons for the industry's deep malaise are complex. One obvious factor is the vast opportunities that beckon successful Australian filmmakers to Hollywood, which quickly recognised and captured the talents of such masters as Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Robert Luketic and George Miller.

Another issue is the size of the local talent pool, especially of writers. Sometimes, this can result in good subject matter failing to reach its full potential when translated to the screen. Romulus, My Father, based on the memoir of philosopher Raimond Gaita, warmed the hearts of many audiences, especially migrants. A stronger script and fewer silences could have lifted it from being good to outstanding.

The industry's tax breaks, too, warrant attention. Initially, they played a positive role, helping establish a promising industry in the 70s and early 80s - the era of Sunday Too Far Away, Newsfront, The Getting of Wisdom, Gallipoli and Stormboy among many others. Their current impact, however, is debatable. Perhaps authorities overseeing the incentives should question whether they are facilitating - primarily for tax purposes - the making of films that otherwise might never see the light of day.

Critics, too, must bear some responsibility for the malaise. Despite strings of box office failures, it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to find a biting critique of Australian films. Rather than representing the public paying at the box office, too many critics act as advocates for the film industry. As a result, lured by glowing reviews, cinema-goers will be disappointed, and will not waste scarce leisure time on the next Australian film.

The grim, small budget Oyster Farmer is a such an example. Lauded by The Sydney Morning Herald as "seductive and affectionate", a film that "sparkles and broods ... its surface glimmering with speckled light and shade" it was awarded four stars by this newspaper's David Stratton. Encouraged by such accolades to see it, many cinema-goers found it pedestrian and disappointing.

Generally, the industry has been unambitious, priding itself for years on producing small films - so small as to be invisible. They are not cinematic and have all the qualities of an average telemovie. One of the problems appears to be the rush to production without adequate script and character treatment.

Oh dear. Let's go through this bit by bit.

The idea that Hollywood steals our best talent is something that's always held up as a reason why our industry is in trouble. This is not true. Even the example of people cited here are long-gone practitioners that got their start in the 1970s, except for one Robert Luketic who I wouldn't put on the same level as the two George MIllers, Peter Weir or Bruce Beresford. Those guys not being here is not why this industry hit the ditch and rolled over.

The stark reality is that Hollywood is always going to lure the best talent through money, but somehow our industry has failed to thrive when other anglophone industries have thrived under this exact same pressure. In the case of New Zealand, Peter Jackson singlehandedly brought a large chunk of the world's cinema back to Wellington. Why haven't our directors and producers done the same? England's industry continues to thrive, as does Canada. South Africa seems to be behind but their social policy agendas probably have more pressing issues than cinema in general or whether it is right that they get portrayed as the bad guys in 'Lethal Weapon 2'. So why has our industry failed so badly.

The answer lies in the sad fact that the funding bodies have repeatedly punished any and all productions that might have an actual international appeal through bad selection criteria and obstinate refusal to listen to actual practitioners as to how to actually help them get their film made. An international director of renown such as Fred Schepsi no less has pointed out just how perverse and anti-filmmakers these funding bodies with their film bureaucrats really are.

The usual complaints about scripts goes back to the point of development. If people want better scripts, they're going to have to reward writers better. That means producers, executives, directors and the funding bodies have to put much more money into the writers an their writing. It just hasn't been happening after many a promise. I know lots of good writers. Students of the craft who have toiled and toiled for very little money to reach... nowhere. And when I see just how much each and every film bureaucrat who goes to a SPAA conference to hear why the industry is in the toilet actually makes, I go for the vomit bag.

It's been going on for years. Nobody seems in the least bit interested in addressing this; the Labor Party seem to like it this way, and the Liberal Party want to wage a 'Culture War' instead of actually fixing it so that the market can dictate what gets made - which happens to be what should happen, which also just happens to be Liberal Party policy for just about everything else under the fucking sun. Well they sure flubbed their shot during the Howard years and Kevin Rudd is actually spending more money to reinforce the crappy institutions that suck the money out of the State coffers and returns 40 cents on the dollar.

That brings me to the next point about the tax breaks. None of these things work because the ATO adjudicates these things; and it is in their interests time and time again to not let anybody actually merit from the tax breaks. For nearly 12 years, 10BA's last years languished as people *failed* to prove how their film was Australian and therefore warranted the tax break. It just doesn't seem to matter what the government of the day says or does - the ATO is there to willfully fuck it up, free-of-charge, obligation free.

The result of all this has meant that nobody who actually is an investor in films wants to invest in an Australian film any more because they just don't want to go toe to toe with the ATO over definitions about what exactly constitutes 'Australian Content'. The ATO in turn have passed amazingly astygmatic judgments that said that if a film could be shot anywhere other than Australia, it couldn't possibly have 'Australian Content'. Yes, just try figuring that one out.

It's this kind of insanity that has led to just about every film ending up needing government assistance, and this usually means the crappy film bureaucrats get their stupid little mitts into these projects, effectively fashioning the cinema output in their criteria-driven agendas. And people wonder why it is that the Australian film industry serves up 'Oyster Farmer'.

As to the critics, it has to be said that their inability to separate out the bad from the good isn't their problem. It is that they spend so much time in knee-jerk bashing of Hollywood fare that they feel compelled to pitch hard for any Australian film. The way the industry is going, these tend to be fewer and farther in between, so they get all carried away just because somebody actually made something -*anything* - through what is perhaps one of the least productive development systems in the world.

While I do have a bone to pick with the critics, I will cite that elsewhere. For now, it has to be said that critics such as David Stratton are *not* the reason our industry sucks so badly. It's the people who *think* they can pass critical judgment as well as David Stratton who actually don't have his knowledge or experience, who happen to decide which films to fund or which people to fund, that are killing it every day, every week, every month, every year, year after year.

I'm sorry but it's that simple. The Australian Film Industry would be much better if they got rid of the film bureaucracies and directly invested that money into US studios in Australian soil with the single proviso that all that money HAS to be spent on Australian writers, producers directors and crew, with proper accounting at the end of each year to show that the money has been spent on such people. It would be exactly the same thing they did with giving Toyota that money to produce Hybrid cars in Australia. They would see much better returns, and it would provide the proper opportunities for our creative talent. The days of keeping inept film bureaucrats in cushy jobs, who stifle the industry more than they help it, just has to end.

Because he Australian Film Industry is an English speaking industry, it inevitably leads to being a sub-system for the US system. It is its curse, but it is also its blessing - a blessing that enables our talent to flourish as international talent. Talent from say, Serbia or Burkina Fasso don't share this advantage because they speak another language. That being the case, it is insane to try and keep it separate and independent when globalisation is the order of the day in just about any and every industry.

Speaking of Bad Critics...

This bit in the same article made me see red:

Obviously, international cinema styles have moved on from the great Hollywood movies of the 40s and 50s in which dialogue was everything. The move has been to the adventure epics, aimed at younger audiences and laced with special effects. Survival means producing something that people will go out for rather than wait a very short while for the home theatre experience.

Currently, the broader range of international films also provides good reason to stay home with a book, with offerings such as Burn After Reading, Body Of Lies, The Duchess and Beverly Hills Chihuahua on offer.

You see, I actually paid to see both 'Burn after Reading' AND 'Body of Lies'. They are worthy films by worthy directors in every single way. They are worthy of deeper analysis and discussion. If this opinion piece really thinks that these films are not worth heading out to the cinema, I think they are never going to set foot into the cinema to watch an Australian film.

If you can't be bothered to venture out to see a good film, avoiding it sight-unseen, how will you ever know if there is a good Australian film out there? The notion that they only want to watch good films that aren't American is exactly the kind of criteria the film bureaucrats use to bully the creatives in this country to make our pictures smaller, less universal, less interesting and entertaining, and ultimately less profitable.

Yankee Hotstove

Signing Damaso Marte To An Extension

Every GM has a white whale out there. Billy Beane's was Erubiel Durazo Brian Cashman's was Damaso Marte, in as much as he traded him away once but so desperately wanted him back. They sure as hell didn't trade for him as rental.

Marte's graphs look interesting. Crucially, his K/BB ratio stabilised in the last 2 years in the Good range, and his HR/9 has stayed in the good range for 4 years. He's a pretty good pitcher to have for the next 3 years if h can keep it up. The usual pitcher caveats apply. He could go Pavano, but they all could go Pavano. I don't know what Pavano proved but the fact that not all free agents are destined to pitch in New York, even if they sign a big fat contract to do so.

Trading For Nick Swisher

The White Sox are so accommodating of the Yankees. Some years back, they took in Jose Contreras after he flamed out in NYC. Now they're taking Wilson Betemit off the Yankees' hands in exchange for their disappointment, Nick Swisher. Nick Swisher is of course that famous object of desire that Billy Beane so wanted to sign in 'Moneyball'. So having been traded unexpectedly by Beane last winter, Swisher suddenly finds himself in New York. I'd imagine his head is spinning. It's certainly going to make Mark Lewis' follow-up book to 'Moneyball' mighty interesting.

I'm going to miss Wilson Betemit. I kept waiting for him to be that guy, but he was never going to get enough playing time on a team with Jeter, A-Rod and Cano.

Giving up Jeff Marquez and Jhonny Nunez together with Wilson Betemit is a bit of shame, but the Replacement Level Yankee Weblog says this Teixeira pitcher the Yankees are getting back in return is better than Nunez.That's good.

Nick Swisher was a disappointing player this year, but that is mostly due to his BABIP being so woefully terrible. I had him on one of my fantasy teams this last season, always knowing his BABIP had to get better than the .200 level it was hovering at during April, May and June. Then I gave up. He was solidly unlucky for 3 months, after which he hit well enough for his BABIP to finish at .251, but by then the damage was done. Again,t he RLY days he was not one, but two standard deviations below his career norm. Well, the Yankees can expect at least 1 deviation below next year and still come out all right. He's more productive than Betemit, or Melky, or Gardner. He wasn't Billy Beane's fave candidate for nothing.

The LoHud blog is reporting that Swisher probably will play 1B. He's not a big enough bat to play 1B, but he's versatile. Peter Abraham thinks that this trade removes some leverage for Teixeira.

What's interesting with both the moves is that the Yankees are making medium moves arther than blockbuster moves to shore up their position, before the storm of bidding for CC Sabathia and Mark teixeira begins.

On A Side Note About The A's

Having mentioned Billy Beane and the A's, I want to quickly note the trade that saw the A's acquire Matt Holiday on a 1 year rental. Very interesting move from Beane considering he was dismantling his 2007 side not so long ago. Holliday's father was interviewed on the NYT and made lots of noise saying he wanted to see his son in pinstripes. It may still happen too.

“If someone would have called me today and said Matt had gotten traded to the Yankees, I’d have been hunting for a place to celebrate,” Tom Holliday, the associate head baseball coach at North Carolina State, said in a telephone interview.

---

As for Tom Holliday, who coached Street at the University of Texas, he said he had hoped that if his son could not be traded to the Yankees, he would at least be dealt to a team in the East. Alas, he is headed farther west.

“We wanted him to come to the East Coast so we could get some sleep at night,” he said. “It’s just a different channel on the package for me.”

Hmm. Talk about dropping heavy hints. Next off-season when Holliday becomes a free agent, expect to see him go to New York. :)

One of the things about the move is that it temporarily removes Matt Holliday as trade target... or does it? Do the Yankees have a package of players Beane might want to swap Holliday for? Like, say, Nick Swisher? hint, hint? In any case, the hot stove has been interesting to date. I've really not done much baseball blogging because I've been too depresed about the 2008 season. The Phillies won the World Series you say? Well, I, never!

News That's Fit To Punt

DNA Justice = Payback?

The latest thing with DNA testing seems to be checking paternities. I mean, if it were me, I'd do it immediately after birth, but it seems this is difficult in some cases. 18 men have been cleared and so the women who have been pulling in Child Support from these guys have to pay back what they owe.I think this is kind of cool.

More than 300 men have been cleared by DNA of being fathers. Documents obtained under Freedom of Information show orders for $171,567 to be returned have so far been made against the mothers.

Angry women's groups said last night that it would be the children at the centre of the disputes who would suffer most if money were paid back.

The money is being garnisheed from mothers' incomes by the Child Support Agency in the same way that payments are taken from the wages of non-custodial fathers.

In each case the duped men were able to prove beyond doubt in the courts they were not the fathers based on DNA paternity testing.

The next bit got my attention:

But making mothers pay back child support was last night condemned by women's groups.

Sole Parent's Union president Kathleen Swinbourne said garnisheeing a mother's wages would only hurt the child.

"The money has already been spent on rearing the child," she said. "If the mother is forced to pay it back, its hard to imagine the child won't be disadvantaged."

She said men should raise doubts about paternity when they are first told they are a father.

Men's Rights Agency director Sue Price said men wrongly named as a father of a child were entitled to justice.

She said all child support payments made by a man should be "refunded in full" by the Child Support Agency where paternity is successfully challenged and then recouped from the woman.

"A woman's knows who she's been with in a particular month," she said.

"They must know if there is any doubt about whether the man they are pointing their finger at is actually the father."

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

I don't quite get the Sole Parent' Union logic that taking the money from the mother after the money had been spent would hurt the child. Yes it would, but the child wasn't entitled to that money form that man in the first place. That's the point of the law - it's tough cheese for the kid, but the mother's to blame for lying in the first place.

Of course it's a 2-way street. This dude was told he wasn't the father through DNA testing and so will lose contact with the girl he thought was his daughter forever. Listen pal, it's a good thing.

I Don't Get This Either, Nor Do I Want To

This guy had sex with his wheel-chair bound mother and is now headed for jail.

The 26-year-old man moved from Western Australia in February this year to live with his mother in Darwin.

On May 29, they were watching television when he told her: "Why don't women want me. I can't get no women here," the Northern Territory Supreme Court was told.

The son then pulled his mother's pants down, took a condom out of his wallet, and had sex with her.

They had sex again before the mother got into her wheelchair and went to her bedroom.

The woman - who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and has been dependent on a wheelchair for the past seven years - told her doctor about the incident the following day and the man was arrested.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of having sex with a person knowing that the person was his mother.

In the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Darwin today, Justice Sally Thomas sentenced the man, who cannot be named, to three years in prison with a non-parole period of six months.

---

Justice Thomas said the mother had felt "betrayed, lost, lonely and very upset".

But she said the son, who was drunk at the time of the offence, was "extremely remorseful".

She said the fact that he had been raised by his father in Western Australia meant the two did not share "a normal mother-child bond".

I guess they don't. What a Motherfucker.

Gag me with a spoon, that's just plain wrong. I don't think I'll be writing a song about that one, by the way.