Film
High-stakes verité: Andrew Haigh’s Weekend
There’s a scene early in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend in which Russell (Tom Cullen), a handsome, semi-closeted gay man, patrols the local indoor swimming pool where he works. He plods around the pool perimeter and then looks on pensively from the lifeguard’s chair while a younger guy playfully offers a towel to another guy, perhaps his boyfriend. Then there’s a long shot of Russell keeping watch taken from the other end of the pool – arms folded, in the centre of the frame, standing under a sign that says ‘DEEP END’. Just after this we watch his bored, impassive face while he overhears a workmate in the midst of a staffroom brag about how many fingers he can get inside his girlfriend.
The scene reiterates what we already know about Russell: he’s a brooder, he feels like an outsider and he treads an ambivalent line when it comes to the public management of his sexuality; and, after spending the previous night with Glen (Chris New) – a caustic but magnetic art student whose current project involves taping his conquests talking about their night together – he’s in the emotional deep end. Shit is going to float to the surface.
Weekend is a two-hander with a superbly simple narrative about the passionate but short-lived hook up between these two men. It’s an exercise familiar from a lot of other low-budget cinema: the two-people-talking-and-fucking-in-an-apartment movie. Comparisons have been made to Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, and it’s a valid correlation. Weekend is like Before Sunrise but with more drugs, facial hair, and gritty hand-held camera shots of council estate apartments and restless youth, all of which feel surprisingly authentic and refreshingly un-self-conscious.
Column: Film and TV
A Fussy Filmgoer speaks out: cinema’s mixed pleasures
Image via dreamsjung/flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamsjung/3855653245)
Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting with a friend in a reasonably full, darkened cinema, anxiously waiting for that film you’ve both been dying to see all summer to begin. The previews finally finish and the film’s production company logos start quietly appearing. At this moment, you can decide that, A: now’s the perfect time to open a bag of Kettle chips and start up a conversation with your friend about the lack of parking in the area, or, B: that the persons behind you, who have started talking in failed stage whispers about parking, should to be dragged outside to a purpose-built booth and there must listen to the tedious nattering of strangers for two or three hours.
If, like me, you opted for B, you’re what I call a Pathologically Fussy Filmgoer: you fantasise about what you might do to those you perceive to be grossly inconsiderate. Of course, there is a spectrum of cinema-going tolerance – the Pathologically Fussy at one end and the Phone-Answering-During-A-Film type at the other – with most people probably seated in the aisles between. One thing’s for certain: all of us are at times irked by the habits of other patrons. So why, then, do those of us at the Fussy end keep going?
One possible answer is that going to the cinema is the closest thing to a ritual occasion that a secular existence affords. As Susan Sontag said – decrying the rise of home-viewing and the ‘decline’ of cinema as ritual – in her 1997 New York Times Magazine essay ‘The Decay of Cinema’ (log-in required): ‘To be kidnapped [by films], you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.’ Herein lies the ritual’s paradox: in order to achieve that special, collective cinema-going feeling, other people must be there – but their presence is often completely maddening.
News
Kill Your Darlings available online!
We’re immensely excited to announce that Kill Your Darlings is now available in digital formats.
Our new issue, Kill Your Darlings No. 8, is available here as an e-book from Booki.sh (just $9.99) and Kobo (a steal at $7.99). Of course, it’s also available in a beautiful print edition.
Subscribers who elect to have KYD delivered to their door four times a year now also receive free online access to all our archives. Or, you can now subscribe to KYD online for just $30!
We’ll be sending current subscribers their online access details very soon, so that all of our friends can join us online.
To celebrate our new formats, we’ve got a terrific giveaway: 10 copies of Michael Sala’s debut novel, The Last Thread, to give away to new and renewing subscribers. Don’t miss out!
Literary Links
Amusements and distractions
Killings brings you our fortnightly selection of posts that have amused, enlightened and generally distracted us.
The art of book cover fails
How to write like a funny woman (and other tips)
How internet memes and hollywood remakes are alike
Do our viewing tastes reflect a conservative turn?
Would you demand a refund if you didn’t enjoy a film?
A video gallery of cinematic villainy from the year’s best performers
The striking illustrations accompanying a new edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Column: Art / Music / Theatre
Living a Pop Life: The rise and fall of Smash Hits Australia
Eighteen months ago, while I was clearing out old boxes at my parents’ house, I came across a relic from my childhood: two Smash Hits sticker sheets, intact, covered with my favourite pop artists and TV stars. Mariah Carey, the Backstreet Boys, Hanson, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and the cast of Party of Five all stared up at me from within the pink fluorescent grid. My twelve-year-old self had intentionally preserved these treasures, not wanting to waste them on a schoolbook or diary in case they became dirty or creased (or – worse yet – a Hanson-hating friend scrawled devil’s horns over Taylor’s hair).
How pleased I was, then, to read Pop Life: Inside Smash Hits Australia 1984–2007, and to find that I was not alone in my young reverence for pop stars (nor for paraphernalia with their faces on it).
Pop Life is the ‘definitely not official’ guide to the rise and decline of Smash Hits Australia, the ‘biggest selling pop magazine in Australia’, which ran for 23 years from 1984. Through alternating, individually written chapters, authors Marc Andrews, Claire Isaac and David Nichols, who all worked as writers and/or editors for the magazine, detail their own interests in music, involvement in the magazine, office antics, personal and celebrity scandals, and encounters with everyone from Peter Andre to Melissa George to Robbie Williams.
As such, PopLife is part autobiography. Particularly memorable is Andrews’ description of being a gay teenager in Queensland who hid ‘70s Cleo male centerfolds in his ABBA scrapbooks so his family wouldn’t know he was gay – scrapbooks he later hid when ABBA became ‘uncool’, for fear of being beaten up at school. Or Isaac’s transformation from Duran Duran-stalking teenager to Smash Hits Australia features editor – not to mention Nichols’ humorous recollection of a former editor calling Johnny Diesel ‘yum’ in an article, which resulted in Diesel’s management refusing ‘point blank to deal with pop magazines any longer’.
Column: Books and Writing
The stories that numbers tell: Jane Gleeson-White’s Double Entry
Jane Gleeson-White is a doyenne of the Australian literary scene. She is the author of two books on literature (Classics and Australian Classics), the fiction editor at Overland magazine and the blogger behind Bookish Girl. It is only natural, therefore, that her new book should be about … double entry accounting.
Yes, you read it correctly. Double Entry traces the introduction of double entry accounting to Europe in the fifteenth century, through to the role it played in the industrial revolution and its adoption by post-war economies as a means of measuring gross domestic product. The book has the same flair for making intricate concepts accessible that is evident in Gleeson-White’s other work. So far from being a dry, academic treatise on what one could be forgiven for thinking was a dull topic, this is a frequently engrossing history of a concept integral to modern, market-driven economies.
Double entry accounting, the practice of keeping separate tallies of income and expenditure so net profit can be derived, has driven the quantification of our lives. This quantification is exemplified by the ‘cost/benefit’ concept – as if something’s worth can be neatly subtracted from its cost of production to give its total value. It’s an empiricism Gleeson-White doubts in Double Entry:
[a]ccounting’s use of numbers gives it an air of scientific rectitude and certitude, and yet fundamental uncertainties lurk at its heart. Indeed, accounting is as subjective and partial as the art of storytelling, the other meaning contained in the word “account”.
This subjectivity is amply displayed in the collapse of Enron and One.Tel. Both companies boasted squeaky clean account books before they collapsed, yet the ethical turpitude behind this ‘health’ had me spitting obscenities.
Classics
‘They have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing’: Catch-22
In our new ‘Classics’ series, we ask writers to read – or reread – literary classics. In this first instalment, Claire Corbett discovers the military horrors of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
For a new reader, a novel’s status as a classic can obscure its true achievements because its meaning and influence have already been decided. The blackly comic view of war is now so commonplace it’s easy to forget that Catch-22 was bold, in 1961, in its use of humour to explode the heroic narrative of World War II. A WWII bombardier himself, Joseph Heller showed us, before Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), that military authority is not just arbitrary but actually insane.
What does this classic have to say to us now that we’re all so well schooled in the absurdity of war after Vietnam? A great deal, as it turns out.
Catch-22 is the story of bombardier Yossarian, who tries to escape certain death from flying the ever-increasing number of missions demanded by his commanding officer. He is a victim of military regulation Catch-22, however, which states: If he flew them [the missions] he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.
Catch-22 forms a Moebius strip of logic, its eternal loop expanding to encompass every bureaucratic trap through which authority can demean and overpower the individual: Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.
News
Announcing the Kill Your Darlings columnists
As part of Kill Your Darlings’ commitment to in-depth arts coverage, we have selected nine regular Killings columnists to cover Australian books and writing; film and television; and music, theatre and visual arts throughout 2012.
We’re delighted to announce that the Killings Australian books and writing columnists are Caroline Hamilton, S.A. Jones and Laurie Steed. Our film and television columnists are Thomas Caldwell, Kate Harper and Brad Nguyen. And welcome to our music, theatre and visual arts columnists, Nikki Lusk, Timothy Roberts and Julia Tulloh.
Their columns will begin on Monday next week.
News
Counting down the days to Kill Your Darlings online…
You may have heard around the traps that Kill Your Darlings will soon be available online and as an e-book. Well, it’s true! We are extremely excited about this progression, and we will be launching these new formats very soon. Don’t worry – you’ll still be able to buy our beautiful print editions in bookshops and online. And in the meantime, watch this space…
Literary Links
Amusements and distractions
How many movies are there, really?
Beautiful ink portraits on vintage envelopes.
Kerouac wanted Marlon Brando to bring On the Road to life.
The Millions’ most anticipated books of 2012.
‘Call me Bella.’ If famous writers had written Twilight.
A rare look at Samuel Beckett’s notebooks.
‘Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it’: Mark Twain’s 18 rants on bad writing.
The real-life stories that inspired some of the scariest movies of all time.
