Column: Film and TV
Monsters at 70: Tod Browning’s Freaks
Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks begins with a lengthy prologue recounting the ill treatment that ‘freaks’ have experienced throughout history: ‘their lot is truly a heart-breaking one…Therefore, they have built up among themselves a code of ethics to protect them from the barbs of normal people’. Browning’s … Read more
Column: Film and TV
How to make sportspeople interesting: what we can learn from the ABC’s Paralympics coverage
It is fair to say that contemporary sportspeople do not often make scintillating speakers; that’s not their job. But it is sometimes painful to see people with such skill appear so breathtakingly vacuous when asked to reflect on the processes of being an athlete. And this is … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Gleefully changing my mind
When I was at university, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the cool television show of the time. It was almost impossible to get through any subject of an undergraduate Arts degree without a week on Buffy, genre and postmodern aesthetics. But I didn’t really get it: I … Read more
Column: Film and TV
The Spanish Film Festival: a celluloid armada
In 2010, I wrote an article about the Palestinian Film Festival. That festival showcased the works of a fragile film industry that receives no government funding – a national cinema without a nation state – from mainly diasporic Palestinian directors. Likewise, the festival itself had no major … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Two adults and a movie: admission prices in Australia, France and the US
In the spirit of hard-hitting investigative journalism, my partner and I recently set off to Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs in search of a Golden Beast I’d heard spoken of in furtive whispers, but had never experienced in the flesh: the massive suburban multiplex cinema. I’d always … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Food fantasies: virtuosity and curiosity in film
I have to admit that I’m an epicurean chump of the first order – I can spend money on quinoa and obscure spices like asafoetida more quickly than I can pronounce them: is it ‘aso-fo-ti-da’? I can watch, and genuinely enjoy, almost anything to do with cooking. … Read more
Column: Film and TV
‘I can’t die. I haven’t figured anything out’: neurotic best buddies in Bored to Death
In season two of Bored to Death, George (Ted Danson) and Ray (Zach Galifianakis) sit next to each other on a single bed while Jonathan (Jason Schwartzman) shows them, on the pine bookshelf of his childhood bedroom, his collection of original Tarzan novels. George is wide-eyed; Ray … Read more
Film
Human intimacy, or the lack thereof: Shame
Directed by Steve McQueen (no, not the dead actor), Shame is a film that could only have been conceived of in the last few years. Its subject is human intimacy, or rather the lack thereof in an age of ever-expanding technological immediacy. Brandon, played by Michael Fassbender, … Read more
Column: Film and TV
A Fussy Filmgoer speaks out: cinema’s mixed pleasures
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, … Read more
Reviews
Film review: Beginners
After director Mike Mills’ mother died, his father announced, at age seventy-five, that he was gay and now wanted to live a life of candour and verve. Sadly, his father died of cancer only five years later. Beginners is partly the autobiographical story of Mills, renamed Oliver … Read more
