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Just intolerable | Oct 28, 2003 14:11
Intolerable Cruelty, everywhere.
Seven years on from the inimitable Fargo, the Coen brothers arguably find themselves in the same position as Quentin Tarantino; struggling to live up to the extraordinarily high expectations of their devoted audience. With Intolerable Cruelty they fail, again.
Following an equally poor effort in the Man Who Wasn't There, this flick stuns in its opening sequences only to fall horribly flat in the middle and lift only slightly towards the end.
The Tarantino comparison goes deep, for both he and the Coens are constantly exploring, or maybe ransacking, film history for genres to "refresh". While Tarantino this time has gone for the kung fu action movie, the Coens are after romantic comedy a la Preston Sturges. For both, or rather all three of them, the closer they get to being faithful to these models, the greater it seems is their failure. By being faithful they are failing to make their own mark on the material, failing to take ownership, to grab the genre by the scruff and give it a good, hard shake.
This film has been receiving breathless reviews over here, making me wonder if maybe there are two films out there with the same title. Maybe I saw the wrong one. If that's the case all I can say is the one I saw wasn't very good. Slate's been harsher.
In fact I'd say the last film from the Coens that stood up was made way back in 1998, The Big Lebowski, and even that was a comedown from Fargo.
The opening sequence of Intolerable Cruelty is vintage stuff, with the brothers' current favourite, George Clooney as divorce lawyer Miles Massey, having his impressive teeth polished. Making Clooney's pearly whites the stars of the first ten minutes of the film is a great self-referential gag. Unfortunately, there isn't much to back it up. Some good lawyerly set pieces follow and then the humour goes west until the end.
Classic Coen grotesquery does feature; in the head of the law firm, totally wired to life support, gasping and heaving and raging a mere hair's breadth from death. Also in the asthmatic hired killer, Wheezy Joe, who dispatches himself most bizarrely.
But in the end Intolerable Cruelty just doesn't do it. Clooney ends up pulling faces rather than acting, overusing the lines on his perfect face. Zeta-Jones does a tolerable job in what is hardly a demanding role. Clooney's sidekick is plain unfunny.
Sad.
George in da house | Oct 23, 2003 13:50
Girlie's been serving it up to da man. She went on the big protest march yesterday, but reports it was kinda boring. I watched it pass from a comfy chair in a local café. George probably didn't even know it was happening.
Anyway the good ol' boy flew in last night with an entourage of 656 people in six planes. He's here for 21 hours in what some wags have dubbed "The Great Sleepover".
"Mum, can I go to John's place tonight?"
"Yes, George. But don't stay up too late, dear."
Reports indicate the US ambassador here, a mate of George's from the days he was making a fortune from government favours in the baseball industry, recorded a world series game or two in case he wanted to stay up before hitting the sack. Maybe they played a bit of PS2 while they were at it and dialed-in a pizza.
I'd like to think so.
Protest activity is the order of the day. Everyone is waiting to see what happens in Parliament this morning. Who will turn their back? Yes we know the Greens will, but which Labour MPs will protest and which won't? Will there be any surprises? I'd be surprised if there weren't. Keep track of developments here. Some MPs have signed a letter of protest.
Meanwhile in South Sydney the boys from ABC's CNNNN show are hosting the world's first protest line-dance.
At the last minute two Aussie journos have been added to a function with the President today to show he is not afraid of the local media. Restrictions on carrying weapons seem to have been waived for his security people.
According to the official schedule Bush will visit the Australian War memorial at 5.20 and fly out at 6.20. Now I've written about the memorial before and he really should have allowed himself more time. The dioramas are terrific. And how the hell does he expect to do all that, get to the airport and through check-in in an hour?
He'll be fucked if there's a queue.
In the President's shadow the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, will become, reportedly, the first representative of a one party dictatorship to address the Australian Parliament. A great moment indeed.
But, hey, so what if he's a despot? At least he isn't detaining Australians without charge, trial or access to a lawyer. No doubt while here he will be talking to the gruesome twosome, Tony "Headkicker" Abbot and treasurer Peter Costello.
So its Abbot and Costello, and Hu's on second!
Tarantino meets Father Ted | Oct 19, 2003 23:53
Kill Bill (everywhere) and The Lieutenant of Inishmore, at the Belvoir Theatre, Surrey Hills.
Theatre, at its very best, can deliver an even more engaging and exciting experience than film. However, it rarely does. The film-makers' toolkit is huge and powerful, their budgets so enormous that film almost always outguns the older medium.
Granted, theatre has the edge in intimacy, but this advantage also limits its audience. And many productions are flawed. You have to be devoted to theatre to experience its rare gems.
This week I have had a theatre experience that humbles our era's most iconic film director and starkly displays how very poor his latest offering truly is. That The Lieutenant of Inishmore owes Tarantino a huge debt only serves to emphasise his failure. It also leads me, at least, to ask whether Tarantino's many fans now have to look to his legion of followers and imitators for both satisfaction and the continuation of his great and usually enthralling cinema experiment.
Kill Bill sucks.
Yes, I know it is just part one. And yes, there were highlights. But it does not deliver. Far from it.
The film totally lacks the wit that made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown such joys. Occasionally it peeks through, but lines are too often awkward and badly delivered. This films relies on a totally linear plot based on revenge. This is the simplest of set-ups.
Where in the past Tarantino has extended the genres he references, this time he does not. In fact, I'd rather head down the video shop and hire the originals.
In his previous efforts the plots had complexity and his characters depth. Here we have linearity and a cartoonish quality. While a portion of the story is delivered as a manga cartoon, I'd be tempted to say it all should have been, except that would be an insult to manga.
To make it worse, Tarantino almost seems to recognise these failings. Uma Thurman's samurai mentor at the end of the film muses that the way of revenge is not a straight line, "it is a forest".
Not here it ain't.
Part 2 of Kill Bill really has to do something special to redeem this. Does the maestro have something up his sleeve? We'll have to wait and see.
But for those readers in Sydney the Tarantino disappointment can be remedied. Go to the Belvoir, and see The Lieutenant of Inishmore for a truly witty, cleverly plotted and beautifully acted Tarantinoesque experience.
Tarantino crossed with Father Ted, that is.
Long story short: A spotty teen runs over a black cat, Wee Thomas, belonging to an IRA splinter terrorist. This guy, Padraic, has splintered so much he's way out on his own. The cat, whom he entrusted to the care of his dad while he's away bombing fish and chip shops, is his only friend in the world. He loves Wee Thomas sooo bad.
Before Padraic comes home spotty teen Davey has to find a replacement black cat or face certain cruel death. Padraic specialises in torture.
This unlikely scenario serves to introduce a play of unpredictable and well concealed plot twists, sub-plots, great characters and more blood and body parts than Reservoir Dogs. And it's a comedy. I was pissing myself.
Playwright Martin McDonagh's work is graced with direction from Australian theatre icon Neil Armfield. Among the performers, Frank Gallacher as Padraic's dad Donny and Tom Budge as Davey really turn in some great set pieces while Colin Moody as INLA boss Christy, out to eliminate Padraic, delivers an ominous, Michael Madsen-like performance. He even looks like him.
Kudos too to special effects man David Trethaway, who really has a way with blood, explosions of blood. Buckets of the stuff.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is Reservoir Dogs with cats, Pulp Fiction with pussy, Jackie Brown with, well, you get my drift.
Sexist Pig | Oct 15, 2003 22:09
My record collection is taking a real battering in the old style. A couple of weekends ago a mate, Dan, came around and I played him all sorts of old NZ stuff. He found it depressing. Yes it was great music, he said, but where are they now? They were great, but they never "made it".
True enough. But my memory is that "making it" wasn't a high priority for many of those bands anyway. Never mind. Dan was in an odd place at the time, obsessed with failure - which at least made a change from humiliation.
Anyway, last night I pulled out an old Joe Tex soul album and was reminded of one peculiar musical phase I went through: my sexist pig stage.
Joe launched into a song called A Woman's Hands, which starts off almost like a women's lib song: "A woman's hands weren't meant to work hard, all the time." But pretty soon you get to the chorus where you find out exactly what a woman's hands were "may-ay-ay-ade for".
"To make her man some bread,
fix him a good cup of coffee,
and put his children to bed.
That's what a woman's hands,
were may-ay-ay-ade for"
I'd been turned on to sexist music when I came across a total classic from a bluesman called Lightnin' Hopkins. This guy was a slide maestro, and at least on the album I had, Lightnin' Strikes, very smooth, not that rough Chicago style at all. Really laid back. Except for a song called "Shake Your Moneymaker".
"You gotta roll your money-maker.
Baby you really can shake 'er.
Move your money-maker.
Baby it feels alright.
You gotta move your money maker,
All night"
For the life of me I can't find any reference to this track, but the guy appears to have put out several albums by that name. I did come across another track tantalisingly titled "Let me play with your poodle" which you can check out here.
I used to actively collect such songs. There were lots of other examples, but I forget them now. Some are obvious (James Brown's "This is a Man's World"), but most were pretty obscure. Anyway during this phase, and for quite a long time after, until I was forced to sell key portions of my collection to keep me in beer, I used to give these tracks a spin when we had guests.
Back in the 80s and well into the 90s, you see, NZ crawled with arch PC-type feminists. I've got nothing against feminism, it's the PC stuff I hate. It's a real downer, you know. And back then the two were pretty inseparable. Everybody was way too serious.
Anyway I used to play these songs because, around ours, it was the only way to get the PC crowd out of the house!
And when you told them the blues was equal opportunity sexist, they wouldn't listen. Try and tell them about Bessie Smith singing about that good ol' "Round Steak"? Forget about it. You couldn't get a word in.
"Sisters don't need yo' round steak no mo', brother."
Feminist baiting, I'll confess, was one of my favourite activities. Juvenile? Yes. I know. But talk about a laugh!
I came across another relic of those times online the other day. An article about the glass ceiling in the IT industry. Rereading, I think it has some nice turns of phrase, but God did it create a stink.
Email had only just been rolled out in my workplace. Did I get a good flaming? Tell me about it.
In the end it was the use of the word "little" I was found guilty on, by a one woman jury of my peers. That's what it came down to. But hey, how come there weren't any salary and employment statistics on what was the fastest growing industry in the country? That, it seems to me still, was the real issue.
I've left all that sexism stuff behind me now, of course. It went out with the LPs.
It was just a phase, anyway.
Honest.
A game of two halves | Oct 14, 2003 10:23
The problem with two-day games of cricket is they take two days. In winter tournament over here each day is played on consecutive weekends. So having avoided humiliation last week, I now had to front up again.
Still, given the other side needed only 50-odd runs to win, it should've been over in an hour. Little did I know the opposition had other plans. They wanted an outright victory. To do that they had to post a big lead and bowl us out again.
That would take all day.
So, another three hours in the field were in order. It's hard to hide for three hours in a game of cricket. And sure enough it didn't take long for me to be posted way out on the boundary as the boys hit out in the last hour.
Inevitably, one of ours bowled a dolly. It came crisply off the bat rising and coming straight for me like one of those laser-guided things, a fear-seeking missile. I wasn't afraid of the ball or its finger-breaking power. I just didn't want to drop it.
Across the park, the sounds of the Livid festival could be heard, distorting in the strong wind. It's been windy and occasionally wet here for a week or more. Very un-Sydney.
The little black dot grew bigger and reached the top of its arch before bearing down at me.
At least this week I wasn't hung over. My mind was clear. My weekend was all mapped out. Cricket today, dial in some nice food for tonight and watch World Cup games with the Girlie. Sunday is my day of culture. Last week I went to the NSW Art Gallery for the Dobell Prize for Drawing among other exhibits, including some pretty challenging video installations.
This week the Girlie was into her homework, so I went to the movies on my todd, The Weather Underground. This is one of those films that has you coming out of the theatre wondering what you are doing with your life. Not that I wanted to go out and blow things up or anything, it just makes you feel disconnected and pointless.
But that's probably just me.
The documentary is the story of the Weathermen, home-grown US radical resisters to the Vietnam War whose slogan was "Bring the War Home." For five years or more they bombed government offices – never killing anyone – and eluding the FBI by living in various hippy communes around America. It's also the story of their rapid marginalisation in a changing 60s and 70s radical scene. If it comes your way make sure you stay right to the end of the credits to see one of these former terrorists win $29,000 on the US TV show Jeopardy. Priceless.
The black dot was now large and moving fast. The wind carried it a little. Just one step to the left. Right in the old breadbasket.
To add to my dissociation, I'm reading Fight Club by Chuck Pahlaniuk at long last. It is incredibly well written with some amazing and horrifying ideas. From memory, the film is very faithful to the book, but I haven't seen it in a while. The studio head got sacked by Rupert Murdoch for making it, so he must have done something right. It's very reminiscent of Ballard's Crash.
The ball hits with a leathery smack. Right in the middle of my hands. Victory.
Carrying a book like Fight Club around with you in Glebe has an odd side-effect. People talk to you. I was having a coffee before the movie and running late when a young guy bailed me up at the counter to share his thoughts. He was a fan of the book, of course. Very keen. I felt rude cutting the discussion short. It isn't easy to strike up a conversation with strangers. But the Weathermen called. I made my apologies.
And then the ball popped out.
Anyway, we still had to bat. This offered some redemption. In a dour rearguard action, yours truly managed to last 15 overs and collect 18 runs, top score for the second innings.
Maybe I won't retire after all...
Of wool and fluff | Oct 09, 2003 12:38
The voice of protest has not been dimmed here in Australia. Following the massive anti-detention and anti-war events of the last couple of years a new cause has emerged:
"For we are saying, give sheep a chance …"
Yes, the save-the-sheep people really did sing this over the weekend.
"Give sheep a chance…"
It was inevitable, I suppose, that the fate of these bleaters (the sheep that is) has resulted in a new sheep joke. I seem to be a magnet for any of these going around. Here it is, with thanks to David and hot from my inbox:
"The crisis of the ship containing 50,000 Australian sheep in the Persian Gulf has been solved. The ship has been redirected to New Zealand and renamed 'The Love Boat'."
Oh, I never get sick of those sheep jokes - not.
Anyway just to show I'm not afraid of tackling the big issues, there was a great response to my request for the correct word for that funny ring of fluff you get out of the dryer, possible uses and why is it always that funny mauve colour?
Norm wrote he thought "lint" was the word I was looking for.
"It wasn't a word that I heard much in NZ, but funnily enough here in the US it's pretty common. Read into that what you will."
Thanks Norm, but while I agree lint is the stuff, the word doesn't work hard enough. It doesn't describe the unique ring shape of dryer fluff.
DavidG says the "lint in the 'lint filter' of the dryer "has a bluish tinge because apparently that is the base colour of the plastic compounds that are use in the synthetics in clothing these days. There was a study on belly button lint done recently and it delivered this finding."
On uses, ChrisB reckons "It's clean (having presumably just been in the washing machine prior to its sojourn in the dryer) and dry, so it would make a good packaging material for the evironmentally friendly. Or a cushion or cuddly toy stuffing.
"Of course, then you'd need another sad-bastard hobby, on top of collecting lint: making cushions or cuddly toys. BTW: Sometimes it's anaemic mauve, such as when you've only been drying white towels. But it's still got a bit of mauve in it. Questions should be asked in the House. I'll get on to Winston ..."
Scott provided these useful links for the fluffophile in all of us:
"I thought these might interest you and the Girlie's dryer lint fetish:
http://www.colba.net/~brock/2000b/11-19.htm
http://www.mommarama.com/contest/contestlint.html
http://www.plokta.com/plokta/issue17/lint.htm
"Along with these there are a heap of recipes for dryer lint modeling clay (almost makes me want to go and buy a dryer now)."
While Deborah showed real creativity with these suggestions:
"Sometimes, if you put a load of say, white and yellow towels through the drier, you can get a layer of white fluff. This can create a particularly pleasing layered effect if you first dry some ordinary clothes, then the white and yellow towels, and then the ordinary clothes again. Of course, you have to ignore the manufacturer's instructions to clean the lint filter after every load...
"Names for 'fluff' rings... I suppose 'ruffs', but that has been taken. More interestingly, what about 'frings'.
"I had better go back to marking essays...."
Frings I like. It has a nice, err, fring to it.
And, finally, blog-mate Damian says:
"You have piqued my interest with your drier fluff. God, I don't know who's the sadder...
"I note Graham Barker, avid collector refers to research about the colour of navel lint vs drier lint and says that the light grey from the drier is more likely to be an average of the colours of the clothes, which would make sense really.
"As for uses, I should think it would eventually be useful for lining a shoe box, in which one could raise small birds (and I guess in Australia, joeys) that have fallen from nests. Softer than cotton wool, more environmentally friendly, and free."
Readers, you truly rock my world.
Zero impact | Oct 06, 2003 11:57
Horribly hungover on Saturday morning, my phone wakes me. It's a mate asking if I'm still playing cricket.
"Whaddya mean 'still'. No. I told you, I'm hanging up my gloves … ah bat …pads ... whatever."
"You bastard," he said. "I'm counting on you. I've penciled you in."
It turns out I'd phoned him the previous night, clearly in an unfit state to make such a decision, and said I'd play. Worse, he wasn't going to cut me any slack. He was holding me to it.
I checked the clock. It was 11. The game started at the headache-friendly time of 1pm. Well, I calculated, we might win the toss. It was a two-day game so if we won the toss and I batted at the end I might not have to do anything at all; just sit on the sidelines and read the papers, maybe have a hair-of-the-dog, and go home smug and self-satisfied that I'm leading an active, healthy lifestyle.
Regular visitors may remember it was only two months ago I swore never to step out on a cricket pitch again. I made this decision because I am, frankly, hopeless. You can't bat, you can't bowl. So who are you kidding? It was time to stop the lies, to abandon the delusion.
After struggling through the horrible Sydney traffic jams, through Surry Hills up to Moore Park near the SCG, we arrive late to find we had, indeed, won the toss. And, yes, there is no argument. I would bat last. Number 11 was the place to be. And there are two massive papers to work my way through. Maybe I could even squeeze in a few ZZZZs under a tree somewhere.
I may be a cricketing zero, but I accept it. Nay, I welcome it. Far worse would it be to be John Howard, who has discovered even after supporting the war and being the US's number two ally, he's still a political zero. They still don't know who he is. His mate George is coming to a special sitting of the Australian Parliament this month. However, when this was announced in the US the statement referred to "the Australian Prime Minister, John Major".
The US certainly knows how to win friends and influence people. Meanwhile, Phillip Adams delivers an interesting reading of Bob Woodward's Bush at War:
"The thought that this monumental mediocrity is the most powerful man on Earth will reassure Bush's Christian fundamentalist followers that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is utterly wrong. Descended from apes? The US President hasn't descended at all.
Don't you love that phrase, "All Stetson, no cattle"?
Glancing up from my papers, it begins to dawn on me that the guys I'm playing with this week were rather good. It turns out I'm playing number 11 for the Kingsford 4th grade. I haven't been in such exalted company since turning out occasionally for University-St Heliers in my twenties.
"Shit," I thought, as a ball flew down the pitch. "Their opener is pretty quick," an impression reinforced shortly after when he sent one of our openers' wickets flying. One wicket fell and then another until we were five down. One guy, Dave, soldiered on to a fine 87.
Howard also has to deal with some strange and annoying distractions right now. And believe it or not a real sleeper is the so-called "Sheep of State", a shipful of woolies that have been floating around in the Indian ocean for more than 60 days. The issue has given the cartoonists a field-day. One had two cages side by side. The first holding a refugee was labeled "vote winner", the other holding a sheep was labeled "vote loser".
Then Dave went. By 3pm I knew I was going to have to bat.
Padded up, gloved up, boxed up I wandered out to the centre. Two balls left in the over. The first whizzes past. The fielders seem suddenly excited. They close in. The second ball I block staunchly. My partner gets the strike. Brilliant.
He hits two, then one. I'm back on strike. Another ball whizzes past. Then another. Then I block a good ball. So far so good. I'm settling in. These guys ain't so tough. Unlike last time, my feet are moving. It feels okay. I'm ready to hit something.
I see the over out and once gain the strike goes to the other end. He misses the first. The second he knocks up straight to a fielder and it's all over.
Not out for nought.
Of course we still had to field, but to cut a long story short, here's my record: I didn't bowl. I didn't take any catches. I didn't drop any catches. I was not out for nothing. My impact on the game was zero, nothing, nada, but I did not humiliate myself!
Phoney surpluses, unfunded liabilities | Oct 01, 2003 14:30
The great news over here is we can expect tax cuts of $10 a week following the surprise $7.5 billion surplus announced overnight. Now some of you may remember just the other day I chided Howard for his big spending.
"What the bloody hell are you on about Rob?" you may well ask.
Well, you see, there a surplusses and there are surplusses. I'll let finance maestro Crikey explain how it works:
"The various Australian websites are carrying the basic AAP report on the booming tax receipts but none of them have linked to the detailed Treasury documents.
"You can only laugh as Cozzie [treasurer Peter Costello] claims he is reducing debt (in this case by $8.4 billion to $29.7 billion) at the same time the government's superannuation scheme motors ever higher towards an unfunded liability of $90 billion. A responsible government would not have allowed unfunded public sector superannuation to blow out by almost $15 billion in 8 years.
"It is amazing that the mainstream press continue to let Cozzie and Howard get away with this dodgy accounting.
"Meanwhile, the economy is booming and we're getting slugged like never before as personal income tax receipts power above $90 billion and even company tax leapt by $2 billion thanks to a good profit reporting season."
Now that $15 billion of unfunded superannuation would not only wipe out the current surplus, but would also wipe away every budget surplus since Howard took office.
Interestingly, the New Zealand government's second biggest liability is, wait for it, unfunded government superannuation. In 1999 this unfunded liability amounted to $NZ8.5 billion. By the end of April 2003 it had grown to $NZ10.4 billion.
But financial trickery over here goes further than super. Crikey from July:
"With the Australian dollar rising to four year highs last month, the Reserve Bank wisely took the opportunity to offload $5.5 billion Australian dollars they acquired whilst defending the currency during its cellar-dwelling around the US50c mark in recent years.
"This is sound economic management.
"However, profits raised from the sale are not going back into the Reserve Bank of Australia, but instead are being pumped straight into the federal budget as Howard and Costello cook the books to claim a surplus. The government is hoping to rip almost $4 billion out of the RBA this year which is a disgrace when you consider Australia's pathetically low levels of foreign currency reserves."
Now I presume from this that a significant amount of this super liability was unfunded from before 1996 and the blame for that should go to Howard's Labour predecessors. But then there is a huge argument that the credit for Australia's long boom should go there too.
Crikey, followed an Australian Financial Review report to draw these conclusions in July:
"While Steve Bracks and Bob Carr are guilty, the worst offenders are undoubtedly John Howard and Peter Costello who claim to be responsible financial managers.
"Their fiscal credibility is blown out of the water by this one Financial Review fact: since 1995 unfunded Commonwealth superannuation liabilities have blown out by $20 billion from $69 billion to $89 billion - equivalent to 8 per cent of GDP.
"In other words, all these claims of 7 straight budget surpluses is a fib, although the big privatisations would have produced the occasional cash surplus even if superannuation liabilities accrued were properly accounted for.
"However, with proper accounting, the Howard Government would probably never have reported a recurrent surplus."
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