Tag Archive for ‘Film’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Tag Archive for 'Film'

Lazy Sunday! (Thesis finishing edition)

Published

3 days, 3 hours ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Education, Film, TV, Video etc, Life, Photography and Urbanism

. 35 Comments

Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!

Although it’s been uni break over the last week, I’ve been a busy boy. I now have a date with destiny for my doctorate - I’m presenting to a final seminar on 30 October. This is the internal examination stage of phd completion according to the QUT rules - it’s a bit like a viva voce where you talk about what you’ve done and found and are questioned by a panel of senior academics (and the audience!) - in my case from QUT’s Humanities Program (once was a Faculty…) I more or less wrapped the thing up on Friday, did a little revision yesterday, and lazed around last night and watched Maggie Cheung movies on dvd, and today and tomorrow before the teaching and marking onslaught resumes, I’m giving the thesis a final spit and polish.

So I’m very chuffed!

Folks might also remember I’ve been doing a bit of travel writing - of the insider’s guide to where you live variety. I filed my copy for that and sent in the invoice on Tuesday arvo, and it was a really neat gig. On Monday, I went for a wander around Paddington and took some photos - not for the project itself - but as an aide memoire. It turned out to be a dodgy day to be walking - 35 degrees maximum. But it did also prompt me to decide that walking for about an hour a day was a good custom to be revived - so I’ve been doing that ever since - in the late afternoon on cooler days and at night on hotter days. Anyway, here’s the photographic record of my Paddo perambulations. It’s a really nice part of the world, and somewhere I wouldn’t mind living. But the real estate market would really have to collapse before I could contemplate buying there!

White picket fence II by *phenomenologist on deviant ART

If you’d like to see a larger image of the photos, click on them then click on “full view” once you’re inside the gallery.

Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday! (Thesis finishing edition)’

Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have

Published

Kim

4 weeks ago

in Blogging, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Lesbian and Gay, Life, Relationships, Sexuality and Sociology

. 6 Comments

Never let it be said that this blog lets a good idea from its commenters go to waste. Even when that good idea emerges in response to a monotonous manifestation of the enormous ego of one of the blogosphere’s most ubiquitous hydra headed trolls. While Pavlov’s Cat is no doubt right that basing one’s entire orientation to life on a film is somewhat superficial, on the other hand, as a number of commenters indicated, it might be a neat thought experiment. For there is a serious point here - the mass medium of the film does actually provide something of a socialising phenomenon in modernity. (Whether that’s still true in late or post modernity is perhaps another debate.) For instance, I was recently alerted - through reading Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz’ Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - to a really huge project conducted in America in the 1930s - the Payne Fund Studies. Chicago School sociologist Henry Blumer asked adolescents about the impact of movies on them (and in many ways the 30s was the height of Hollywood dreaming). He found that a lot of teens modeled their dating behaviour consciously on film scripts, as it were:

When I saw “The Pagan” I fell harder than ever for Ramon Navarro. All my girl friends talk about is these wonderful love stories. When I see a picture like that it makes me like my steady boy friend all the more… it happens that through the movies I have learned to close my eyes, and I use that “Deep Bend” pose.

From watching love scenes in the movies I have noticed that when a girl is kissed she closes her eyes; this I found that I also unconsciously do. When [boys] go to make love, to kiss or hug, I put them off at first, but it always ends in them having their way. I guess I imitated this from the movies because I see it in almost every show I go to.

Continue reading ‘Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have’

Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published

Guest Poster

2 months ago

in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War

. 193 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’

Where the bloody hell are ya, Baz?

Published

Kim

2 months, 1 week ago

in Advertising, Australiana, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Government, Melbourne and Sociology

. 26 Comments

Tourism promotion is a weird thing. Like the unrolling the huge ball of string come to Melbourne message (?) which hardly survived its unravelling by the Chaser. Something I read recently about the career end of Geoff Dixon as CEO of Qantas pointed out that one of the challenges for an Australian airline is that Australia is only on the way to Antarctica. So how to induce people to come here? Efforts to promote the joint seem to waver between “natural beauty” messages and weird distillations of Ozculture - whatever that might be. Perhaps it’s Lara Bingle? Now we’ve got Baz Luhrmann either leveraging his new movie - Australia - you know the one, our Nic’s in it - for a government sponsored tourism campaign, or, alternatively, leveraging Australia off a movie with the same title. Did I get that right? It’s all very recursive!

Would it just have been simpler if we’d made Lord of the Rings here? Worked for NZ tourism. With tons of Australian actors… How *do* you market/represent/thematise a post-colonial culture?

What are the rules for a good dinner party?

Published

Mark

2 months, 1 week ago

in Art, Brisbane, Consumerism, Culture, Education, Fashion, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, History, Life, Parenting, Politics and Sociology

. 64 Comments

I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.

I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.

Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.

Lazy Sunday! (Brisbane Festival edition)

Published

Mark

2 months, 1 week ago

in Art, Brisbane, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Life, Music and Urbanism

. 9 Comments

Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!

I’m still a bit pressed for time, what with the phd thesis - second draft now under construction - and the first week of semester, but I did manage to sample a bit of the Brisbane Festival goodness last week, going to two gigs on Tuesday night. Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier were, as expected, totally brilliant, and Feasting on Flesh was a fine piece of burlesque cabaret. (It’s on til Saturday if anyone wants to go.)

There are a lot of really neat ideas in the planning of the festival this year - including quite a few free events in the burbs, and the rather interesting idea of hosting bands in people’s backyards. That’s a nice way - along with the Spiegeltent in Queens Park - to make it a bit more of a genuine festival than just having people traipse off to headline theatre and dance performances at QPAC. I wish I had more time to enjoy more of it.

Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday! (Brisbane Festival edition)’

The compulsory (if belated) Joss Whedon’s “Dr Horrible” post

Published

Kim

2 months, 2 weeks ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Feminism, Film, TV, Video etc and Media

. 12 Comments

This post is so belated that spoiler warnings are hardly an issue (I suspect) so I don’t think I need to give any, though I don’t warrant all the links are spoiler free.

So the saga began with the anticipation… fueled by the unfortunate non-viewability-ness of the Joss Whedon intertubes serial in Australia. You have to give the guy big props for the cleverness of this model - something not entirely new to the Whedonverse though a bit of an extrapolation. I figure the uneven success rate Whedon’s had with getting projects up and keeping them on air has actually stimulated a lot of creativity - for instance the Buffy Season Eight continuation by comic. If anything’s a great example of the “intercreativity” of fans and various pros in constructing a fictional ‘verse across all sorts of platforms, it’s all things Whedon. So I guess the expectations for Doctor Horrible were pretty high. I thought it was kinda… well, meh. Diehard Whedon fans loved it. Others turned a more critical eye on the Doctor’s adventures.

Bring back Firefly I reckon!

Continue reading ‘The compulsory (if belated) Joss Whedon’s “Dr Horrible” post’

Standard Operating Procedure

Published

Darlene

3 months, 1 week ago

in Film, TV, Video etc, Iraq and War

. 27 Comments

A few years ago, most of us were appalled by the infamous photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Seeing those photos again in Errol Morris’s exceptional documentary Standard Operating Procedure lets us know that time has rightly done nothing to diminish our negative reactions to those images.

However, Morris’s film seeks to give us the picture behind those pictures.

Continue reading ‘Standard Operating Procedure’

Darlene Recommends “My Brother is an Only Child”

Published

Darlene

3 months, 2 weeks ago

in Film, TV, Video etc and Politics

. 76 Comments

Brooding brothers: One is a fascist and the other is a communist (the communist is the spunk with dreamy eyes who’s in front of Stalin). Picture courtesy of Aztec International.

If you’re looking for an interesting, intelligent and at times amusing film with political and familial conflict at its core, you’ll enjoy My Brother is an Only Child. I give it four out of five stars. If anyone can recommend other good movies, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Here’s a synopsis of the film from the aforementioned Aztec International:
Continue reading ‘Darlene Recommends “My Brother is an Only Child”’

Madonna’s material (girl) culture

Published

Kim

5 months, 1 week ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Feminism, Film, TV, Video etc, Music, Sexuality and Women

. 16 Comments

I suspect they’re dead and gone now as uni courses (cos’ Madonna is a very Gen X phenomenon), but one of the staples of the anti-pomo anti-cultural studies culture wars used to be claims that Universities were teaching subjects about the Detroit diva rather than, you know, Shakespeare.

But I still think she was and is a cultural phenomenon. Her radicalism and her cultural reach into lives shouldn’t be underestimated. I was bopping around (bipedally in those days) to Like a Virgin in 1985 when I was just a little twelve year old thing, and I can remember being thrilled by Desperately Seeking Susan, which in retrospect now reads like a mirrored fantasy where both Susans incarnate different aspects of Madonna’s own biography and evolving mythos, transposed to New Jersey and New York City. In any case, she made a lot of sense to a Catholic school girl!

Continue reading ‘Madonna’s material (girl) culture’

Avalon

Published

Mark

5 months, 2 weeks ago

in Film, TV, Video etc, Media and Sociology

. 40 Comments

Not a post about Roxy Music… I’ve just been watching Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii’s rather stunning film Avalon on dvd. It’s effectively a live action anime - made in Poland in Polish using Polish actors for a Japanese and international audience, rather than for a domestic one.

I’ve found the user comments on IMDB quite interesting - and this actually sums the film up very neatly:

…this movie is what one could call a cyberpunk poem.

I typically go hunting down comments and reviews after I’ve seen a dvd - not sure why! Because Avalon didn’t get a theatrical release in the US, I wasn’t surprised not to find too many mainstream media reviews. You can get a little bit of a sense of what it’s about from this short notice in the Village Voice [and a lot more from Cyberpunkreview], and from the trailer and an excerpt beneath the fold. But I wasn’t too surprised to see this sort of thing - from Peter Bradshaw in the Graudian:

If Hungarian miserablist Bela Tarr ever remade The Matrix, it might look like this, but I don’t think Tarr would have made it quite so boring.

Maybe it’s a genre effect. Continue reading ‘Avalon’

Horton and Lars

Published

Darlene

5 months, 4 weeks ago

in Film, TV, Video etc

. 12 Comments

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Moody youngsters take note: the film version of Horton Hears a Who! represents the character of Jo-Jo as a sensitive and hardworking genius who looks like a mini-emo rather than the “twerp” he is in the book. Even if you can’t relate to a kid who looks sad most of the time because his dad doesn’t listen, there’s plenty to enjoy in this wonderfully funny and visually delightful take on Dr. Seuss’s tale of an elephant who saves the tiny people of Whoville thanks to some clover and a willingness to believe in something even though it can’t be seen. The movie features the voices of several comedy giants, including Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Carol Burnett as an authoritarian kangaroo. Given the kangaroo will do anything to uphold the status quo and ensure the jungle’s children don’t exercise their imaginations, it’s no surprise she’s pouchschooling her joey (a wonderful dig at the kind of homeschooling that’s all about indoctrination and keeping difference at bay). Meanwhile, the councillors of Whoville are angry that plans to celebrate their supposedly utopian community’s centenary are being disturbed by the Mayor’s warnings about the danger they’re in. Just like all the best movies for littlies (e.g. Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin); there’s humour, pop culture references adults can embrace, dramatic tension, good versus evil, and a happy resolution, while fans of Seuss’s nonstop rhymes won’t be disappointed. Alas, also like a lot of films for littlies, it’s rather sexist, with the Mayor’s daughters being vacuous and apparently unsuitable to follow in their father’s footsteps.

Continue reading ‘Horton and Lars’

Science Fiction double feature

Published

Kim

6 months ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, Film, TV, Video etc and Levity

. 19 Comments

Then something went wrong,
for Fay Wray and King Kong
they got caught in a celluloid jam.

Check out the best lyrics site evah!

After all the intriguing discussion on Mark’s sf thread, I reckon we need an sf film thread for Thursday night.

That should be enough of a discussion starter!

I won’t add my condemn to your condemn XVI (Purgatory Blues edition)

Published

Kim

6 months, 3 weeks ago

in Film, TV, Video etc, History, Levity, Media, Miscellaneous, Music and Politics

. 58 Comments

Oh noes! We forgot to do this in February!

So, it’s time again to condemn. Here’s a sixteenth open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this month so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)

You can condemn anything you like except Juliette Lewis’s band Juliette and the Licks who are touring Australia in April. But you can condemn Brendan Nelson for his party of compassion hypocrisy and the punditariat for writing it up as “necessary pragmatism”, “end of Kevin’s honeymoon” etc! You could also condemn Juliette Lewis for over-acting in Natural Born Killers, and that movie for being a dumbing down of the 90s wave of American indie films. But I do condemn myself for thinking her band would be rubbish… Judge not, lest, etc…

See these eyes so green

Published

Kim

7 months, 2 weeks ago

in Film, TV, Video etc

. 7 Comments

Morality was a word my parents never used. Truth was the word. Truth and facing things like an animal.

- Nastassja Kinski

Everyone, I imagine, has seen the 1982 sort of remake. The original is stunning classic noir horror. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (and its sequel, Curse of the Cat People) is on ABC1 at 1.05am on Tuesday.

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