The documentary JoyDivision is flawed in many ways, including in its annoying insistence on freezing images in an attempt to create a dramatic or expository effect. The thesis about the role the band Joy Division played in the evolution of Manchester is stated and then frustratingly left alone until the end of the production when it’s mentioned again without much being said in the movie to back it up.  Nevertheless, it’s an engrossing work featuring some great music and amusing and touching interviews with the surviving members of the group, as well as associates such as Tony Wilson. When one of the participants reflects on the anger he felt when learning that Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, had killed himself it’s honest to the point of being uncomfortable. After all, these days a person who suggests that somebody who has taken their own life is a bastard who should’ve stuck it out like the rest of us isn’t looked upon kindly (even if that anger is a result of a mixture of grief, shock, sadness and a genuine belief that what the deceased has done is wrong).  The doco claims that Curtis, who was only 23-years-old when he died, was conflicted, talented, emotionally and physically sick, emotionally erratic and sad, which isn’t a surprise. The rest of the band are a wonderfully motley bunch of middle-age blokes with varying degrees of articulateness and emotional stability.  Given the thousands of romanticised accounts of the 1960s, it’s a real treat to finally see movies being made about the importance of the punk and post-punk eras.           Â
At the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, you can watch any number of short films from a variety of Australian writers and directors in these booths that seat three people. Yesterday, seated in one of those booths, I pressed play on a Gillian Armstrong short from 1973 about a woman who used the services of a backyard abortionist in the 1930s. On the screen giving details of the movies on show, viewers are warned that the Armstrong film might cause offence. Was ACMI worried that people might become upset by a movie about abortion, or perhaps were they concerned that someone might get the grumps because the lead character expresses sorrow about the loss of what she describes as a baby? Later that day in one of the ACMI cinemas, I watched a documentary called Darling!ThePieterDirk-UysStory. The documentary was a stylistically flawed but very interesting look at the South African satirist and AIDS educator, Pieter Dirk-Uys. I wondered to myself, “Why no warning that viewers are sure to be offended by the South African Government’s response to the AIDS crisis (what Dirk-Uys provocatively describes as “genocide”)?” Back at home last night, I put Ken Loach’s devastatingly sad Kes into the DVD player. Looking at the DVD case, I wondered why there was no warning on it that the bullying, classism, limited opportunities for working-class kids and abusive authority figures in Kes would surely cause offence. I’m still wondering why ACMI deemed it necessary to put a warning on Armstrong’s work.       Â
In the latest editions of the feminist magazines Bitch and Bust, there are articles railing against the lack of movies celebrating gal geeks.
As the item in Bitch by Sarah Seltzer claims, a nerdy chick must leave her geekiness (and independence) behind before she can win the heart and other body parts of some handsome guy:
The female dork chooses her own narrative over the narrative of a conformist society and demands to be accepted for who she is. And as punishment, pop culture robs her of her sex appeal.
Think you’ll ever see a movie in which the lead character resembles that woman from Trekkies who wore a Trekkie uniform to court, and she gets to date the cutest and nicest boy in school (possibly even the cutest, nicest jock).
Okay, okay, Tom Cruise is one unpleasant dude with all that Scientology crap and his intense and arrogant way of viewing the world, but is he on par with an infamous Nazi? What if Cruise was a mainstream Catholic (Mary wept) and was trying to convince his fellow Catholics about the glory of their faith? Of course, they’d probably give him a cup of tea and tell him to calm down a bit, but is Cruise’s style of preaching Nazi-like and thoroughly repugnant because he belongs to a totally weird ”church” and not a sensible one that believes in the Virgin Birth and The Pope?Â
The long-standing antagonism between Germany and the Church of Scientology escalated over the weekend when a high-profile historian compared Tom Cruise’s performance in a Scientology video with the style of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Guido Knopp, who has written a number of books on Hitler and his inner circle, said the video, which surfaced on YouTube last week, “inevitably” recalled Goebbels’ speech in a Berlin sports stadium when he asked “Do you want total war?” and the crowd thundered “Yes!”
The Scientology footage shows Cruise, wearing a large medallion and speaking from a podium.
In the movie Cloverfield an unnamed monster of unknown origin does a number on Manhattan. The movie is told from the view of a group of twenty-something New Yorkers who record their flight from the destruction on a digital video camera. The movie arrived with a lot of hype which some may have encountered. Most was generated largely from a trailer that showed the head from the Statue of Liberty being thrown through the sky and rolling down a street and a clever internet based viral campaign. Images of the monster have been cleverly kept secret, further building buzz around the movie.
Because what IÂ have dictated is nothing less than a Constitution for the Colbert Nation. And, like our Founding Fathers, I hold my Truths to be self-evident, which is why I did absolutely no research.
I didn’t need to. The only research I needed was a long hard look in the mirror. For this book is My Story and, as such, it is the American story.
I am reminded of the words of Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century poet, naturalist and all around man’s man, who, through his epic lyricism, defined the character of this new nation. He said,
The old teev during the non-ratings season has been a bit of a write off, which in many ways isn’t a bad thing. But I have enjoyed a lot of what SBS has had on (and I’m also pleased to see that the Rudd government is seeking legal advice on the decision to run in-program ads as promised). I could mention some of the Wong Kar-Wai flicks, and many others, but one doco that turned out to be heaps better than I’d anticipated was the one last week on teen movies, partly because it had a lot of interesting talking heads, and partly because it inspired me to go out and rent movies I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years like The Outsiders and remember with what emotional force it struck me way back when (I was a middle class boy going to a working class school, so I was alternately fantasising about being in a John Hughes world and being a “grease”.) It really is amazing to feel exactly how much I did identify with some of the characters and how much I felt - something that’s really very rarely the case now. Perhaps the 80s was something of a golden age for teen cinema, or maybe it’s about the difference between being in your teens and in your thirties.
According to Yen Magazine, the 90s are back. Or something. (Actually from a bit of shopping recently, I think the 80s are back - skinny knit ties or puffy sleeved dresses, anyone?)… Anyway, since the last time we had a federal Labor government it was very unashamedly 90s (coz it was in the 90s…), how was the world different? Was Australia another country? What were you doing? What was the zeitgeist?
“With a song like ‘Sex Farm’, we’re taking a sophisticated view of the idea of sex and…putting it on a farm.” (Derek Smalls, This isSpinalTap)
A special edition of Total Filmmagazine contains a list of the “Top 100 Movies of all Time”.  Okay, lists of “best films” are subjective, and often encourage much scratching of one’s noggin. “Where’s TheHours?”, I ask myself while watching ThePiano. Anyway, TotalFilm’s Top 100 contains such joys as ThisisSpinalTap (it gets up to 98),  One Flew Over theCuckoo’sNest (a nutty 43), and BladeRunner (number 32 with a, errr, don’t know what the film is about).  Anyway, here’s the Top 10 of the Top 100: Continue reading ‘The best films of all time?’
… is on the ABC now! For all kitsch martial arts film lovers. Wacky film - Bruce Lee wrote the screenplay in 69 with James Coburn but they had a falling out, and it wasn’t made until 78, after Lee’s death. His idea was to combine his “zen philosophy” with martial arts to bring the world “the first mystical martial arts adventure”. It’s incredibly silly and erm, the philosophy ain’t that profound. David Carradine is eminently watchable (he took on all the parts Lee was to have played), but Jeff Cooper as Cord is either doing a convincing impression of extreme unflappability or is a terribly wooden actor. But it’s all enormous fun!
When Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, made an off-the-cuff comment about President George W. Bush at a gig in London in 2003 she never would’ve imagined it’d become such a defining moment for herself and her band.
A movie called Shut Up&Sing, which cheekily uses an absurd assertion by a member of the anti-Chicks army on its promotional material (”Freedom of speech is fine, as long as you don’t do it in public”), charts the Chicks’s evolution from women with an unsure and regretful voice to females who were prepared to own their views.
While watching this informative and unexpectedly humorous film, it was difficult to understand why members of the most powerful and arguably most democratic nation on earth became so agitated by the following statement by Maines:
During one of the speeches that preceded the screening of Constructing Fear last night at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, it was pointed out that both the ABC and SBS were unwilling to have a look at the original version of the documentary, let alone fund it.Â
The inference was clear; the broadcasters didn’t want anything to do with a film about workers fighting for their rights in today’s industrial relations climate.Â
The documentary focused on a number of cases in which CFMEU members raised issues such as workplace safety and then found themselves sacked or up before the Australian Building Construction Commission (ABCC) for their trouble.        Â
Darlene Taylor has joined LP as a culture correspondent.
The word “youth” is synonymous with “young men” in Bra Boys, a film in which females are absent except for a stalwart grandmother, two little girls playing patty-cake as the Long Bay Correctional Complex lurks in the background and some mums who let their sons surf with the gang who give the documentary its name.
Since women are often portrayed as victims in feature films about working-class men, their nonappearance in Bra Boys could be a sign there are things the filmmakers do not want the audience to know about.
For instance, Grace in Once Were Warriors kills herself after a rape confirms her fears she will never escape, while Michelle in The Boys is brutalised by the psychopathic leader of a band of siblings in Western Sydney.
Though Bra Boys, which was recently released on DVD, gives us no insight into how females living in Maroubra cope with their lot, it is an intriguing and confronting look at the way surfing has given the Abberton brothers focus in their lives.
John Howard made news recently by putting a couple of dull speeches up on YouTube, and Kevin Rudd has launched a big site to sells bumper stickers. As Mark has pointed out, these token efforts don’t really take the online plunge, they just move the same old campaign from talkback and letters pages to a new venue: “the Young Liberal and Young Labor junior apparatchiks have moved on from the traditional talkback phone trees to being alerted via email to post comments on MSM ‘blogs’ and vote in online polls”.
A new CFMEU initiative looks far more interesting as a campaign tool. The union has sponsored the production of a documentary about the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the Gestapo-like outfit that treats union members as if they were terrorists. The 35-minute program is being publicised via a YouTube channel, and when it launches on 14 August, the whole documentary will be available for download at the Constructing Fear website.
After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God� to “I was drunk.� They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.
The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.
Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they’d had sex “to get rid of a headache.� It’s No. 173 on the list.
Others said they did it to “help me fall asleep,� “make my partner feel powerful,� “burn calories,� “return a favor,� “keep warm,� “hurt an enemy� or “change the topic of conversation.� The lamest may have been, “It seemed like good exercise,� although there is also this: “Someone dared me.�
It’s an interesting article, with some stereotypes reinforced and others contradicted.
A related question: what’s the least convincing setup for characters bonking each other you’ve ever seen/read in films/books? Has anyone ever seen/read No. 173?
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
 
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