hey y'all

My blog is steadily moving to here.

Why I am (hopefully) moving.

Hi y'all. Currently I'm in the process of moving over to Tumblr. I'm doing this for two reasons; one is pictures and interface are much more pleasant over there; the second is I want to make a private work diary and I have to have a primary blog to do so.

It'll probs take me a while to work out the interface. I don't want to have a traditional scroll-down affair if I can avoid it. Then again I do have to Google terms such as "script", so that may take a while. But on the up and up, I will have another hi-lar article published somewhere soon, and a few short-stories off to various places.

Let the horrid inter-web fenangling begin!

Shut Up Fifth Element you are so fine

Look at you. Your costumes are by Jean Paul-freaking-Gaultier:

  You have Milla Jovovich with minimal dialogue:

Your villain is Gary Oldman with a flavour saver and an over-sized orthopedic shoe.

You have an operetta in space in a space-opera film. With hip-hop stylings!

The good guys are literally Mighty Ducks, not just the symbolic, anthropomorphic sports-team kind:

And IMDB puts you 19th on it's list of best-sci-fi/fantasy movies of the last twenty years?  Beneath Avatar!? Really?

Really. But that's okay.

Sort of.

One more thing

Inside of this:

I read a fascinating article about this:

written by the man who wrote this:

 

that is all.

Things I've been reading lately.

Culcher: Akira Yamaguchi

Movies: The Chaser and The Yellow Sea

I've been meaning to catch up on my Korean films. More than anything else they're always surprising. Perhaps it's just I don't know the cultural stereotypes and story tropes, but I never know what's going to happen. The Chaser is exactly like that. For starters it's a murder thriller where the main character is a cop turned pimp, and the killer is caught in the first half-hour. From there it gets messier and messier as the police force tracks down the killer's lair before the next victim dies. Now that I think about it in some ways that's like quite a few Hollywood movies. But this is different! I'd explain how but it doesn't matter, since this one is being adapted into a Hollywood version ala Infernal Affairs.

In translation "The Yellow Sea"

The Yellow Sea is the next film from Na Hong-jin the director of The Chaser. It's also about murders. FYI guns are apparently v.rare in South Korea, because I've never seen so much stabbin' before. As in pretty much every death (and I'm guessing there are at least thirty)is by stabbin' and axin' and motherfuckin tomahawkin'. Killings aside, it's actually really compelling and gives a great insight into a world most of us know nothing about.

News: Voiceworks

Hi y'all! I recently had my first non-fiction article published. It's called We the Bitchfaced, subject matter self-explanatory. It's in the current edition of Voiceworks magazine. It can be found in various book stores, but also online for your convenience.

Movies: The Hunger Games

Space-age Torvill and Dean

I'll spare you the review and merely ask, in regards to costumes: 'Whuh?'. How did dystopian future translate into formal-disaster slash futuristic figure-skaters in space? And, in the above scene, THAT HAIR. I flinched when I saw it. And why does Katniss wear so much yellow chartreuse? Is that a metaphor for her being fiery...like the liqueur...anyone?

And why is Lenny Kravitz in a film directed at Tweens? American Woman came out when the key demographic were about two.They should have gotten Willow "Whip My Hair" Smith to play Rue at least.

Co-worker

Culcher: Zhong Chen

I'm a little slow. Australian artist Zhong Chen has been making these excellent artworks for yonkers, and it's taken me till now to find them.
 

No, they're not terrible quality, they're supposed to be pixelated. I do like a good video game reference to. I love it how video games are becoming a part of cultural fabric, in the same realm as literature, music or movies. Well, slowly but surely, anyway.

Catch Up: Books Part 1

Okay okay so it's been a long...long..looooong time since I last posted. I've been to Melbourne, I've been to Sydney, I've been getting more and more terrified of catching up with my book posts. For the sake of brevity/sanity, let's make these reviews a series of buzz-words and adjectives. Okay, yes?

One for the linguist-nerds. Humans living with double-mouthed aliens in bizarro future-future time. Has some great sci-fi, but also some awful characters. Lead is an automaton with a penchant for sleeping with twins. Cold but satisfying.

Read to be culturally relevant. Idea is like the toothless, anti-communist spin on Battle Royale:

The parts I like most were the descriptions of the stylists making them over. Is it just me or is this both weird and unnecessary? Wouldn't Katniss be a little miffed about being all gussied up just to go gut some of her chums? And also, if style is so important, why do the outfits in the movie version look so blah?

Non-fiction book about two of Australia's foremost patrons of the arts. Visited their gallery in Melbourne; an elderly tour guide followed me around giving me the inside story. John and Sunday Reed supported the likes of Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. Sunday had affairs with many of them. Both saucy and educational. 

Culcher: Marc Blake

This is the work of New Zealand artist Marc Blake, currently on show at the Michael Reid gallery in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney. A few more can be found here.

Moves: Melancholia

Okay so Melancholia, the latest film by Lars von Trier, does have an amazing opening sequence.

With its extreme slow motion and highly posed shots, it reminded me of the work by Russian collective AES+F:

Other than that and some very pretty shots, the film was a snooze. I couldn't relate to Kirsten Dunsten's character. I don't think I could relate to anyone who couldn't make a marriage to Alexander Skaaaaarrsgarrrd work.

:-(

Although you do get to see her goombas in a very painterly evening scene:

O O

So everyone's a winner. Except the world. Which ends. :-(.

Virtual Obesity

For the past few days I've been on a kind of digital sabbatical. That is, I've taken a break from obsessively checking and re-checking newsfeeds, Twitters, blogs, Facebook, and Wikipedia trawling. Not only was it interrupting my work pattern, it's effects remained even after I'd left the computer. So I switched off and went to the library, which, for those who haven't been lately, is a large wi-fi hub with book shelves for decoration. I was often the only one actually reading a book.

Not that I'm suggesting these people weren't working. I'm sure they were, and often with a greater attentiveness that myself. Although a lot were Facebook-ing. Even without a computer nearby, I found I had to stand up and walk around at least once an hour. If I wasn't careful I'd start picking out books at random and start flicking through them, i.e. trawling the internet. The fact is that after a lifetime saturated in television, computer games and now the internet, my attention span is one of the shortest  I know of. I can't watch a movie without fidgeting. I didn't need a detox from technology, the problem was entirely my own. It was as I flicked through a book on Oriental Textiles that I realised my brain was overweight; that my thinking was obese.

The food analogy was effective, which is to say terrifying. I was snacking on something at least every fifteen minutes, if not every five - sometimes every two. I considered quality irrelevant. It may have been a news report, but if it wasn't related to my work, which it never was, it counted as a distraction - as a Chicken McNugget of brain junk. Nicholas Carr, in his excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, discusses how using the internet changes the fundamental way in which our brain functions. Using the internet is not the same as reading. For instance our eyes don't move in the same way; instead of moving left to right, they're moving in all directions and at a much higher speed. Our brains are processing a larger of amount of information and greater speeds. My quandry is this: no matter how educational it may be, if it's served to us amongst a million blinking links, videos, advertisement, comment boxes and memes, are we really taking it in, or is it the informational equivalent of a Double Down? 

New music things: Zebra Katz and Azealia Banks

Things to be thankful for:

A website dedicated to putting Fran Drescher's head on things.

Books on my bedside table:

Richard Flanagan is an excellent Australian author. I read Gould's Book of Fish on a long haul to Honkers years ago. It's an amazing take on Australian history and is definitely one of my favourite Australian books. This one reads a little meh; parallel stories with a Tasmanian gaol-keeper and Charles Dickens. Although having written that it seems really interesting. What is my problem? 

I read The City and The City by this author just the other week. That book is the 2010 Hugo award-winning novel about two cities imposed one on top of the other. The citizens of each city have to pretend they can't see one another or risk being disappeared by "The Breach". Queue Orwellian ideas of thought police, coupled with a hard-boiled murder mystery and philosophical speculation. This one is about a species of alien who don't know how to lie...yet.

This one's for the book club. Am I missing something big when I say I'm not wildly crazy about Eugenides? As in, I wouldn't run screaming to buy this book? I mean, I've read both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex and was just, well, not blown away. And is it just me or does this plot - a love triangle set in the 80's - sound something like an "intellectual" Marian Keyes? And that the title seems a bit Penny Vincenzi? Should I stop talking?

Film Review: The Vow

 

My review of The Vow, starring Channing Tatum, can be found here. Tatum also stars in the excellent move, The Eagle, which out on DVD now, not to mention the upcoming re-make of 21 Jump Street (it looks set to be appalling) as well as a G.I. Joe sequel. He's like this years Natalie Portman, except a man, and in much worse movies.

Books: The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje, author of the new memoir/fiction/travelogue/coming of age story, "The Cat's Table", is also a prolific poet and non-fiction writer. He also wrote The English Patient, winner of the 1992 Man Booker Prize and the inspiration for one of my favourite Seinfeld moments:

While The Cat's Table may not suffer from the same interminable length (or passion, depending on who you ask), it does have a tone that seems to drag time out. In this case it's three weeks spent on a cruise ship, the Oronsay, in the middle of the 20th century. The narrator is eleven year old Michael, who is being relocated from Sri Lanka (previously Ceylon, as it's called here), to England. At book's end the author specifies that The Cat's Table is not autobiography.  At points you can see why he did this; the novel often feels like a nostalgic meander through time, with a few dramatic moments grafted on top.

Time is not only slowed for these three weeks, but stretched out over an entire lifetime. Adding to the books already calm tone is the fact that the author is recounting the story from the safe remove of, say, forty years. From England he relocates to Canada - again, much like the author himself. This has the effect of removing any sense of tension in the novel. The young Michael comes from a broken home; he is being relocated to England, where he will his mother who may or may not even be there to greet him; he is traveling unaccompanied into world he's never been before, leaving his school and friends behind. Not once does he look back in anger, as they stay. He doesn't have a tantrum. He doesn't even cry about it. It's all a bit of the classic "British Upper Lip", albeit a bit more relaxed, like a holiday-version of emotional disconnect.

On to the dramas, if you could call them that. Most of the chapters are two to three pages in length, reading more like vignettes than anything else. In them we meet the cast of The Cat's Table, and the various stories they have to tell. They're not all sunshine. There's stories of seduction, self-harm, imprisonment, and death. In the tradition of Agatha Christie, there's even a murder on board. In another novel it would have served as the novel's core, the dark star around which everything turns. In The Cat's Table it's treated almost like an afterthought. There are very few ramifications for anyone, aside from the writer and possible murderer, who, years later, chat about it over a cup of tea.

Ondaatje's novel tries to be several things at once but just comes off as, well, weird. Much like the inhabitants of it's own table. In fact, aside from the bloodshed I pictured it as a Wes Anderson movie. It certainly has the emotional remoteness to match. There's no doubt the author can write, and write beautifully, but in The Cat's Table he tries too hard to put a pretty face over something that's ugly, or rather add a little bit of weight to something that's meant to be light.