Before Snowden comes on, there’s a short film of Oliver Stone, the director, warning cinema audiences that they can be surveilled, so please turn off their devices. Even as a humourless joke for geeks, it sets the sombre tone of the movie to follow. This is a feature version of Linda Poitras’ Citizenfour (2014), that adds political and personal narratives to the story of the young intelligence employee who exposed America’s mass surveillance of the world’s communications. (more…)
Directed by Cesc Gay, Truman is a wonderful Spanish film about a couple of old buddies saying goodbye for the last time. One of them is dying of lung cancer, and the film traces their last four days together in Madrid. The good news is that Truman isn’t nearly as miserable as it sounds. In some reviews –and in the ads – I’ve seen it described as a “comedy-drama,” though the comic elements are often hard to discern. (more…)
by Milton Moon.©
I’m due to die sooner rather than later.
My wife of sixty-seven years has already gone,
her mortal remains,
in ashes waiting for mine.
Together they’ll go, somewhere
as part of the seasons
or the tides ebb or flow.
She is still with me,
I talk to her often,
burning incense twice a day
and telling her
“incense is dispersed for the soul
of the young girl.” (more…)
It occurred to me watching Money Monster that George Clooney is Hollywood’s Malcolm Turnbull. Think about it. Both are rich and famous. Both are smart, good-looking and smooth-talking. Both exude confidence and charm. Like Malcolm, George has no difficulty persuading us that in any unforeseen emergency he’s the one who can save us from chaos or disaster, even a budget deficit or a dreaded hung parliament. But Clooney is something more. He’s one of that rare species – the old-style Hollywood leading man. A generation ago we had Cary, Gregory, Charlton, Spencer, Burt and the rest, all in their prime. Now we’ve got George. And we’re lucky to have him. (more…)
If you want to see Chasing Asylum, Eva Orner’s brilliant new Australian documentary, my advice is to hurry along. At last count it was showing on just two screens in Sydney, and when I went along to the Dendy in Newtown on a recent Sunday afternoon – usually a good time for ticket sales – I was directed upstairs to a little cinema at the end of a long corridor to find the place half full. The ads are promoting it as “The film the Australian Government doesn’t want you to see” – and that I can believe. But does anyone want us to see it? Not the distributors – there’s barely a mention in the ads. Not, apparently, the ABC or SBS, who should be seizing it with both hands for prime-time screening during the election campaign. Perhaps that’s the problem – the film is politically explosive, and everyone seems to be running scared, including, of course, our political masters. (more…)
At the first Brian Johns Annual Lecture, Julianne Schultz spoke of the challenge to Australian culture by the global tech giants. In the summary of ‘what can be done’ she said:
So what can be done to join the dots in the Age of Fang?
We need to become better advocates of the value of cultural investment. We need to find new ways to put the case so we can win political and bureaucratic supporters with hard headed and sustainable arguments.
We need to find ways to embrace the particularity of being Australian in a global context and find new ways to express that.
We need to be willing to challenge the market if it is not delivering – adding our voices to those demanding that the Fangs pay their taxes, and not allowing them to unfairly distort the market.
We need to be prepared to use the legal and other means at our disposal to demand that laws are not broken.
We need to use the leverage we have as the generators of 2% of global GDP to get returns and opportunities to participate that are our due – a digital news initiative here for instance, or a major contribution to the digitisation of cultural assets without giving up the copyright.
We need to leverage 50 years of cultural investment to ensure our stories are told not only to ourselves, but the world.
If, as the scholars have identified, the dominant companies in the Age of Fang have the power to command attention, communicate news, give voice, enable collective action, hold power to account and influence votes, we need that to be done on our terms.
This power needs to be institutionalised so that it is civically accountable. The smartest Fangs understand that playing a civic role brings extra kudos and wealth, but there is a need for vigilance to sustain this.
Getting the settings of this institutionalisation will be challenge of the next decade. It will require a carrot and a stick.
Some Americans are suggesting a royalty should be paid on data mining of personal information, as is done with the mining of minerals, and returned to the country of origin.
Europeans are challenging antitrust and privacy. G20 is renewing attention on tax to examine ways to ensure that the wealth generated is spread appropriately, and not left to a few rich dudes to distribute to suit personal philanthropic ambitions.
The market alone won’t do this. We know from the process of creating cultural institutions that there is a role for the state – a place where in the words of Robert Menzies, the future and past can connect in the present.
Even in this rapidly globalising age, the nation state remains the best organising principle we have. I am not alone in feeling uneasy about the proposition we should give it over to a new oligopoly that is present every moment of our lives.
The purpose of cultural investment in the Age of Fang needs to be reiterated and maintained. As a nation, we need to take this seriously now if we are not to become an asterisk. The purpose of cultural investment in the Age of Fang needs to be restated, funding maintained and opportunities to innovate and export enhanced.
Otherwise we will become invisible at best and tribal at worst. If that happens we will be reduced as citizens and countries to passive consumers in a digital marketplace that values us only for our ability to pay.
The Brian Johns lecture was presented by the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University and the Copyright Agency.
A fuller version of Julianne Schultz’ address can be found at:
Julianne Schultz is Editor and Professor, Griffith Review.
As someone who has spent my life running organisations that take risks, invest billions and innovate to provide the best of local and international content to Australian consumers, reading the Productivity Commission’s draft report into our intellectual property arrangements was profoundly dispiriting.
I cannot think of another recent report that so seriously misses the main drivers of its area of inquiry – namely innovation and the incentives to produce new work. At the same time, the report treats Australian creative content and its production with a disdain bordering on contempt, and that is surprising for any economic statement.
The commission makes recommendations which would have such a deeply detrimental impact on the ability of film and TV makers, writers, artists and journalists to tell Australian yarns, and make a living doing so, as to be worthy only of rejection.
Take the commission’s conclusions on what drives innovation. The draft report claims our intellectual property and copyright settings inhibit investment and innovation. Really? Most people who run businesses and invest money know that what really drives innovation is a clear operating framework which enables companies and entrepreneurs to manage their risk appetite and capital investment, as well as access to highly skilled people.
In the creative landscape, the bedrock of production is copyright – the Copyright Act provides the critical framework for ensuring returns from investment.
The Prime Minister recognised the drivers of innovation in a statement last year. He committed over $1 billion to ensure the right incentives to innovation were in place; to encourage risk-taking; and to promote science, maths and computing in schools. There was no mention of intellectual property in his statement, given there is already a clear protection framework in place.
So, having spent considerable amounts of time answering the wrong question, the commission then demonstrates what can only be described as a breathtaking disregard for the creativity of Australians. It dismisses concerns that its recommendations would lead to less Australian content, with this response: “most new works consumed in Australia are sourced from overseas and their creation is unlikely to be responsive to the changes in Australia’s copyright (laws).” So, that encapsulates the commission’s thinking – American and British material will suffice and Australian original work doesn’t really count for zip.
But make no mistake, if the commission’s recommendations to implement “fair use”, for instance, were implemented, there would be less Australian content on our screens, on our bookshelves (real and virtual), and in our schools and universities.
“Fair use” is an American legal principle which would allow large enterprises to use copyright material for free, which, under Australian law, they currently have to pay for. PwC recently estimated that introducing “fair use” in Australia could result in a loss of GDP of more than $1 billion.
PwC’s report (provided to the commission) outlined three reasons for this collapse. First, “fair use” would strip millions away from Australian storytellers and content creators because governments, companies and large education institutions who now pay to use content, would stop paying as much or stop paying at all.
PwC examined what happened in Canada when similar changes were made in 2012. Universities and schools refused to pay for the educational content they used. This led to a 98 per cent reduction in licensing revenue, the closure of many publishers and a loss of jobs. Oxford University Press stopped producing Canadian textbooks for schools.
The Canadian Writers Union’s John Degan described the effect this way: “We are headed back to the bad old days of 40 or 50 years ago, when everything you read in Canadian schools was produced in the US or Britain.”
Second, “fair use” would permanently lift legal costs in Australia. US copyright cases are almost five times the volume of cases in the UK, whose law is comparable to ours. Good for lawyers, bad for creators and consumers.
Third, fair use would undermine the effective and fit-for-purpose licensing system that has evolved here allowing Australian teachers to share and copy almost every book, magazine, image or journal published in the world, with their students, for less than the cost of a single book each year. This fee is paid by school departments, not students.
None of this means that we shouldn’t continue to update our Copyright Act. Industry-led reforms to the Copyright Act are already well advanced in an unprecedented collaboration between rights holders, libraries and education institutions. They deliver on a promise by the Attorney-General George Brandis to review the Act in the government’s first period in office.
So let’s aim for sensible reform which balances the incentives and protections for creators with the rights of consumers to access wide ranging material on fair terms.
But remember, fair does not equal free, and no one needs a manufactured revolution driven by armchair economists who want to blow up Australia’s content sector – as this disappointing report proposes.
Kim Williams is chair of the Copyright Agency and Viscopy. He is a former CEO of NewsCorp Australia, FOXTEL, Fox Studios Australia, the Australian Film Commission, Southern Star Entertainment and Musica Viva Australia.
I went to see A Month of Sundays, Mathew Saville’s new Australian film, expecting a comedy about real-estate agents. It was the impression I’d gained from a careless reading of publicity handouts and other usually unreliable sources. And sure enough, the film has some witty lines and one or two moments of gentle satire at the expense of the real-estate profession. But Saville’s film isn’t really a comedy – unless you get your laughs watching lonely old widows coping on their own, grieving teenage boys pining for parental love, divorced husbands pining for lost wives, and other unhappy souls. (more…)
Rams is a strange and beautiful film from Iceland. And we don’t hear much about Iceland these days. As a child, I pictured a place of endless glaciers and permanently frozen lakes, and was surprised to discover that it was also a place of gentle hills and verdant summer grasslands, with streets and houses and a capital city whose name I could never remember. Iceland was in the news the other day when their prime minister, Sigmundur Gumlauigsson, was revealed to have hidden large stacks of money in an overseas tax haven and forced to resign. I was reminded of another prime minister in a similar predicament – attacked in parliament for investing a chunk of his personal wealth in a tax-free haven in the Cayman Islands. His name escapes me, but I’m pretty sure he hasn’t resigned.
As its title would suggest, Rams is a film about sheep. And that’s another surprise. Sheep have never figured much in movies. We’ve seen any number of films about dogs, cats, horses, lions, birds and fish; even the humble pig landed a starring role in Babe. But Rams must be the first film in which sheep have made it to the big screen. With their mild little faces and general air of ungainliness, they must have rated too low on the Disney cuteness scale to clinch a spot in Fantasia or The Jungle Book or Snow White and Seven Dwarfs. Yet sheep have a sacred place in western culture. When we remember the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the parable of the lost sheep and many other biblical allusions, it’s surprising that Hollywood hasn’t given us a suitably reverential epic in honour of the humble bleater.
Rams was written and directed by Grimur Hakonarson, and more than one reviewer has described it as a comedy. It’s a “charmingly understated comedy” according to Variety, and “a marvel of deadpan comedy” in the opinion of the Wall Street Journal. I agree that its comic elements are understated, since I was never remotely aware of them while watching the film. But if Rams is a comedy, so is Romeo and Juliet. For me it’s one of the saddest films in a long time – delicate, poignant, profoundly humane, and immaculately photographed in some weather-beaten Icelandic outpost where blizzards, bleak skies and occasional bursts of sunshine mirror the moods of the characters.
It’s the story of two brothers – a pair of stout, rugged, well-bearded old codgers who look so alike that I had difficulty telling them apart. This proved a little confusing at first, but the underlying message of the film is so transcendentally simple that after a while it hardly seems to matter which brother is which. Gummi (Sigurour Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi (Theodor Juliusson) – and no more of these funny Icelandic names, I promise – are sheep farmers, living a stone’s throw from each other in separate houses. Both are unmarried – where are the women, we wonder? – and as a result of some long-standing family feud they haven’t spoken to each other for 40 years. If communication is unavoidable, Kiddi’s dog carries a handwritten note from one brother to the other. (And that, come to think of it, is rather a funny idea, so Rams may have some comic elements after all.)
When a deadly sheep disease is identified in the valley, the local authorities order that all sheep must be slaughtered, threatening financial ruin for the farmers. Gummi, the more tender-hearted of the brothers, is reluctant to comply. He treats his sheep as pets, giving them names and fondling and cuddling them as others would a much-loved dog or cat. Under pressure from his neighbours and a no-nonsense local vet, he comes up with a plan of his own.
I’m making it sound like a bit of a tearjerker, but Hakonarson steers clear of sentimentality. Aided by two finely nuanced performances and a strong supporting cast, he delivers a rich moral fable of love and redemption, illuminated by a warm eye for the beauty and grandeur of the natural world. I liked the scene when Gummi rescues his comatose brother from the ravages of a snow storm and transports him to the nearest hospital in the scoop of an earth-moving tractor. (Another understated comic touch? Just possibly.) It’s hardly a surprise when the brothers are finally reconciled – we sense that from the beginning. The surprise is that Hakonarson’s film, with its odd mixture of realism and improbability, works with such effortless grace. Rams has won many awards, including a major prize at last year’s Cannes festival. All sheep – and countless filmgoers – have cause for celebration.
Four stars
Rams, rated M, is in limited release.
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
The ads for the new Australian film The Daughter are proudly informing us that the film comes from the same producer who gave us The Piano and Lantana. And that’s some pedigree. Lantana and The Piano were both distinguished Australian films (though the Kiwis shared some credit for The Piano), but what’s this about the “producer”? With all due respect to Jan Chapman, the producer of The Daughter, producers don’t make films. They raise the money for them, hire the main players, acquire all the rights and turn up to collect any best-picture gongs on Oscar night, but they don’t make the movie. Sam Goldwyn was one of the great Hollywood producers, but he didn’t make The Best Years of Our Lives (that was left to William Wyler), and who remembers Goldwyn anyway for Roseanne McCoy or The Adventures of Marco Polo?
I make this rather obvious point to make the equally obvious point that whatever we may think of The Daughter, credit or blame for the finished film must lie with Simon Stone, the director (who also wrote the screenplay). It’s a visually stunning work , finely acted by a remarkable cast, and set in an unidentified region of rural Australia. So full marks to the cinematographer, Andrew Commis, and actors of the calibre of Sam Neill (who starred in The Piano) and Geoffrey Rush (who starred in Lantana). Stone’s screenplay was “inspired” by Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck, which Stone adapted for a production at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 2011. Based on my dim memories of that occasion, the stage production departed freely from Ibsen’s play and the film version departs from it even further – which pretty much absolves Ibsen from any responsibility for the movie.
There are some resemblances, of course. Put crudely, this is a film about a daughter and a duck, in which both have prominent roles and can be seen as complementary elements in the fabric of the story. The daughter is 16-year-old Hedwig (Odessa Young), whose mother Charlotte (Miranda Otto) teaches at the local school. The duck, which we meet in the opening scene, has been wounded by a bullet fired by Geoffrey Rush’s character, Henry, who owns the local timber mill and is about to marry his much younger bride and former housekeeper (Anna Torv). Everyone is gathering for a fancy wedding. The duck, meanwhile, is rescued and nursed back to health by Walter (Sam Neill), the father of Oliver (Ewen Leslie), who is married to Charlotte.
I confess that the details of these relationships eluded me at first (narrative lucidity isn’t the film’s most obvious virtue), but we are left in no doubt that Walter is a nice guy. He lives in a splendid mansion that looks more like a colonial palace than a country homestead, and runs a sanctuary for wounded animals – a sort of “unofficial RSPCA”, as he calls it. (I doubt if Ibsen would have thought of that.) Hedwig, incidentally, is the only character whose name remains unchanged from Ibsen’s play, though I suppose it would seem odd if the horny-handed, bush-dwelling Aussies in the story went around with names Knut, Lars or Thor.
Without trying to summarise all the film’s emotional conflicts, it’s fair to say that nearly everyone is miserable for one reason or another. The plot is replete with disappointments, infidelities, thwarted passions, buried secrets and skeletons in closets. All good, steamy stuff, well matched by the gloom of the surroundings. A mood of desperation is established early on when the timber mill is closed and hundreds of workers find themselves out of a job (timely echoes of recent events in Queensland, though Sam Neill comes across as a more sympathetic boss than Clive Palmer).
Stone made his cinema debut with a miniature piece called Reunion, one of a compilation of 17 short films – or fragments of short films – that made up The Turning, based on a book of stories by Tim Winton. Written by Andrew Upton, Reunion was about a Christmas Day family gathering that gets absurdly out of hand. Praising it at the time, I called it one of the best pieces in The Turning and the only one of the 17 stories with a touch of light-heartedness. And how I longed for a touch of light-heartedness in The Daughter. Stone’s colour palette is unrelievedly dark, his cameras dwelling on rows of deserted shops, empty streets and grim forests of brooding trees, with more than one scene shot in a derelict factory.
The acting honours must go to Odessa Young, who gives a performance of lacerating honesty and pain as the daughter. As for the duck, who is given the name Lucky, I think she shows great promise, and there is no more moving moment in The Daughter when she soars into the sky at the end, as if eager to escape the cauldron of misery and confusion engulfing the rest of the cast. A lucky duck indeed.
Three stars.
The Daughter, rated M, is in national release.
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
Alec Guinness is remembered for playing seven different roles in the classic English comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. In Nicholas Hytner’s film, The Lady in the Van, Maggie Smith goes one better. At different times she’s a crazy old woman, a street beggar, a nun, a belligerent suburban mischief-maker, a well-to-do motorist, an incarcerated lunatic, a kindly old biddy and an aspiring concert pianist – all embodied in the person of Mary Shepherd, the film’s formidable central character. It’s an acting tour de force for which Dame Maggie has received awards and much critical acclaim. It seems a pity to strike a critical note.
The film is adapted from a play by Alan Bennett. Many consider the play a classic, but it’s well to remember Bennett’s own definition of a classic book – “one that everyone is assumed to have read and often think they have.” I won’t assume that everyone has seen Bennett’s play, but audiences love it and I have warm memories of the late Ruth Cracknell playing Miss Shepherd on the Sydney stage. But Maggie Smith has made the part her own: she was in the original London production in 1999 and in a radio version Bennett adapted for the BBC. Her character can be described as a seriously deranged version of the imperious countess and family matriarch she played in Downton Abbey. And everyone, of course, remembers Downton Abbey. To judge from early box-office returns for Hytner’s movie, especially in the US, Downton Abbey fans are flocking in great numbers to The Lady in the Van.
As an opening title informs us, it’s “a mostly true story.” One day in 1984, a woman calling herself Mary Shepherd drives a battered old van into Gloucester Crescent, a street of grand Georgian houses in a posh part of north London. Filthy, unwashed, and clad in soiled rags, Miss Shepherd makes it clear that she intends to remain in her van and leave it parked in Gloucester Crescent for as long as she wishes – a prospect that hardly appeals to Bennett’s hoity-toity neighbours , who include a certain “Mrs Vaughan-Williams” (Frances de la Tour), who may or may not be the wife of the composer. Bennett (nicely played by a wonderfully look-alike Alex Jennings) feels a little sorry for the old girl and lets her park her van in his driveway. And here she remains for the next 15 years, venturing out for short walks, rides in a wheelchair, encounters with bemused strangers and one enforced visit to a local doctor.
Like the play, the film is an uneasy mixture of comedy, pathos and sentimental kitsch. There are plenty of clever lines (this is an Alan Bennett script, after all), but the comedy consists largely in the spectacle of Miss Shepherd behaving like a graceless old ratbag. Much is made of her bodily odour. People are constantly recoiling from her presence with a disdainful twitch of the nose or wave of the hand, and there’s a brief moment in a cathedral when Miss Shepherd, apparently a regular worshipper, crosses the floor while a priestly voice intones: “The air freshener is behind the Virgin.” She may be a pious soul, but she isn’t above stealing holy water from the church to put in the radiator of her van. All reasonable requests from other s are parried with one of two impatient lines: “I’m a busy woman” (hardly believable), or “I’m a sick woman” (probably true). No thanks are offered for casual courtesies or even for the Christmas gifts brought to the van by neighbourhood children. Miss Shepherd is very hard to like, and for the film to work I think we need to like her rather more than we can bring ourselves to do.
With a little research Bennett discovers that Miss Shepherd’s real name is Margaret Fairchild, a pianist and former pupil of the great Alfred Cortot, with whom she has studied in Paris. Committed by her brother to an asylum for the insane (as mental hospitals were once known), she somehow manages to escape, and while driving her van on a country road collides with a motorcyclist, who is badly injured in the crash. Fearing she will blamed for the motorcyclist’s injuries, she flees the scene, only to be blackmailed by a crooked cop (Jim Broadbent), who has discovered her secret and agrees to keep silent for a price.
All very strange – and no doubt “mostly true.” But there are too many loose ends to the story. What happens to the motorcyclist? What has brought on Margaret’s illness – the trauma of her accident or the encroachment of age and dementia? She acts like a pauper but surely she has a source of income – how else to pay her blackmailer and afford to own, not one van, but two or three (the original being replaced by a gleaming and much bigger new model)? Bennett might have done more to enlighten us. Yes, it’s a comedy of sorts, if you enjoy seeing a devout young woman succumb to illness and the rigours of penury and squalor.
Unlike Alec Guinness, Alex Jennings plays only two roles. He is both Bennett himself and Bennett’s identical alter ego – and often they’re together in the same frame. One of them, we are told, is the “real-life” Bennett, the other the writer tapping away on his typewriter while he tells the story. It’s an unnecessary gimmick concocted for the movie, but Bennett is such a mild and self-effacing character that his double-sided presence never feels overbearing. It’s just as well we don’t get two Maggie Smiths playing two Miss Shepherds. That would be overdoing things in a film already overdone.
Two-and-a-half stars
The Lady in the Van, rated M, is in national release.
My vote for best performance by an actor in this year’s Oscars goes to Leonardo DiCaprio – not for his much-touted appearance in The Revenant, but for his rousing speech at the presentation ceremony. I don’t know if he scripted it himself – if he did he deserved a screenplay Oscar as well – but I rate it the most powerful contribution to the climate debate delivered from a public platform in recent memory. His passionate plea to “save the planet” drew cheers from the crowd. Yes, I know showbiz luvvies tend to be self-indulgent lefties and climate alarmists, but what an audience he had! By all accounts he was heard by 80 million people around the globe. What politician could wish for more?
Speaking of politicians and great performances – and digressing for a moment – TV audiences the same evening witnessed rare footage of Malcolm Turnbull shedding tears on camera while recalling an encounter with an indigenous woman. It may not have been Oscar-winning material, but at least it showed Malcolm has a heart (as I suspect it was meant to do), and put Malcolm in the same lachrymose company as Bob Hawke, who famously shed a prime ministerial tear before the cameras while speaking of problems in his family. Cardinal George Pell made another TV appearance on Oscar night – this one from Rome – but I rate it the least impressive of the night’s offerings. No tears from George. Not yet.
Getting back to the actual ceremony, I found DiCaprio a much more impressive performer than Chris Rock, the black comedian who hosted the evening and treated us to a seemingly endless harangue on the vexed issue of white actor bias in the Oscars. It’s not the first time the disparity has been noted. But could the reason simply be that, like it or not, more parts are written for white actors than black ones, or as we now say, for people of colour? It’s fanciful to suggest that the imbalance has anything to do with conscious racial prejudice. When actors of colour are called for, actors of colour are cast – witness In the Heat of the Night (1967), Gandhi (1982), The Last Emperor (1987), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), and 12 Years a Slave (2013) – all featuring great performances by actors of colour, and all of them Oscar-winning films. So there, I’ve had my say.
What else? My vote for best costume design goes to Cate Blanchett for the frilly blue number she was wearing on the red carpet – the one with the non-existent neckline – which may be some consolation, I trust, for missing out on a best actress Oscar for Carol. Which brings me to the high point of the evening – those six gongs for Mad Max: Fury Road, a wonderful boost for the local industry. Admittedly they were only “technical” awards – best sound mixing, best hairdressing, makeup and the like, which most audiences couldn’t care less about – but when the film is revived soon in Australian cinemas, as it surely will be, “Winner of Six Academy Awards” is going to look great in the ads. It was the biggest Oscar haul by an Australian film since Jane Campion’s The Piano in 1993, which picked up best picture as well.
Whether Mad Max deserved the best picture Oscar that many were hoping for is another question. Technical tour de force it may be, but for my money, The Big Short and Carol were both better films. And much as I hate to say it as a loyal, movie-going Australian, Mad Max: Fury Road strikes me as the apotheosis of today’s debased, spiritually exhausted, action-ridden cinema in which plot, character and dialogue are subservient to the hyper-kinetic demands of stuntmen and special effects designers. The film has almost no dialogue – though, as The Artist beautifully demonstrated in 2014, it’s possible for a silent film, even a silent film in black-and-white, to win the Oscar for best picture.
But whatever you think of Mad Max: Fury Road, you have to feel sorry for George Miller. Six Oscars and he couldn’t crack it for best director. Bruce Beresford met a similar rebuff in 1989 with Driving Miss Daisy, which picked up four Oscars, including best picture and best screenplay, but no director’s gong for Bruce. And it was noticeable this year that Spotlight – of which more later – won both best picture and best screenplay but no prize for the director, Tom McCarthy. All of which raises an old question: if you have a great script, how important is the director’s contribution to the final product? Well, of course, it’s important – some would say all-important – but not perhaps in ways that audiences care about. Alfred Hitchcock directed some the best films ever made, and no director in the 20th century was more widely admired and imitated. But Hitchcock never won an Oscar for direction. A few years before he died he was given an honorary one for lifetime achievement.
And so to Spotlight – a fine film, an important film, though not, I think, a great one. To many people’s surprise it beat The Revenant for the best picture award. Reviewing it a few weeks ago, I wrote that it consisted of little more than a series of low-key conversations – which put it well outside the Mad Max class as an action movie. But it’s unfailingly gripping and well-crafted. This is the one about a team of reporters on the Boston Globe uncovering evidence of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Massachusetts. The parallels with the church’s crisis in this country are obvious enough, which is no doubt helping at the local box-office.
Tragically, clerical paedophilia has become a hot-button issue, and I suspect that Spotlight got its best picture Oscar at least partly on the strength of its topicality. When the Academy members were casting their votes, George Pell had yet to give his latest round of evidence to the Australian royal commission, but the scandal that rightly or wrongly surrounds him was already widely known abroad. Is it possible that George helped swing a few votes in Spotlight’s favour, perhaps clinching the Oscar for it? No doubt he would hate to think so, but at Oscar time, never underestimate the power of a cardinal.
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
Evan Williams recently reviewed Spotlight. This film has now won the Best Film at the recent Oscars. This review is reposted below. Evan Williams will soon also write on the Oscar awards in general. John Menadue.
The other night I watched a DVD of Foreign Correspondent, Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful thriller about a newspaperman on the trail of a secret spy ring. Nostalgic as I am for the glory days of print journalism, I love the moment when the paper’s editor yells from his desk: “Hold the front page!” You don’t hear that any more. Films about newspapers – those who own them and those who work for them – tend to be either very funny or very serious.
And a surprising number are cinema classics. Lewis Milestone’s The Front Page was one of the wittiest comedies of the thirties. In Citizen Kane (still considered by many the best film ever made), Orson Welles brilliantly captured the power-hungry paranoia of his ambitious media baron. And two years after Richard Nixon resigned, Hollywood gave us All the President’s Men, recounting one of the great feats of modern investigative journalism – the unmasking of the Watergate scandal by two dogged reporters from the Washington Post. The film collected four Oscars and set a benchmark for the genre.
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (rated M, on general release) is in the same exalted company. It’s gripping, it’s sordid, and it’s desperately sad. In 2001, four journalists from the Boston Globe were assigned by their paper’s newly-appointed editor to investigate allegations against a defrocked priest, John Geoghan, accused of molesting more than 80 boys in Massachusetts. After months of work, the Spotlight team – as they were known – uncovered a pattern of rampant sexual abuse within the Church and a systematic cover-up by senior prelates. It’s a familiar story. A closing title for Spotlight lists scores of cities around the world where similar evidence of abuse has been revealed. And here in Australia, thanks to Julia Gillard, a seemingly endless royal commission continues to enliven evening news bulletins with reports of sleaze and depravity in holy places, though in fairness it must be stressed that the horrors aren’t limited to the Catholic Church. Other religious denominations, high-profile schools, sporting bodies, the armed services – all have endured their share of ignominy. Our latest prime-time penitent was the hapless Peter Hollingworth, former governor-general and archbishop of Brisbane. making a ritual mea culpa for the TV cameras.
With a screenplay by McCarthy and Josh Singer, Spotlight is little more than a series of conversations. There’s nothing you’d call action – except, perhaps, when some character or other breaks into a run while crossing the newsroom floor. That’s as fast as things get. All is slow, plodding, painstaking – and wholly engrossing – much, as I imagine, like the investigation itself. And what a frustrating business that must have been – with every possible difficulty encountered along the way – legal constraints, reluctant witnesses, ecclesiastical obstruction, privacy laws, confidentiality agreements, the Massachusetts statute of limitations (“That was years ago – these victims were kids!”), not to mention timidity and vacillation in the upper reaches of the Globe’s editorial hierarchy. No one wanted to take on the power and prestige of the church, especially in a city where 54 percent of the population (and no doubt a majority of Globe readers) were Catholic.
In Spotlight, the Peter Hollingworth character – or dare I say, the George Pell character – is Cardinal Bernard Law (Len Cariou), head of the Boston archdiocese. There’s a telling early scene when Law is in intimate conversation with the Globe’s editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), newly arrived from the Miami Herald. Baron has gone to the rectory to brief the cardinal on the Globe’s inquiries, and Law’s reaction – not surprisingly – is to urge caution in the interests of Boston’s good name and reputation. “The city flourishes,” says Law, “when its great institutions work together” – in other words, when church and press collude in keeping things quiet. Baron politely disagrees. There are higher values than civic harmony – truth and justice among them. Challenging entrenched authority and tradition is never easy, but the Globe will stick to its guns.
There’s an excellent cast at work here, even if everyone seems a bit downbeat, oddly colourless and subdued. There are no charismatic heroes in Spotlight, no dynamic crusaders, no star turns – just a bunch of hard-working, preoccupied journos doing their job – hitting phones, pouring over ancient church files and library records, searching through press cuttings and door-stopping interviewees while juggling pens and notebooks ( surely there were miniature recording devices in 2001). And everyone looks a bit scruffy. But it rings true. Years ago, when I started as a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald, reporters were required to wear suits and ties and beards were verboten. Not on the Globe. To complicate things, everyone on the Spotlight team seems to have a Catholic background, including Robbie, the team leader (Michael Keaton), who is very much a part of Boston’s Catholic establishment. Working with him are Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Byron D’Arcy James), all bothered by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.
In a telling scene, an ex-priest, door-stopped at his home, readily and calmly admits to having abused boys, but insists that “I got no pleasure from it.” It’s an odd form of self-absolution. Audiences, I suspect, will get little pleasure from Spotlight, a shocking and angry film and a unique combination of detective thriller and modern morality tale. It is hard to know which is the greater calamity – the evil of paedophile clergy or the existential tragedy now engulfing the Catholic Church, if not the whole of Christendom. Perhaps, in the end, all great institutions survive. As Cardinal Law wryly observes: “The Church deals in centuries.” But what if it doesn’t survive? Can we imagine the headline,” Pope Quits And Shuts Down Vatican”? Hold the front page!
Four stars.
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
Last week both Village Roadshow and Foxtel finally launched court actions under the eight months old Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act designed to deal with Internet “piracy”.
The first thing that needs pointing out is that downloading video and audio content over the Internet is a not a crime as such. It is, however, in breach of the intellectual property rights of the producers and distributors.
The so-called “site-blocking law” was passed by Parliament in the middle of last year, following a concerted lobbying campaign on behalf of the content rights holders who claimed it was a problem requiring urgent action. So it is curious, to say the least, that it took nearly nine months for anyone to make a move. You’d have thought that if unlawful downloads are such a problem and are costing the rights holders serious money they’d have had their lawyers burning the proverbial midnight oil when the Bill was introduced into Parliament so that they were ready to proceed immediately it came into force.
International experience has found site-blocking is more effective as a PR stunt than a real solution. You close them down and they reappear in no time on another site and/or with another name. What’s more, serious offenders with a modicum of technical knowledge can always find a way to access what they want, lawfully or unlawfully.
Another practical issue is there are more than 400 ISP’s in Australia. As I have noted elsewhere, [Data Retention: How not to introduce complex legislation.https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=5315] no-one knows how many ISP’s there are and so, of course, no-one knows who many of them are even or how to contact them. So how do you ensure that “pirate” sites are effectively blocked if you only target a small proportion of ISP’s?
Graham Burke of Village Roadshow told Fairfax media“the high profile case helped educate people about the threat that piracy imposes on the creative industry to those who didn’t realise or understand the implications”. This perhaps belies what could be the ultimate motive for heading to the courts now. That and the embarrassment presumably caused to the government by not rushing to use a law lobbied for with such gusto. Others have reported that pressure was brought to bear by the government to finally see some action.
So we are going to inconvenience ISP’s and probably see everyone’s Internet access fees increase as a consequence of the costs of implementing site-blocking, all for a bit of PR?
This is purely conjecture, but you have to also wonder if these court cases aren’t designed to create a legal precedent in Australia that could be used in other jurisdictions where “piracy” is a serious problem.
It’s not just the site-blocking idea that is problematic. Last year the government ordered the rights holders and the ISP’s (represented by the Communications Alliance) to develop a process for sending out warning letters to alleged offenders. A code was developed and lodged with the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Coinciding with the launch of the site-blocking actions last week came news that the code has been abandoned because the parties couldn’t agree on how to fund the operations of the scheme. If the rights holders were serious and unlawful downloading was really costing them big bucks in Australia they’d surely foot the bill for the so-called “three strikes” warning notice scheme? Or could it be that they just don’t think it will work? In which case, why did they spend so much time working on the code? More PR?
Actually, there is scant evidence that these notice schemes are effective and they are somewhat expensive to administer. New Zealand has had one for some years but it is apparently little used. Understandably, then, why would either party want to bear the costs of running something that isn’t going to achieve much?
A recently released report from the International Intellectual Property Alliance showed that Australia hasn’t been on their global watch list of worst offenders since the late nineties. Internationally we are not seen as a major part of the copyright infringement problem.
The best way to reduce unlawful downloading is to make content available and easily accessible at reasonable prices comparable with similar markets overseas. This view is supported by Prime Minister Turnbull who, according to ZDNet, said last year that“Rights holders’ most powerful tool to combat online copyright infringement is making content accessible, timely, and affordable to consumers”.
Australians have been price-gouged for decades through “geoblocking”. Countless Australians have come back from the United States with much cheaper DVD’s only to find that they wouldn’t work on top-line DVD players (often produced by companies that are also content rights owners). Anyone who legally downloads music will tell you it is much more expensive here than if it were purchased via the same delivery platforms in America.
It would be in the best interests of content creators, perhaps as opposed to local content distributors, if we all accepted that the main reason why most people unlawfully download is that they can’t get what they want through legitimate channels. There is ample research evidence that people are willing to pay if they can get the content they’re after. Some surveys have shown that the people who “pirate” are also among the most active legal downloaders.
Netflix has enjoyed considerable success since entering our market last year, and two local SVOD platforms – Presto and Stan – are both signing up reasonable numbers of subscribers. This tells you that there is pent up demand for the very content that, otherwise, is unsurprisingly subject to “piracy”.
We’ll see how these new court cases go, but it is worth noting the very recent failure of the Dallas Buyers Club case, where the distributors of this film sought to identify and force downloaders to pay a retrospective fee for use plus damages.
Internet Australia is committed to effective protection of intellectual property rights, as an important incentive to innovate and create. However we are opposed to the “site-blocking” law and have argued that the government should conduct a formal review of its effectiveness two years after its enactment, in 2017, if not sooner.
Internet Australia maintains it is time to accept the pointlessness of current strategies to deal with unlawful downloading of video and audio content. And, just as airlines are not held responsible for the ‘knock-off’ DVD’s their passengers bring home from their holidays, we don’t believe that making ISP’s liable by using the Internet to block content is appropriate.
Laurie Patton is CEO of Internet Australia, the NFP peak body representing Internet users. As a former television producer he is personally committed to the protection of intellectual property rights through effective methods.
Everyone remembers Psycho, in which Anthony Perkins played a knife-wielding weirdo obsessed with his dead mother, and most of us remember Rambo, in which Sylvester Stallone played a super-patriot action-hero fighting for truth, justice and the American way. We all know about Romeo, and some of us will remember Dumbo, Disney’s animated baby elephant with the big ears. But Trumbo? He’s not exactly a household name, and unless you’re something of a film buff you may never have heard of him. Trumbo is the hero of Trumbo, a wholly absorbing film from Hollywood director Jay Roach.
For the record, Dalton Trumbo was a successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s golden years, one of the notorious ”Hollywood Ten” blacklisted in the 1940s for refusing to testify before Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was set up to weed out communists in high places, and the definition of “communist” was fairly loose. These were the dark days of anti-red witch-hunts, when many a loyal American was named and shamed for real or imagined communist sympathies. The Hollywood Ten finished up in gaol, and many other writers, actors and directors were sacked or boycotted by the major studios. Some eked out an income by writing under assumed names, but their work was never credited on-screen. In Roach’s film the screenplay – crisp, witty and disturbing – is the work of John McNamara, and I doubt if Trumbo himself could have written a better one
It’s true that many Hollywood celebrities had communist connections . As an opening title informs us, thousands of Americans joined the party during the war years when Uncle Joe Stalin was a loyal ally of Uncle Sam. Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) joined up in 1943, and in the eyes of McCarthy and his witch-hunting mates, was a still a certified security risk years after the war was over. It was much the same here. Thousands of lefties and Laborites, haunted by bitter memories of war and depression, drifted into the communist camp. My own father was one, causing much anguish to poor mum, who was convinced that dad’s CP membership had denied him an army commission.
Roach’s film is as much a portrait of those paranoid times as a study of Trumbo himself. Cranston, familiar to all except me as the star of the TV series Breaking Bad, gives us a grimly dogged and highly convincing impersonation. But for all his studied mannerisms and surface gestures, we never engage deeply with Trumbo as a human being. If anything, Diane Lane as his loyal wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning as his teenage daughter, are more vivid and sympathetic characters. Roach falls back on repeated shots of Trumbo belting away at an old manual typewriter or writing in his bathtub, sustained by cigarettes, whisky and Benzedrine hits, as if this were enough to reveal his inner life. I wanted to care more for the guy. Neighbours shunned and vilified him, and the syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper (a gleefully malicious Helen Mirren) pursued a relentless personal vendetta . Hopper comes across as the real villain of the story – not McCarthy or the feeble studio bosses or the big-name stars like John Wayne who spurned Trumbo in his hour of need .
How good was Trumbo anyway? He made a tidy fortune as a screenwriter, but apart from Kitty Foyle, about a working-class girl who makes good, and the Oscar-winning romance Roman Holiday, there’s not a lot else of Trumbo’s I remember. Roman Holiday was written by Trumbo’s friend Ian McKellan Hunter, who based his script on Trumbo’s storyline and declined to turn up at the presentation ceremony to accept his Oscar (which officially went to Trumbo in 1975). A turning point came when Stanley Kubrick defied Hollywood moguls by insisting that Trumbo be credited for the screenplay of Spartacus (1960). Spartacus isn’t Kubrick’s best film, but it sealed the fate of the Hollywood blacklist and signalled the end of the McCarthy era.
Could it happen again? I think so. There’s no shortage of political hysteria in the air these days, and plenty of reckless military adventurism of the kind that feeds hatred and suspicion. I can imagine a round of Islamist witch-hunts in the US, especially if Donald Trumbo (sorry, Trump) becomes president: “For our own security I want to weed out all those Islamists in the State Department and the White House.” There’s a telling moment in Trumbo when news comes through of the death of justice Wiley Rutledge, wiping out a narrow liberal majority on the US Supreme Court and denying Trumbo any chance of a successful appeal against his gaol sentence. With the recent death of justice Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama has a choice. He can cement a conservative majority on the court or make it a little easier for liberal causes to succeed. Future Trumbos will await his decision with interest.
Three-and-a-half stars
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascall Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
My pen and paper
I walk a deep sadness path with my loneliness. This emptiness makes me slow.
I fall to my knees and cry out loudly.
Tears knock silently at my eyes.
I can’t find anyone to share my pain with so I make friends with my pen and paper. I share with them all my pain.
They cry with me.
The paper becomes wet with their tears.
Feelings of Loneliness
I am alone
very alone.
And this is what alone is:
To be nothing
To have nothing
To hurt so badly
Aching not only in your heart
But in every cell of your body.
I am ignored,
utterly unnoticed,
thrown aside
as a completely uncared for orphan.
And friendless
because they’ve all gone.
Their love,
their smiles
all gone.
I was left behind
with no one to walk with.
Oh how I want them back! With no friend to see or hear my agony I cry.
With all possibility of hope
vanished
sorrow moves in to love me.
After travelling to Australia from Sri Lanka by boat, Ravi was detained in Nauru Regional Processing Centre and Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation for over three years. He is now living in the community and has published a collection of his poems written from within our detention centre system.
An opening title informs us that The Big Short is “based on a true story.” That usually means that the film we are about to see has only a tenuous connection with reality, that most of it is invented and the events depicted may not have happened at all. Is anyone suggesting that the Global Financial Crisis, the subject of this scarifying comedy from director Andy McKay, may not have happened, that the millions who lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses, or saw their families shattered by the crisis were victims of some strange delusion? Well, of course not. McKay’s film is a viciously funny and horrifically convincing account of how the GFC came into being, driven by the base instincts of crooked bankers and cynical financial go-getters.
It’s based on a best-selling book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, described by Reuters newsagency as “probably the best single piece of financial journalism ever written.” McKay’s film, already a winner of many awards and a nominee for best picture Oscar, I rank as the best single film on the subject – though there haven’t been many. The last big one was J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, set in the (well-disguised) offices of the New York investment banker Lehman Brothers, whose collapse in 2008 triggered the global crisis. In one of the more poignant moments in The Big Short, McKay gives us a desolate recreation of Lehman Brothers’ abandoned offices, a wasteland of scattered paper, idle computer screens and overturned chairs.
So it’s funny, it’s sad and it’s scary. I remember when it first occurred to me that stock exchanges were little more than glorified casinos. But compared with those dignified bastions of financial sobriety, with their long-established rules and venerable traditions, the Wall Street financial scene (at least in the years from 2005 to 2008) was closer to a certified mad-house. And as befits a film about an outbreak of collective insanity, McKay’s film is pretty mad itself – a bundle of cinematic tricks with scarcely a moment for reflection or calm analysis. We get it all – jump cuts, freeze frames, little touches of animation, odd mixes of colour and black and white, hand-held camera stuff, and characters speaking direct to the audience as if to vouchsafe some deeper truth. But it’s never overdone, and somehow, miraculously, it works.
McKay has assembled a top-flight Hollywood cast and given them their heads, with the result that there is much shouting and ranting and a generous scattering of four-letter words from actors of both sexes. Among the standouts are Michael Burry (Christian Bale) a retired neurologist and former Deutche Bank guru who is the first to recognise mysterious trends in the US housing market; Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a hedge-fund manager with a troubled conscience; and a barely recognisable Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert, a retired banker and one of the film’s token good guys. The cast also includes plenty of “himselfs” and “herselfs”, though I don’t think I’d heard of any of them. Margot Robbie is a real-life glamour-puss who appears in a bubble bath quaffing champagne while explaining the intricacies of the sub-prime housing market.
It’s not important – thank goodness – that we follow what’s going on or understand what anyone is talking about. The gobbledegook of the high-end finance industry has an inscrutable charm of its own – credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, “ninjo” loans (mortgages issued to people with no job and no income), bespoke opportunity tranches, and my favourite, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). There’s even something called a synthetic CDO, which I leave to your imagination. But we get the picture: when these guys talk about “shorting the AA-rated tranches of CDOs” we know they’re up to no good. Something has to give, and eventually, tragically, it does. We laugh and seethe with anger at the same time.
It’s a compelling film – even when we have no idea what actually going on. I had the much same feeling reading Paddy Manning’s book Born to Rule, his excellent account of Malcolm Turnbull’s rise to power and prominence in the worlds of finance and politics. Of course, no one would dream of comparing our esteemed PM with the wicked wolves of Wall Street, but both in their time pursued similar intricate paths of financial wheeling and dealing, and I had little idea of what Turnbull was up to.
In The Big Short McKay seems to be hinting at something deeper than mere financial skulduggery: his glancing references to cocaine addiction, strip joints, idiotic pop music, drug cheating in sport, and other contemporary foibles suggest that The Big Short is both a critique of market capitalism’s worst excesses and something closer to cultural decadence. Only one banker was charged in the wake of the GFC and nothing whatever was done by governments to tighten regulation in the finance industry. Yes, it could happen again. I read somewhere that Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist candidate for the US presidency, has commended The Big Short as “excellent.” He would say that, wouldn’t he? But what does Malcolm think? Or Bill Shorten? I urge them to see it.
The Big Short (M) is in national release in selected cinemas. Four and a half stars.
Evan Williams has reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
I’m not alone in rating her the best actress in the world. Or as some would prefer to say, the best female actor in the world. Or more precisely, the best female English-speaking screen actor working in mainstream cinema. And yes, I’m talking about our Cate – up there with Garbo, Hepburn, Streep, destined for legendhood (if I may use that word) – and currently starring in Carol, an absorbing romantic drama directed by Todd Haynes.
She’s in her usual impeccable form. A critic once said that Cate Blanchett has “the kind of beauty – svelte, ravaged, angular, irresistible on screen – that combines sternness with vulnerability … acutely sensitive, finely nuanced, every twitch and head toss perfectly judged.” Who wrote that? Well, I did, actually – reviewing Rowan Woods’ 2005 film Little Fish, in which Blanchett starred with Hugo Weaving. Her performance was the best thing in the film. Indeed, every one of her films seems to demonstrate some new aspect of her power and versatility. A couple of years after Little Fish, in which she played a reformed junkie in Sydney’s western suburbs, she turned up with a cultivated English accent to reprise her role as the first Queen Elizabeth and won an Oscar. And she’s won a string of Oscars, Globes and similar baubles since.
But to say that she’s best thing going in Carol may be a little unfair to Rooney Mara, who plays Therese, Carol’s lesbian lover. Mara won an Oscar nomination for her performance, with Blanchett conspicuously passed over, probably on the grounds that she’d won more than her fair share already. And speaking of fairness, why is the film called Carol and not Carol and Therese? The characters have equal weight, the performances are comparably fine. It’s as if Thelma & Louise, Hollywood’s last great all-girl romantic escapade, had been called Thelma, or if someone had made a film of Romeo and Juliet and called it Romeo. I could go on, but it’s time to get serious.
Haynes’s beautiful and sombre film is drawn from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, from which Phyllis Nagy has adapted the screenplay. By all accounts, Highsmith based the character of Therese Belivet on herself, after an affair she had with a woman in 1948 while working at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. Carol is set in New York in 1952 (Eisenhower has just been elected) and, as in all the best period adaptations, no relevant background detail is forgotten or out of place. Gleaming Packards cruise the streets, gas stoves are lit with matches.Haynes’s last film, the excellent Far From Heaven, was another story of illicit love set in the 1950s, in which a middle-class suburban housewife has an affair with her African-American gardener. Carol is the better film, and the more daring. Lesbian love is still a no-no for the big studios, and I think I’m right in saying that this is Blanchett’s first venture into full-on sexual passion. Certain male admirers may also be interested to note that it’s the first film in which she gets her gear off, though unlike her great contemporary, Nicole Kidman, in Eyes Wide Shut,s he doesn’t give us the full Monty.(Sorry about that.)
Carol has been through a difficult divorce from her thoroughly unlikeable husband (Kyle Chandler), and Therese, an aspiring photographer, is coping with a devoted boyfriend (Jake Lacy), whom she doesn’t much care for. The women meet by chance in the toy department of a store called Frankenberg’s (real name?), and are reunited when Therese discovers a pair of Carol’s gloves left (accidentally?) on the counter and mails them back to her. The progress of their doomed affair is chartered with a depth and sensitivity wholly in character with the social constraints and polite inhibitions of the time – routine courtesies become sympathetic gestures, then something more serious, the lightest touch of a hand on another’s shoulder conveying a lingering erotic charge.
At just under two hours it’s a bit too long, considering that little actually happens and what does happen is largely predictable. There’s a violent twist about three-quarters of the way through which seems oddly jarring at the time but delivers some much-needed dramatic impetus. In its miserable way Carol is a wonderful and truthful work, superbly shot in the best Fifities tradition on 16mm stock by Edward Lachman. The ambience of the time is charmingly recaptured, though someone should have told Todd Haynes that respectable gentlemen never wore beards in those days, no one could take photographs in available light indoors without a flashlight, and that someone as rich as Carol could surely afford to have her piano tuned. According to my life’s companion, “It sounded terrible.” But I suppose that even the best pearls have some minor irritations.
Carol, rated M, is showing in selected cinemas nationally. Three and a half stars.
Evan Williams has reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
Written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Youth is a film for the young at heart – or at least for those aspiring to that happy condition. The main characters are a couple of blokes on the wrong side of 70, and it was noticeable at my screening that most of the audience weren’t too far behind. Youth may not have been the best title. For all its undoubted charms, this isn’t a film for the 18-to-24 demographic, much targeted these days by the major studios. That makes it something of a rarity – and a pleasure.
Sorrentino is keen on the idea of oldies discovering their inner selves and coming to terms with the passing years. His best known film, The Great Beauty, winner of all sorts of awards a couple of years ago, gave us a 65-year-old who has spent most of his life revelling in the fleshpots of Rome before hearing some nasty news. Among other odd characters, the film featured a self-styled “dwarf” and a nun with two crooked teeth. Among other odd characters, Youth gives us a grossly obese sunbather, a naked Miss Universe, a faded Hollywood star (nicely played by a faded Jane Fonda), and an assortment of less than glamorous geriatrics rich enough to stay at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. The shadow of Fellini looms large.
Fred Ballinger (a morose and taciturn Michael Caine) and his old friend Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) are among the hotel’s many disconsolate residents. Fred is a retired orchestral conductor and composer, famous for a one-hit wonder called “Simple Songs”, which he no longer performs in public because, as he somewhat enigmatically explains, it was written for his wife, who can no longer sing. Not even an emissary from Queen Elizabeth herself can persuade Fred to perform the piece for Prince Philip’s birthday. Mick is a film director working on what he believes will be the crowning masterpiece of his career – his “testament”, as he calls it – though judging from the assortment of actors and screenwriters assembled for the project, one doubts that the film will be the triumph Mick is hoping for. Perhaps Sorrentino will enlighten us in a future instalment.
Youth is described in the blurbs as a “comedy-drama” – a term that always fills me with foreboding. You will have gathered that it is seriously weird – weird, but fascinating, not to say beautifully acted , and above all, quite ravishingly photographed and designed. Sorrentino’s cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi, who also shot The Great Beauty, has a wonderful eye for lush landscapes (or snowscapes) combined with a taste for bizarre, often surreal, compositions. He can find beguiling patterns and shapes wherever he points his camera – hotel corridors, symmetrical archways, rows of reclining sun-seekers.
The “comedy-drama” consists of long passages of moody introspection relieved by occasional jokes, most of which are funny. There’s a delicious scene when Fred and Mick are relaxing in the hotel pool when a naked Miss Universe slips into the water beside them. Miss Universe is played by an actress called Madalina Diana Ghenea, who appears to have been well chosen for her wordless role. And I liked the scene when one of Mick’s actors (Paul Dano), sporting a little black moustache and an all-too-realistic Hitler uniform, takes a seat in the hotel dining room and proceeds to eat in solitary silence, much to the alarm and indignation of other guests.
It is a film full of little puzzles and unanswered questions – I’m still not exactly sure what happened to Fred’s lost wife – but the total effect is strangely moving. There isn’t a great deal of cohesion and narrative drive, but Youth is never dull, and whenever things get a little vague or perplexing we are given a lovely piece of visual wizardry. The film is a beautiful affirmation of the power of pure cinema. Of course you won’t see it at multiplexes. Try the art houses instead and you should be lucky. But hurry.
Youth, rated MA, is showing in selected cinemas.
Evan Williams has reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.
Paul Krugman reviews ‘The Big Short’, a film that the enemies of financial regulation hope you won’t see or believe. See link below.
Now is the time to support the ABC and SBS and the reasons are clear for all to see.
Our new Prime Minister has the chance of reversing decisions made during the Abbott leadership – but with him as the Communications Minister.
Public broadcasting is under attack in many countries. The BBC has been particularly targeted by the Murdoch media in the UK to devastating effect by a grateful Conservative Government. In the USA support has been cut by Republican State leaderships and here in Australia – surprise, surprise – the ‘Murdoch factor’ has resulted in the ABC and SBS pondering a lean and restricted future.
The Friends of the ABC has launched a National Campaign to ensure it has the funds to both defend the ABC and to lobby for an ABC which serves all Australians as required under its Charter.
Already, by capricious decision of Foreign Minister Bishop who broke the Australia Network contract, the ABC has lost its ability to both report Asia and the Pacific and also to project an Australian voice to our Northern neighbours.
The result – less of our outstanding foreign correspondents, a dismembered Radio Australia and 500 jobs lost, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Australians deserve better – and we are calling on both the new PM and the Labor Opposition to right the wrongs – though Malcolm Turnbull introduced the cuts and arm-twisting of the ABC took place.
NO CUTS, Abbott trumpeted before the election – and our new PM now has the opportunity to rectify the situation.
The BBC is a fascinating case study for us here in Australia . PM David Cameron rewarded the Murdoch Empire (which just happens to dominate BSkyB and wants total control of it) with a first raft of cuts immediately he reached Number 10. With his Murdoch-supported re-election, further cuts introduced of some 20% (with more in the wings) will ensure a lesser competitive corporation. (I have just returned from the UK and the pressure on the BBC is palpable).
The parallels with Australia are obvious. In both countries, the international reporting and penetration has been heavily affected, with the suggestion from Government Ministers that the new media should be left to ‘Private Enterprise’. In other words, slow down public broadcasting with a view to its demise, while News Limited flourishes.
Yet Russia, China and Al Jazeera are upping their television budgets – and our neighbors in New Zealand are rushing to fill the broadcasting gap left in South East Asia and the Pacific by the forced retreat of the ABC.
That is why the National Campaign by the ABC Friends – explained in half page ads in the SMH and The Melbourne Age on next Saturday, October 31 – is crucial for democracy and for all Australians who want independent, properly resourced national broadcasting producing quality programs for everyone– children, rural and provincial, those interested in the arts, drama, sport, documentaries and who seek in-depth and authoritative news coverage and analysis.
Once we weaken or lose our independent public broadcasters and the economic rationalists take control, we will mourn the passing of a vital part of democratic Australia. Both the ABC and SBS serve Australia’s interests.
The battle is ideological, political and also very much driven by those who would benefit from less competition.
Ranald Macdonald is a Friend of the ABC. He was formerly Managing Director of David Syme, the publisher of The Age. .
For those who miss the Friends ad. On Saturday – Join the Friends State organisations, Donate to the National Fighting Fund and become Supporters of the ABC NOW – through the website www.abcfriends.org.au, or by calling any hour on 0498 111 258, 0498 111 259 or 0498 111 261 and talk to friendly volunteers.
In a Senate Estimates hearing this week, the new Arts Minister Mitch Fifield was gently questioned for ten minutes by Senator Scott Ludlam about his intentions with regard to the future of arts support: in particular, did he intend to implement the plan of his displaced predecessor, Senator George Brandis, to use funds taken from the budget of the Australia Council to set up a new fund under direct Ministerial control. This scheme created open warfare between Brandis and his arts constituency and doubtless was the reason for his removal from the post in PM Turnbull’s ministry reshuffle.
Fifield dodged and weaved. To be fair, he is still warming his seat as Minister for Communications and the Arts. But he has been left a mess, and no government action in living memory has put the arts in such a precarious position. If Fifield perseveres with Brandis’s plan, there will be enormous damage. He should at the least postpone that decision until he knows what he is doing.
The funding to the Australia Council was divided by Brandis into two categories: support to major performing arts organisations – the large theatre, dance and circus organisations, the orchestras and opera companies – and everything else. Support to the major performing arts organisations has been quarantined over the last two budgets. Support to everything else has been halved, firstly by a cut to the arts budget in 2014 and then, in 2015, by Brandis’s raid on that part of the Australia Council budget that does not go to the major companies.
Brandis never gave a coherent explanation of his policy intentions. He pointed out that the overall funding to the arts had not been cut. However, in a one-sentence improvisation in a Senate Estimates hearing, he said that his main intention was to give more funding to the major performing arts companies. So the major companies retain all of their ongoing funding, and will receive more from the funds removed from the Australia Council.
Of the $26m a year taken from the Australia Council, Brandis announced that $19m will be distributed via his National Program for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA). That will be divided into support for international touring (intended recipients: the major companies), matching grants for funds secured from the private sector (de facto recipients, the major companies, which have staff members devoted to fund raising), and the rest to “strategic projects” for which small organisations can apply. That leaves $7m. Could it be that the intention for this money was to fund the recommendations of Brandis’s National Opera Review?
Excluded from applying for NPEA support are individual artists (Brandis was dismissive of them as interested only in creating art – bye bye Beethoven; a recent statement from Malcolm Turnbull was even more scathing – indeed was the sort of abuse that many people direct at politicians.) Also excluded were applications for “operational” funding – the core funding that enables an arts organisation to have a continuing existence.
The NPEA would fund projects – one-off exercises that certainly are important but only in a scatter-gun sort of way support the existence of the art world. Private donors like the in-and-out thrill of project funding. It is governments that give ongoing core funding, the funding that allows an organisation to build skills, audiences, supporters, mount projects, raise money.
So the Australia Council is left with sole responsibility for funding operational budgets and it mainly does this through support to 145 “key organisations”. These are the small to medium sized organisations that make up a sort of informal infrastructure for the arts in Australia. The Australia Council has suggested that in the new circumstances, it may have to delete support to about half of them.
Here from the list are the “A’s”. (This being Australia, there is a bias towards national support organisations cf production/presentation organisations.) If the Australia Council has to close half of these organisations, which will they be?
One year ago, then-Minister Brandis announced that he would take half of the funds provided by the Australia Council to literature and with them create a national book council, which would distribute the funds on new criteria decided, presumably, by the Minister and the commercial industry. There is still no book council and arrangements are in limbo.
The Minister announced the redirection of the Australia Council funds at budget time in May. There are still no guidelines for application to the National Program for Excellence in the Arts.
Beyond the ineptitude in instigating and following through on his scheme, the problem with this whole initiative is that it seems simply to be an indulgence of the Minister’s personal artistic taste. There is no sense of an understanding of the ecology of the whole of the cultural sector, the interdependence of its parts. The arm’s-length status of funding under the Australia Council is bypassed in favour of direct ministerial control, leaving the arts open to political favouritism or censorship – only a good idea when your own side is in power. Pork-barrelling was seen, in the May Estimates hearing, as an exercise in democratic government. There is no sense of the importance of artistic creation. Malcolm Turnbull has said that we will be an innovative nation but the government’s arts policies withdraw support from the artists and organisations most responsible for artistic innovation. Mitch Fifield should dump the Brandis scheme while he has the chance. There is nothing in it for him.
Michael Naphthali was Minister Brandis’s chief arts advisor and Naphthali and Brandis made very similar statements about these initiatives in the middle of the year. Naphthali was on the Board of the Australian World Orchestra – which to date is by far the principal beneficiary of the new arrangements. (The lack of guidelines and applications did not deter Minister Brandis from deciding upon a number of handsome grants.) There is some speculation that Michael Naphthali was an originator of the Brandis scheme. At the least, they appear to have sung from the same hymn book.
Malcolm Turnbull has just appointed Michael Naphthali as his arts advisor.
Dr Richard Letts is Director of the Music Trust. In the 1980s he was Director of the Music Board of the Australia Council. He was founder and CEO of the Music Council of Australia (now Music Australia) and is a past President of the International Music Council.