Movies: 

BOOTMEN which I reviewed during the AFI screenings and which I think is a movie with huge overseas sales prospects has been dealt a body blow by US censors who gave it an R rating. In thinking about this movie I can’t think of why. A little swearing and mild violence but nothing compared with the stuff that gets on our screens from the US with a PG 13+ rating. (That’s Parental Guidance for 13 and over.)

The next two “Matrix” movies look likely to be shot in Australia. Some sequences will however be shot in parts of the States.

The movie I reviewed last month I think, INNOCENCE, was awarded Best Film at the Programme des Antipodes in Saint-Tropez 2000. What a fantastic run INNOCENCE has had at international festivals this year, having been awarded the Grand Prix of the Americas (Best Film) and the People’s Choice Award at the Montreal World Film Festival; the FIPRESCI Critics Award at the Taormina International Film Festival in Sicily; and Best Film at both the Vlissengen Film Festival in Holland and the Saint-Tropez World Film Festival in France. The film has also won third prize (joint) in the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Awards and screened in the prestigious Telluride International Film Festival in Colorado.

CHOPPER, also reviewed for the AFI’s has been nominated for an amazing 10 out of a possible 12 categories. CHOPPER opens soon in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and has recently been acquired by First Look Pictures for theatrical release in the United States in March 2001. If BOOTMEN got an R who knows what this will get.

The STOLEN GENERATIONS documentary has been nominated as Best Documentary for the 2000 International Emmy Awards. Written and directed by Darlene Johnson and produced by Tom Zubrycki, the documentary tells the shocking story of the history of removal of Aboriginal children from their families, drawing together personal testimonies of suffering and resistance from survivors of Australia’s "Stolen Generations". Our current Prime Minister is under great pressure to apologise for this travesty, and many others, but has so far resisted all approaches. Those who saw the closing ceremony of the Olympics, may have noticed the t-shirts sported by Midnight Oil which had the word SORRY across them. This was a message directed at him, but he probably thought they said Nike.

The Dish: Director: Rob Sitch. Writers: Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro, Jane Kennedy and Tom Gleisner.

In 1968, the NSW country town of Parkes is dominated by the giant radio telescope, THE DISH that stands in the middle of a sheep paddock. Scientist (Sam Neill) and his workers (Kevin Harrington and Tom Long) operate the dish and they are proud to be the only link in the Southern hemisphere for NASA and its moon missions. When man is going to step on to the moon for the first time, the dish will be the sole receiver for the television signal from the lunar surface.

This is among the best work I have seen Sam Neill do, and I am a fan of his. He is usually good but in this he excels. A proud but sad man, with great integrity and the best range of cardigans ever assembled on screen. I had heard some criticisms of this movie prior to viewing it, but all I can say to that is that they missed the overall flavour of the film. To carp on the fact that the music doesn’t acknowledge the changes of the late 60s is just stupid. I lived in a small town at that time and Hendrix and Cream were known to us, but what we listened to was the Aussies on the “hit parade.”

I loved the humour in this piece, mostly at the skilled hands of Kevin Harrington and Tom Long, but with a beautiful local mayor (Roy Billings), whose excitement at his town hosting the biggest event in world history is only matched by his ignorance of how it all works. There are some lovely scenes where his 10-year-old son explains the mechanics of it all to him. The conflict in the story comes from the NASA representative in Parkes for the landing (Patrick Warburton) and the fact that the Aussies resent being treated as drongos (not very bright) by him. Ultimately though they are all working together and for the safety of the Moon Lander crew. This is a feel good movie and makes no apologies for that. It is also aimed fair and square at an overseas market, always explaining for the American, the various Australian terms used in the movie, with clever humour. If you get the chance, see it. Let go and enjoy the ride.

Verdict: Served piping hot.

Late news: The Dish was first acclaimed last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it got a standing ovation from an audience of 2000 people and second place for best film. It was announced today (29/10) that Warner Bros. have acquired domestic distribution rights for the US. Watch out for the censors!

Television:

Oz actor Robert Taylor (The Matrix) will be the new priest in UK TV
series Ballykissangel. This series is immensely popular in Australia, so Taylor will add to his following with this move.

Theatre:

Lounge Wizard: With Ross Skiffington and Wendy Dalton. At Capers Dinner Theatre.

An empty stage except for a big black trunk welcomes us to the space. On top is a sign saying “Don’t Touch.” From the back of the room a man who has wandered off the street, inebriated, makes his way to the stage and, fascinated by the trunk, at first touches and then opens it. Inside are various props including a pair of legs, a kimono which he wears some scarves and various magic accoutrements, and finally a guillotine. Playing with all these magic things, he moves finally to place his hand into the guillotine. With a deft move he chops, and his hand falls behind the box. The drunk puts everything back in the box and slowly leaves the room, chastened and having learned that magic is a serious business.

Ross Skiffington is very serious about his magic, (a recent recipient of a lifetime achievement award for magicians) and over the next 2 hours he brings us all the tricks and illusions we know and love, plus a few new ones. After a brief interlude of Dalton dancing and sweeping the space, we see Skiffington as himself, talking about his life in magic and giving us some insights into the dedication and time needed to be any good. The dancing cane, card tricks, mind reading and predictions are all there, always with a possibility that this trick has failed, but we are wrong.

Then a wonderful illusion, a small box with 2 one-inch holes drilled in the sides, through which is threaded a rope. With two assistants from the audience holding a curtain arrangement, Dalton stands in front of the box with one end of the rope tied around her, the other held by another audience member. The curtain is lifted and shimmied, then dropped and Dalton is gone. Skiffington opens the tiny box and Dalton emerges miraculously to the applause of the stunned audience.

Then comes Neville Fontaine, a Skiffington character, who is the worst of the lounge performers. Loud, brash and insensitive he insults his audience and performs tricks that sometimes go terribly wrong, to the great amusement of his assistant Bruceene (Dalton) in a series of outrageous costumes. Just before interval we are treated to Bruceene giving a truly awful rendition of a cabaret song while being sliced in three and having her middle section moved sideways.

After interval comes a truly wonderful character that Ross calls Ms Magic. A white face, totally expressionless, all glitter and tails, mirror ball, flashy lighting, this is Skiffington at his best. The Prince of Prestidigitation. This is hardcore magic, but just when we think we know the secret Ms Magic shows us we were wrong to make assumptions. Always with humour close at hand we have rope tricks, the wonderful floating zombie ball, another 2 trunk illusions, appearing bottles, and by this time at least a quarter of the audience has been involved in an illusion in some way.

To finish, Skiffington sits in front of us and removes the white face, and showing us his first magic case, finishes with the exquisite linking rings, and a confetti and fan trick.

Verdict: It must be done with mirrors.

Meat Party: By Duong Le Quy. Directed by Michael Kantor. Set and Costume design by Dorotka Sapinska. Presented by Playbox Theatre Co. at the Malthouse

From the stark and terrible opening until the closing moments, this play assaults all our senses as we are bombarded with a remarkable and terrifying soundscape, composed by Darrin Verhagen, that leads us on our journey to the White Sand Desert in Vietnam. Stark lighting and smoke and incense, actors whose bodies seem to smoke when they move, beautiful and haunting flute, cello and voice, movement and dance that owes it’s origins to Butoh, all these things make up Meat Party. But there is so much more. This is a story we all know, the war in Vietnam. But here we don’t see pictures of bodies and bombs and devastation, rather it is brilliantly suggested by the staging, which is more affecting than newsreel footage we have seen many times. Now we feel the pain and the suffering and we see that these people are still living the nightmare. At one moment the famous and terrible picture of the young Vietnamese girl running naked from the napalm is flashed up. It seems otherworldly and less shocking than the play.

A young Australian cellist, Mary (Alice Garner) comes to Vietnam to find the memory of her father (Matthew Crosby), a flautist who was fighting with the Aussie contingent in the Vietnam conflict. She knows the general area where he died but is searching for any clues as to who he was and how he may have died. She meets many people who help and hinder her in her search. A Crone stunningly played by Yumi Umiamare picks her way through still live minefields, finding bones and valuables from these killing fields. Umiamare is an extraordinary performer highly trained in Butoh and she is riveting. Mary has a meal with Lam (Tam Phan) and his son (Huong Nguyen). The father, a decorated war hero, is still a Lenin devotee, and is devastated to hear that the statues of him in Russia have been pulled down. Eventually Mary meets An (Tony Yap), who has been a soldier, and he returns her father’s flute to her. He then tells her the story of his great love, Mai (Trang Nguyen), who sang like an angel, and through a terrifying recreation, we realize that her father and An were both burned to death by the young Lam when he discovered them together. In her attempt to aid a dying man, she offered help, but the soldiers misunderstand her assistance. All that remains are their shoes and his flute. They are buried together beneath a tree and Mary decides to leave him in peace, satisfied that she has his flute and his story.

The images from this play, will I know, stay with me for a long time. Tremendous lighting and sound, and highly disciplined performances throughout make this a stand out production.

Verdict: Prime cut.

Food For Love: Written and performed by Jan Friedl and Rod Quantock. Music performed by James Voss. Seduction Opera Company at the Malthouse.

“The food of love is a response to the 250^th anniversary of the death of J.S.Bach. What is the purpose and value of “art” in a world of glaring global inequalities? What does Bach mean to us in the 21^st century? Can we be guided by the same sort of passion that inspired Bach, or is this beyond us in a globalised and packaged world where the most important decisions have already been made in corporate board rooms?”

This piece of theatre grows from three politically aware and active performers who have very different and mostly contrasting talents. Jan Friedl is a performer writer, known for her comic and highly original works. An accomplished singer and actor she has been around the industry for a long time. Rod Quantock is a stand up comedian, writer, producer and well-known political stirrer. Put them together with James Voss a concert pianist who travels the world and stir for an intriguing evening of entertainment. Into an empty theatre, Voss moves to a grand piano, but first he makes a call on his mobile, speaking in rapid German. Then he calls front of house to ask that a certain woman be stopped from coming backstage. She will have flowers. As he prepares to play, Friedl in a bed suffers a nightmare, and Quantock enters to demote our virtuoso to a page-turner as he tells us how he will play the Patons Knitting book number 17. All this is absurd and very funny. As we continue, Quantock in an inimitable comedic style rails against everything from bad architecture to the appalling reporting of the S11 protests in Melbourne, during which he was injured while peacefully protesting.

Friedl questions our relationships to music and to our everyday lives. Did Bach and Beethoven and Schubert have to cope with getting the kids to school and paying their tax bills and GST and feeding themselves? There was more here than I can convey, a sort of desperate longing to be an artist, to create and inspire without having to cope with the crap of every day survival.

In between these hilarious and penetrating moments, Voss plays the incredibly difficult Partita No4 in D BWV828 By J.S.Bach. This is the first time it has been performed in Australia apparently because of the extreme dexterity required. Voss too has great moments of humour, and when he is not playing seems to be constantly eating. Toast, which Friedl has cooked and buttered for herself, cups of tea, sandwiches from a plastic container, and finally after a particularly beautiful and difficult piece, he uses the phone to order a pizza.

Sometimes the three performers seemed to be in totally different spaces, not at all cohesive, but rather than being a problem, it is actually one of the strengths of the piece. We certainly never get bored. There is something for all of us, and some beautiful and disturbing images projected onto various surfaces such as the bed, a sheet, and Friedls clothes, counterpoint the music at times.

The only carp I have is not with the show, but with the projector’s clunk every time a slide changed.

Verdict: Adventurous, ardent, artistic, and above all absurd. That’s an A.+.

© 2000 Don Bridges ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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