Gone with the Long-Winded
Baz Luhrmann's epic, Australia, is, as everyone has said, the Australian "Gone with the Wind," with the WWII bombing of Darwin by the Japanese standing in for the American Civil War. It's got it all: love-match misunderstandings, race relations, scenic backdrops in place of on-location shoots, set-piece chapter breaks - plus digital effects George Lucas would be ashamed of. Oh, o.k., the story's not bad, and for a tear-jerker, it's effective enough, but Nicole Kidman, for all that she makes a go of it, struggles throughout, and Hugh Jackman basically alternates between trying to be an Aussie Rhett Butler and otherwise Snowy-Rivering his way through all the other scenes he's in. The Aboriginal kid is good, but doesn't get to do much, and everybody is pretty much left to caricature instead of character. Jack Thompson gets killed off so fast there's pretty much no need for him to even have been in the movie. David Wenham, an actor I've really enjoyed in many other roles, is given little more to do than sneer through his nose in sound bites, more like John Lovitz's pathological liar than anything else ("Yeah, that's the ticket, yeah"). It's pretty, it's loud, it's got a story, but it has no substance. The narration is repetitive, and so's the plot, finally.
One of the standard tropes is that at 165 minutes (plus twenty minutes or more of advertisements and trailers), the movie's about an hour too long. I reckon I'd really only ask for about twenty minutes of my life back, discounting the ads, which I'd get even for a 90-minute flick, and basically just because that's about how much time in total is spent lingeringly on cliches.
Oh, and the songs over the closing credits are terrible. Really, get out while you can.
29 December 2008
Packaging
Public Image, Ltd., has re-released "Metal Box" in a CD analogue to the original packaging. I know I only bought it because I fell for the marketing gimmick, but it's a terrific record anyway, and now I'll have those "poptones" turning up on my iPod.
Public Image, Ltd., has re-released "Metal Box" in a CD analogue to the original packaging. I know I only bought it because I fell for the marketing gimmick, but it's a terrific record anyway, and now I'll have those "poptones" turning up on my iPod.
23 December 2008
Conveniences
There were a number of considerations I had to make when I took this job in North Ryde, some of which included the fact that in Parramatta I had convenient lunch-hour access to doctors and dentists, whereas the desolation of a big-box industrial park offered limited prospects even for so much as a cup of coffee (it being a cultural practice here to provide instant coffee in the workplace in preference to what is considered horrible American drip machines; many people prefer to bring a small French press, but then I'm just bringing home clean-up chores along to the office, and I've got enough to do). Other factors include: home deliveries (Australia Post does not open on Saturday and only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, severely limiting my ability to attend the local branch) and household repairs.
A month or so ago, my oven stopped working.
A month or so ago, my Parramatta dentist called to remind me of my six-monthly appointment, prompting me to find a local dentist, who, delightfully, doesn't work Saturdays, but 8:30 to 5:00 on weekdays.
A month or so ago, I bought tickets to a big event that the Sydney Festival organisers thought best to send to my home address via registered mail without offering me a different mailing address option.
I booked the dentist and a day off. Probably I could have done a half-day, but let's make a long weekend out of it, I thought.
As long as I've got an early dental appointment, I thought, let's book an electrician for the same day.
And on the Wednesday preceding, the registered mail pick-up slip arrived in my mailbox. It all worked beautifully, serendipitously. Hooray for me.
The dentist, despite accepting my insurance, charges $60 above the "reasonable and standard" rate established by my private cover. (And let's not even get into the whole water-boarding experience it proved to be; don't tell me that's not torture.)
Yesterday the dishwasher broke.
If these things go in threes, there'll be a problem with the tickets, I reckon (although it could be that the NY'er's international distribution company has decided to reallocate my subscription to somebody else), but that'd be the least thing to go wrong.
There were a number of considerations I had to make when I took this job in North Ryde, some of which included the fact that in Parramatta I had convenient lunch-hour access to doctors and dentists, whereas the desolation of a big-box industrial park offered limited prospects even for so much as a cup of coffee (it being a cultural practice here to provide instant coffee in the workplace in preference to what is considered horrible American drip machines; many people prefer to bring a small French press, but then I'm just bringing home clean-up chores along to the office, and I've got enough to do). Other factors include: home deliveries (Australia Post does not open on Saturday and only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, severely limiting my ability to attend the local branch) and household repairs.
A month or so ago, my oven stopped working.
A month or so ago, my Parramatta dentist called to remind me of my six-monthly appointment, prompting me to find a local dentist, who, delightfully, doesn't work Saturdays, but 8:30 to 5:00 on weekdays.
A month or so ago, I bought tickets to a big event that the Sydney Festival organisers thought best to send to my home address via registered mail without offering me a different mailing address option.
I booked the dentist and a day off. Probably I could have done a half-day, but let's make a long weekend out of it, I thought.
As long as I've got an early dental appointment, I thought, let's book an electrician for the same day.
And on the Wednesday preceding, the registered mail pick-up slip arrived in my mailbox. It all worked beautifully, serendipitously. Hooray for me.
The dentist, despite accepting my insurance, charges $60 above the "reasonable and standard" rate established by my private cover. (And let's not even get into the whole water-boarding experience it proved to be; don't tell me that's not torture.)
Yesterday the dishwasher broke.
If these things go in threes, there'll be a problem with the tickets, I reckon (although it could be that the NY'er's international distribution company has decided to reallocate my subscription to somebody else), but that'd be the least thing to go wrong.
20 December 2008
Genre Nostalgia
It's funny that I never got into The X-Files, but I didn't, and watching the movies confirmed it. I rented both yesterday and watched them back-to-back. I guess I already knew that that wasn't going to offer much continuity, but it seemed the best way to address the second, to provide context. Now, this was a show that essentially pioneered the techniques used in Heroes, Lost, etc., that sense of dislocation as the different plot lines within and between episodes swirled around, touching, almost but not quite converging, and it was all going to be the aliens all along, of the secret world government, or maybe just some mad scientists operating all on their own, so even if you weren't going to get a straight answer, it'd be a fun ride. It just wasn't. Largely, David Duchovney goes around blank-faced, beaten up, and carrying on through, like the good hard-boiled detective he's modeled on, but without the force of personality to make you care, and Gillian Anderson wanders through every scene she's in looking like a startled squirrel, which is the full range of her acting ability from what I've seen elsewhere. So even when you get any kind of plot, there's not a lot of it - which may be a movie-length translation problem - leaving the majority of what's on screen mere atmosphere.
As we're now in the summer television doldrums (not that we aren't usually, there being nothing much to watch on free-to-air to begin with - and even if I had digital, the broadcast options don't vary), I've been reading a little more after dinner than usual (and just to keep adding parentheticals, since most of what I watch are the hot shows out of the U.S. and these are usually played at or through past what time I go to bed, I usually knock over at least the NY'er in short order), which has led me to the Smiley series of John LeCarre's spy novels. I remember when these were the hottest spy novels going, and the third of them was made into a BBC show with Alec Guinness, but the novels aren't holding up particularly well. Is it post-Cold War malaise? Is it just that they're too British, too English, really? Is it just the narrative voice, one that seems to go off into an aren't we clever tone, speaking suddenly quite directly to the reader as if regaling its audience with an amusing story? Big, overwritten, these books are nothing like LeCarre's recent stuff, books where he's found an anger not expressed in these. Maybe that's the key, finding the anger, because there must be some, repressed, stiff-upper-lipped into a gruelling slog through minutia.
Perhaps instead of renting a movie tonight, I'll focus on finding Smiley's edge.
It's funny that I never got into The X-Files, but I didn't, and watching the movies confirmed it. I rented both yesterday and watched them back-to-back. I guess I already knew that that wasn't going to offer much continuity, but it seemed the best way to address the second, to provide context. Now, this was a show that essentially pioneered the techniques used in Heroes, Lost, etc., that sense of dislocation as the different plot lines within and between episodes swirled around, touching, almost but not quite converging, and it was all going to be the aliens all along, of the secret world government, or maybe just some mad scientists operating all on their own, so even if you weren't going to get a straight answer, it'd be a fun ride. It just wasn't. Largely, David Duchovney goes around blank-faced, beaten up, and carrying on through, like the good hard-boiled detective he's modeled on, but without the force of personality to make you care, and Gillian Anderson wanders through every scene she's in looking like a startled squirrel, which is the full range of her acting ability from what I've seen elsewhere. So even when you get any kind of plot, there's not a lot of it - which may be a movie-length translation problem - leaving the majority of what's on screen mere atmosphere.
As we're now in the summer television doldrums (not that we aren't usually, there being nothing much to watch on free-to-air to begin with - and even if I had digital, the broadcast options don't vary), I've been reading a little more after dinner than usual (and just to keep adding parentheticals, since most of what I watch are the hot shows out of the U.S. and these are usually played at or through past what time I go to bed, I usually knock over at least the NY'er in short order), which has led me to the Smiley series of John LeCarre's spy novels. I remember when these were the hottest spy novels going, and the third of them was made into a BBC show with Alec Guinness, but the novels aren't holding up particularly well. Is it post-Cold War malaise? Is it just that they're too British, too English, really? Is it just the narrative voice, one that seems to go off into an aren't we clever tone, speaking suddenly quite directly to the reader as if regaling its audience with an amusing story? Big, overwritten, these books are nothing like LeCarre's recent stuff, books where he's found an anger not expressed in these. Maybe that's the key, finding the anger, because there must be some, repressed, stiff-upper-lipped into a gruelling slog through minutia.
Perhaps instead of renting a movie tonight, I'll focus on finding Smiley's edge.
03 December 2008
Rate Cuts
It’s a dilemma: when the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates, commercial banks can pass that along in part or in full to their customers, but when they do, reducing mortgage repayments, for example, and everybody cheers, they also cut the return on savings or new term deposits, which everybody seems to forget. Granted, these are not the preferred investment instruments these past few years, and if you’re holding a mortgage, your savings may not be doing you much good (better if you pay the maximum extra and then bank what’s left), but mortgage rates simply aren’t all that high at the moment and while the global economy is bad everywhere, we’re not at much at risk of massive foreclosure exposure as others are. Banks, like any other company, need profits. They shouldn’t need the kind of profits that have provided CEO’s around the world with income in excess of 60x that of their lowest-paid employees, but enough to stay open and keep handing out compound interest and offering loans. I say all this in the first year of a five-year fixed-rate mortgage, so if I’m honest, I suppose if I had a variable rate I’d want the full cut just as much as I’d hate every interest rate rise passed on in full. Fair enough, if they run the rates up equal to or in excess of the Reserve Bank’s increases – and they did – they need to at least pass on the savings, too.
It’s a dilemma: when the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates, commercial banks can pass that along in part or in full to their customers, but when they do, reducing mortgage repayments, for example, and everybody cheers, they also cut the return on savings or new term deposits, which everybody seems to forget. Granted, these are not the preferred investment instruments these past few years, and if you’re holding a mortgage, your savings may not be doing you much good (better if you pay the maximum extra and then bank what’s left), but mortgage rates simply aren’t all that high at the moment and while the global economy is bad everywhere, we’re not at much at risk of massive foreclosure exposure as others are. Banks, like any other company, need profits. They shouldn’t need the kind of profits that have provided CEO’s around the world with income in excess of 60x that of their lowest-paid employees, but enough to stay open and keep handing out compound interest and offering loans. I say all this in the first year of a five-year fixed-rate mortgage, so if I’m honest, I suppose if I had a variable rate I’d want the full cut just as much as I’d hate every interest rate rise passed on in full. Fair enough, if they run the rates up equal to or in excess of the Reserve Bank’s increases – and they did – they need to at least pass on the savings, too.
01 December 2008
Thanksgiving
American history isn't a big thing here, so I found myself on Saturday having to explain a little about the Pilgrims and their Indian enablers, but all-in-all we had fun. I didn't do much cooking, and certainly no roasts. Even though rain blew through a couple of times, we had lovely weather out in the garden. I guess a BBQ might have been o.k., but I haven't done much towards that. It's a small, communal space, after all, so maybe that's for the best anyway. I did make a nice cucumber salad, with crushed peanuts, dried chilies, turmeric, cumin and mustard seed, parsley, mint, and dressed with lemon. Quite nice, too, as all the flavors were present, distinct, yet melding nicely. It's always nice to see the Spielman's, even if it wasn't the full contingent. The Munoz's turned up late, but I was very pleased to see them. Married two years now, and this is the first time we've gotten together since the wedding. Very bad.
American history isn't a big thing here, so I found myself on Saturday having to explain a little about the Pilgrims and their Indian enablers, but all-in-all we had fun. I didn't do much cooking, and certainly no roasts. Even though rain blew through a couple of times, we had lovely weather out in the garden. I guess a BBQ might have been o.k., but I haven't done much towards that. It's a small, communal space, after all, so maybe that's for the best anyway. I did make a nice cucumber salad, with crushed peanuts, dried chilies, turmeric, cumin and mustard seed, parsley, mint, and dressed with lemon. Quite nice, too, as all the flavors were present, distinct, yet melding nicely. It's always nice to see the Spielman's, even if it wasn't the full contingent. The Munoz's turned up late, but I was very pleased to see them. Married two years now, and this is the first time we've gotten together since the wedding. Very bad.
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