Dance of Death (Malthouse)

An English language and no doubt otherwise-tweaked take by Australian playwright Tom Holloway on a free and indeed in many respects oppositional (according to the program) adaptation by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt of Strindberg's original Dance of Death.

Felt like a Malthouse production, in a good way - traverse stage, fishbowl-enclosed behind perspex walls, blaring music and lights, kinetic use of stage and set (complete with roast chicken piece hurled to splatter against one of those walls), profanity galore, meta-scene announcing ('round 1: the battle before dinner'), &c. All deployed in service of this lacerating and extremely dry depiction of a 25-year marriage of mutual tearing away at each other; it did have hints of Beckett, with its trapped, grotesque figures going around in entropic, destructive circles. Not a play or production to fill its audience with optimism about the human condition, but skilfully, absorbingly done.

Jacek Koman as the husband (aka the narcoleptic Argentine in Moulin Rouge) and Belinda McClory (who has apparently been in everything including, most recently for me, Pompeii, LA) both great and believably horrible human beings; David Paterson as her cousin Kurt, whose arrival precipitates the latest round of blood-letting, also good.

(w/ Alice - amusingly, the name of the wife in the play - and Mehnaz)

Jessie Ware - Devotion

'Classic' is a word that I use charily, but in the case of "Wildest Moments" I think it's not completely inapt - a resonant, pulsing, elegant piece of electro-soul with a pop edge which doesn't pall in the slightest on repeat listens and which cut through despite being in a genre that doesn't normally pull me. Indeed, it was months of listening to it, on and off, that led me to Devotion, which probably inevitably doesn't match the standard set by that first, gorgeous single (although "Sweet Talk" certainly has a something going), although there's a smoothness and a pulse to it that makes for ready listening.

"This summer hurts": Laura Stevenson - Wheel

So easy for me to like, this one. A sort of indie-folk-americana confection, layered with electric guitars that sound as if they've come by way of late 90s indie rock - a good thing, obviously - and charismatically sung by Stevenson in a scratchily immediate voice that puts much of the record into the same terrain as Martha Wainwright. It takes in soaringly epic countrified rock ("Triangle", "Telluride"), giddily veering pop moments like "Runner", "Bells & Whistles", "Sink, Swim" and "Eleonora" (that last particularly bringing Belly to my mind - again, always a good thing), and a bunch in between. Very enjoyable.

Trance

Stylish and never boring to watch, but in the end not particularly interesting either, despite the hypnotherapeutically-connected reversals and blurring of reality. Vincent Cassel as the nominal villain a plus, though.

The Apartment

The 1960 one - a comedy, but with actual sadness mixed in. I must admit, I was prompted to watch it because I saw Shirley Maclaine's character on a list of manic pixie dream girls and was intrigued; she's fetching, but not an MPDG. Jack Lemmon's likeable too, and seeing him as a young man is interesting...I just read that his performance in this film was one of the iconic American roles upon which Kevin Stacey based his character in American Beauty, and I can see it.

The Neverending Story

Some images just stick with you; I was little when I last saw The Neverending Story, but the sphinxes guarding the gate and the crumbling oracle have stayed with me. This seemed a film worth seeing on a big screen since the opportunity had come up (Astor), and while it wasn't magic, the revisiting was still worth the while.

(w/ Julian)

Other Desert Cities (MTC)

I think that I've become quite a hard marker when it comes to theatre, which might explain why I'm not more effusive about this one. I thought it was good all round - performances (Robyn Nevin always stands out, but here all the others held their own), staging (set design by Callum Morton [1], [2]), the play itself (sharply written, funny, avoiding caricature) - but it also felt like I'd seen its story of old family tensions arising from past secrets being brought to light before, right down to the final act reveal about what really happened with Henry. But for all that, still, this was good.

(w/ Cass)

Jo Scicluna - "When Our Horizons Meet" & Lydia Wegner - "Folded Colour" (Centre for Contemporary Photography)

1. (Scicluna). Investigation/disruption of 'landscapes', including their framing and production. Photography and other material - eg clear plastic discs superimposed over images.

2. (Wegner). Created abstraction - brightly coloured objects photographed then treated so that what they are is no longer apparent. (Without the benefit of a description, could have been taken for something done entirely with a computer and a printer.)

Both appealing.

Machete

I do like this kind of thing. If you're going to make a mexploitation film, then there's literally no other possible lead than Danny Trejo...and it's a significant bonus if you can get Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal and Robert De Niro (and Lindsay Lohan) on top of that. "Machete don't text" (although, later he improvises).

Joni Mitchell - Travelogue

I've dipped in and out with Joni Mitchell over the years, which means that this 2002 double cd set of reinterpretations of songs from across her long career, set to an orchestral backing mingles the familiar and the unfamiliar in an additional way for me. Truth be told, I've never taken Mitchell to heart in a concerted way, although there've certainly been times when individual songs or records have been important to me, and maybe that's part of why I find this one pleasant - not in any way jarring - but one that only marks me lightly. I've sometimes wondered in the past if I would get to a point - probably a point in my life rather than specifically in terms of my appreciation of music - when her music would resonate more deeply, if perhaps its subtleties aren't yet fully for me...but that point isn't yet now.