Big Eyes

Feels like one from the heart from Burton, playing out as it does - and in relatively straight up fashion - its themes of artistic self-expression and value. Doesn't quite settle into a satisfying tonal shape at any point, and also features both an oddly inwardly-directed performance from Amy Adams (who has been basically captivating in all the other things I've seen her in) and an overly mannered - to the point of caricature - performance from the usually excellent Christoph Waltz (Krysten Ritter is a welcome dash of energy whenever she appears), but still and all, okay.

(w/ Rob)

Inherent Vice

Pynchon, of course, a past icon of mine (although Inherent Vice is something of an outlier - a far less lightly coded, more straightforward version of his habitual literary thickets); Paul Thomas Anderson maybe the best director working in Hollywood today (and I still haven't even seen the so very acclaimed There Will Be Blood).[*] Plus Joaquin Phoenix, who for me has come along a trajectory matched only by Matthew McConaughey from intense dislike to considerable respect and enjoyment.

Add it up, and what you get is a film that succeeds on terms that are at once set by its source material and created by itself - Pynchon's distinctive rhythms, cadences and spirals rendered remarkably effectively (albeit probably only possible with this particular novel of his) not least via Joanna Newsom's affecting narration and appearances, Anderson bringing his usual sublime eye to proceedings while drenching it all in 70s iconography, Phoenix the shambling, human-symbolic figure at its centre, while others whirl in and out and around. Impressively, the off-kilter humour translates too.

(w/ David)

[*] Much as I love Sofia Coppola and do admire the craft and style in her work, my response to her films feels like it arises from something far more personal than in any sense objective.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Not without its pleasures, but suffers from a sense of the stakes not being high enough and overall being somewhat lacking in the richness of the LOTR films - inevitable, I suppose, given the smaller canvas nature of The Hobbit

The stretching to three films might have been an attempt at giving it more grandeur as well as increasing its box office returns by 200 per cent but actually leaves it probably even more visibly thin ... would have been more satisfying, I suspect, if instead it had been a single film and pitched as a more straightforward adventure with resonances of the broader story that was to come than attempting out and out Epic in its own right.

(1, 2)

Edge of Tomorrow

Pacy and entertaining, and I like the sense of humour too. Tom Cruise is always a figure to be reckoned with, one way or another, and Emily Blunt, who I thought I hadn't come across before but it turns out was in Looper (another time travel type flick as it happens), is good too.

Tana French - The Secret Place

One thing about touchstones, I suppose, is that - probably by definition - you see elements of them everywhere, and maybe even sometimes when the connection is faint at best. Be that as it may, The Secret Place, which I enjoyed a lot, for me summoned to mind both The Virgin Suicides and The Secret History (two of the very biggest for me).

The funny thing is that The Secret Place sets up as (and is) a piece of genre fiction, and namely crime - a genre that's always been more or less outside my interests but tends to intersect incidentally with my reading anyway.

The apparent supernatural elements are risky, but they're important to the novel's effect and they work - adding to the air of mystery as well as the intense focus on the heightened nature of the girls' friendship and insularity of feelings, coming off as at least plausibly an entirely inter-subjective mass hallucination, as well as being a kind of experience that exists naturally on a continuum with the intensity with which they respond to their evening excursions to the hidden grove (a secret place of another kind).

In any case, it's pretty terrific, with the suspense building nicely across the two timelines playing out in alternating chapters - detective Stephen Moran's investigation of the year old murder of schoolboy Chris Harper on the grounds of exclusive Irish girls school St Kilda's, and the unfolding narrative that year previously from the perspective of the four girls - close friends - who emerge as suspects and prove to have plenty of unplumbed depths and internal corkscrew twists in their individual and collective psyches: Holly Mackey, Julia Harte, Selena Wynne and Becca O'Mara ... as well as the other clique (Joanne Heffernan et al). Works as both a mystery and, just as satisfyingly, as an examination of a time of life, a particular place, and the working through of a whole set of characters and personalities.

"Alex Prager" (NGV) - second look

An hour to kill so I went back and enjoyed "Face in the Crowd" again, and this time also watched the trio of shorts on the large screen in the main chamber: "La petite mort" (erotically, symbolically charged rendition of a Claudia Cardinale-esque woman struck by a train, literal, figurative, it doesn't make any difference), "Despair" (Bryce Dallas Howard, striking colour coding, throwing herself from a tall building) and "Sunday".

(first time)

The Fall

Not bad but I'd hoped for more from it on multiple fronts - out and out visual spectacle, general narrative complexity and coherence, overall imaginative and emotional impact.

"In The Flesh" (National Portrait Gallery)

Ten contemporary Australian artists exploring the nature of humanness across a range of forms with something of an emphasis on sculpture. The exhibition was arranged according to themes like transience, alienation, acceptance, intimacy, transition and so on ... but in fact nearly all of the works could've been exhibited under the umbrella of empathy.

Apart from the Ron Mueck pieces (always welcome) - 'vulnerability' - I also particularly liked Natasha Bieniek's miniature oil portraits ('restlessness').

"James Turrell: A retrospective" (NGA)

"My work is about space and the light that inhabits it"

Unsurprisingly, it's the immersive ones that make the greatest impression - the 'ganzfeld' (complete field) "Virtuality squared" (2014) in which groups of eight or so at a time stand and wander through a large room for a timed session (about 7 or 8 minutes) as lights project all around including a concealed 2 metre drop at one end of the room, the 'wedgework' "After Green", 1993 (in fact an extremely dark room, against one wall of which is projected a series of red and violet outline squares appearing to be ramifying portals into the distance) and the similarly dark "Orca" (1984), in which the projected light images are only a muted grey against the black, creating an experience more contemplative and focused on mortality than merely sombre or depressing. All offer that kind of experience that art, and art alone, can elicit and create.

Then, too, there are the less fully physically enclosed, yet - once you focus on them - equally enveloping other projections, given abstract names ("Afrum") and distinguished by colour, with some actually projected in rooms and others rendered in etched aquatint on paper in series.

As well as a range of others, including, in perhaps the retrospective's simplest but also some of its greatest pleasures, the three reflective holograms (blue, green, red), seeming to emerge three-dimensionally from their black backdrops.

* * *

Elsewhere in the NGA, "Myth and memory in recent American landscape photography" which, despite its title, focused on the 1970s. Naturally, I liked it - especially those by Robert Adams and Frank Gohlke.

And, miscellaneously across the rest of the galleries: Anne Ferran's "Scenes on the Death of Nature" I and II (1986), John Olsen's "Childhood by the seaport" (1965), a couple of the Australian surrealist pieces (Freda Robertshaw's "Composition", 1947 and James Cant's "The Deserted City", 1939), the curved room with a whole lot of Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings, two Rothkos (that I also spent some time with the last time I was in Canberra, a few years back), "Blue Poles".

Ossian Ward - Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art

The how, it turns out, is a 'TABULA' approach (as in - rasa) - time, association, background, understand, look again, assessment (although, for the most part, the book deliberately steers clear of that last). An enjoyable and plentifully illustrated skip through a range of ways of tackling/framing contemporary art - 'as entertainment', 'as confrontation', 'as event', 'as message', 'as joke', 'as spectacle', 'as meditation'. Plus, fit well with my scattershot approach to learning anything in particular about art, as I was able to fit various artists whose pieces I've seen previously into at least some kind of context as provided by the book.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians, The Magician King & The Magician's Land

The Magicians

"It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view." - that, not at any of what Brakebills or Fillory hold of magic and adventure, but at something Alice says shedding light on Janet's motivations and her entanglement with Eliot.

The wonder of their flight, geese-transmuted, to Antarctica. The immensity of Quentin's journey to the pole; the bathos of the discovery that he and Alice were the only two who even attempted it.

The melancholy stone-paved piazzas, fountains and sealed, book-filled buildings of the Neitherlands. Like something straight out of de Chirico.

The way that magic functions variously as metaphor, symbol, intertext, synecdoche and metonym for language, literature, happiness and The Magicians itself without this ever becoming too overt or over-determined.

Quentin and Alice, Eliot and Janet, and, at the outskirts, Julia.

The Magician King

Julia's own journey, filled in, through magic's fringes and demi-monde. A raising of the stakes to encompass magic itself, along with a revealing of the structures and nature of said magic. The true nature of the heroism forced upon Quentin: to pay the price rather than receive the reward, and to be denied the thing that represents - and, in this case, ipso facto is - what he most wants (no further leap, adventure, to the Far Side of the World; not even to remain king in Fillory - each both standing for, and embodying, that which fills the lack which otherwise ensures his discontentment...which is, maybe, the central metaphor and idea at the heart of these books after all).

The Magician's Land

I re-read the first two because I wanted to - as much for the characters as for the everything else - but also as a run-up to this, the third and presumably final in the series. And yes, it finishes strong - full, like the two preceding it, of sequences and scenes that stick in the mind.

Does it squib on the themes of the first two books in the way that it has Quentin emerge finally as a fully sympathetic character, and in the final happy ending? I don't think so; rather, it's the culmination of an arc through which Quentin has been developing and maturing into an adult, just like the others, and the climactic re-creation of Fillory works, consistently with that. Also nice is to see Janet emerge more as a fully fledged character - both rendering her more understandable, and casting retrospective doubt on the reliability of Quentin's after-the-fact take on her motivations for sleeping with him back in book one - plus Mayakovsky's reappearance, again at once forbidding and oddly sympathetic, and the pleasure of Asmodeus' extended, explosive cameo.

(Against all of this, Plum doesn't make an enormous impression, but more or less holds her own, and knits neatly into the Chatwin back story.)

Also, like all of them, littered with little throwaway bits of wonder - like the bits about the whales and what they're up to...

Anyway, altogether, terrifically good reading.

Lydia Loveless - Somewhere Else

For a number of reasons, the very act of listening to music on one of the in-store headphones in Basement Discs summons up a bunch of memories and associations for me; it's something I've done plenty of times, and most recently last weekend, on the strength of a short piece from Rolling Stone Australia, May 2014, torn out and stuck on fridge since, starting:

SOUNDS LIKE: Loretta Lynn and Patti Smith slamming shots at a Midwestern dive bar while cowboys and punks brawl out back.
FOR FANS OF: Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, country singers not averse to using the word "fuck" when necessary.

... and then, if that wasn't enough, the even more enticing text on the sticker on the cd:

"Is Stevie Nicks singing lead on 'Born to Run' overstating it? Probably, but too bad."

Anyway, while neither of those descriptions is particularly accurate, they're still in the ballpark of the style that (the aptly named) Lydia Loveless is working - kind of Kathleen Edwards-y but grittier, rockier. There's both seethe and surge to her songs, a hustle and an energy, a rough undercurrent that churns along beneath the ringing electric guitar lines - this is a good one.

"Richard Avedon: People" (Potter Museum)

Sunny Saturday during an extended long weekend - spur of the moment repeat visit.

(w/ Erandathie and Derrick)

(previous time, a few weeks ago)

M R Carey - The Girl With All The Gifts

A page-turning piece of zombie fiction as promised, plus a spin on evolution and survival. Apart from the urgency of the plot, has some strong points (notably the child protagonist Melanie, along with the inherent pathos that comes with her situation) but a tendency to be overly simplistic and direct in some of its exposition and characterisation.

Don Watson - Recollections of a Bleeding Heart

Seemed like an apt time to re-read this one. Enjoyed it again, though it's interesting how the experiences of the intervening years have changed my perspective in certain ways.

(first time)

Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons

Reverence is an appropriate attitude towards Gram Parsons, because he was truly great, and when you pick a whole bunch of artists who've nearly all been strongly influenced by his music or at least, indirectly, by the possibilities that it opened and then get his old musical partner Emmylou Harris singing along on several of them, and it's unsurprising that reverence is what you'll get.

Truth be told, a bit more in the way of divergence from or reinterpretation of the originals wouldn't have gone astray (two of the more memorable, in the Cowboy Junkies' "Ooh Las Vegas" and Lucinda Williams and David Crosby's "Return of the Grievous Angel", go further in that direction than most), but, simply by not mucking around too much with the timeless originals, this crew - which also includes Gillian Welch, Whiskeytown, Wilco, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, and more - produce a pretty nice tribute indeed.