The Wave

Tidily effective Norwegian disaster film. Formulaic in the extreme, but works anyway. Part of Scandinavian Film Festival in the nice surrounds of the Westgarth.

(w/ Laura F)

"Cindy Sherman" & other things @ GOMA, Brisbane

I don't have strong feelings about Cindy Sherman but have always tended to enjoy my encounters with her work along the way. This exhibition was from the 2000s, the series taking in head shots, clowns, large murals, a Balenciaga set, another for Chanel against backdrops from Iceland and Italy treated to look as if they were painted (I liked these), 'society portraits' and new work from 2016 strikingly printed on aluminium, all featuring Sherman herself but avowedly not self-portraits since their subject is precisely not the person whose image appears throughout.

Another exhibition was described thus: " 'Time of others' is a curatorial collaboration between four of the Asia-Pacific region's leading institutions for collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting contemporary art. An exhibition project evolving as it travels between each venue throughout 2015 and 2016, it is an attempt to create a platform for reflecting on social and cultural relations in the Asia-Pacific today." One of those institutions is the Singapore Art Museum, which I visited at the start of the year, so I had the interesting experience of again coming across several pieces in a new context, including Heman Chong's "Calendars (2020-2096)", Ringo Bunoan's "Endings" and "No endings" (the final pages of over 100 books / a column of books with their final pages missing), Shitamichi Motoyuki's abandoned Shinto gate photographs ('torii' series).

Plus, a 'documentary' about a Malay communist party double agent that was constructed entirely with biographical voiceover over spliced together scenes from many Tony Leung movies (In the Mood for Love etc) as a way of rendering the fluid, constructed, etc nature of its subject. Artist: Ho Tzu Nyen, who I see caught my eye with quite a different piece in that same Singapore instantiation.

Also, it was quite fun hearing and seeing the responses of various school children to the untitled Anish Kapoor mounted in its own room although the piece itself didn't move me in the way that so many of his did when I first came across him a few years back.

Zoolander 2

Well I'd read the reviews so I wasn't expecting too much. And I have to say, apart from the many celebrity cameos and residual affection from the greatness of the first one, there wasn't much point to this film.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Excellent, and funny. Just a hint of Moonrise Kingdom? Or was that just the chaptering and child protagonist? Seems kind of unfair to compare it to anything else really though.

(w/ Kevin)

Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station

I'm not sure whether it helped or hindered that I read this novel of disconnection while in a rather disconnected state myself. Either way, it kind of felt like while I tangled with this novel and didn't at all mind the experience, I didn't inhale.