Unforgiven

The previous time I watched this - high school, probably - it was too early I think. I knew it was a 'revisionist' western but I'm not sure I'd seen any of the other kind before that, and I reckon it's only on this second pass (prompted by Passenger) that I picked up the ways in which it layers and complicates the more traditional narrative of the west and its heroes, not to mention its more general meditation on ageing, regret, and the limits in how much we can leave our past selves behind.

The Big Short

Very good. Funny, engaging, easy enough to follow, and lit with anger at the many systemic failures that allowed the financial crisis to develop and the impact it had. The various men (they're nearly all men) in suits all come to life - the protagonists we follow who spot the bubble, and the hissable others with whom they interact as they discover how complex, out of control and ultimately fraudulent the whole edifice is - and the direct-to-camera asides and celebrity explanations (Margot Robbie in a bubble bath on sub-prime mortgages and 'shorting', Anthony Bourdain in the kitchen on collateralized debt obligations, Richard Thaler and Selena Gomez at a casino on synthetic CDOs) are witty and effective.

Passenger

You embark on a bus from the Footscray Community Arts Centre with everyone else, and as it pulls out, one of your fellow passengers, a man in a suit, takes a phone call - it doesn't sound like it goes well. Next, gradually, a conversation stutteringly develops between him and the woman sitting next to him.

On the way out, along a busy road, you look out the window at the urban landscape and see a woman mounted on horseback and dressed for the part; the horse rears and gallops alongside briefly before the bus outdistances horse and rider.

Weaving through and around the Docklands and looking out the many windows of the bus (screens), you begin to wonder what's performance and what's real - if you're alert, you might also see, recurring along the route but in the distance amidst everyone going about their Saturday afternoon, a lone man with the appearance of a cowboy.

The discussion on the bus continues at intervals, music rising from time to time as soundtrack and score; he's in the dairy business and possibly less than entirely scrupulous in his dealings with farmers, while she seems more like one of life's little people, a battler of sorts maybe. The conversation touches on their life circumstances, shame, responsibility, oligarchy, the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven (they both know it).

On the way back, the Docklands left behind, the tone of the conversation turns accusatory and the woman now speaks for the farmers who have been exploited - she is one of them, in a way that's possibly literal but doesn't entirely matter. Him: "Hang on, where am I?" The bus pulls into what seems to be a truck stop, completely with (closed) diner at the entrance. There are parked trucks, a man sitting sullenly in hi-vis watching the bus pull in; the cowboy appears again, lean and still and looking into the distance, and the music takes on a Morricone-esque flavour. The bus slows, inches through a narrow gap into a clear lot, and wordlessly the man obeys the woman's (equally wordless) command they he get off. He walks agitatedly ahead with her behind him; they stop, face each other, and the woman on the horse from earlier reappears. The bus circles slowly, round and round, like the camera panning around the climactic show down in a western movie - and then you leave them, facing each other beneath the gaze of that same silent rider.

(w/ trang)

Produced by Jessica Wilson - and in case this wasn't obvious, a most enjoyable piece of theatre that makes very good use of its bus and city setting (the former of those working as a particularly intimate seating 'in the round', while the external elements also played out all around)

Lucy Crehan - Cleverlands

I read this for pleasure and enjoyment but it's also pretty relevant to work, so I sent around a note as below (with some specifically work-related commentary removed):

***

The author, Lucy Crehan, took a couple of years out from teaching in the UK to visit Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai and Canada, aiming to get a better understanding of what contributes to their strong performance in standardised international testing (especially PISA), which aspects might be replicable elsewhere, and the trade-offs associated with focusing on such tests.

It came out last year and is well informed by an understanding of evidence and policy but also weaves in her experiences as a visiting teacher and observer in schools in all of those systems, as well as elements of psychology, sociology, and national histories and cultures. It’s very readable and also has heaps of classroom anecdotes and conversations with parents, teachers, principals, administrators and policy makers.

Anyhow, I finished reading it over the weekend and really enjoyed it. So a few things that I took out: 

Ten interesting ideas, reminders and ways of thinking about things

All contestable and maybe over-simplifications to varying degrees, but good thought starters.

1. Evidence suggests that the aims of improving overall achievement, equity and equality are not in conflict with each other. Broadly, you can measure the equity of a system by how much students’ outcomes depend on parental background, and the equality of a system by the overall dispersion (or spread) of students’ results. While everyone would agree that improving overall achievement and equity are desirable, equality can be trickier: what does it mean for the ‘highest performing’ or ‘most able’ students?
2. Early selection (into schools – often a choice between ‘vocational’ or ‘academic’ schools), streaming and setting (into different ‘tracks’ or ‘sets’ within schools and subjects based on ability) of students seems to produce overall worse outcomes than a system that sets universal expectations and tries to bring all students (to the extent possible) up to those standards. Early and more selection/streaming/setting seems to reduce equity and equality, without improving overall achievement. 
3. There’s a potential tension between high equity/equality in student outcomes and high employment but a choice between the two is not inevitable. Earlier selection, streaming and setting – and creating different expectations for different students – may reduce equity and equality, but can have the benefit of increasing a system’s vocational orientation. Avoiding selection, streaming and setting until upper secondary years may achieve the best of both worlds, provided that primary and early secondary education is strongly directed at improving all students’ outcomes and there is strong vocational educational education in upper secondary and tertiary years. 
4. Intelligence (general cognitive ability) is not fixed – rather, it develops over time. It is partly heritable – explained about half by genetics and half by environment/experiences. And it does not develop in a linear way but rather through intermittent bursts at different times for different children. A school system should recognise this, including by not lowering expectations of children too early but instead structuring effort to bring all children up to a minimum standard over time and to ensure as much as possible that all children have the same education at least through to mid-secondary years. 
5. Activating teachers’ motivation is critical. People act based on intrinsic motivation when the action is inherently interesting or enjoyable. The four elements that contribute to individuals being intrinsically motivated are mastery (our desire to get better and better at what we do), relatedness (our desire to have positive relationships with others), autonomy (our desire to be self-directed) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves) (see Daniel Pink for more). Effective school system settings will play into all four of those. More recent theories of motivation also differentiate between different types of extrinsic motivation which are more or less effective according to how much we internalise them. 
6. Culture and society matters (1). People in Western cultures are more likely to believe that learning is more strongly attributable to a child’s intellectual abilities and that intelligence is fixed, whereas people in Asian cultures are more inclined to believe that hard work is more important relative to innate ability and that intelligence can be developed. This means that Asian societies will tend to assume a greater equality of potential amongst children (regardless of starting point). One reason this is important is that we know from the evidence that teacher expectations make a big difference to student outcomes. Teachers in China, for example, may be more likely to praise a student for hard work than for high achievement – which happens to be, according to Carol Dweck, one of the most effective ways of promoting a ‘growth mindset’ in children. 
7. Culture and society matters (2). The way that children interpret behaviour of teachers makes a difference to how they respond, and is likely to be culturally conditioned. For example, there is some evidence that behaviour such as a teacher keeping a child behind in class to complete homework might be interpreted negatively by the student as controlling behaviour and reduce their motivation in America, but more positively as indicating that the student was being looked after or cared for and increase their motivation in China. The same may be true for parental behaviour – e.g. parents being demanding about completing homework may have different effects on students’ motivation and learning in different cultures. 
8. Memorisation is helpful for more than tests. The more you have committed to long-term memory, the better you will be at problem-solving – because when solving problems, you don’t need to use any of your working memory to solve or retain certain operations or facts since they can be accessed from long-term memory with minimal additional cognitive effort. Also, memorisation and repetition doesn’t always imply only shallow, surface-level understanding. There is a difference between rote learning and repetitive learning, and if done properly, the latter can lead to a deeper understanding. So the popular perceptions about Asian societies being all about rote learning at the expense of creativity and the ability to problem-solve and innovate may be off base – things may be more complex than first appears. (Having said that, some high-performing Asian systems are actively reforming in this area; a few years back, the Chinese government introduced a new curriculum that emphasised the cultivation of independent and critical learners, in a move away from ‘tianyashi’ or ‘force-feeding the duck’ – what an amazing educational metaphor). 
9. If not designed carefully, pedagogical shifts designed to enhance ‘21st century skills’ such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity may entail a trade-off with learning core academic content like maths and reading. Across Canada, maths scores in PISA and TIMSS dropped between 2003 and 2012. This coincided with a national move towards more discovery-based (or problem-solving focused) pedagogical approaches, away from more traditional teacher-directed learning approaches. And in Japan, PISA scores dropped after it introduced a ‘relaxed education’ policy in the early 2000s that partly had as its goal focusing more on developing students’ critical and creative thinking abilities (it also, for example, included other elements like eliminating the previous practice of requiring students to attend school on Saturdays). Both Canada and Japan then moved back towards more traditional approaches and learning goals after those experiences. 
10. Other forces and policy settings also affect PISA results, beyond school system settings and socio-cultural forces. For example, in China, people are registered according to their home town and can generally only access public services in that area. In Shanghai, this means that many migrant children are educated in lower-quality migrant schools, outside the high quality public school system, and are forced to return to their parents’ home town at the age of 13 or 14 to attend high school. The effect is that a large proportion of the poorest and least educated cohort of students in Shanghai society leaves just before PISA testing (15 years) – which may well have an impact on Shanghai’s results.

Lucy Crehan’s ‘five principles for high-performing, equitable educational systems’ 

1. Get children ready for formal learning – through both high quality ECE and ‘non-learning’ supports such as multi-disciplinary teams on-site in schools
2. Design curricula concepts for mastery and context for motivation – cover fewer concepts in more depth, and in a way that motivates children to learn 
3. Support children to take on challenges, rather than making concessions (this is the principle that Crehan identifies as her number one most important principle) – have common standards and support all students to achieve them, including providing extra support for children who are struggling, not selecting children into different schools based on ability until late secondary years, and teaching children in mixed-ability classes also until late secondary 
4. Treat teachers as professionals (an aside: in Finland, teachers have a high degree of autonomy in how they teach, and yet there is a very high degree of uniformity in classroom approaches because there is strict quality control in teacher training and resources) 
5. Combine school accountability with school support (rather than sanctions)

E. Lockhart - The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

This will sound like a cliche but it's true: there are some books that, when you start reading them, right from the get-go you feel in safe hands and sure that you'll enjoy them, and this is one. I read and adored Lockhart's We Were Liars a little while back, and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is impressively different in tone while being of a comparable quality; Frankie's coming into her own as a 'near criminal mastermind' at her exclusive Massachusetts preparatory school while simultaneously discovering her agency amidst the privileged, masculine environment that finds its clearest expression in the secret society of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds which she effectively subverts is strongly feminist while also (just about) believable, and a hugely enjoyable read.

Anti-Gravity (Malthouse / Chunky Move)

I picked this one as part of the subscription mainly because I noticed it was a collaboration with / response to the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, who I came across only fairly recently but have enjoyed the encounters with. It was fun: in the right spot for contemporary dance between being clear enough about its subject (things elemental, and specifically clouds) without being overly determined or literal, with quite a zen-like stage set up but enough dynamism in the choreography and performances to hold the attention, with the use of stage elements (dry ice for clouds, various rocks, pillars, screens, balloons, and other pieces with which the dancers interact) added to the performance.

(w/ Tamara)

The Martian

1. Yes, Matt Damon is probably the perfect person to watch play an astronaut-botanist who has to, quote, science the shit out of it to survive on Mars.
2. Neat cast and nearly all at that 'definitely famous but one step below super famous' level including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Kristen Wiig and Donald Glover.
3. Candidate for funniest scene: when all the NASA geeks immediately get the Elrond reference except Wiig's media director. Bonus: Sean Bean aka Boromir is one of them.
4. Light, involving, uplifting. Well done Ridley Scott, not least for the versatility.

The Salesman

In retrospect, it was a tactical error to watch this one at the late screening (11pm) as it would've been heavy going at any time of day - although it did mean that, apart from one latecomer at the back, we had the cinema to ourselves.

It has a certain stageiness - and not just in the scenes of the production of the play within the film of Death of a Salesman - and the intriguing potential of the metaphor/synecdoche of the locked room and the haunting/violent return (of the repressed?) by the absent (except by phone) prostitute isn't fully satisfactorily developed, but it does feel like a very real and human film, strong (one assumes) on contemporary Iranian society and masculinity as it is more broadly.

(w/ trang)

Spotlight

As good as it is, it's kind of surprising that Spotlight took out best picture at the Oscars a couple of years back, because it's very unshowy. But maybe that's appropriate given its subject matter.

Blade Runner

What a powerful vision this is. Surely equally resonant today - visually and philosophically - as when it was first released (1982 - the year I was born ... and set in November 2019, which is no longer so very far away)[*].

[*] This was the 'final cut' currently showing at the Nova - Ridley Scott's 'final' version as recut and released in 2007.

Bill Henson (NGV)

Twenty three pieces dating 2008 to 2011, all hung in a single dark room, white borders glowing palely all around - a mix of naked adolescents, dramatically twilit landscape, and sculpture and other art amidst viewers, emerging against darkness with pale and sometimes golden glow.

I've sometimes wondered whether the attraction to Henson is primarily aesthetic - residing in his emotional sensibility and the way it mingles the beautiful and the sublime in a nocturnal palate. This exhibition hasn't particularly helped me in resolving that question, except by producing the thought that, maybe, so deep is the effect that he has that there must be something more profound to it, something more essential - in the sense of being of the essence - however it's produced.

Hinds - Leave Me Alone

Brightly clattery, garageily jangly guitar pop.

Transformer

Impromptu dinner at Transformer on Thursday night, and they were playing the best songs from first Mezzanine, then Moon Safari, then Dummy - three albums that were always far better than the 'chillout' genre that sprung from the beginnings laid by them and others, and indeed three albums that have proven to be real classics, now some two decades on.

Jennifer Down - Our Magic Hour

"Tender are the stairs to heaven". That's the name of the piece they see in the NGV:

At the end she came to a great dark room. There was a ladder suspended from the ceiling, made of fibre-optic cables that changed colour. As she got closer, it seemed to stretch impossibly into the sky, and down into the ground. It was dizzying.

Adam was lying on the floor on his stomach like a child. Audrey lay down next to him. The dark, his warm body, the lit ladder reaching into the ceiling, its illusion of bright endlessness. Audrey thought she might cry.

'It's a mirror,' Adam whispered. 'See? There's one at either end.'

Audrey stared at the ladder, watched the colours change until the room around it melted away.

At last Adam stood, and she did too, obediently. It was like swimming up from underwater.

It's a Yayoi Kusama and one that I know well from when it was last on display, there on the third floor in that stand alone room on the other side of the decorative arts.

And it's that kind of local detail - contemporary inner city Melbourne, littered with highly specific references to place as well as a certain associated mode of living for the young - which makes it very difficult, and probably impossible, for me to tell how 'good' Our Magic Hour is; the passing (or not so passing) references to Nicholson, Brunswick, Smith and Gertrude Streets, the view from Ruckers Hill in Northcote, familiar pubs, sharehouse dynamics, the type of music that's always in the air ("an earnest, jangly garage rock that made her sentimental").

But however much I was filling in myself, and however influenced by my own desire to read books set in the Melbourne that I know today, I think that Our Magic Hour is a novel of genuine quality. The writing is simple but unafraid of the descriptive, experiential moment or image; the interactions between the characters feel real, even the ones who are only sketches, passing presences on a few pages here and there; the depiction of Audrey's slump into depression is convincing, including in how it renders the flatness of affect and hollowness that comes with it, layered with the struggle to function day to day.

Miss Sloane

The premise is inherently enjoyable: watching a whip smart manipulator take on enormously powerful vested interests in what, for better of for worse, must now be known as the DC swamp of political lobbyists, and Chastain brings a suitably hard edge and opaque outwardness to the portrayal as her Elizabeth Sloane manoeuvers towards her endgame. Also good: seeing Mark Strong play a regular, decent human being (a first I think); plus Alison Pill.

Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman - Good Omens

It's been a long time! A one-off, published in 1990, so same year as Moving Pictures and pre any of Gaiman's solo novels. Hasn't aged too badly but then it comes so wrapped up in the associations of both authors' oeuvres that it's basically impossible to tell.

"Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts" (ACMI)

A return visit. This time, it was:

• La Nuit des Heros (which I didn't feel bad about finding largely incomprehensible once I looked it up, after the fact, to discover that it was a comedy about an art historian who "has removed himself from society to write the history of modern art, and amuses himself by making important figures from modernism, from Cézanne to Yves Klein, speak with the voices of French celebrities such as Jean-Paul Belmondo or Françoise Sagan"; in the meantime, his neighbour, who he thinks is an angel, films people asking them whether they believe in images)
• Boy From Mars (of which I'd seen the first, two and half minute establishing shot of the lit-from-within purpose building last time, but not - I don't think - the water buffalo generating the electricity for the illumination or the other images of flaring light and darkness)
• C.H.Z. (continuously habitable zones - black vegetation in imagined landscapes)
• Crowd (only the first bit, and then I had to rush off - so I didn't get to see the effects of the full hypnotism)

Kong: Skull Island

Friday night fare. Elevated to enjoyableness by some of the cast (more because of who they are than because of any particular charisma in these roles - Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, SLJ) and the impressive creature effects, especially on Kong himself.

(w/ Julian)

The Earthmen - College Heart

A best-of compiling 18 songs released by this Melbourne band across the 90s; I came to it because of their transcendent version of "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" on To Hal and Bacharach (though that one's not actually on College Heart) and it's a pretty good set of alternative-ish rock-pop including a nice line in short, low-key balladry, the strings on "Tell The Women We're Going" the first sign of that propensity on the compilation.

Andrey Kurkov - The Milkman in the Night

Surreal happenings in and around Kiev, Ukraine, from the just about plausible if rather odd (Irina's breast milk and its use) to the really extremely unlikely (Semyon's somnambulistic joining of a new democratic movement that meets only at night and aims to take over Parliament) through to the out and out fantastic (the chemical formula causing all who ingest it to be imbued with an extremely sharp sense of justice on which they act, include the grey cat Scruffy who becomes a kind of feline vigilante of the night, which is even capable of at least temporarily reanimating the recently dead), with a cast of characters whose motivations are unclear to say the least, although all of the main ones end up turning out to act honourably and get happy endings when it comes to it. A pretty interesting novel and difficult enough to predict (impossible actually) that I finished it quickly. I picked it up in a bookstore a while back because the blurb made it sound a bit like The Master and Margarita, but actually it comes across a bit more like some kind of post-Soviet and multi-perspectived Murakami styled piece (down to the regular recitations of what is eaten and drunk - in this case frequent bowls of dumplings called 'pelmeni', loaves of brown bread and various salted and pickled vegetables and food-stuffs, often as accompaniment to vodka).

John (Annie Baker; MTC)

Quite exceptional - best thing I've seen in a while.

A youngish Brooklyn couple - Elias and Jenny - check into a somehow forebodingly kitschy bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, where they're greeted by an owner, Mertis, whose chipper demeanour can't help but (at least in the context) cause the audience to wonder what secrets she or the house are harbouring and later meet Mertis's friend Genevieve who, blind and oracular, seems almost to have stepped out of a Beckett play; Genevieve's pronouncements during the play's second act (there are two intervals over its more than three hour running time) seem like embodied statements made by the world itself, and still more so when she breaks the fourth wall when house lights come up for the second interval and directly addresses the audience about the time, years previously, when she went mad.

One of the play's most impressive features is the way that it's so clearly 'about' a number of things - most notably, hauntings and ghosts of many kinds - and yet never obvious or at all over-determined. This plays out particularly keenly in the many parallels that are set up between Jenny and Genevieve, leading us to speculate that - on some however level - the latter is an older version of the former (the similarities of their names, the way that both describe experiences of feeling transcendently at the centre of the world, their common tendencies to ascribe spiritual relevance or even agency to objects, the way that it seems just possible that Genevieve could have been the one who gave the doll Samantha - from Jenny's childhood - to Mertis so that it could end up hauntingly surveying the scene from its shelf in the b&b/stage set, the common (ha, ha) name of 'John' across their stories) without resolving or really more than suggestively hinting at the possibility or what it might mean. (Also - is that Lovecraft that Mertis reads to Genevieve as her 'weekly reading'?!)

It's very good on each of the levels at which it operates, not least in the relationships between the various characters and between each of them and their pasts and off-stage others. And its subtlety neither obscures nor falsely betokens a depth that will, I think, make it linger.

(w/ Laura F and Meribah)