Beirut

Solidly put together political thriller, Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike the best things about it. And I usually enjoy films about negotiation.

(w/ Erandathie)

Jamie Marina Lau - Pink Mountain on Locust Island

Electric-sharp and disconnected, sprinkled through with unusual turns of phrase ('Trapped between this white envelope or for everybody to be the way they used to be'). Figurative speech blurs all over with rhythms that suggest meaning which may or may not exist ('In here it's a greasy intergalactic mission); it's all wrapped up in a first person present tense (my old favourite) affect that's diminished or odd or both ('This is good, this is working').

Convincing seediness, contemporary art-making, drugs. Chinatown blues, lots of food and a teenage narrator. I went to the book launch a little while back and the author said something like she wanted it to be like the actual experience of a teenager and teenagers don't go around noticing things and being empathetic with others; she's tapped something here. Excellent.

Tomb Raider

Not that exciting, though I liked the way it kept ambiguous until the critical moment whether the tomb actually did contain a supernatural threat. This was the recent Alicia Vikander one.

VCA Masters of Contemporary Art First Year Exhibition

(w/ R)

Chris Stapleton - Traveller

Probably as close as I get to 'country' country, and even then taking in an alt-ish swing, a bit of southern rock crunch and some real old rock n roll gospel-tinged blues (e.g. "Might As Well Get Stoned"). Traipses from relaxed to wistful to more fiery, and has worked its way under my skin along the way.

"Nothing quite so poison as a promise": Neko Case - Hell-On

Yeah! Favourite new album of the year so far I think, and at a minimum right up there with Golden Hour and 7. Hell-On is as warm, rich, enveloping and textured a record as Case has released; the last song's called "Pitch or Honey", and the album feels full of both, flowing through all kinds of underground chambers.

The bright moments are as generously bright and modern-retro as they always have been (exhibit A: "Bad Luck", which could almost be taking cues from Camera Obscura[*]), the propulsive sections as urgent (e.g. the commanding crests to which songs like "Halls of Sarah" and "Curse of the I-5 Corridor" work their way), the ballads as touching ("Sleep All Summer"!), the fragments as alluringly oblique and casually great (there's a terrific mid section pairing of "Dirty Diamond" and "Oracle of the Maritimes" - two songs that don't seem to be doing anything special but definitely are, especially the stormy drama summoned by the latter's end). It all works.

(prev.)

[*] The sung-chanted "another happy new year" coda to "Gumball Blue" also brings them to mind.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol & Rogue Nation

I've watched these before (though only with a note about one); they're still fun.

Kingdom of Heaven

Director's cut = 3 hours.

(previously: lots of times!)

While We Live

A tragedy from the past resurfaces, and a family splinters in consequence; we've seen this done before. It holds its cards close to its chest at first, and the 'initially undisclosed two different historical timeframes interspersed in parallel' device probably added to the impact, albeit partly by disguising some of the lack of distinctive characterisation, with some of the critical action being motivated in only the broadest of generic strokes. It was involving enough, though, so despite its flaws, pretty good in all its seriousness. (Also, a bit of a quibble but I didn't like the way Q is more or less a plot device who doesn't get her own story or ending.)

(w/ R - part of Scandinavian Film Festival)

Melancholia (Malthouse; Declan Greene / dir. Matthew Lutton)

Impressive stage adaptation of a film that just looms larger and larger as time goes on. Effectively conveys the enormity of the mental event that Justine experiences and the symbolic layers associated with the planet Melancholia and the approaching end of the world. The staging and conception are top notch, with some of the imagery and sound design feeling likely to linger. I wonder what this would have been like without the shadowy presence of the source film; differently powerful, I suspect.

(w/ Hayley)

A Quiet Place

Well I enjoyed this one. Actually quite thrilling, neat in its set-ups and resolutions of tension, with just the right amount of plot, and a nicely paced ending.

Gurrumul - Gurrumul & Rrakala

Two gentle, nice records with occasional peaks.

Blackie Blackie Brown (Malthouse)

A righteous, angry burst, which makes the humour even more welcome and impressive. Queer, uneven and excessive, all as a matter of sensibility and politics,[*] with the several aspects of staging - set, lighting, projections - gelling well in aid of the stylistic mash-up that ensues when Blackie Blackie Brown goes on her murderous vigilante rampage to right historical wrongs.

(w/ Hayley, Cass, Ruth + Cassandre, Meribah + Stuart, and R)

[*] My response to the tonal unevenness in particular is informed by some articles I've read recently about how valorising tonal consistency within a piece of art - and criticising works which don't have that consistency - can often be a strategy to reinforce existing (white, straight, male, etc) power structures.

k.d. lang - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Curious but good grab-bag of country-hued songs and instrumentals. (The soundtrack to what sounds like a total hot mess of a movie.)

Foxtrot

Powerful, heavy and rather great - by turns emotionally claustrophobic, surreal, naturalistic, (literally) cartoonish, metafictional (including a quasi-direct address to camera) and, across all of those modes, frequently beautiful, and taking in grief, loss, guilt, trauma, responsibility and masculinity as themes, including specifically in relation to Israel, Jewishness and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and wrapping in an intergenerational context to all of the above.

(w/ Erandathie)

Disobedience

Somewhat slow going, but with some interesting elements. At its heart it's a character study and drama, and the film makes an effort to keep its events generally plausible-seeming, including the way in which the tension plays out between the conservatism of the London Orthodox Jewish community it depicts and the attraction between Ronit (Weisz) and Esti (McAdams) that reignites when Ronit returns from NYC following her Rabbi father's death. I liked that it was quite muted in some ways, even though that also sapped some of the (melo)dramatic air from the developing action. Also, even though it kind of stuck out, I didn't at all mind the appearance of "Lovesong" on the radio at a critical moment.

(w/ R)

Joe Kelly & J M Ken Niimura - I Kill Giants

Good!

"Rod McNicol: Portraits from my Village" & "Tsuka: An Exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Photography" (CCP)

Rod McNicol's 'village' is Fitzroy and Collingwood, and the portraits range from the 80s to today, with much of the interest arising from the changes over that time. Liked these.

There were several amongst the contemporary Japanese photography exhibition that I liked, though as a whole it was thornier and more difficult than I'd anticipated/hoped. Favourites were Mayumi Suzuki's hazy "The Restoration Will" series (2015) and Go Itami's interesting, large-format 'photocopies' (2018), some of which reminded me, in a fairly ineffable way, of Andreas Gursky.

(w/ R)

Game Night

Enjoyably rough-edged caper, aided by Rachel McAdams's pleasing comic touch, a willingness to get a little bit dark, and a deft hand with all of the action-y bits, the marital/relationship elements, and the actual comedy.

The Blackcoat's Daughter

Kind of spooky, the 'what if someone possessed wanted their demon to return?' angle created some interesting possibilities, and the three lead actors are all pretty good, but the potential, including as arising from the overall mood, didn't feel realised. I'd hoped this would be one of that handful of horror films that affects me. It wasn't.

"Confessions" (Emerging Writers Festival)

Ana Maria Gomides, Aimee Knight, Jamie Marina Lau, Bastian Fox Phelan, Mira Schlosberg and Nevena Spirovska. Each reading a 'confession' in a darkened theatre, in which the audience members wore blindfolds. The confessions leaned heavily towards identity; my favourites were Jamie Marina Lau's, starting from that Dorothy Parker short story about the woman awaiting a phone call, and the one (I don't know whose) that was mostly excerpts from a university diary, before she knew (or 'knew') she was lesbian. All female or non-binary.

(w/ R)

"MoMA at NGV" (second visit)

Another enjoyable pass-through, though the exhibition didn't feel like it especially deepened for me from the first time - I basically again liked the same ones, which in addition to those I already singled out, included:

Paul Cezanne - "Still life with apples" (1895-98), clearly figurative, but interestingly heading towards abstraction on at least a couple of dimensions, the kind of thing I like, and well chosen for inclusion in the first room of an exhibition like this one.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner - "Street, Dresden" (1908, reworked 1919), luridly expressionistic, and maybe with more of an air of horror than intended by the artist, who can say.

Fernand Leger - "Propellers" (1918). Futurist Cubism!

Also in there from that earlyish-mid 20th century period: good pieces by both Delaunays (Robert and Sonia), Mondrian, Picasso, Wifredo Lam, etc.

Jasper Johns - "Map" (1961), simple while also visually appealing and sort of obviously iconic like so many of his.

Three Raymond Pettibon illustrations of his character Vavoom, "a little Inuit who can move mountains by shouting his own name" (if only). 1987.

This time I found Rineke Dijkstra's series of photos of Almerisa, a Bosnian child of refugees, from 1994 through to 2008, more moving too.

(w/ Yee Fui)