Art Smitten: Reviews - 2016

There always seems to be something unsatisfying about these personal depictions of major historical events. Human dramas with a historical "backdrop" work well enough, but if the huge scale history is in the foreground it can really upset the balance. Jackie, the first English Language film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination from the point of view of his wife, Jacqueline Lee Kennedy. Mostly it's a psychological portrait of a grieving, widowed mother of two small children who has some very difficult decisions to make. There are countless movie protagonists who've been put in this same predicament, but of course she also just so happens to be the First Lady of the United States, and her husband just so happened to be the President. Because of their positions, any gossip about their private lives is thought of as political fodder and is of great interest to the public. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay works across three separate but very close

After the melancholy vampire story that was Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has delivered an equally meditative human drama with Paterson. It’s a film that shows a week in the life of a lovely artistic couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is an avid painter, designer and cupcake maker, with a distinctive monochromatic colour scheme in everything she makes, and wears, though ironically she is a very colourful character. Her husband, Paterson (Adam Driver), is a gentle poet who drives a bus for a living, and uses all of his break time to write a few lines in his "secret notebook". While Laura sells her wares at the local farmers’ market, where they're very popular, Paterson won't share his work with anyone other than her. For ages, she's been telling them he should get his poems published, or at the very least make copies of them. Eventually he promises to photocopy them all on the weekend, on one of those last two days that the film shows. This is hardly a movie t

The Founder is screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s scathing portrait of Roy Kroc, the eponymous creator of the McDonald’s Corporation, not to be confused with the McDonald brothers who created, well, McDonald’s. If that sounds as all suss it’s probably because it was. Kroc, as written by Siegel, and played by Michael Keaton, is a shameless anti-hero, an opportunistic businessman who listens more to his motivational tapes than he does to his own conscience, if indeed he has one. The film follows his great ascent (or descent, depending on how you look at it) from a not-so-humble milkshake-mixer merchant to the owner of a giant plagiarised franchise. He’s that kind of smarmy fourth-wall-breaking capitalist who is usually the smartest person in the room. However, Siegel, and director John Lee Hancock, both suggest he might simply be the most “persistent” person working in the food industry, since one of his favourite tapes tells him that neither genius nor talent can ever be

Threadbare   Featuring: Fipe Preuss, Elnaz Sheshgelani and Phillipa Russell Choreographer: Kathleen Gonzales Producer: Natasha Jynel Threadbare is a three-part multidisciplinary show that celebrates the diversity of Australian identity through dance, poetry and visual art. The show is presented in languages including English, Spanish, Tongan, Arabic and Auslan. Threadbare invites audiences to shift their perspectives and open their eyes with ideas that challenge convention in modern Australian society. It brings together artists from diverse backgrounds to explore the commonalities of human experience.   Each artist brings a personal reflection and identity to the show. In Threadbare, there is poetry featuring Dr Quinn Eades exploring feminist, queer and trans series of the body. His poem The Urge to Speak encourages gender queer people to find a voice. What does it mean to be in contemporary Australia? How do our languages, culture, heritage and traditions connect us? As a society, the most diffic

Arrival is the latest film by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer and adapted from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s a science-fiction film in which aliens arrive on Earth and Dr Louise Banks, a linguist, played by Amy Adams, is asked to help decipher their language in order to find out their purpose on Earth. Over the course of the film we join Dr Banks in solving this curious puzzle, as she races against the worldwide chaos caused by the presence of these creatures. Interspersed with the plot of Dr Banks and the aliens is another storyline involving her daughter, which not only adds emotional weight but also ends up being quite a central element in understanding the film itself. There’s an absolutely brilliant confluence of visual, emotional and intellectual elements that keep you engrossed and awed throughout the film’s duration. Everything just comes together so well. First, let’s talk about the visuals. In particular, all the things to do with the aliens

Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking. Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books. Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objecto

The audience at La Mama Courthouse demanded encore bows from the cast of Rust and Bone on the night of its Victorian premiere performance, which they very humbly gave and most definitely deserved. Caleb Lewis’ three-pronged play asks a lot of its actors, and quite a bit from its audience as well. A trio of male performers - Luke Mulquiney, Adam Ibrahim and Glenn Maynard in this production - play out three of the stories from Craig Davidson's collection of the same title. Ibrahim plays a SeaWorld whale trainer whose leg was torn off by an Orca, Maynard a fading boxer in need of someone to fight for, and Mulquiney a crazed dog fighter who's struggling with his infertility. The narratives are all interspersed, such that Lewis needs to carefully choose when to switch from one to the next, director Daniel Clarke has to think carefully about how to transition between stories, and the actors have to be ready to change gears in an instant. As well as that, each of them needs to have the range to play all of the

Blaque Showgirls is a merciless interrogation of Australian racism in the form of a stage parody of dance movies, including, of course, Showgirls (1995). Written by Nakkiah Lui, the acclaimed Aboriginal activist and playwright who recently worked on the ABC’s Black Comedy, it’s a play that mocks and borrows from film and tv in equal measure. Eugyeene Teh’s set design even resembles a television set as well as a theatre within a theatre, something that director Sarah Giles takes full advantage of. Voiceover abounds instead of theatrical asides. Jed Palmer’s musical score provides the cheese while the cast brings the delicious ham. Humorous captions race above the actors’ heads, and are easy to miss unless you’re paying close attention. Naturally, it ticks of all the obligatory dance movie scenes, albeit with more than a slight twist: a “montage of moderate success”; the arrival-in-the-big-city scene; the audition poster that blows into our protagonist’s fac

As fantastic as it is to see Arrival gaining so much traction, I do hope that Amy Adams’ other big release, Nocturnal Animals, still gets enough attention. Tom Ford’s second feature, after A Single Man (2009), sees Adams playing an equally sleep deprived but much less scholarly professional at the peak of her career. Susan Morrow is the jaded owner of a glitzy contemporary art gallery, a realist in a world that is anything but reality.  She first entered the creative world when she wanted to a bohemian herself, back when she was engaged to Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). Edward was just the kind of carefree romantic that her mother, Anne (Laura Linney), had always hated, and Susan has always hated her mother. She only has one scene, naturally the one where Susan announces her engagement, but that’s all we really need of her. She's the classic classist, conservative parent that any protagonist would want to rebel against, especially by running off with someone she looks down upon. Be

F. is a theatre production by Riot Stage, a youth theatre company based in Melbourne. It is part of Poppy Seed Festival, Poppy Seed is in its second year, it aimed producing shows made by independent and emerging theatre companies. F. followed a lives of a group of teenagers, it was composed of short scenes playing out different stories throughout the show, they sometimes became connected and it all ending in a huge stylised movement and piece. These explored all sorts of themes around being in the world as a teenager in modern Australia. It focused a lot on mental health, queerness and sexuality, the internet and consent. F. felt like a devised show, but it was written by Morgan Rose, the writing was very naturalistic, almost as if it was verbatim. Stylistically it was very beautiful it had a strong and clear aesthetic and mood,  the lighting design was very beautiful and precise, although I liked the sound design, I felt like I wanted a bit more, the space F. was performed in was pretty big, sometimes

Ken Stone and Irene Silber’s Hard to Believe is a tight 56-minute exposé of an issue that few people like to think about: forced organ harvesting in China. It isn’t exactly a secret that the Chinese government performs surgery on its political prisoners without their consent, but in recent years the media has largely neglected this still very present atrocity. This documentary, which mostly looks at the communist party’s persecution of Falun Gong spiritual practitioners, is Stone and Silber’s great effort to bring this issue back into the spotlight, to push past the compassion fatigue that most Western citizens in particular seem to be feeling. Most of the interviews here have been conducted with American Human Rights Defenders Torsten Trey and Ethan Gutmann, who urge people to realise that these horrific violations will never be stopped if everyone just keeps waiting for someone else to fight the fight. It seems to Trey and Gutmann that if this was happening anywhere other than

Roger Ross Williams' latest feature documentary is about a 23-year-old autistic man who's obsessed with Disney movies - basically, me, if you just wind his age back two years, move him from America to Australia and rotate his sexuality 180 degrees. In light of that, you'll have to forgive me since I can't exactly distance myself from what is pretty much my own biography. Mostly, I was just overjoyed to see a real person that I can relate to standing on the screen in front of me. I feel like I've earned that given how much of my life I've been looking at that screen. Not only is he obsessed with something that is neither maths or IT, he is also not a little kid: he is a self-aware adult, and fortunately Williams knows how to treat him as such. Unlike the subjects of most other autism documentaries, he is old enough to reflect on his own past and current experiences of friendship, love, and coming of age, and he is actually given the space here to share his reflections. Owen Suskind, the man in question, has wa

There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about seeing a show about poor people by non-poor people, essential for rich people in one of Melbourne’s most highly regarded theatre venues. Blessed explores the lives of Maggie and Grey, two poor people who fell in love as teenagers and had heaps of fun, then Grey disappeared for ages and Maggie found him in a disgusting apartment, they talk about their past and what they’ve been up to and then towards the end it turns out that Maggie is pregnant and is the mother of god. The play ends with a beautiful monologue by Maggie about how her son is going to be a kick-arse god. Blessed has been described as an ‘insight into the lower class’ and as someone who grew up in a family with very little money, I honestly just find that offensive. It was a grossly one dimensionally portrayal of people from low-socio economic background, it portrays us as drug addict, angry, hopeless people with weird accents, it portrays us as people with no agency a

This review contains mature content and language and pretty major spoilers about the show. Straight up, Anti-Hamlet was one of the best productions I have seen this year. It was absolutely trilling, and so engaging it left me exhausted and unable to get up from my seat, which is always a very special experience that I’ve only felt twice before I loved it so much that I was it two times in it’s opening weekend, but not only because I loved it, but because it was so complex and intelligent I think I had to see it twice to get a stronger grasp of what it all meant, the first time seeing it was like being a twig thrown into a whirl wind, and coming out the other side with flowers growing all over me, but not knowing how they got there. The second time I saw it, I was able to process the content of the work with a deeper sense of comprehension, which was very rewarding. That being said, you don’t have to see Mark Wilson’s phenomenal work twice to fully appreciate it as a production. Nor do

Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans is something of an epic, operating on quite a small scale but still putting its characters through some formidable challenges. It's based on TL Stedman's novel of the same name, one that suggests both intimacy and profundity. This story does eventually deliver on both, but in the film at least, the intimacy is there pretty much from the get-go. It sets itself up to be a charming love story about a mild-mannered lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) and his lovely wife (Alicia Vikander) who live on the Island of January between two oceans. It is December, 1918. Tom Sherbourne was a lucky survivor of the Great War, though with no loving family to come home to and no reason to believe that he has any right to be alive after so many have died. As he is first getting to know the sweet young Isabel Haysmark, he tells her he has done some unspeakable things in the years he spent on the front, though he doesn’t go into any detail. For him, the noble occupation of a l

Julieta is the latest film by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, based on three short stories by Canadian writer Alice Munro. The eponymous lead character is depicted in the present and in flashbacks through a diary she is writing in a sort of cathartic fit. From the flashbacks we learn of Julieta's life, her joys and more specifically her tragedies, of which there are several, spanning everything from her parents to her daughter to her love. Some have criticised the film for being emotionless, for retreading themes familiar to Almodóvar's previous work  - such as loss, passion and parent-child relationships  - in a lacklustre way. But I would in fact argue the opposite. In the words of Almodóvar, this is a "dry, tearless film". Such was his intention when shooting, so much so that he specifically told the actors not to cry. So really, Julieta is not so much about the emotions felt when grieving as the lack of emotions felt when grieving. The empty hole you find yourself in. The

If you’re fan of that strange nostalgia that comes from witnessing old Hollywood glamour, Café Society might just be for you. Complete with a backdrop of wonderfully detailed fashions, an upbeat jazzy soundtrack and in the company of presumably rich, carefree socialites, Woody Allen’s latest venture is a rabbit hole into that bygone era of Hollywood romanticism. Set in the late 1930s, Café Society details the life of the young and naïve Bobby Dorfman, as he sets foot in Hollywood, eager to make a name for himself. Using the connections of his powerful uncle, he is given a front seat to the glitz and glam of Hollywood life. However, for all it’s glory and lavishness, Bobby finds himself more infatuated with his uncle’s secretary, Veronica, or rather, Vonnie, as she’s called. From here, a messy and bittersweet romance unfolds itself and brings Bobby back to New York, where he runs a high society night club with the support of his colourful and eccentric family. T

Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon would have been, I imagine, quite an easy film to pitch, but a very hard one to describe. Since seeing it I've been explaining it to people as "the Black Swan of modelling,” which might sound very reductive, but given how much it invites comparison with Darren Aronofsky's film, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Refn had originally conceived it. Both of them begin by introducing a gifted but naive young woman wanting to enter into a soul-crushing profession, one that they short-sightedly think they can handle without losing themselves completely. This time around, we have 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning, giving, to date, the best performance of her career) a natural beauty who wins over everyone with simply her radiating  personality. At first, she is aware of this great power she possesses, but only somewhat, only enough to know that, as a girl with no real professional skills and no family or friends to support her, her looks are something she can make mon

La Mama Theatre’s The Masque of Beauty seems to have taken its name from Ben Johnson’s courtly masque composed in 1608. However, in Peter Green’s ‘Renaissance Cabaret’ we certainly feel far away from the England court, even if he uses a few Shakespeare passages on one of his literary medleys. Green’s writing, and indeed Faye Bendrups’ directing, both take Australian audiences to very different theatrical territory than they might be used to. True to the form of a masque, this show is a meandering hour of live music, dance pieces, dramatic scenes and chorus style songs, which historically would espouse the most famous figures of the day. On this particular outing, to the Italian court, we encounter three formidable sisters-in-law – the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, the sharp-witted Isabella d’Este, and the worldly Elisabette Gonzaga – as well as the controversial Pope Alexander VI, his son, and Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia, the Monna Lisa (&ld

Hell or High Water is a 2016 film written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by David McKenzie. Set in blistering rural Texas, it focusses on two brothers, played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who rob banks, and a cop on the verge of retirement who is chasing them, played by Jeff Bridges. There’s action, there’s tension, there’s laughs. Tonally, the film carries itself with a particular relaxed, laid-back nature that seems to befit the type of life present in small-town Texas. What makes this tone so much more appealing is how well it complements the more intense moments of the film, of which there are plenty, with much of the film’s runtime being taken up by bank heists, car chases and shootouts, and more. Adding to the fun of the plot is a real sense of humour which shows up not just in the banter of the various main characters but also in the dialogue of the various minor or incidental characters that pop up, including a very memorably dismissive elderly waitress in a steakhouse. The f