Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Interstellar
"MATT DAMON!!"
(Dir. Christopher Nolan) (2014) It is shocking how Hollywood, where marriage equality is all the rage, seems unable to avoid schmaltzy deployment of The Nuclear Family as its trope for love and sacrifice. In the visually impressive Interstellar, a former NASA ace stumbles, through the dust of his corn fields, onto a super-secret (off balance sheet) NASA base, where the head guy only needs to finish that knotty maths equation (or make up something in its place) in order to save the world from a kind of agricultural Ebola, doubtless the product of pulping that mountain of IPCC reports and…
Continue Reading →The Lonely Critic Laments
'The Critic' by Allen Robert Branston (1817) (Wikimedia Commons Images)
I sense the ending, lack the script, A familiar story’s meaning stripp’d, Of what and when and who and how Whatever, I want the ending now. I go to shows and realize The makers of them do despise Their customers; ’tis crystal clear Mammon not art, is worshipp’d here. But have I miss’d a salient point? Got it wrong, destroy’d the joint? Confounded meaning with the clear Unconscious cause of being here? Art is always doomed to flunk. From highest brow to utter junk, Through countless, low, fun-free travails To rare, derided, epic fails And as…
Continue Reading →Jimi – All is by My Side
Are you experienced?
Have you been experienced recently?
(Dir. John Ridley) (2013) TVC is assured by B, a colleague with impeccable sources, that this film is not overly prone to truth, particularly in its styling of Hendrix as a violently jealous thug. Without having any personal knowledge, we must say that his persona, as we recall it, does strike one as being more akin to, say, Sam Cooke than, say, Big Lurch. Whatever, our main fault with this film effort is that it is silly, and rather dull. Whilst watching, TVC extemporized a new set of lyrics to be sung to “Hey Joe”: Hey Jim, They made a movie of…
Continue Reading →Faust
"Faust" by Jean-Paul Laurens
(Opera Australia, Sydney Opera House, 7 March 2015) The story of Faust and his bargain with the Devil is old as the hills and versions are manifold. The first and still greatest example of the legend is Goethe’s monumental poem, in which Mephistopheles bemoans the angels who void his contract by ferrying the old doctor off to heaven and beyond his clutches*. This production is of Gounod’s (19 March 1859) Opera, which was rather loosely adapted from Goethe**, and conceived by Sir David McVicar in 2004 at Covent Garden, revived here by Bruno Ravella. The staging easily survives transportation from…
Continue Reading →Fly-blown to Emerald City
March 2015 The New South Welshmen-and-women complained about the autumnal ‘cold snap’ (the softies). Anyway, Sydney is exactly the reverse of Adelaide in being a sensational place in which to visit but challenging to live. The Mardi Gras and election nonsense sums it up: ultra conservative. They’re still doing the first (!) and in the (mandated) second, they are debating the privatisation of poles and wires (how September 10th). We arrive on a Friday and search for food on Circular Quay (for our U.S. friends, that’s pronounced ‘KWAY’, very loudly) – we meet Opera buddy Lindsay, for Faust. We see Germaine Greer at…
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