Woody Allen’s Moral Universe
"Dostoyevsky or Turgenev?"
The Varnished Culture is conflicted: L dislikes Woody with his gaunt, Hebrew gamines, his obsessions, his recherché nostalgia, his nihilistic sentiment and relentless chauvinism. P loves him, truth to tell, for the same reason. He cites a brace of films, maybe with one addition, as examples of his comic, cosmic, genius: Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, and Husbands and Wives. These films suffer, like his other works, from a stuffy and noisy egocentricity but they are also, by far, the best depictions of modern morality – wise and wicked. Check out, for example, Judy Davis’ sublime failure to succumb to the…
Continue Reading →Shop Til You Drop
If Shop Til You Drop were a woman, her name would be Symantha. Symantha is a nail technician but she’s trying out for “Australian Idol” and her friends say she’ll win. Symantha’s living with her boyfriend but she’s ditching him soon and her friends say she should. Symantha’s friends LOVE her selfies and say she should try modelling. Once upon a time, I woke like Sleeping Beauty from a years-long coma during which I had worn the same out-dated princess outfit. I swept out into an unknown world (known as “The Newsagents”) and saw Shop Til You Drop. I thought it was a…
Continue Reading →In Style (Australia)
If the Australian edition of In Style were a woman, her name would be Alyssä and she would be the PA to the CEO of an interior design firm whom she hopes to marry when his wife gives up on the botox. Alyssä would wear Armani culottes to theatre first nights. She wouldn’t think much of you. The Good: In Style is much more likeable than Alyssä, its corporal manifestation. It is a truly terrific and selective catalogue of upper-mid-market fashions, arranged into useful categories. It does an admirable job of showing how to style and combine these expensive things. It shows you clearly who has…
Continue Reading →The Doomsday Book
Are we in...when?
(Connie Willis) Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) time-travel novel was so disappointing that this (often hasty) reader determined to read and to say nothing of this author again. However, the main ingredients of The Doomsday Book (1992) (Oxford, time travel, Middle Ages) were interesting enough to cause this (often ridiculously optimistic) reader to give Willis another go. I hoped that the author might have honed her skills after finishing To Say Nothing of the Dog, and have travelled back in time to improve the earlier novel. Or something. But I was (surprisingly) wrong. An amusing idea is thinly imagined and stretched. The cast of characters…
Continue Reading →Requiem
SA Dante Society, 17 August 2015 At the Italian Centre on Monday evening the Society was treated to an early taste of Verdi’s tempestuous, mighty and dramatic requiem mass. This will be performed with full chorus and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra on 26 and 28 August, as conducted by Timothy Sexton. Maestro Dr Joseph Talia OAM gave a lucid and learned backgrounder, virtually extemporaneously, as to the sources, anxieties and influences on Verdi in the creation of this unique liturgical music, operatic in style and inspired by the life and death of Alessandro Manzoni, whom he revered. Verdi grappled with the…
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