Ulalume
We’re Hip When We Shoot
TVC offers the following flip and militant arts wrap up: Game of Thrones: TVC has viewed episode 1 of series 1 and doubts we’ll catch up (series 5 is currently screening we gather). It appears on first blush to be trash from the schlock-hopper and one hopes cast and crew shall soon be eaten by wolves, like President Taft. Adelaide Arts Festival: This is close to TVC’s heart, so it pains us to say past offerings have ranged from insipid to embarrassing – it hasn’t been Helpmann, Steel, Sharman, Hocking or Archer down here for a while! Thus, thanks be…
Continue Reading →Much Ado About Nothing
"This looks not like a nuptial."
(W. Shakespeare) (1598) (Dir. Kenneth Branagh) (1993) (Dir. Megan Dansie) (Theatre Guild, 2 May 2015) This is not the Bard’s best comedy but it endures as pure rollicking farce, with Beatrice and Benedick as a prototype Martha and George from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? TVC quite likes the Kenneth Branagh film with him and ex wife Emma Thompson as the leads, staged in Tuscany with a roving, loving camera. And on Saturday last, we walked our pleurisy into the night and caught the nice production at the Adelaide Theatre Guild. Bronwyn Palmer and Adam Tuominen starred as the verbally-crossed lovers…
Continue Reading →We Gotta Go
Vale Andrew Lesnie, who died on April 27, a great cinematographer who enhanced the films he shot with dazzling light and shade – Babe, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Water Diviner among them. Vale Jack Ely, who died the following day, and mumbled his way, on April 6 1963, through the Kingsmen’s recording of Louie Louie, a lucky mix of prehistoric recording techniques, throwaway vocalising and Ely’s new braces, which gave a raw and dirty sound to an old standard. Two generations have extemporized their own smutty lyrics to this Dance Hall classic and TVC recommends the live…
Continue Reading →Half-priced sex
Up for it...Laura de Sade by Stefano Bolognini
Music being the food of love, where to get it cheaply? Some suggestions for starving pagans on this Eastertide: Bluesfest, just north of Byron Bay, can be done inexpensively, but TVC does not recommend it! Classic FM – yet another argument for the national broadcaster. Seriously though – how expensive is it, such that the ‘savage cuts’ by government threatens its existence? With all due respect to the superb pre and post prandial duo of Lawrence and Lester, they’re not paid as much as Leonardo Di Caprio! With a staffer to select the material and a taxpayer funded studio, plus the strongest transmitters…
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…
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