Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Begin Again
(dir. John Carney) (2013) A slight, Star-is-Born vignette features thick slices of schmaltz, yet manages to say something genuine about the contemporary creative process. Gal with wafer-crisp lungs is taken on by down-at-heel Svengali – sweetness prevails but not necessarily as predicted. Keira Knightley shows considerably more charm than she did through the entire ‘Pirates’ franchise; Mark Ruffalo underacts to shaggy advantage; James Corden is everyone’s kind older brother. TVC’s favourite bits: I) Keira’s lover returns from L.A. and plays her his new song, whereupon she instantly apprehends he has fallen for another; II) Ruffalo drops his still respected business…
Continue Reading →Calvary
(dir. J M McDonagh) (2014) This is Craggy Island without the laughs, a richly human ‘who-will-do-it’ as Brendan Gleeson, the village catholic priest, struggles with his faith in the wake of a confessional death threat. Paul Byrnes in the Sydney Morning Herald well described Gleeson’s role as “the one good man in a town of jackals” – the relentless vitriol and mockery spat at him by various village types is matched by their own astonishing, preternatural candour – no feelings are spared in this story. The whole tone reflects an Irish ambivalence vis-à-vis organized religion, its utility and its scars….
Continue Reading →Falstaff
Opera Australia, Melbourne December 2014 To the claustrophobic scarlet pit that is Melbourne’s Arts Centre for Verdi’s take on Sir John, a rather broad and heavy handed work drawing mostly from the plonking Merry Wives of Windsor with only salted bits from the history plays. First done at La Scala in 1893, this is a radically economical opera in structure: no overture, no recitative, almost no arias; melodies that rattle along, into each other and most formalities discarded as it cuts to the Garter Inn without ado. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is big in every sense but here he is merely fat,…
Continue Reading →The Hustler
(dir. Robert Rossen) (1961) A tough, raw, hard-hearted story of Eddie Felsen (Paul Newman) who wants to move up from two bit hustling at pool to beat the best, Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Great pool scenes: Fats’ seven- ball in the corner is a shot Eddie Charlton would be proud of. Newman is also highly competent, although he joked of shooting some pool decades later when a youth approached, declaring he’d seen The Hustler dozens of times and that watching Newman play pool was one of the great disappointments of his life. Perhaps Eddie does shoot good but also lucky….
Continue Reading →World Order
(by H Kissinger) World Order is a knotty concept prone to interpretations of violent subjectivity. On the one hand, we have the seers of doom, who see only a world in chaos and inevitable decline (e.g. Mark Steyn). Farthest from this on the spectrum are the utopian promoters of one world governance (to whom one recommends an urgent reading of Thomas More). Along the way are those who deprecate the notion of order at all, preach heterogeneity and the cult of small-as-beautiful, the barrackers of old powers, cultists for the new such as the revived Middle Kingdom or ISIS, or…
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