Raw

November 16, 2023 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | AUSTRALIANIA, Documentary, LIFE, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

A film by Lumin Sports, produced by Henry Jones, shot by Henry Jones and Jack Shephard (November 2023) The Great and the Good (plus your correspondent) gathered at Glenelg Football Club on 8 November to view an advance screening of this short, brilliantly produced, and exhilarating view of the 2023 finals campaign, viewed from within the inner sanctum. Lumin ( https://luminsports.com/ ) is an expert qualitative data company, specialising in enhancing sporting analysis and performance. It’s flagship visualisation platform, “Arc, was launched in early 2019 as a way for technical and non-technical decision-makers in professional sporting teams to interpret complex athlete…

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Moonage Daydream

September 30, 2022 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Documentary, FILM, Modern Music, MUSIC, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(Written and directed by Brett Morgen) (2022) The great David Bowie died in 2016. He’d have liked this ‘documentary,’ we suspect, because like him, it is sui generis, an assault on the eyes, ears, and (pace his philosophical meanderings) the mind, that satisfies for almost all of its 2 hours and 15 minutes. With a mountain of footage and full estate authorisation, Morgen has lovingly assembled a vibrant, moving monument to the peripatetic searcher and androgynous transformer who was Starman, Ziggy Stardust, Cracked Actor, DJ, the Man Who Sold the World, the Space Oddity, a Young American, a Hero, and…

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This Is Spinal Tap

(Directed by Rob Reiner, 1984) (Special Screening at the Mercury Theatre featuring a Q & A with Harry Shearer, Adelaide Guitar Festival, 22 July 2022). Spinal Tap are the blond rock god David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean, who you already know well from Better Call Saul and other offerings), the bass player Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), who longs for St. Hubbins with big wet spaniel eyes. When Nigel learns that David’s girlfriend Jeanine Pettibone (June Chadwick aping Yoko Ono) is flying over from England to join the tour, his heart sinks. His crush on David…

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Roadrunner

October 27, 2021 | Posted by Lesley Jakobsen | Documentary, FILM, FOOD, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

A film about Anthony Bourdain  (Directed by Morgan Neville) (2021) Famously rockstar-level restaurateur, best-selling author (Kitchen Confidential), martial arts expert and prolific television host, the subject of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain was no doubt a wildly successful man.  As we have come to expect from biographical documentaries, this level of achievement means that he must also have been deeply unhappy. And often unkind.  One of his friends is reduced to tears recalling Bourdain telling him, “You’ll never be a good dad”.   Bourdain’s two marriages, to a childhood sweetheart and a restaurant executive, failed, in part because he was…

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This is a Robbery

April 22, 2021 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, Documentary, FILM, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(The World’s Biggest Art Heist) (Directed by Colin Barnicle) (Netflix, 2021) The documentary tells (at Dickensian length) an intriguing story: how in 1990 two men dressed as Boston police officers were admitted to the elegant and boutique Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in dead of night, tied up the two slipshod guards and stuck them in a basement area, and helped themselves, in a leisurely fashion, to 13 artworks, several of them priceless (to use an old cliché). SPOILER ALERT: We have to plough through 4 episodes to learn that, $10m reward notwithstanding, the works have not been recovered, nor anyone…

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