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 →Jamie’s Italian – Adelaide (with a Minority Report)
TVC ventured with friends L and M to Jamie Oliver’s eponymous restaurant in a restyled bank – an immense vault – on King William Street. Having valiantly resited the Jamieabilia for sale in the lobby shop the diner is then assaulted by a tsumani of sound and the unappetising sight of a sea of cafe-like booths. However, the further end of the restaurant is slightly more impressive, with individual tables and banquettes, low lighting and tall, bare windows. The “marble” bar, hung with red peppers and sausage lights, is an imaginative (if not authentic) rendering of an Italian lunch counter. People who…
Continue Reading →The Judge
(dir. David Dobkin) To make a film as bad as this, more ingredients are required than Hollywood plot #7, additional clichés and dollops of sentimentality. To the mix must be added really good actors – (Roberts Downey and Duvall; Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent d’Onofrio, who is starting to look like a confusing cross between Charles Durning and Brian Dennehy) – so that the hapless viewer is all the more disappointed when it turns out that there really is no more to this than appears. Avoid.
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