Bigger Than Life
cortisone
(dir. Nicholas Ray) (1956) Uber-normal 50s family has life turned on its head when Dad gets hooked on cortisone and starts wearing robes and a crown. It’s like The Brady Bunch meets Oliver Twist and it fairly crackles. James Mason’s great performance is almost too big for the film – you want him strait-jacketed only after he stabs everyone in the cast.
Continue Reading →Badlands
(dir. Terence Malick) (1973) Bleak and stark it may be but there is a fairy tale quality in this sanitized, loose but compelling adaptation of the Starkweather-Fugate crime spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957/8. Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) brilliantly capture the sweetest, stupidest and deadliest couple since Bonnie and Clyde. Holly’s girlish internal monologues are laugh-out-loud, close to the style of Stephen Leacock’s Memoirs of Marie Mushenough. This is Malick’s magum opus.
Continue Reading →Vale Gough Whitlam
Vale Edward Gough Whitlam (11 June 1916 – 21 October 2014) After the Australian Labor Party failed to win the cliffhanger federal election of 1961, in which it won no seats in Victoria, the leader, Arthur Calwell, failed to quell the left’s hatred of aid to non-government schools that lost it a stack of votes among working class Catholics. Eventually, on 8 February 1967, having not held the reins of power for the better part of a generation, federal caucus turned to Whitlam, who stared down the Victorian State Conference in June of that year (saying of their electoral death…
Continue Reading →Accident
(dir. Joseph Losey) (1967) Harold Pinter scripted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley: Dirk Bogarde covets his pupil’s girlfriend but lacks the courage to close in. Meanwhile his academic pal is already on the case. Everyone deserves censure and they know it. Moody, slow, richly complex, misanthropic and not-to-be-missed.
Continue Reading →Bruno Mars
The Today show featured a song by a young fella alleged to be ‘Bruno Mars’. Clearly this is an alias: Michael Jackson, circa Off the Wall (1980) has been removed from cryogenic storage. But Bruno seems pretty cool and inspired The Varnished Culture to attend the local second hand record sale next Sunday afternoon. P bought The Delphonics on ‘Philly Groove’ Records…A cover with 3 sharply dressed dudes! We only realised later they feature heavily in Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown…”they’re pretty good.” And what could be a priceless bonus, subject to verification. ‘E Costello’ signed on the back cover. EC, were…
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