The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
The Penguin Lessons
(Directed by Peter Cattaneo, 2024)
(Thanks to White Rita, our ‘off-budget’ film reviewer, for this comment).
The Penguin Lessons is a beautiful, moving film made all the more poignant by the fact that it is a true story. Set during the “Dirty War” in 1970s Argentina, it revolves around a middle-aged English teacher and the delightful little penguin that imprints itself on him.
Steve Coogan delivers a wonderful performance and is supported by a delightful cast of characters. This important story is sad, happy, humorous and at all times, engaging.
An Evening Without Kate Bush
(Adelaide Fringe, Garden of Unearthly Delights, 13 March 2025)
Kate Bush, is, like one of her influencers Emily Bronte, both genius and mystic. Her look, her voice, her entire unique and brilliant oeuvre, have entranced us ever since her debut in 1978, aged 19.
Sarah-Louise Young is clearly a Kate obsessive, and her show, a dizzy mash-note, is clearly for fans (we mean that in a good way), the Fish People, but it is witty and vibrant enough to please those ignorant of Kate-World.
Whilst the music is pre-recorded, Young is not: her voice is strong and she inhabits the Bush persona brilliantly, engaging and interacting with an appreciative crowd and sharing personal anecdotes regarding her Kate fetish. Effects are minimal but effective, as are her frequent costume changes (we reserve judgment on the rather alarming red leotard) and her array of comic props.
Highlights were And Dream of Sheep, shrouded and in darkness but for a winking red light; James and the Cold Gun in said leotard; Babooshka (sung beautifully, in Russian!); Running Up That Hill ; Army Dreamers replete with a pair of over-sized, luminous eyes; Wow; Hounds of Love, accompanied by yelps and squeals, with audience participation; Don’t Give Up (cf. Keep Trying by Brian Pern and co.), assisted by a couple plucked from the front row to slow-dance à la Kate and Peter Gabriel; Cloudbusting; Sat in Your Lap, with 3 ladies from the audience, complete with Dunce Caps; and a lovely version of The Man With the Child in His Eyes.
The closer, of course, was Wuthering heights, which was imagined more than performed, but who could outdo Kate’s original, either on vinyl or film? At a little over an hour, this is a worthy tribute act, and more.
Almost the Real McKate: pigmented photograph of Kate Bush by Clive Arrowsmith
Krapp’s Last Tape
(Directed by Vicky Featherstone; Adelaide Festival, 7 March 2025)
Less is more with the great reductionist Samuel Beckett, although sometimes less is less. James Wood observed of Beckett’s late work that he had “smothered longings for riches, and [made his] reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it.”* Take the best of Kafka and Jimmy Joyce, stir, and simmer.
Stephen Rea stars, if one can call it starring. In The Crying Game, he was upstaged by a penis; in V For Vendetta, by a Guy Fawkes mask; and a burning theatre in Interview With a Vampire. Here, he is a sad, lonely old man, on his 69th birthday, checking his old reel-to-reel tapes of years gone, from decades ago. It is a grand theatrical device, theoretically, with Rea’s voice recorded aeons ago, to capture the timbre of a younger man, as the current emanation rattles around and eats bananas, but it palls over the course of an hour, because, frankly, modern sensibilities, extremely fragile and self-absorbed as they are, can’t engage with nostalgic reveries about old Dublin town, the girl with the eyes (Irish eyes, put in with a smutty finger) whom he laid, mum, and so on, even with great lines like the closing ones, in which a lifelong atheist perhaps reveals a tincture of doubt:
“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.”
Stephen Rea’s performance is muted and unhurried, the set and lighting is minimalist and fine, but we could have done with a bit more noise from the actor, in order to drown out the squeaking and clatter of seats in the Dunstan Playhouse. Krapp’s Last Tape would make any audience squirm and fidget a bit, so where is the WD-40, AF?
It Ends With Us
(Directed by Justin Baldoni, from the novel by Colleen Hoover) (2024)
Thanks to Guest Reviewer Rita, for sitting through this so we don’t have to. Her pithy synthesis is below, with our additional comments further on.
“What a woeful travesty! This film trivializes and romanticises the very serious subject of domestic violence and is downright insulting to the many true victims of this ongoing crime.
It fails in many ways…most notably it neglects to portray the fact that the most dangerous time for a woman entrapped in such an abusive relationship is when she summons the courage to leave. Give this film a miss.”
Lily Blossom Bloom (!!!) in her flower shop
The Rom-Com genre is tired, overworked and lazy, but this entry appears to have seized upon a new wrinkle: Woman (‘Lily’) with a Past (her first love ‘Atlas’) suffers in a relationship with a chap rather quick with his hands (‘Ryle Kincaid’) – even the names spring straight from Mills-and-Boon, which seems to be CoHo’s oeuvre – but Lily thinks her love will change his ways…However, men who say how they’ve changed, never change.
The Varnished Culture posits a new business: Brothers Inc. For a modest fee, sensitive but tough blokes (the kind Scott Ryan plays in “Mr. Inbetween”) pay visits to abusive men and give them a taste of their own medicine.
In any case, a better film would focus on the litigious violence between Baldoni and star Blake Lively, their significant others and respective cohorts. Reports of alleged back-stabbing, double-dealing, harassment, libel and slander, ‘fat-shaming,’ shameless promotional exploitation of hair care products, legal suits and cross-suits accusing emotional abuse, intimidation, civil extortion and invasions of privacy, seeking multi-million dollar damages…how about a comedy drama called “It Ends in Court“?
Where’s Justin
Social Justice Fallacies
(By Thomas Sowell, 2023)
Described by economic historian Niall Ferguson as a tour de force, Social Justice Fallacies arrives, like Spiderman, just in time, the imminent end of Peak Woke (aka Peak Stupid).
Wikipedia defines Social Justice thus (footnote omitted):
“Social justice is justice in relation to the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals’ rights are recognized and protected. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society. In the current movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets, and economic justice. Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions often include taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, labor law and regulation of markets, to ensure distribution of wealth, and equal opportunity.”
Whilst your reviewer’s chest tightens, from learned and lived experience, at the phrases “distribution of wealth,” “receive their due,” “breaking of barriers,” “assign[ing] of rights and duties in the institutions of society,” and last but by no means least harmful, “equal opportunity,” prima facie, there’s none who could quibble with these aims, right? Well, with profound respect, dive into Mr. Sowell’s book and get some perspective. Sowell, originally a Marxist, converted by a hefty common sense and preference for hard facts (plus the likes of Friedman, Stigler, Becker, and Hayek), painstakingly shows, via real data and wide reading and research, that social justice warriors, some of whom no doubt mean well, harm the very people they either wish, or pretend, to help. Yes, we’re looking at you Mr. Trudeau.
In 5 short but dense chapters, Sowell expertly shows us that, pace Orwell, “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others;” that folks can’t, or don’t want to be, equal in many respects; that correlation is not causation; that confirmation bias reigns among the socially just; that their myriad crusades rely on the misreading or misrepresentation of data; that the lumpenproletariat aching for salvation happen not to be inert chess pieces, moving according to bureaucratic arrangements; that there are particular types of knowledge often not in the possession of central command; that every redistributive act ever deployed in history has had unintended and often parlous consequences (e.g., forcing banks to lend to people of minority groups with low credit ratings that led to the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the raising of tax rates leading to decreased tax revenues, or legislating minimum wages above market rates as a direct cause of increased unemployment); and of course, that equity is not equality, and equality has human and natural limits. And to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, the warriors know much about the origins of poverty but precious little about the origins of wealth.
Some quotes as examples:
“Nature- as exemplified by such things as differences in geography, climate, diseases and animals- has not been egalitarian, despite Rousseau’s claim that nature produced equality.”
“We might agree that “equal chances for all” would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.”
[On Eugenics and its social policy ramifications] “The casual ease with which leading scholars of their time could advocate imprisoning people for life, who had committed no crime, and depriving them of a normal life, is a painfully sobering reminder of what can happen when an idea or a vision becomes a heady dogma that overwhelm all other considerations.”“...the social justice agenda…included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations for the past…[drawing on] myths presented as history, as well as assertions presented as facts- the latter in a spirit reminiscent of the certitude and heedlessness of evidence in the genetic determinism era…The central premise of affirmative action is that group “under-representation” is the problem, and proportional representation of groups is the solution. This might make sense if all segments of a society had equal capabilities in all endeavors. But neither social justice advocates, nor anyone else, seems able to come up with an example of any such society today, or in the thousands of years of recorded history.”
“The confiscation and redistribution of wealth – whether on a moderate or a comprehensive scale- is at the heart of the social justice agenda. While social justice advocates stress what they see as the desirability of such policies, the feasibility of those policies tends to receive far less attention, and the consequences of trying and failing often receive virtually no attention.” [A recent example might be the City of Los Angeles cutting $18m from the Fire Department’s budget, which began hiring under an aggressive DEI regime, instead distributing money to various LGBTIQA+ causes and events, and demolishing dams to appease first nations peoples, resulting in a lack of qualified firefighters and available water to prevent large swathes of the city and surrounds going up in flames this month].
“Among the comments from “experts” was that “sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful to share useful sexual information with his child”…[But, quoting Sargent Shriver, who led the early charge for explicit sex education in schools, having an epiphany in 1978] “Just as venereal disease has skyrocketed 350% in the last 15 years when we have had more clinics, more pills and more sex education than ever in history, teen-age pregnancy has risen.”
“Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe…self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence…For many social issues, the most important decision is who makes the decision. Both social justice advocates and their critics might agree that many consequential social decisions are best made by those who have the most relevant knowledge. But they have radically different assumptions as to who in fact has the most knowledge…feasibility…depends on the distribution of relevant and consequential knowledge…Intellectual elites with outstanding achievements within their own respective specialties may give little thought to how ignorant they may be on a vast spectrum of other concerns…as an old saying expressed it: “A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.“”
Sowell eloquently sets out an array of dangers arising from the work of today’s social-justice warriors, compounded by their disinclination to apply logic to test their faith and empirical evidence to their implemented programmes, seasoned with hostility to those who dare challenge their views. They almost invariably make things worse. Exhibit A: The Biden Administration.
A not-too recent photo of the great Thomas Sowell – he’s now 94
Paris, Texas
(Directed by Wim Wenders) (1984)
Virtually no one has seen this film, but those who have, love it to bits. We caught it in Adelaide at a special New Year’s Eve screening. It is not as good as Wings of Desire, but then, what is?
An alien film set in an alien landscape, ponderous and slow, it captures the heartbreaking loss of love between a couple, and reflects upon the nature of obsession. A child-like man (Harry Dean Stanton) stumbles out of the wilderness, is taken in and cared for by his brother (Dean Stockwell) who helps him reconnect – fleetingly – with his lost love (Natassja Kinski). Great performances and atmospherics can’t conceal the obliqueness and emptiness at its heart, which may be the point. Well worth watching on a rainy day.
Stanton, Wenders, Stockwell
Childhood
(By Shannon Burns – 2022)
Having forgotten virtually all of my childhood (relentlessly happy I imagine, thus unfit to record), I tend to spurn memoirs of early years, having confined myself to undoubted classics, such as Gorky’s My Childhood, Speak, Memory, and Unreliable Memoirs.
Childhood is a worthy addition to those classics and also stands as a bemused, relentless, almost angry monument to the power of compartmentalization (selective forgetting), and particularly, the redemptive and palliative power of great literature (Burns shares with others a love of The Brothers Karamazov). “We read to know we are not alone” (attributed to C.S. Lewis) and this record bashfully celebrates that. The vulnerability and unhappiness, that can infuse childhood, here recall some of the saddest (and funniest) passages in Dickens. For example, when the boy starts filling exercise books with a Clarissa-sized story, only to find, on review, that it is mere gobbledygook.
“And how do you escape from yourself?” Brought-up in beautiful Mansfield Park (South Australia’s Mount Druitt) and other tortuous and sinister suburbs, Shannon Burns spares nobody, least of all himself, in his hauntingly beautiful account of an ultimate release from arrested development. Scenes swing from the intense to the insouciant – A broken, impoverished home, or series of homes; an abusive and alcoholic mother who ‘works nights’; exposure to lazy racism and adolescent sexual exploration; unwholesome foster care; restless impatience with the impenetrable feelings of others; petty and grand crimes; the burgeoning awareness of class and cultural difference. And after his escape from the clutches of outrageous misfortune, the pessimist in him finds himself “dangerously contented.”
Moving seamlessly between tenses and first / third person narration, Childhood charts a path through a landscape filled with shadows, tedium, and terrors, determinism and dreams, reading often like a modern novel. One problem that arises is what has been recognised as the “experience of familiarity [having] a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience“, such quality of pastness being, naturally, an illusion.* (We wondered about that when the lad and his mate, Ryan, poked holes on the bottom of milk cartons delivered to the front porches of houses – did the milkman deliver anything but bottles?)
Some random samples from Childhood will show its heft and muscle:
“I have to strain my neck to see above the dashboard of an early model Ford or Holden, and I’m amazed that the driver simply trusts the road to keep extending beyond the darkness.”
“Are they harsh and callous to begin with, or do they become harsh and callous over time? Does the boy wear them down with his glum demeanour? Do they become the parents he remembers partly because he resented them from the beginning, because his refusals made them mean?”
“Compared with the more respectable working class, the welfare class has long been regarded as a kind of human waste…And if you make the terrible mistake of befriending or, worse, marrying or having children with one of us, we will quickly bring you down to our level.”
“We have committed to each other, I think, and I already feel a peculiar loyalty to her, as if she is my responsibility now, as if I owe her fidelity and our bond will be everlasting. From that day on, the girl is forbidden to play with me.”
“I lie sleepless on the floor in an unfamiliar room, listening to the snoring man who is my father, a stranger with the enormous body of a man.”
“I will be told, many times, that my mother ‘sleeps with men for money’, but I have no way of understanding what it means beyond the literal sense: she falls asleep with men, perhaps snuggling. I’m jealous of these men, of the comfort she brings them.”
“My mother presses the shelter’s buzzer for a long time before someone comes to let us in.”
“I spend a lot of time pestering my youngest uncle, who is shy and antisocial…When he’s not available to annoy, I bounce a tennis ball against the outside wall and dive to catch it, like a slips fielder; or I throw it at a tree stump, like an infielder; or I bowl yorkers down the driveway, pretending I’m Curtly Ambrose.”
“This is his way of contemplating escape, and escape now comes in two clear forms: leaving home, or suicide.”
“He has only one goal now: to escape his family, to live his own life, to start from scratch. His other ambitions are subservient to that one overpowering desire. He has decided to leave home as soon as he turns fifteen. That’s all he cares about, all he dares to imagine, the single thing he can control. Everything else is suspended until that moment.”
[On the anxiety of influence:] “The initial thrill of the encounter with Shakespeare, with Keats and Wordsworth, the sense of being possessed by something that made the world seem new, and alive with meaning and feeling, has been dulled by a new imperative, to convert it into writing and thereby make himself into that special thing: an artist.”
Cover design by W.H. Chong
Alexandra Coghlan, reviewing Stephen Hough’s “Enough: Scenes from Childhood”, asked “At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir?” We think it’s been a while, actually, but Childhood by Shannon Burns is happily emblematic of that development.
Portrait of the author as a grown man
An Obvious Disavowal
“Disclaimer” (Directed by Alfonso Cuarón Orozco from Renée Knight’s novel, 2024; Apple TV)
Prima facie, this appears to be a clever, intriguing, well-made, beautifully-performed dramatic series, with a cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville. A revenger’s tragedy, where a woman’s wicked past comes back to haunt her, undermine her marriage, further alienate her son, and damage her career. A series of flashbacks – the default of weak or flawed narratives, real and confected – terminates with cartoon-telescoping straight from a Warner Bros. cartoon, or Happy Tree Friends.
These scenarios, unfortunately, are not only ludicrous, but cynically so, involving plot-twist-cheating on an epic scale. At the black heart of this high-end trash, there are two cavernous black holes in particular. First, unless the revengers are metaphors for the conscience of Blanchett’s character (“Catherine Ravenscroft” – even the name seems to come from Barbara Cartland or Mills & Boon), there are insufficient objective inferences, let alone facts, such that the story, and the case against her, could never be mounted. Second, apart from an adulterous summer fling in Italy and some arguable wilful and callous blindness, one struggles to convict the woman of wickedness. I rather subscribe to L.P. Hartley’s statement: “Nothing is ever a lady’s fault.” And I know that’s old fashioned stuff, but I was vindicated at finale (which was predicted and predictable), and took no pleasure from it.
The whole mélange has not a jot of subtlety or credibility, and is psychologically weak in the extreme. Whilst there is much diverting sex, it is presented with determined bad taste and insensate boorishness. We add that the icky, creepy scene, where the young woman teases-out the boy’s sexual fantasies concerning Kylie Minogue, looks and plays false – it is a conversation that might be deployed by a perverted uncle, rather than a young mother, or imagined by a grieving older mother, IMHO.
Before the Fall (Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen) – “Why didn’t I win for “Tar”?
All one can conclude, fairly comfortably, is that Kline’s and Manville’s characters are psychotic; that Cate (a great actress, particularly in roles where she’s coming apart) is enjoying a conceit of heroic masochism (but her younger ‘self’ looked more like a young Greta Scacchi); that boys and young men (who are inept at handling knives and forks, especially knives) are stupid, callous, selfish, and criminal; that the heroine’s husband has the resolve of a month-old damp lettuce, and that the ridiculously pompous and sanctimonious staff at Ravenscroft’s documentary studio are so stupid as to require their summary dismissal.
All at sea
Conclave
(Directed by Edward Berger, 2024) [Thanks to our Guest Reviewer, Dr. Jack White]
Last night, I attended the final night of the Italian Film Festival in Adelaide that presented “Conclave” – a papal thriller based on Robert Harris’s novel.
This is a film you must see, certain to take out many Academy Awards. Obviously, the setting is the Vatican. The Pope has died. The film explores the process by which Cardinals come together to vote for a new Pope. What is clear from the outset is that the cardinals are real people with real frailties who are driven by human motives of lust, power and control.
Playwright Peter Straughan has adapted Harris’ work in a beautifully balanced way. The acting is outstanding and includes Ralph Fiennes who plays the role of Cardinal Lawrence, the manager of the election who claims no interest in the top job. Then there are the papal contenders : Cardinal Bellini (played by Stanley Tucci) whose charter is liberal open-mindedness; Cardinal Tedesco, played by Sergio Castellitto, representing the conservative right of the church; John Lithgow plays the role of Cardinal Tremblay, obsessed with a desire for greatness; Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi, played by Lucian Msamati, is the representative of the black people; and finally, Cardinal Benitez, played by Carlos Diehz, a surprise attendee working in Afghanistan whose background is relatively unknown.
The music and photography is exceptional. Add to this a twisting storyline and you will be hooked. Ultimately, Cardinal Lawrence finds his position more to be that of a detective who must investigate the facts from hearsay – and allow the mystery to unfold. “Conclave” is an exciting and tense thriller that will keep you guessing through to the end. A scene involving Sister Agnes (played by Isabella Rossellini) turns the film.
I am not of the Roman Catholic faith, but I found this political drama absorbing and stimulating. Not to be missed. Be assured, there is no certainty in this world.
Still Shining
(Marcia Hines at Norwood Town Hall, Adelaide, 4 October 2024)
She came from Boston to Australia on a six month gig in Hair, and 50 years later…she’s still here. And Australia is the better for it. Three times crowned as Australia’s Queen of Pop, Marcia’s lovely voice soars through all registers and her choice of material is broad but apt. At Norwood on Friday night, a packed Hall saw an enthusiastic (up in years) cohort get up and boogie, to songs such as Fire and Rain, I Want You Back, Shining, You, Disco Inferno, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, I Don’t Know How To Love Him, From the Inside, How Deep is Your Love, I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself, Hard to Breathe, and I’ve Got the Music in Me, accompanied by two excellent male singers and an amazing drummer/percussionist/guitarist, Stef Furnari.
Marcia worked the crowd with a short Q & A, during which she spontaneously belted out portions of Amazing Grace and The Age of Aquarius, also explaining her good looks at age 71 by saying “Black Don’t Crack.”
Hines is doing a national tour that, importantly, includes many regional towns. She’s touring for another couple of months, so see her if you can.
Thank you, Marcia. Your love still brings us to our knees.
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