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.
(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.
Continue Reading →
(Our Guest Reviewer is a King’s Counsel of several decades experience, particularly in the criminal law)
Prima facie: (of first appearance) Where there is some evidence in support of an allegation made, which will stand unless it is displaced.
As it happens, I have never attended a performance by the National Theatre in London and I have not seen, or heard of, the actress Jodie Comer. That was until recently when I had the great pleasure to watch Prima facie, filmed live at the Harold Pinter Theatre and featuring Comer in a one-woman production occupying two hours. It is without doubt the best theatre that I have ever seen. Confronting but magnificent!
Without giving too much away, the plot centres around Tessa, a young working-class woman, who has excelled as a criminal defence barrister. She tells us the techniques that she deploys in securing acquittals for her clients, particularly those accused of sexual offences. (At this point it is worthwhile to note that these techniques are both proper and appropriate in revealing reasonable doubt).
Then things get tricky. Tessa, who doesn’t mind a drink or two (no judgment; no eyebrows raised here) has a fling with another counsel in her Chambers. However, once bitten, second try, and so a week later, after a big drink with fellow counsel, Tessa invites him back to her lodgings for enthusiastic sexual congress. Afterwards, Tessa is very unwell, naked, projectile vomiting into the toilet and counsel comes to her rescue. He collects Tessa from her squalid environs and puts her to bed.
Further encounters there occur; she says, without consent; he disagrees. Here’s the kicker; she reports her allegation to police; her colleague is charged with rape.
A trial ensues some 2 years later. I don’t need to tell you the verdict. You should be able to fathom that yourselves. The message from this powerful production, in my opinion, is twofold:
I would encourage everyone to access this glorious production, to absorb the excellent performance and make up your own mind.
Continue Reading →(Director: Osgood Perkins, who is also the sole accredited writer. You have been warned).
Long Legs is so terrible that we advise against seeing it (if you value your time, money and/or pride).
SPOILER ALERT
In case there are any readers who might be considering seeing it, we will help dissuade you by posting some spoilers. And, perhaps some of you who have watched this rubbish could help us out with some of our queries. It starts off well enough – don’t all horror films? Perkins has just enough talent to do one good scene. Small girl, curiously alone in curiously isolated Oregon house, is confronted by a weird clown guy*. There’s a figure in black in a car in the driveway. Is the car her family’s or the weird clown guy’s? The weird clown guy is Nicolas Cage in a Witchy-Poo mask and a lot of white makeup, looking and acting every bit as stupid as Joachim Phoenix in Joker.
Cut to rookie FBI agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) who is wooden and socially awkward**, but has “half-psychic abilities”*** according to some obviously meaningless testing. You know the type, where the bewildered young person has to watch slides in a dark room**** and give answers to a disembodied voice#, the type of testing where the examinee turns to see behind the projector but can’t because of all the dust motes in the light@? This rookie and her arrogant male partner go looking for some serial killer called Longlegs who kills families somehow without being present. Sexist boy cop gets shot in the face because he didn’t listen to psychic girl.
Is the zombie-like rookie our kid from before, now all grown up? Of course she is. Is Longlegs the clown guy from before? Of course he is? Why is he called Longlegs when his legs are the same length as Nicholas Cage’s ordinary-length legs? Is agent Harker all retardo because of something clown guy did to her? Why does she live in a shed on the premises of her parents’ old house? Why does she make peculiar phone calls to her mother? Does she have a father? Is Longlegs her father? How does he get into her house? Why doesn’t she have curtains? What is the meaning of some kids having 9th birthdays on the 14th of the month? Why does Harker not tie her late-night crazy collage together with red string, like a normal cliché-obsessive cop? Why does it take so long to solve a simple substitution code?## Why, when she is poking about, holding a gun in shaking hands, doing her best Clarice Starling, is Harker’s scared breathing mixed up to 11 on the volume scale?@@
Don’t ask, because you will never know. Nor will you know why Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is getting around in a nun’s outfit, doing bad things, or why Nicholas Cage is called “The Toymaker” and is allowed to wear a disguise even while being questioned by the FBI. What’s with the creepy life-size doll that controls people, even though all it contains is an empty metal ball? Why didn’t the one, solo writer predict that some viewers might work out that the the sweet family (including a daughter who is about to turn 9 on the you-guessed- it) of Harker’s super-nice black supervisor (Blair Underwood) will become victims? Is any of this happening?
We were so confused that we turned to Wikipedia, which asserts “Longlegs has lived in the Harker basement, creating satanic dolls that Ruth, posing as a nun, delivered to families, causing them to kill each other. Lee’s doll blocked her memories of Longlegs while influencing her with her magic”. Of course. Now it makes sense.
This is an awful film. Apart from its incoherence and stupidity, it is has that worst quality common to all terrible films: It is boring.
[Editor’s note: Oh dear, Oz. What would your Dad have made of this, despite the fatuous praise being sung about it? For amateur productions with a horror aspect, try The Blair Witch Project.]Notes
[*It**The Silence of the Lambs
**** The Game
# Scream
## Zodiac
@@ Alien]
Continue Reading →Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 18 July 2024
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” That’s how one feels in reviewing Dutch minimalist pianist Joep Beving, who is obviously a very nice guy, but his work is alarmingly redolent of the kind of records Windham Hill put out in the 1980s.
We were told: “Beving’s latest endeavor, Hermetism, released in 2022, marks a return to solo piano, inspired by the ancient spiritual philosophy of Hermeticism. Through this project, Beving invites listeners into a meditative exploration of music’s ability to reflect the universal laws of nature and the interconnectedness of existence.” Rest assured we’re not being introduced to the St Anthony-kind of hermitism; rather, on a very dimly-lit stage (initially, a weak lamp only was directed at the piano keys) that was intermittently bathed in glaring light (see below), where the pianist, his back to the audience, was at times almost invisible, playing a number of noodling, dark, impressionistic and – dread word – mellow piano pieces, with a very basic structure, a simple tone accompanied by a guide one to form kinds of repetitive chords. The effect was pleasant enough, and represented an interesting departure from the standard piano recital format, but alas, tending to the soporific.
Beving’s latest endeavor, Hermetism, released in 2022, was ‘meditative’ and ‘immersive’, to use rather overworked terms, and smacked of highly competent film scores. In a recent interview with Edmund Black for In Review*, Beving remarked: “I wanted to go back to an era in which I thought things were looking more optimistic, so that’s kind of how the more romantic, fin-de-siècle vibe got into the album.” We liked “For Mark,” the therapeutic mood of “Pax,” and “Sleeping Lotus,” this last dedicated to his daughter, which came alive in the use of highly percussive notes.
Hermetism was pleasant but The Varnished Culture prefers Martha Argerich, Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein or Sergey Rachmaninov, playing less ‘wandering’ pieces, thanks.
[* https://inreview.com.au/inreview/music/2024/07/11/a-piano-recital-like-no-other/] Continue Reading →(1918 – 1938) (Edited by Simon Heffer)
In the elusive search for historical truth, contemporary records such as diaries, even unreliable ones, can be valuable. Private diaries in particular, as they can break free of censorship, even self-censorship to a degree. Furthermore, insider diaries can give great insight into the mores of the times. Classic examples include Pepys, Boswell, Francis Kilvert, Anne Frank and Alan Clark.
Henry “Chips” Channon (the nickname came when he roomed at Christ Church College, Oxford with a friend nicknamed “Fish”) was born in 1897 in Chicago, son of a wealthy family; served with the Red Cross and as a attaché in Paris in the Great War; attended Oxford; soaked his parents for money; ‘anglicised,’ and married Honor, a daughter of the extremely wealthy family owning the Guinness company; obtained British citizenship (he despised his native America) and entered Parliament in 1935, serving as an obscure MP, obscure at least as revealed in this volume, until his death in 1958. He was notably undistinguished in his political career, but he seems to have attended every haut monde lunch, dinner, ball, party, soirée, and royal ceremony going. He knew everyone it seemed and tells us just what he thought of them. He was privy to events like the General Strike, the Abdication crisis, and the rise of international tension. The First Volume creates a vague feeling of dread, a time when Britain drank, danced, caroused and flounced about, careless and sans umbrella in the shadow of the gathering storm.
We except his feckless public service when it comes to his involvement in the Foreign Office, dealing with European difficulties in 1938. However, in relation to Continental affairs, he was wrong as he could be, and he was often wrong (we say this in hindsight). Virulently anti-Communist, slavishly attracted to royalty and the high-born, self-obsessed and obsessed with money, status and access to power, snobbishly admiring of “Strongmen” like Franco, Mussolini and You-Know-Who, he was one of Parliament’s enthusiastic advocates of appeasement, writing very waspish and derisive diary notes about anti-appeasers such as Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, etc.
Simon Heffer has done a superb job as editor, the exhaustive footnotes almost outdoing the Burke’s Peerage or the Almanach de Gotha, which is even more impressive when one notes there are two equally massive subsequent volumes (1938-1943 and 1943-1957). Expurgated versions came out in 1967 but are child’s play compared to these. And the footnotes are worth traversing while reading the diary entries, or afterwards: the detail is vivid and sometimes startling. Consider this footnote, for example: “Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (1882-1940) began in the Arts and Crafts movement and became a renowned sculptor and designer of typefaces. He adapted to the style of art deco in which he created three of his best-known works: Ariel, one of several sculptures at Broadcasting House; three sculptures depicting different winds, over the London Transport building at 55 Broadway in London; and seahorses at the Midland Hotel, Morecombe. Devoutly religious, he had incestuous relationships with two of his daughters and his sisters, and committed sex acts with his dog.”
Here are some excerpts to get an idea of Channon’s style, wit (he was no Oscar Wilde), and (looking through the ‘high-resolution retrospectoscope‘) misjudgments, as well as times when he was ‘spot on’:
“I am susceptible to flattery, and male good looks; I hate and am uninterested in all the things men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.”
“He has a collection of some thirty or forty Hogarths as the painter was a protégé of an early Lord Lonsdale. Unfortunately, our host showed us one of ‘Lord Byron’, we did not know where to look.”
“The more I know of American civilisation, the more I realise how I despise it – and what a positive menace it is to the peace and future of the world – if it triumphs, the old civilisation that loved beauty and cruelty and lust and peace and the arts and rank and privileges – will pass from the picture. And we will have Fords, cinemas – ugh!! Give me Leninism in preference.”
“The government has chosen the ‘easiest way’ and at the eleventh hour decided to subsidise the mining industry…But is it wise to drop palliatives to the proletariat, who go on clamouring for more? – always more?”
(George VI): “He is completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!”
“A full, exhausting day. We had a luncheon party here, and the plot was to do a ‘politesse’ to Mrs. Simpson. She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. At least, she wouldn’t be too surprised. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales, who is trying to launch her socially.”
“Personally I think that they will be back in England in two years’ time living comfortably at the Fort or elsewhere.”
(George Moore): “He tells me over 200 women have written to him begging for rendezvous (mostly Americans). His dodge was always to answer and demand a photograph in the nude. This got rid of all but the most zealous, who complied.”
“I hate society at the moment: it is too fanatically anti-Hitler”.
“The morning was calm, the PM enchanting. I am in and out of his room constantly now. Early on, there were messages announcing mysterious movements of troops in Bavaria with the usual denials from Berlin. Then there was a grand luncheon party at 10 Downing Street at which, the Chamberlains entertained the Ribbentrops, the Halifaxes, Winston Churchills, etc. By then the news had reached the FO that the Germans had invaded Austria, and from 5 to 7 p.m. reports poured in. I was in Halifax’s room at 7.30 when the telephone rang ‘The Germans are in Vienna’, and five minutes later ‘The skies are black with Nazi planes’. We stood breathless in the Secretary of State’s room, wondering what would happen next. All night messages flowed in; by midnight Austria was a German province.”
“Halifax [Honor’s uncle] and Chamberlain are very great men who dwarf their colleagues; they are the greatest Englishmen alive, certainly; aside from them it is a mediocre crew; but I subscribe, I am afraid, to the totalitarian view that England is on the decline. We shall dwindle for a generation or so; we are a tired race and our genius, I believe, is dead. We produce nothing new whereas Germany and Italy are seething with vigour and life; we have only choruses of cranks! Democracy is absurd.”
“Militarism is dead in Germany: instead there is a cult for physical perfection and nakedness – there are even naked clubs. Physical exercise and homosexuality are the great modern German movements: both have taken on the proportions of a crusade.” (Berlin, 1928)
“The dreadful day has dawned coldly, and my limbs are numb and chilled. The telephone began early, Diana (and let me in parenthesis say that Duff Cooper has behaved shabbily. He was intimate with the King, he even flirted, or tried to, with Wallis, and she was eager to be with them at the Fort, at dinner parties, aboard the Nahlin and elsewhere, and now he is a Roundhead and calls Wallis to my face ‘a tenth-rate ugly old strumpet.’)”
“I had a row with that smelly, slimy Duchess of Atholl, who looks like an under-stuffed crocodile and has the manners of a downtrodden governess.”
“Ministers threaten to resign, but never do.”
“My new servant Morhan is an Irish ass, honest, sound…but a fool. Today he didn’t know where the Ritz was.”
“An unbelievable day in which two things occurred: I fell in love with the Prime Minister [Chamberlain], and Hitler took Vienna.”
Continue Reading →(Director – not to be mentioned. He is not to be encouraged.) [Zach Cregger directed, his first, possibly last, effort, although the film made good money apparently – Facts matter- ED.]
“Barbarian” is not rateable on the “Babadook Scale“. It’s not that sort of horror movie. It’s the sort on which even fewer pesky script meetings are wasted. You can determine whether you have seen this film by casting yourself in the lead role and answering the following questions.
(a) Get the Hell out of there, or
(b) Go into the cellar of the B and B to get some toilet paper?
2. In the cellar you find a hidden room containing only a stained mattress, a bucket and a camera on a tripod. Do you:-
(a) Get the Hell out of there, or
(b) Grab a torch and go down another set of slimy wet steps into the darkness and then into to a further hidden room?
3. You’ve escaped from the underground cages and the hideous, murderous monster. Do you:-
(a) Get the Hell out of there, or
(b) Go back down alone and unarmed to attempt to save another captive?
If you answered ‘b” to all of the above then you have seen this film before, although it may not have been called “Barbarian”. Here are some bonus questions, in case you are still uncertain. These are easier yet, because with films as bad as “Barbarian” as our point of reference, the answer is always “yes”.
Does the Magic Negro get beaten to death with his own severed arm?
Does the cellar door lock itself behind you?
Are there false deaths?
Are we left without an explanation about the double booking?
Was there an inexplicable interlude which leads to suspicion that two films were accidentally spliced together?
Is an unpleasant person who drives a fancy car punished?
Do the police refuse to believe the hysterical black woman?
Is the film as revolting, misogynistic, ridiculous and boring as “Bone Tomahawk” but without any redeeming features (such as Kurt Russell).?
The director cannot be forgiven. The actors can because they do passably, given that they were knitting barbed wire with overcooked spaghetti. They possibly deserve second chances. “Barbarian” however, does not..
Continue Reading →Adelaide Festival Theatre, 12 June 2024
The most famous pair of legs since Betty Grable, Rhonda Burchmore took to the Cabaret Festival stage in a show that gave a full house souvenirs, stories, selfies and songs from her 42 year career (details linked in Wikipedia below), in an amusing reverie touching upon gigs and hotels from hell, celebrities with peccadillos, almost-but-not-quite meeting Michael Jackson, the idiosyncratic Betty Buckley and her vicious Macaw, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhonda_Burchmore
Covering a wide range of songs from ONJ, Melissa Manchester, Eartha Kitt, Bette Midler, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, etc., (song list below), Rhonda’s voice can still belt them out; her stories (ranging from vibrant to, frankly, wan) were engaging enough, a slice of tap-dancing and some by-play with her excellent 3-piece band, made for a charming evening. Rhonda strives to please and be liked, and she succeeds.
Song list:
Back to Black
Come in from the Rain
Love You Inside Out
My Discarded Men
Out of My Life
Pretty Legs and Great Big Knockers
Screw Loose
Slow Boat to China
They Just Keep Moving the Line
The World Still Turns
Xanadu
Continue Reading →Dir. Luca Guadagnino (2024)
Our fabulous Guest Reviewer, Rita, gives us her thoughts on “Challengers”. Thank you, Rita, we didn’t get to see it, all we know about it is that there’s a lot of tennis, so we thank you for your input. NB We know Rita well and she is anything but shallow! See also Rita’s equally pithy review of “Fremont“.
The three main characters are awful people in my view but my mind became addled and distracted by the overwhelming physical gorgeousness of Tashi (played effectively by Zendaya). Thus, I have exposed my shallow nature, but I would be interested to hear what people think of this film other than that it is too long.
[Ed: Tennis films are problematic – e.g. the egregious “Players” (1979). Here at least there seems to be a love triangle, which suggests American Doubles. The Spectator reviewer ‘quite’ liked it.] Continue Reading →Directed by Babak Jalali (2023)
Our insightful Guest Reviewer, Rita, gives us her thoughts on “Fremont”. Rita exhorted us to see it and we are really sorry that we missed it, because Rita knows what is what. So thank you Rita. Please send us more reviews of the weird and the wonderful. See also Rita’s equally succinct review of “Challengers“.
I am really interested in your critique(s) on this film. I was gripped by this strange but engaging little gem. Loved the odd beauty of the following. She said, “I brought you a deer.” He replied, “I wanted a deer.” Endearing and funny.
[For post-war trauma, I’d plump for The Deerhunter personally, but still, this looks like a Jim Jarmusch-type, intimate jewel – Ed.] Continue Reading →Adelaide Festival Theatre, Dunstan Playhouse, 24 May 2024
The Woman in Black is an adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 Gothic novel, by Stephen Mallatratt, concerning a mysterious spectre that haunts Eel Marsh House in a small, remote English town. It’s a hoary old piece, and a tad clunky, but the novel, film and TV versions, and the play, have been consistently popular – only The Mousetrap (another mediocre piece) has had a longer run on the West End.
There’s some post-modern, story-about-a-story business, as Arthur Kipps (John Waters), a self-effacing and strangely diminished solicitor, tries to enliven his story for an actor (Daniel MacPherson) he has retained to tell it. So as fast as you can say ‘flashbacks,’ there we are, young solicitor travels to an old dark house to wind-up the estate of dowager Mrs. Alice Drablow. Shades of Jonathan Harker’s trip to the Carpathian Mountains.
Whilst the lawyer is sifting through papers, we are treated to a bunch of “effects without causes”* – the usual smorgasbord of haunted house tropes; slamming doors, screams, flashes of light and flashes of darkness, the sound of a horse and trap and fleeting appearances by a mysterious woman in black – we eventually learn about a single mother, a child, his fate and her revenge, and revenge’s lengthening shadow.
Every plot point creaks and croaks as from under a wheel; the gothic touches spill untidily as straw from a broken doll, but it survives as pleasant entertainment due to the accomplished playing of two accomplished actors, Waters and MacPherson. The woman in black does dramatic entrances and exits, although she was not disposed to answer the curtain call. This is a nice and uncerebral night’s entertainment, that could do with some tightening of the script, and perhaps be enhanced by some more pyrotechnics when it heads to its national run.
[*”Effects without causes.” Thus Wagner, commenting on an opera by Meyerbeer.] Continue Reading →