Cinema Dogs & Stunners

Merry Antoinette writes:~

“Is she wearing that head for a bet?”  Asks my flatmate as our lady Prime Minister’s distinctive head with its flame coloured bob of hair fills the screen. Its a fair question -
After several therapeutic glasses of Fruity Lexia  Marjorie has a wanton way with words – she doesn’t mince them.
When I enquire if someone she is referencing in her extended monologue is attractive – she doesn’t bother with a nuanced description of where they fit on the scale of  1 – 10,  or even with words like pleasant, attractive or plain. The answer is direct -  he’s a ‘stunner’ or she’s a ‘dog’.
I understand such black and white thinking. Personally I’m not the slightest bit interested in a movie that is passable or watchable or god help me entertaining… do not entertain me ever… I want to be engaged – and not by my ex Peruvian stalker… and if not engaged then rudely jilted in a way that provokes me to hit the hardcore verbage.
In a life full of other distractions only films that are truly great or truly awful are worth the word count.
So with time being limited (after an extended manic episode outside the Batcave) and with only 6 sleeps to go before the Big Fat Man trashes the chimney and drinks us dry -  I was going to write a whimsical list of some of the first flea-bitten Dog movies that came to mind – I quickly noticed something very strange – Kevin Costner has a lot to answer for – He has starred in some of the finest American films of recent decades and directed some of the worst films ever made with the exception of Dances with Wolves which he co-produced with his wife before having a mid-life-misadventure, apparently shooting himself in the head with his own penis and beginning a long run of shitting lemons….
His films provide my all time favourite and least favourite cinema experiences. So this list is also what I love and what I hate and what I love to hate about Kevin…. So let’s do talk about Kevin.

 DOGS  AND STUNNERS.. This is just a starter list -  feel free to add your own Dogs and Stunners.

DOG   
WATERWORLD           perpetrated by Kevin Costner    
Chinese water torture would be preferable. Epic post apocalyptic tale – Mad Max on water. 
     
STUNNER
PERFECT WORLD   Directed by Clint Eastwood
Classic filmmaking at its best. Kevin Costner delivers one of the finest acting performances ever recorded – not to mention the kid!  Great script and narrative.

DOG
THE POSTMAN       Answerable? Kevin Costner (Directs, Stars, Produces)
Over two and a half hours of pure self-indulgence (not yours – Kevin’s). Post  apocalyptic tale II – Mad Max goes postal.
On second thought this outdoes even Waterworld and should be on top of the list of Dogs.

STUNNER
THE THIN RED LINE    Work of genius by Terrence Mallick.
A poetic Masterpiece from opening shot to closing frame. Rare and delicate portrayal of the human spirit in the face of death. Exquisite performances  by Penn, Nolte, Koteas, Brody, Harrelson et al -  Jim Caviezel is luminous – christ like – destined for his later role in The Passion. Rarely has a face been so internally lit onscreen.
Why wasn’t Kevin in this one with the rest of his peers?

DOG
SOMERSAULT    Assaulted by: Cate Shortland - director. You have to give the writer equal blame for this indulgent coming of age pastiche of wanna be art house implausability. Writer – Cate Shortland…… 
To add insult to injury this film was widely hailed as a significant film that signalled the revival of the Australian film industry.
The Emporer definitely had no clothes on in this one – and even the provided synopsis on IMDb shows that this excercise in arts funding has no worthwhile storyline.  Let it be a warning. If you’ve got nothing to write about put the pen down and back away from the keyboard and for God sake do not think a storyless story will magically transform itself into one by breaking it down into script format!  That’s code for start with a ‘story’ dickhead.
“Coming of age: Heidi, 15, runs away from home after her mom sees her kissing mom’s boyfriend. She goes to a Snowy River resort where a vague job offer doesn’t pan out. She manages to find a place to live and a job at a convenience store. She’s between childhood — nursery rimes and a scrapbook of glittery unicorns – and adulthood – working, sorting out emotions and sexuality, and dealing with social slights and false charges of bad behavior. She’s attractive and her loneliness makes her vulnerable. She sleeps with Joe, the son of local ranchers, and she awakens in him feelings he can’t express. Is there any way she can put off adulthood and be a kid awhile longer?
I shit you not….  The prosecution rests.

STUNNER
THE BOYS       Director Rowan Woods . Screenplay by  playwrite Stephen Sewell.
Australian filmmaking at its authentic best. A visceral portrayal of suburban garden variety evil. The screenplay suspensefully re-orders events that lead three brothers inevitably towards a savage crime ,with chilling detachment. The sociopathic menace portrayed is so real the director leaves the story a few scenes shy of the actual crime for even greater impact.

STUNNER
LITTLE VOICE        Directed by Mark Herman – written by Mark Herman.
What can I say – a poignant comedy – a riot of regional dialect -  pathos bathos and idiosyncratic characters. A study of sublime dreams and failure and Michael Cain’s best most endearing performance ever  “When you take your clothes off I can’t keep track of yer, yer all over the place” – alongside the utterly human Brenda Blethyn in all her glory – ‘tits and a gob on me fer all occaisions’. Jane Horricks in a parallel universe sublimely singing impersonations of all the greats. Ewan McGregor a fawn-like bundle of nervous ticks and awkwardness. And ‘the one the only’ Jim Broadbent.
A wonderful film.

The list is endless and will be revisited but right now it’s keeping me from a well deserved Redly – thankfully young Maximilian has just phoned in his contenders for the STUNNERS list pasted below for a male point of view….

Hi Mum,
Here are some of my favorite Stunners, in no particular order:

The Shawshank Redemption    (great film, great story, great characters, great acting, great cinematography)

Fight Club    (quirky instant classic, with riveting watchability from Edward Norton & Brad Pitt)

Goodfellas    (instant classic, great mix of melodrama, authenticity and dark comedy)

Once Upon a Time in the West    (awesome western, some amazing scenes)

The Matrix    (breakthrough film, set a lot of standards for modern cinema … the sequels were shit)

Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark    (unbeatable classic, still sets the standard for fun-filled comic book style epic action)

The Silence of the Lambs     (combination of Jodie Foster & Anthony Hopkins makes this an all time classic, intelligent suspense / horror)

Paranormal Activity    (scariest film I’ve seen in my life)

Memento   (Guy Pierce’s performance and the unusual way this film was edited together made this a fave)

American History X   (a real story about real problems in American society and real consequences to extreme act

Finally a decent Fill-um…..

WHO CAN RESIST A GOODLY JANE

Marjorie and I have been labouring away on far less than the bas-ic wage, taking our vita-mins and almost going beresk - despairing that we would ever see a decent fill -um  again.
Well thanks to the recommendation of my first-born Maximillian - no slouch with a camera himself – the cinematic drought was finally broken in the Batcave last-nite.
Believe it or not it was the latest version of Charlotte Brontes miserable tale ‘Jane Eyre’ that lifted us out of the doldrums and well and truly above the clouds of bad art.
Directed by Cary Fukunaga it is beautifully shot – carefully composed scenes confining themselves to the telling of the story – and carries a sense of realism often lost behind the elaborate costumery of period dramas. The costuming in fact plays a big part in the films restraint and authenticity.
The skillful restructuring of the original story achieved in the script relieves the tale of much of its customary melodrama. 
The story and the inner emotion of such well-known characters is beautifully rendered by understated performances of an exceptional calibre.
The youthful lead actress (Mia Wasikowska) transmits the suppressed feelings and frustrated emotional fury of Jane Eyre more than any other I have seen in the role – and there have already been some excellent renditions including Charlotte Gainsbourg directed by Franco Zeffirelli. 
Michael Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester is not so much full of cruelty and malice but conflicted by the caprice of his position and tormented by emotion for his spirited governess when cold calculation would serve him best.
Previous Jane’s have been signified by their austerity and duty over emotion – this Jane is alive with tenderness and oceanic love and will let down her conventional defences for nothing less in return- a lively minded dreamer despite the many cages she has lived in.
A wonderful and moving film of love surviving the obstacles of pride and convention.
Four stars and bouquet of roses.
Marjorie is still swooning.

When No News is Good News

Some Things You Would Rather Not Know

My Life is a Travesty 
It’s not everyone who could say – “Oh I just heard word that my ex husband has married 3 women and converted to Islam.”
Well knock me down with a magnum of Spumante and funnel me several glasses of the redly – and quick.
I just received a call from young RORY wanting to tell me ‘the most bizarre news ever” – apparently his father (a celibate monk I once married in a cowshed on a cult commune) has just converted to Islam in order to marry his mail order bride and her two older sisters  – somewhere on the  outskirts of Jogjakarta’. The religion and the siblings were an upsell – ‘you want two extra brides with that?’
I am momentarily speechless and may even take Marjorie up on her offer of an intravenous transfusion of rescue remedy.
It poses a good many questions not only about the ex’es sanity but mine – about my choices with the menfolk and about some uglier issues like exploitation and misogyny.
Some people are born into abject poverty under the heel of opressive regimes where women are held and traded like property and spend their lives trying to escape . If I were in their shoes there is no price I would not pay the boatman to ferry me to the land of the free and nothing I would not do obtain my freedom. To travel in the other direction to exploit such vulnerabilities and fringe benefits is not so comprehendible.
Is it any wonder that my other illustrious offspring Maximilian recently changed his family name by deed poll?
Pass the smelling salts Marjorie..

Suicidal Santa – For the Love of Laudanum

“Christmas is coming and the multinationals are getting fat. Please put a penny in the old mans hat”

SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS

  
SPOILER ALERT

Merry Antoinette writes:~

The sound of a neighbors prematurely ejaculated Christmas carols violating the sanctum of the Batcave has sent Marjorie to ground with a blinding migraine. We’re all out of laudanum and if I hear another word about Rudolph I’ll punch his lights out myself.
For many of us Christmas lurks around the corner of November like a tinsel covered monster. A monster that eats cash and credit and vexes even functional families in their efforts to include and satisfy everyone. The build up, the expectations and the endless palaver more a form of torture to be endured than a celebration. 
Honestly – who got together and decided that, a hybrid stew of fat men in red coats drink -driving sleighs pulled by reindeer, carrying breakable toys and i-pods from China, AND an immaculately conceived baby (Joseph must have been closely watched) in a barnyard crib, receiving gifts from three metrosexual Kings, AND a dirty great fir-tree, egg nog, mulled wine, mutilated turkeys and truckload of dead pigs, a pork pie and a pudding that nobody wants constitutes a good time?
And remind me, what are we celebrating again? The birth of a spiritual radical and all he stood for? (Team Jesus) or Getting what we want (Team Santa) or the Winter Solstice. Who really cares when you can get tanked for three weeks straight with approbation and gorge yourself senseless at someone elses expense.
Then there is the associated downright sadness of it all. – Maybe I need to up the Arapax but I can’t help wondering how many lovely old Mums will be tucked away on their ownsome waiting for the telephonic instrument to ring, ready to graciously accept any crumbs of solicitation sent their way by busy offspring? If they are lucky..
And what about the bereaved, the brokenhearted, the unpartnered. The broke. The homeless. The drug addicted. The mentally ill and the socially alienated. Or closer to home the menopausal empty-nesters, no nest – what nexters??
Christmas reads to them like a full-page editorial in the Daily Mail highlighting their disaffection and their loneliness.
Is it any wonder that the approaching Yuletide has many of them rushing like lemmings toward the  nearest ledges to throw themselves off? 
May all your Christmas’s be 20/20 in hindsight and for the sake of the sweet baby Jesus and the tired old man in the red suit make sure you call your Mum  (that means you RORY) and anyone else you’ve been neglecting.

Written a Good Script Lately?

     “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t  
        fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.” — William Faulkner”

Got a good Script in your back pocket?

No Marjorie dear we are not talking Novocaine.

I’m about to hunker down in the Batcave to do some real writing for the day and I thought I’d share the following link to SCRIPTAPALOOZA.
A screenwiriting competition that can turn you from a legend in your own loungeroom to – well an even bigger legend in your own loungeroom and just possibly give your script a look in with real live actual shakers and makers in the Wood – Hood … that’s loungeroom legend inspeak for Hollywood.
Earlier this year during a flight of  red-mania I even entered one of my own legendary works and got as far as the semi-finalists list (the final hundred scripts out of 3000) which means my script will be promoted for a year.
God knows what might happen next – I may even have to leave the Batcave.

Check out the promo for this years comp here:   http://vimeo.com/33193186  What can Scriptapalooza do for you?

When Arthouse is next door to the Outhouse. Sleeping Beauty, Film Review

Sleeping Beauty:

HOW OLD IS THIS CHILD?

Merry Antoinette writes:~
It seems that last night there was a poltergeist abroad in the Batcave, as Marjorie and I were both beset with lurid dreams.This could have been due to having watched probably the most morally bankrupt 104 minutes of ‘cinema’ ever produced.
Such grubby excursions serve to remind us that the art house is never too far from the outhouse.
In director Julia Leigh’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ an actress with the physical development of a 14-year-old is plotlessly and pointlessly drugged and used sexually by a succession of bandy-legged geriatric toads who throw her child’s body around like a rag doll, whisper vile misogynist slurs into her face (and our’s), and smear her with their bodily fluids.
To add insult to injury the actress who portrays the woman who serves as Beauty’s pimp seems to be trying hard to effect the delivery and mannerisms of Charlotte Rampling – pl-ease!! ~ now there goes a luminary in the firmament of stars.
Between these sessions of comatose molestation the poor child perambulates between a series of unpleasant and unexplained day jobs (apparently prostitution does not pay). To say that the dialogue stinks does not say enough; the dialogue stinks of excrement and the unworldly filth born of the writers pretentious mind.
To exacerbate matters the writer happens to be the Director who happens to be a woman who happens to be an Australian….quelle horreur!
That a woman would conceive, write and direct and deliver such a purulent exercise in pornographic misogyny verging on the paedophilic and snuff genres left Marjorie and I feeling sexually molested and betrayed on a number of levels.
I have since learnt that the thing was booed by audiences at Cannes which gives me some remaining hope for  humankind.

Onward and Upward In the Batcave tonight.

Onward and Upward

Merry Antoinette writes:~

Well its high times in the Batcave tonight. Marjorie is able to avail herself of the magic grape juice after 14 days of deadly antibiotica – not only do they erase all known intestinal life but the life social to boot!
I’ve been looking at my own reflection in the bottle of boutique redly for over two weeks now ($5.99 – reserve label – don’t be fooled it has a superlatively magnificent bouquet and notes of laminex and rhubarb). And who in their rightly mind wants to drink alone and unattended? 
In the absence of any suitable man-friend Marjorie and I are want to regale ourselves senseless (lets face it nobody else is listening) with all manner of hopes and dreams and multifaceted tips on accessorizing (it was called power dressing in the 80′s – but I digress and rightly so for there are no intelligible segues after a glass or two of the redly).
Anyway tonight is definitely the night and Marjorie has her lips wrapped around a luscious clean skinned Sauvignon blanc and is only few sips shy of sanity. Poor love has had a hard time of late and deserves a day off. I’ve cooked a  risotto with goats cheese and wild tomato salsa. I’m about to ‘plate up’  and provide a listening ear to Marjorie’s latest business proposal so I will leave you with this final thought – You are what you eat so be very very careful.
Salud.

Atrocities Against Women

Laughing It Off

Maybe Marjorie and I are mixing in the wrong circles, but between us we know a bakers dozen of passably normal women who have horror stories of intimate partner and domestic abuse that they tell with the relish of a seasoned stand-up comedian – In fact they become stand up comedians in the telling.
All inhibition falls away as they exit themselves from the narrative of their own abuse, get up from their chairs and literally act out the drama.
“He held me by the throat and told me ‘you have no idea what I’m capable of’. I waited till he was asleep and drove four hours to the nearest town in my baby doll pyjamas and all I could think to take was a cheese grater.’
Marjorie and I have not been exempt from such adventures and could fill a small excercise book on the subject.
She once survived the road rage ride  from hell with an enraged SAS officer determined to kill her by car accident because she had dared to receive a text from an ex boyfriend.
One of my stalkers let himself into my flat while I was on holiday and had the temerity to call me from my own landline to let me know that I was neglecting my cat. 
The ex-husband (I prefer the term non-) has left me with many a good bon-mot on the subject . Memorably there was the time when –  after having torn out his marijuana crop from the suburban block for the fourteenth time –  he took his revenge by firing up his chainsaw and giving it to my favourite lemon tree in the neck.
Our last and final conjugal encounter was interrupted mid stream when he leapt off me and ran to the window shouting ‘ Look Chemtrails!!! I told you we were being poisoned by NASA.’
Marjorie and I fall on the floor and laugh till we cry at these tales, tales that often stretch into relentlessly repeating saga’s and no doubt it is a legitimate form of jailhouse therapy. At least the tellers got out alive and have recovered enough of themselves to see the insanity of their situations.
Of course there are some stories that are not so funny…..  and then there are the ones that are too painful or shameful to tell. I am aware of the adage that ‘tragedy plus time equals comedy’ but the real tragedy may be that when it comes to abuse suffered at the hands of a loved one, no one really wants to listen unless there is a good punchline  – boom boom.

The strange case of Arthur Klemp and the missing HU

A sceptic

Merry Antoinette writes:~

Today being Sunday, Marjorie and I travelled a long way from the safety of the Batcave in search of a spiritual meal.
It’s been a long time between drinks for me since my five year stint with the Holy Jesus nut brigade/Son of Sam enlightenment network where I met and married my former paramor Steve who has since found his calling as an international Shroom dealer and Karaoke King of some lesser note.
Marjorie was gobsmacked from the outset by the wonders of Eckancar - the God of Light and Sound. We were greeted by several eager members in quick succession and then treated to a series of impromptu displays of Eckancar talent.
Their was a discussionary panel of two on the subject of gratitude – something that Marjorie and I sorely lack in our current state of bitterness toward the Universe and the self-help industry in particular. Show us the money…..NOW.
Arnold  Schwarzenegger made a cameo appearance to urge the crowd (of 5) towards selfless acts of random kindness and then a video of the man himself the real  ECK,  Arthur – the Kemp of Ages was played – This is a man who has presence even when talking with the aid of flashcards. A slow speaker is always a good speaker I think.
As I said to Marjorie it would have been unfair to ask him to land the plane -  in the absence of the plane itself.
And then there was the chanting of the HUE vibration which really did offer some upliftment and left us both with an irresistible fit of the giggles.
As wonderful as it is to have a good ol roll in the carpet laugh – such merriment – when misinterpreted can be hurtful to the speaker in question. The good lady Marjorie nearly lost conscious trying not to laugh and I myself resorted to stabbing myself in the face with the sharp end of my lipliner pencil in order not to lose my shit altogether.
Heedless to say Marjorie remains very much a heathen after the experience and I, as I contemplate the unbroken meniscus on my evening glass of the redly would still much rather be a sinner than a saint.

Another Saturday Nite

Merry Antionette writes:~

Another Saturday Night in, in the Batcave.
Arrived home late from a swimwear shoot for Big Girl  magazine to find Marjorie on a solo drinking jag, wearing nothing but an apron, listening to the Bee Gees at high-speed while doing a  sudoku – her third for the evening – (mind like a steel trap ). She’s since collapsed on the couch after a texting marathon with her latest beau.
As for me I’ve  waxed my moustache and imbibed enough of the redly to conquer my inhibitions and phone my agent and ask him why he hasn’t answered my calls for over a year - he didn’t pick up. What a relief.