Metropolis 3: Where Lightness Meets Darkness

One of the pieces premiered tonight—Natalie Williams’ Three Portraits of Scheherezade—was based on my own poems. As such, I don’t feel I can give an objective appraisal of the concert as a whole, but I still wanted to write a few comments.

The other pieces on the program included John Adam’s Chamber Symphony, Barry Conyngham’s world premiere Now That Darkness and Feldman’s Coptic Light. In general, I’m not a big fan of Conyngham’s work: it is accomplished, but I do not find it emotionally engaging. But he doesn’t need me to find his work emotionally engaging: he’s very successful without me.

The Adams’ work also didn’t engage on an emotional level: but in this case the composer didn’t really intend to. A piece of great energy, it drew upon many materials including American cartoon music.

Of these three works, it was the Feldman that was the most rewarding experience for me: in part because he is the least played in Australia. His work method, expansion of a small amount of material in a rigorous way was extraordinary to me. His music reminded me of something I once read in John Cage’s (a friend of the composer’s) writings: to paraphrase, play something once, twice, four times and it becomes boring—but play it 64 times and it becomes very very interesting. I’m normally not a fan of minimalism, but Feldman’s work is not minimalist in the sense of Steve Reich’s music, or Arvo Paart’s. Like the Schnittke of the previous concert, I find that I have another new composer to explore on CD over the months to come.

I do continue to find it a little distressing that music written in the last twenty years is confined to the Metropolis portion of the Melbourne Symphony’s program each year.

*

My tenuous involvement in this concert has brought other rewards. As well as meeting the conductor and many composers, Natalie and I have broached the topic of writing an opera together. In the mean time, another Melbourne composer, Steve Hodgson, has reserved my wordsmithing skills for the coming months.

Williams’ piece can be heard online. Just visit the ABC website.

The texts inspiring the music can be found below. These poems originally appeared in Southerly, Slope and a chapbook published by Slow Joe Crow press.

Scheherezade Singing

The Romantics stole it from me, that game
of eluding the cadence, the Wagnerian
flick of the wrist. I knew how to delay it,
to taunt them, centuries before. Legends
of my performance still circulate,
but no notation does it justice. No-one
could get down that swing between the spoken
and the sprechgesang—but even so,
memories short as they are, no diva
mesmerised like me until the days
of celluloid. Now with a pouting kiss
at the camera, that extra inch of leg,
each five-minute starlet for a moment
eclipses all the histories. But none share
the dolce or doloroso of my voice:
they cannot match the intricate weaving
of my tales. And none evade that fatal
chop—none so skilfully as I.

Scheherezade’s Nights

You asked for my secrets? Well,
here they are. I’m fattening you up
on my vernacular of lies,
and you take to it greedily,
like a cat taking a crack at
the skimmings. You absorb my gab
as if nothing was ever interesting before.
You plunder my tongue for its stories.
From nightfall to dawning
these stories are my life, my hold
on you, and I am culling experience
from my jittery bones, burying it deep
in your breathing stone, the depth of you
lover, my rash executioner.

Scheherazade Dancing

Footsteps, light and heavy both,
footsteps full of slang,
or footsteps
showing off a noble leaning, these at least
are fleeting, something unrecordable.
It is the dancing that uncovers a woman,
the rhythm that inexplicably pulls back
all the brocade
& nylons, words their pens
mock up to mask her. There is safety
in this artifice, where there is none
in the heat and nakedness of dancing:
my heels pound, insistent,
as we quick-step
about the room. Though you choreograph
the day-by-day, my tale, you know
you cannot lead this turn—
it is the dance
(the music is its own story) makes me
burn, it is the rhythm
makes me unaccountable.

Melinda and Melinda

I’m a Woody Allen fan. By this I mean that I’ve seen most of his films: from the serious Interiors to the just plain silly “Love and Death”, from the beautiful “Manhatten” to the edgier “Husbands and Wives”, from the science fiction outing “Sleeper” to the musical “Everyone Says I Love You” (this last the source of one of my favourite ludicrous Woody Allen moments, with Alan Alda describing a scene as “like Noel Coward—with hockey”). I’ve missed the last few, but though they’ve only had lukewarm reviews, I still intend to see them: even the lesser Woody Allen films have plenty of moments I enjoy. So, I decided to make the effort to get out to see “Melinda and Melinda” in the cinema, especially since so much of the hype for the film beforehand touted it as Allen’s “return to form”.
Let’s get it out there straight away: this is not another “Manhatten”. It’s more of the calibre of “Manhatten Murder Mystery”: light, fun, a little out of touch (Allen’s interiors and characters get more refined, and, of course, highbrow as his films go on.) At the beginning of “Broadway Danny Rose” a group of comedians sit around and tell stories. At the beginning of “Melinda and Melinda” successful playwrights enjoy dinner together while debating the relationship between comedy and tragedy. This device, introducing the two storylines, has been criticised: probably more for what it is not than for what’s there. It’s a pity: yes, the actors (including Woody Allen stalwart Wallace Shawn) represent a milieu that is all but outdated, but the debate is a old one: and it is not a question of which eventually prevails that is the most interesting, but the close relationship between these.

So it is, this group of jovial diners discuss a story that they’ve heard the barebones of recently, and one playwright casts the facts as tragedy, the other as comedy. Melinda, played by Melbourne’s own Radha Mitchell, is the only cast member appearing in both versions of the story.

The truth is, Allen doesn’t do a lot with the material. Yes, at times the tragic version of the story is funnier than the comedic; yes, the facts can be renarrated in either style; but the truth is that largely the two stories are quite separate in spite of the signposts that crop up in both stories. The main effect of this twice-told story is that the film seems a little too long, but by and large it is an enjoyable exercise: not for drawing any grand conclusions, but because it is interesting to see how the same material is reworked.

Will Ferrell appears in the comedy half, and Ferrell is the Allen stand-in. This is not painful as it was when Kenneth Branagh took on the same role in 1998’s Celebrity. Ferrell as Hobie manages to make this character his own: yes, you can easily imagine a younger Allen delivering some of his lines, but, in truth, I don’t think Woody Allen ever wrote the part with himself in mind: Ferrell becomes most likeable for the audience when he is being most petulant. He and his wife set up Melinda on a date with, apparently, the ultimate catch: a New York dentist who hikes, drives a swanky car and has a house in the Hamptons. To make it less intimidating, they double: Ferrell, jealous, spends the duration of the date playing up, asking foolish questions, and sulking. I’m not a Will Ferrell fan, but I liked him here.

On the tragedy side, Mitchell is heavier: she doesn’t display the easy come easy go attitude of the comedic Melinda, and her dissatisfaction is mirrored by that of Chloe Sevigny as Laurel.

My main problem with this film is that I was often a step ahead of Allen: perhaps this is why the film felt too long? Cutting it to move a little more quickly, not re-enacting each part of the story as both comedy and tragedy would have helped it a little. But I’m glad I saw it, glad Woody is still capable of engaging me for an afternoon.

Metropolis 2: A Matter of Life and Death

I have to say up front that during the past week my life has been taken over the Metropolis series. Having regretfully missed the first concert to attend the opera (a slight letdown as it turned out) I spent much of the last week talking about Metropolis, attending rehearsals and afternoon teas, having many of the composers generously sponsored by the Cybec Foundation to dinner, and generally launching back into music after a few years away from composition.

This concert, then, comprised of a piece by Elena Kats-Chernin, two world premieres, by composers Tristan Coelho and Nicholas Ng, and the Australian premiere of Schnittke’s Symphony No. 7. As has been the case for the past several years, the Metropolis concerts took place at the Malthouse: both an exciting venue for new music in the inclusiveness and general lack of snobbery fostered by the general admission seating and the mingling afterwards, and also a slightly difficult space: acoustically the Malthouse is very dry.

Kats-Chernin’s work suffered from this dryness: “Cadencces, Deviations and Scarlatti”, she notes, evokes the atmosphere of the fairground. The problem was, even with a very small ensemble, the dissonances didn’t come out sharp: instead it was as though the music thudded along. The first half of the piece didn’t seem particularly successful. Structurally it seemed too boxy: the music wasn’t transforming, instead simply turning to the next arrangement of sounds. As it went on, though, it improved, and the players relationship with the music also seemed to improve.

Tristan Coehlo is twenty-one. Now I’ve met a number of talented young musicians, but only one I believe is capable of pulling off a similarly accomplished composition. “Glass Canvas”, he tells us, is about the relationship between foreground and background sounds. What struck me was how beautifully the music mimics the thought process, how much it drew on the way attention shifts: and what a schizophrenic experience, then, it was to listen to a piece about the very process of listening. In the first half of the program this piece was the most successfully realised: and the players themselves seemed to have a real affinity with the work. This piece was more rewarding for me that some of the big-name Australian composer commissions of recent years: there was no attempt toward the populist or accessible. Instead the piece was written with certain aims, and it achieved those aims. At twenty-one Coehlo is a composer of great sophistication and integrity. I hope this premiere launches a successful career for him.

The third piece of the Australian half of the program was Nicholas Ng’s “Secret of the Golden Flowers: Spirals”. In this piece, Ng attempted to explore his heritage, both in the world of Chinese and Western musical sounds, and the fusion of acoustic and electronic elements. More ambitious than Coehlo’s piece, I feel it was not completely successful—but this is in no way meant to undermine what was achieved.

The first thing that struck me about this piece was that it is the first time for a number of years I’ve heard of any of Australia’s Symphony orchestras undertaking a piece that involved live electronics. If it’s a repertoire piece, such as some of Olivier Messiaen’s works, then they will use the electronic instruments called for, but there is very little work by established artistic bodies that is exploring this area. In this sense, it doesn’t surprise me that Ng’s piece was not completely successful: there has been so little done here that as a composer he could learn from. At the same time, there was so much of interest in the work, and the acoustic elements, spiralling between Western and Chinese musical styles was fascinating in itself. The sound levels of the electronic elements wasn’t always right, but it was a rich experience, and this richness certainly wasn’t lost on the audience, who appeared fascinated by the presence of electro performer Warwick Lynch and his table of gadgets,

The second half of the program consisted entirely of Schnittke’s Symphony no. 7. It seemed shocking to me that this extraordinary piece of music, by one of the twentieth century’s big names, hadn’t been played in Australia before when it was written over ten years ago. Under twenty five minutes in length, it was incredibly compressed, a piece that required more than one hearing. Some beautiful solo work, from the concertmaster and from the double bass in particular, when it finished I admit I was waiting to hear more. This is not through any fault of the music, just that it is not a piece one understands the pace of upon a first listening. I hope this is not the last opportunity I get to hear one of our finest orchestras playing this composer’s work.

The Love of Three Oranges

This Prokofiev opera is an oddity: an oddly hummable 20th century surrealist fairy tale. Well and good. And Opera Australia’s recent production of it was adequate, but hardly exciting: somewhere along the line someone made the decision that this production should emphasise its very staginess: and I think this is where the production went wrong. In a production of good singing of largely unfamiliar music, the viewer wants something to really become involved with: wants to be seduced. But the staginess of this production only brought to the fore the slightly odd dramaturgical construction of the libretto, and the good but unremarkable performances of the cast.

The effect of this staginess (for instance, as the chorus are explicating the hypochondria of the prince, our hero, they are running up and down ladders to see to an gigantic plastic inflatable humanoid… the tackiness doesn’t work: I don’t really think a fairy tale is a piece to be camping up. And if you think a fairy tale is the perfect vehicle for camping up, then perhaps you’ll at least allow me to assert—not this fairy tale. It is already so odd a tale that what it needs is to be taken utterly seriously. Besides, as Sontag points out, the best camp is that which wasn’t intended as camp) is that it alienates the audience. No seduction, no real satisfaction—just a mild interest. It is not a production that offends, but neither does it enrapture.

The most successful moments were when the dancers were working—particularly when they appeared as a pack of cards, performing a game between the two supernatural beings in the story, the representatives of good and…mischievous. As these dancers “shuffled” the deck, it was a moment of glorious absorption. There were too few of these moments.

A few years ago Opera Australia put on a beautiful production of Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande” that was almost transcendental. I’m still waiting for another serious and beautiful production of a modern opera to appear at the State Theatre.

Fool For Love

After the performance, my mother turned to me and said “Well, forget MTC.” And I nodded in agreement. I went to see a production of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” at the Trades Hall and was stunned at the difference between seeing it, and seeing a slick, but also rather sterile, Melbourne Theatre Company production. (What was that Kirsten? Subscribe to MTC if “you want to see the stars?”)

There were no stars last night, no Guy Pearce or Mr Wenham to bring in the crowds. Instead there was a thoroughly absorbing piece of theatre. I wasn’t familiar with Sam Shepard’s play beforehand, but walked away with every intention to go borrow an edition of his “Seven Plays” they have in the university library. I have trouble thinking of other plays from the last thirty years that have been accepted as part of the repertoire so readily: because I’d heard of “Fool For Love” many times, just never seen it. And as much as the situation of the play was of course contrived (a motel room in the Mojave Desert, a man arrives, having driven thousands of miles to find his longtime lover, and the violence of emotion that ensues)—the play was perfectly crafted: as if, given this setup, there was no internal contrivance. And old man in a rocking chair sits at the side of the room, not really there, yet speaking to both Eddie and May, his relationship to them becoming clear as time goes on. When he began speaking I never felt the need for him to have a personal role in their lives, I was happy for him to be an outsiders voice, egging them on, calming them down. Yet as the play unfolded, there was an “ah!” as his character took his place in the story. I feel a fool for not having discovered Shepard earlier: but I won’t let long lapse before I dive into his other works.

The production design was note-perfect. The faded painting on the wall, the old metal bed, the baggy denim skirt May started the play in, the cheap suitcase under the bed—cheap, but not “retro”. The set was small—sitting in the front row, May undressed less than a metre in front of me. The intimacy of the space added to the feeling of absorption: this claustrophobic story unfolding was inescapable. There was no room for space between the actors and the audience.

The performances were strong. I was a little distracted by Joe Clement’s Eddie at times: his walk was peculiar, and I couldn’t figure out if this was a trait of the character of the actor. I mentioned this afterwards, and my mother said it had made her wonder, and then she thought that if he had spent that long driving a truck, he probably would have a peculiar posture. But somehow it struck an awkward note with me, which made me take a little longer to accept Eddie than to accept May. By the time the Old Man and Martin became involved the play was in motion, and they hit their stride immediately.

Karen Day in as May was, in particular, extraordinary: facing Eddie, telling him that she’d always either loved him or not loved him, and that now she didn’t love him—there was something electric in her as she became May, as she tried to escape from the pattern of her life.

Three Dollars

After seeing this film, I couldn’t help remembering a scene in the television series My So-Called Life: Angela sitting at the dinner table with her family, talking about her substitute English teacher Vic Racine, and suddenly her outburst—“An adult I can look up to. Finally.” My initial response after seeing this film?—“It’s so nice to see a film actually for adults.” By this I mean that it hasn’t earned a particular rating for its gratuitous sex&violence™ but instead is adult in that it deals with adult life: the struggle to keep certain ideals and make in some small way a success of life. At last!

There’s a lot of talk about what’s wrong with the Australian film industry. I would never have believed that Rob Conelly, the man behind the real turkey of a film The Bank (good fun, yes, but oh so contrived and throwaway) could then come back with such a lovely, sophisticated film. SO lovely and sophisticated that I feel reluctant to use the word sophisticated in case you think of the shallow, chardonnay sipping take on sophistication that is so often the case. And, by the way, in all the enumerations of the sins and downfalls of the Australian film industry, I would like to say that one thing we’ve got oh so right is the ever-present David Wenham. His turn here is no exception. (It has actually contributed substantially to my newfound ambition to hug Mr Wenham before I die…)

The film’s structure is a little more fragmented than that of the book of the same title on which it is based, Elliot Perlman’s zeitgeist moment of 1998. I think this works in the films favour—it is making the connections between the narratives of the periods each nine-and-a-half-years in a more organic way, skipping between these narratives with signposts such as hairstyle and soundtrack to let us know: we’re no longer in the present. But how did they change David Wenham’s and Frances O’Conner’s hairstyles and not play it for laughs? (Perhaps 10 years of Friends has taken its toll on the modern viewer: you view a flashback with a different hairstyle, and expect to hear a laughing track.) It’s just another visual device. So the structure is fragmented, skipping between these narratives, and it works beautifully. Wenham and O’Conner shine, as does the actress…playing their daughter. She is so very cute, so very beautiful, that you worry she’ll fall into that painful category of cute children, and yet she escapes this trite fate too—the moments when she does seem to be over-performing you suddenly realise that this very over-performing is in character, and beautifully judged.

What is wrong with the film? Well, it is too long. There is something a bit far-fetched about the story, but it’s meant to be both far-fetched and within the realm of possibility. I think it mostly succeeds here. Strangely for a film making references to Ian Curtis and Joy Division so regularly, the sound design and scoring didn’t make much impact.

But there is so much else here to discover. I’m not an admirer of the previous Rob Conelly/David Wenham collaboration: I found The Bank to be trite, badly scripted, clunky. Here, at times I responded more to the film than to the book—a rare occurrence to me. I found reading the book, there were moments Perlman seemed to be beating his audience over the head with the message: things cannot continue as they are. It’s a powerful enough message that I think we get it simply as witnesses to the Eddie and Tanya’s life.

What works beautifully is Melbourne: for one thing, the cinematographers have made a virtue of Melbourne’s plainnesses. There’s no attempt to pretty up the city: if anything, the framing of shots is a little too centred and—dare I say it—at times a little dull. Despite this, Melbourne shines through in grey light as well as golden, in the laneways as well as the thoroughfares. Another thing that works beautifully is the clutter: for instance, in their kitchen Eddie and Tanya have not one but two mortar and pestles. One of these is stone, the other wood. Anyone who really uses their mortar and pestle will realise that a wooden one just won’t do the trick. Yet I can imagine buying or being given a wooden one before I realised its uselessness, and then putting it on a shelf just above the really useful shelves. This discussion of the kitchen utensils is simply a long-winded way of saying that looking at Eddie and Tanya’s home, I felt that I had lived there—or if not me, then one my friends. Watching the film, though 15 years younger than the characters portrayed, I recognised my life, recognised my own rebelliousness and imperiousness giving way to the bourgeois attachment to things, to comforts, the details.

A few years ago there was a great tumult about Lantana. I saw it, and enjoyed it immensely—but in that tangle of interconnectedness, I found that every so often the film stepped over some invisible line, no longer felt natural. While coming close to that line on occasion, toeing it, thinking about taking a small skip over it, I don’t think Three Dollars crosses it. And so it is that I say, at last! A film for adults.

Broadcast News

I wasn’t sure whether this film would be badly dated, and was pleased to find many things in it still work—most especially the scenes behind-the-scenes, putting the news together. The sequence where Hurt’s Tom G gets his moment with a major story, and Holly Hunter’s Jane talks him through it is terrific, and the film is enjoyable, but there are times when the script and direction seem a little heavy handed. Talking about ethics in media, the reporters talk about what they would or wouldn’t do—the answers are perhaps designed to shock, but the questions seem pretty tame. “Would you tell a source you loved them?” Absolutely they all answer. Would a genuine source believe them? That’s what I’d like to know more.

The problem with this movie now is partly that the ethical questions seem almost quaint, and partly that the hairstyles are so bad. Okay—that’s being too flippant. But at the same time, it falls into a period in American movies that seems somehow hard to take seriously. It falls mid to late eighties, just after the emergence of teen movies as a law unto themselves, and in a period when Spielberg was still the name of cinemas golden boy. (Tell me truthfully, do people still get excited when Spielberg’s name is attached to a project.) Broadcast News is the product of James L Brooks: I haven’t seen his “critically acclaimed” Terms of Endearment—I’ve been avoiding the task. So maybe next week I’ll sit down and eat my words, in an attempt at revisionism. The truth is, I feel this could have been a more interesting journalistic movie, the way “Welcome to Sarajevo” was interesting. Instead you get a bit of the pace of a producing the news from time to time, and stabs at a complex relationship between the three leads who are stuck in a love triangle: the good reporter loves the girl, and she in turn is horrified to find that she loved the handsome anchorman who doesn’t know the background to the stories he’s presenting.

I think the movie has trouble making up its mind what we’re meant to think of these characters—that should be a good thing, right? Complicated, fleshed out, flawed people. But they’re not that. You plainly aren’t meant to dislike any of them, even when they’re in conflict with each other. Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks are a little too idealistic: they’ve got to throw out the rose coloured glasses. William Hurt is self-effacing, and though he’s a faker, though he ultimately talks about the news and the news broadcaster as commodities to be sold, he’s genuine in faking it. And you can tell he’s going to succeed, because he’s so damn palatable—he doesn’t have that aroma of elitism that surrounds the other two.

I think the reason I’m in two minds about this film is that I enjoyed it, and was willing to co-operate with its moments of shallowness until the entirely unnecessary, and—I think—badly judged “seven years later” roundup at the end. Somehow sexual politics had fairly successfully been left out of the thing until then—impressive in a film ultimately about sex and about politics. Joan Cusack, ever there to provide a light moment, earlier says to Jane “you’re my idol, in everything but your personal life.” And smack, it gets driven home. It was a pity to suddenly find a bad taste in the mouth over a film I’d had a decent showing of goodwill towards only moments before. I don’t think I can even blame it on Hollywood—maybe I’m giving that town more credit that it deserved with the benefit of another 15 years having passed, but frankly I feel that Hollywood was ready for a better ending. So instead I just ask—why?

The Sting

The Sting

The Sting has a lovely surface: and there’s nothing wrong with a film that is mostly surface if that’s where the charm lies. We have Johnny Hooker, a loveable 1930s grifter who knows in advance that if any real luck ever comes his way, he’ll simply throw it out in the same easy going way he takes the back luck in his stride. After he pulls a job with his grifter partner, he shows us this up front: laying hands on three thousand dollars he lays it all out in a single bet—and loses. This misfortune earns a simple shrug of the shoulders. The problem is that he and his partner Luther ripped off the wrong man: they indirectly ripped off one of the bosses, a man not willing to let this mistake go unpunished. Next thing we know, after having told Johnny he’s pulling out of the game and giving him the word on a guy who’ll help him break into the big con, Luther pays the price for ripping off the wrong man, and Hooker, moving quickly and in the process making enemies with a crooked cop by handing over counterfeit money for a bribe, shakes hands on a new caper, with Paul Newman’s Henry G.

George Roy Hill of course had directed these two in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with the same kind of winning style. It seems the combination of these three working together is as winning as they tell us Julia Roberts’s grin is also winning. This isn’t a film meant to push the envelope: it’s a crowd pleaser, and it works, though as is the case with films that work as surface pieces, as style over substance, it’s a film you can watch once and then tick off—yes, immensely enjoyable, seen it.

Its soundtrack is famous—it brought the ragtime music of Scott Joplin back into vogue. Yet the music for me works against the film: ragtime had gone out of favour by the 20s and yet here it is in the 1930s. Everything about the design seems a little too clean cut and overly nostalgic: Redford is the famous pretty boy, and he never looks the slightest bit mussed when he’s dodging bullets, or puffed as he outruns the many men on his tail. The sets look theatrical: finding Henry, he walks through a building with fire engine red doors and details, and a merry-go-round presumably in storage. The cheerful décor works in the same way as the music, or Redford’s improbably pretty face: they romanticise and muddy the era. Redford never looks like he’s playing any era but now: somehow his costumes never lose their status as costume. I’ve heard Redford is so vain he insists on approving his own lighting, a la Marlene Dietrich. This is all very well—but its hard to imagine him getting his teeth into anything. As the Great Gatsby, as the Sundance Kid, as the Natural—and here as Johnny Hooker—its always hard to forget its Robert Redford playing another ultimately loveable guy. Sure he’s playing a crook—but he’s only ripping off people who deserve it: the crooks and murderers. The big bosses who won’t let the little guy make a living. He’s heroic, and you can’t forget it. The most interesting moments in his performances are the moments when you think there is something murkier going on inside his character—like here you’re meant to think he’s going to double cross his partner. Somehow you can never quite believe it though. He’s gotta be loved. And with that face I doubt he’s often been sorely disappointed.

Paul Newman is an actor that continues to surprise me by making me like him. I admit that I can’t resist Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and have been known to hang up from conversation when Paul Newman is about to fall over again. But outside of that role, I hadn’t seen him in much and didn’t expect to enjoy him—and Paul Newman with a moustache? Well, call me shallow, but not my cup of tea. But I like his flair for comedy, and the way Redford and Newman play off each other. The moments when they’re putting each other on are great. Newman shuffling cards as he’s about to go into the big poker game that’ll set the ball rolling loses control of the cards. The knowing exchange of glances between the two leads sums up all the reasons why the pairing works. It’s friendly humour, and we’re in on the joke.

What the Sting is is great popcorn cinema. Once you get into the caper, the slight falseness, the theatricality of sets and costume, suddenly don’t matter—they’re pulling a job, and suddenly the theatre fits: because now everyone is playing a character, playing a part. Instead of wearing street clothes that seem too spick and span, Redford appears in a tuxedo that the audience know is a put on, and it works. The good guys do their job and the bad guys know what’s going on. The good guys always remain that step in front, and keep running. Still, for all its charm it seems to have come along at a lucky moment: some of the important 70s cinema had come along, but the new blockbusters were still on the way. The following year Chinatown lost out to The Godfather Part II on the Best Picture Oscar in what was a much more hard-hitting view of the 1930s, and one that lingers on more completely in the memory. This is old school, and it does it well.

Lately

I’ve been putting a little more effort into answering the question “What did you think.” Into understanding the types of comparisons which may be useful in assessing the “worth” of a piece of art, whatever kind. After all, my life is dominated by the stuff, and recently I’ve yet again resolved to attempt to become more involved with the arts in Melbourne. What does this involve? Well, it involves seeing more plays – two weeks ago I sat down to a production of Chekhov’s "Three Sisters" by the VCA School of Drama company. I was initially inspired to attend as I knew the director, and, though I hadn’t seen or spoken to her for a few years, I was keen to support any projects Kirsten may be involved in. A few years ago I asked her if I should subscribe to the Melbourne Theatre Company the following year. Her answer? – “If you want to see the stars.” This year I bought, on behalf of my father, an MTC membership for my mother’s Christmas present. As a result I was taken to the first two plays of the year, feeling rather pleased to be getting this treatment, to find myself—underwhelmed. Enjoyable nights out, and as my mother often comments it’s good to see what’s “going on”—but the first play was overlong and predictable, the second was a “classic” given a boring production. Sure, it had David Wenham in it, and we all know I want to hug him—but I was more interested in my own proximity to the man than I was in the production.
So it was a beautiful surprise to find I was so engaged and inspired by the Chekhov production directed by Kirsten von Bibra—from a stunning white set (beautiful both for its visually striking nature, and for the symbolic touches added, such as flowers facing the same direction, and then later the flower heads falling off, to suggest the passing of time. I was worried how I would find a young Australian cast (they seemed so very young) in a century old Russian play about ideas and ideals… and they worked. They were beautiful.

So, lately I’ve decided to venture out more. I’m not much of one for staying out on the town, and in truth I’m an unpractised reviewer. But here I am again, with operas, theatre, art exhibitions, concerts, readings in my diary. There are movies to see and books to explore, and ideas to jot down.