ABR Arts
The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble. ... (read more)
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco often darkly depicts the complex dynamics within dysfunctional families. That one of the protagonists in his latest film, Memory, has early onset dementia is by no means a red flag that this will be a hackneyed disease-of-the-week movie. Dementia has been a common theme in many recent films (Still Alice [2014] and The Father [2020] being good examples), sometimes to potent effect, though audiences’ resistance to the well-worn subject may be understandable. ... (read more)
Stepping into the NGV’s Cats & Dogs exhibition at Federation Square, visitors must make a decision. Before them are two arrows directing their path ahead. To the left, a path to dogs; to the right, cats. Immediately, the age-old question is invoked, typically reserved for when the conversation has washed up on first dates: are you a dog or cat person? ... (read more)
Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in this Spinning Plates production at fortyfivedownstairs, opens on a sombre wasteland setting, bathed in eerie yellow light. In a sudden blaze of colour, a raucous rabble of ordinary characters, rendered extraordinary by Dann Barber’s bold and anarchic costumes, invades the stage. The energy is starkly at odds with Jacob Battista and Dann Barber’s superbly contained and claustrophobic staging. From this heightened theatrical world – part pantomime, part circus – we brace for a wild ride.
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My favourite Ralph Fiennes performance is in Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005). Fiennes plays a British diplomat stationed in Africa, forced to unravel the conspiracy that led to his wife’s murder. Investigating her death, he comes to know her better than he did when she was alive; it is a backwards love story about honouring legacies we might not fully comprehend. Fiennes’s role as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence in Edward Berger’s new Vatican thriller Conclave plays out in a similar key. ... (read more)
Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
by Peter Tregear •
01 November 2024
This concert was the fourth, and perhaps most immediately relevant, in a series of concerts conceived over the past six years by artist-in-residence Christopher Latham for the Australian War Memorial. As with the Diggers’ Requiem (2018), Vietnam Requiem (2021), and the Prisoners of War Requiem (2022), Latham has created a narrative to accompany a series of musical works intended to make the history it explored ‘more conscious, identified and understood’. ... (read more)
Melbourne International Jazz Festival
Melbourne International Jazz Festival
by Des Cowley •
29 October 2024
This year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival (MIJF) was heavy on Grammy winners and nominees – including Esperanza Spalding, Makoto Ozone, Antonio Sánchez, Brandee Younger, Marcus Miller – a sure sign of the festival’s growing international status and capacity to attract some of the biggest names in jazz. None come bigger than Herbie Hancock, fourteen-time Grammy winner, who returned to MIJF for the first time since 2019, to headline Jazz at the Bowl, alongside bassist Marcus Miller. ... (read more)
The first act set-up of a biopic is almost always laborious. Grandiose voiceover and lines of dialogue are laden with the knowing weight of history; various conflicting images of the subject and their ‘truth’ are forced, often boringly, into narrative harmony. Lee, the feature début from respected cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, [2004]) and long-time passion project of its star, Kate Winslet, is quick to fall prey to these generic obligations. Characters portentously refer to one another by their full names (‘What are you going to do now, Lee Miller?’) and historical turning points are neatly condensed into one-liners (‘We’re getting ready, aren’t we, for the invasion of Europe?’). ... (read more)
Where David Cronenberg’s body horrors of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Videodrome, The Fly, and Crash, were fascinating because of the fusion of technology and the human form, a new wave of genre films is anxiously asking: how much can we tweak and tinker before our bodies start to bite back? Like Theseus’s ship, how much can we swap out before nothing of our true self remains? Cosmetic surgery is booming in the 2020s, promoted via social media and normalised across every age group, so it is no wonder that a new generation of filmmakers have bodily modification on the brain. ... (read more)
Two new and important Australian operas within a month: Gilgamesh (Symons/Garrick) in Sydney in late September, and now Eucalyptus (Mills/Oakes) in Melbourne in mid-October. This certainly hasn’t occurred for quite some time, if ever. Composer Jonathan Mills, mentored at Sydney University by Peter Sculthorpe, is probably best known for two acclaimed operas. ... (read more)