The democracy of age

Have you ever seen a woman for a distance - hell, even a few metres away - and thought "I have no idea how old that woman is"? She's fit, classically dressed and has terrific hair - she could be anywhere from 27 to 48.

Then you get a little closer. The key is in the lips.

Because you can tell a botoxed pair of peckers. A little too taught, looking like lymph and globby fat is about to ooze out the seam between regular face skin and the pink mucous membrane of the lip. A Madame Tussaud's kisser.

And for reasons known only to dermatologists and witches, the lips are the first part of the body to show age. (Actually, the aged appearance is due to lip skin being particularly thin, and not having the usual protection layer of sweat and body oils which keep skin smooth. Thanks Wikipedia. Wink.)

Simply put, the lips don't lie. You can't dress them up in black cashmere or crust them in foundation. Like rings on a tree trunk, the wrinkles on the lips give the game away. And if you think you can beat the system, the only remedy - botox - is so glaringly obvious you may as well wear a spangly tracksuit and a bum bag.

Embrace the age, people. Love the lip wrinkles.

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When Geeks Go...Geekier

I'm lucky enough to see previews of films from time to time with the premise of reviewing them. The films generally aren't the studio cash cows, but a surprising number of times I see an out-of-the-way release that is genuinely extraordinary. Fanboys - the ode to ritualised Star Wars obsession - is not one of those films.

It is reasonably entertaining, but I haven't quite resolved the contradiction that a film celebrating the appropriation of Hollywood by the suburban masses could be so, well, Hollywood. It is a classic teen road movie superimposed with a particular kind of nerdiness, where the Holy Grail isn't a tumble in the back of a van with a high school fantasy girl but a sneak peek at the new Star Wars instalment.
If you're a fan, you'll love it. If not, you'll be entertained but be left feeling a bit uncomfortable with how the filmmakers managed to feed their hard-won obsession straight back into the machine.

Anyway, the screening was noteworthy not for the film but the company in the cinema. There were two guys behind me when I arrived - not reviewers but possibly bloggers - both in Star Wars T-Shirts with one sporting a Lucasfilms bomber jacket and the other a long black trench coat.

They were talking about the new Star Trek film - the revamped, youthful, effects-laiden, sexy new Star Trek film - and one guy said to the other:

Its like they took all the nerdy stuff about the original series, put it in a separate folder and pressed CTL, ALT, DEL.

I was paralysed. Gobsmacked. The layers of irony were more than my puny little man could handle. More than the filmmakers of Fanboys could ever have pulled together.

It was, quite simply, the most awesome moment of my cinema-going life.

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Grizzly Air

I’m not great with flying. The vast improbability that thousands of tonnes of metal and people won’t fall out of the sky always plays on my mind. But when the alternative is eleven hours sweating it out in a jalopy on the Hume, I can suspend my disbelief. Especially for the bargain price equivalent to two tanks of fuel.

What I find less easy to resolve myself to is why budget airline seats have a recline function. This isn’t long haul, deep vein thrombosis territory – this is a morning jaunt up the east coast in time for a breakfast meeting.

No one needs to sleep. No one needs to recline. There aren’t any gold-leaf clad virgins coming to feed anyone peeled grapes.

The fact is that on a standard domestic flight I have between ten and fifteen centimetres space between my knees and the seat in front. With the seat in front reclined the space disappears. I can’t wriggle forward. I smell the Rogain on the guy in front’s bald spot. I have to suck in my gut to get the tray table down. And I’m not even particularly large. It. Is. Ridiculous.

I just can’t understand how the market research geniuses paid six figure sums to lure passengers haven’t figured out that the small factor of comfort afforded the asshole that reclines the whole flight is infinitely negated by the frustration of passengers pinned to their pleather seats like unwitting UFC warm-up acts.

Or maybe the responsibility is less on the airline and more on the individual who places their own luxury above others’ comfort. People who might well hold the door open for an elderly shopper at the department store will crush a fellow flyer on the Melbourne to Brisbane without so much as a thought. For some reason the air is sanctified space. It’s like flying is still such a novelty, such an unlikely way to casually travel, that passengers have an entitlement complex reserved for the privileged few.

Whatever people. It is time to herald change. Enough of the Me First culture of the air. For the price we’re paying there isn’t much space. We all have to manage.

Suck it up and keep it upright.

Thankyou for flying.

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I finally realised why I hate Napoleon Dynamite so much...

How many super-cool kids did you see wearing 'Vote For Pedro' t-shirts in the early noughties? Behind the velvet rope at every nightclub sidewalk line on a Saturday night, among every clutch of faux-hawked and bleck-tipped lads at least one deliberately-distressed tee emblazoned with the Napoleon D reference. If you listened in carefully to those trendy kids, over the course of the night you might have even picked up the odd "GOSH!" among the homophobia and expletives.

Napoleon Dynamite made nerdy cool. It crossed cultural and sub-cultural divides, and had everyone cheering for the hopelessly daggy. And along the way, while the kids were laughing and rooting for Napoleon, nerdy got appropriated by cool. It isn't bona fide nerdiness, but that doesn't seem to matter when t-shirt sales are at stake.

And I'm not ok with it. I'm very fucking un-ok with it. Nerdy isn't cool - nerdy is the antithesis of cool. The existence of nerdy defines cool. Geeky might be able to straddle the gulf of cultural improbability into cool, but nerdy is and forever will be outside of cool. Those punks in their nightclub lines have no right to nerdy. Even the vasaline-lensed, quaint and redemptive kind of nerdy that 'Vote For Pedro' symbolises.

Cool kids get everything else. They're not allowed to have nerdy too. Not on my watch.

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Growing old gracefully...

How many gazelles die of natural causes?

Has there ever, in the history of the wild plains of Africa, been a gangly old leaper who met its ultimate demise through old age (which apparently is something like oxidization poisoning enough cells that the whole system just gives up)?

Probably how they get their reputation as being graceful - they never get all geriatric and farty and crooked and slow.

They just get eat'n.

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Super Amazing Vocabulary Time!

SUPER AMAZING REAL WORD: Fecundity.
I've seen this word written and heard it used a bunch of times. Maybe at some stage I figured out what it means by the context in which it was used. I hear it now and still think of the bulkheads of tankers, or the rusty iron filings in a jar. The correct usage however would be to describe the fruitfulness of something or the high level fertility of animal or vegetable (not so much mineral).
In a sentence; "The fecundity of the Belgian countryside goes some way to redeeming the barren cultural landscape."

I-CAN'T-BELIEVE-ITS-A-REAL-WORD WORD: Ironical.
Apparently, it means EXACTLY the same thing as 'ironic'. And it sounds stupid.

NOT, IN FACT, A WORD: Alcopop.
You can't just pick two words, put them together to describe something new, and then talk about the new thing in parliament with a straight face. You just can't.

Words are cool. Tell your friends.

One HD - Best. Station. Ever.

When one is a creature of leisure (as is your good author at present), one must be careful to avoid saturation in the inane drivel of daytime television. Cliff-like cheekbones and brick jawlines can only distract anyone for so long from the stupefying abortion of the senses that is the procession of Soaps and Talk Shows.

With all due respect to Ellen (who acquits herself with wry humour and admirable understatement considering the hoards of screaming banshees populating her audience), every time I manage to extricates myself from the vortex of daytime programming, I come away at least 9% dumber. Yet somehow, just when I thought I was out (of this terrible and intellectually corrosive habit) they pull me back in.

Well, no more my friends! The merchants of hype and hysteria and celebrity decorating tips can find a new bunny to boil! For I have One HD!

Sport, sport and more glorious sport. Hours upon hours of basketball, football and surfing by which to whittle away the daytime hours. Why, just this morning I was choking back the sick welling in my throat watching Dr Phil crucify some already-beleaguered simpleton when, during a fortuitously placed commercial break, I flicked to the replay of a 2008 ASP world surfing tour event.

The joy! The sanctuary! I could marvel at the skill and camaraderie of elite athletes sunning themselves in the South of France instead of peeling myself away from revelry in the desperation of a blinkered world.

Sure, I could read a book. I could sort out my tax. But some days are consolidation days. Getting back on top of life, mentally and physically. Now on such days I have an option for mindless entertainment that won't surreptitiously leech my moral and intellectual fibre.

Thank you One HD. Thank you for the time we will spend together.

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Do YOU know the Muffin Man?

I don’t. Not any more. He’s dead to me.

I’m not sure when it happened, but it happened in my lifetime. The humble muffin is an endangered species.

I don’t mean the flat, yeasty, fork split panacea of English afternoons. I’m talking the deliciously portable baked treat of the wholemeal or cornmeal or branmeal with chunks of fruit and nuts and bits of foliage – has become nothing more than a glorified teacake. A bland, dry, processed sugar laden, crusty-topped teacake.

If I wanted teacake, I’d grab it from the Tasteless Shit fridge. A few strategically placed blueberries or a smear of tinned apple doesn’t magically transmogrify sugary bread into the innate awesomeness of true muffin-ness. Lipstick on a pig people, lipstick on a pig.

So, all you purveyors of baked goods. No more sneakily funneling the left over cake mix into muffin tins! The people on the street know the difference!

We’re onto it!

WE’RE MAD AS HELL AND WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!

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Holiday. Celebrate.

I bluster and I huff and I puff and I practice my sardonic glare, and most of the time I have a handle on the world enough to have a point, I think. The world – this life – is ridiculous and arbitrary and comical and fierce, and going in with eyes open is the best buffer. And when the status quo of our immediate world is held, we can carry away to thinking awareness is a defence.
But the universe has a habit of spotting the sprig of hubris.

The universe loves to wield an axe.

I am supposed to be overseas right now, adding the final glaze of tan in the kiln of a Pacific island. It was to be a four week reward to myself for having busted my ass for ten months running a business – a business that in so many ways I loved but that killed my creative urge and netted me substantially less of a salary than I had managing a video store a few years back. It was a reward to myself for having the courage to let go of security and pursue my dream to write. I was thumbing my nose at the financial doom and gloom because I had a higher calling. I’d made enough false starts – now was the time for me to make a fist of the freelance life. The Pacific jaunt was symbolic of that resolve.

I’m fundamentally a disorganised person, but with the departure date looming I was more shambolic than usual. I had failed to make so many of the necessary preparations for an overseas trip. The big things were taken care of – I sent in my passport application with plenty of time, and got injected with a handful of arm-numbing vaccines against unspeakable diseases. But I hadn’t booked any accommodation let alone done any research on the place, didn’t have a backpack, and had nothing resembling an itinerary. I hadn’t even finalised who would look after my cat two days before I was due to leave.

I wasn’t ready for this trip. And, it slowly dawned on me, I wasn’t looking forward to this trip. Even to an island paradise, travelling on your own is hard work. It takes gumption and a certain optimistic, cavalier approach. I was feeling more anxious than cavalier. I didn’t want to go.

Then my passport didn’t come through. For no apparent reason the passport office fucked up my application and it hadn’t turned up a fortnight after it was due. I called to track it down and wasn’t given any explanation, just excuses. Sometimes it happens. There are no guarantees. The dog ate it. You can’t hurry it up. You can’t come and get it. Sorry. So despite the fact that 99% of the population get their passports within the time specified, due to powers beyond apparently anyone’s control my passport would not arrive until the week after I was due to fly out. I was their monkey of the month. Since the tickets were a bargain-basement once-ever-special deal I couldn’t change the booking or get a refund. I couldn’t go on holiday.

Relief swept over me like locusts on a wheat field. I was surprised at the release I felt. I had been pressuring myself so much to let go of my uncertain future and have fun no matter what.
I wasn’t anxious about travelling on my own overseas, but the trip had come to represent the line in the sand between my old life and new, and I wasn’t ready for that definitive break. I was – and am – terrified of the next stage of my life, the one where I grind away at a future that will probably never pay off, ending in poverty, depression and in all likelihood my own prostitution. The trip became symbolic, a initially supposed to be a celebration of the decision to move on and a reward for being brave enough to make it. Time will tell, but I know myself and the uncertainty over my future would’ve made the kava especially cheek sucking.

Of course I might have been anguishing over nothing. My future might be brighter than I could dared to have dreamed. Perhaps I would have touched down in Tonga and felt the weight of the world slip seamlessly off my shoulders, revelling in the local hospitality and the tranquil pace of island life. In hindsight the trip away might have been the best thing that could possibly happen to me.

Still, holidays shouldn’t be so hard, particularly before they even start. It does seem like poetic justice that while I was busy turning a relaxing holiday into a metaphor for the worst case scenario for my future, forces outside my control were conspiring to take the option away from me anyway.

Update: Crazy geological tectonic shenanigans in the Tongan archipelago – earthquakes triggering deep sea volcano eruptions sending fierce plumes of smoke and ash into the air, according to some reports totally blocking out direct sunlight across the whole chain of islands. I take it all back universe. Sometimes you know best…

My Friendz Got Mad Skillz

My friend Sam made a velociraptor. A real big one. Like, three metres tall and a thousand billion metres long. From plywood. He cut it with a laser. This is so many kinds of awesome to my grown up self, it is unspeakable the level of awesome my child self fells about it all.

The piece was part of an exhibition/collaboration of painfully hip fashion types and artists and creating people, and was a beacon of playfulness shining brightly in an ocean of cool and shimmer. The velociraptor was awesomeness in relief.

I'm pretty sure Sam wanted to create something that was visually and spatially striking, provided we were struck to remember the joy of discovery and the excitement and wonder of childhood. Or he just likes velociraptors heaps.

And you know what - even if his only motivation for spending 60+ hours cutting and sanding and slotting together a three metre tall plywood velociraptor is his irrational love of wooden dinosaur toys, I still love it. As an object and as bona fide art. Because altogether too often art gets self important and terminally earnest, and everyone forgets how fundamentally awesome velociraptors are.

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The Social Conscience Episode

I’ve been thinking for a while that this web log feels a bit – how should I put it? – grumpy? Negative? Bashing this, complaining about that, sardonically humiliating the other thing is entertaining – and enormously cathartic, believe me – but saltandcarbon has been in existence for long enough that the time has come to give back to the community.

I’m not one for grand gestures (a la gala ball), or jumping on the bandwagon for organized community wide initiatives (although Movember warms the cockles of my usually-stone-cold-heart every time).

Instead I’m going in to bat for a condition that affects hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians every year – a secret killer, a little addressed scourge in desperate need of a higher profile.

Make no mistake; this blog post is just the start of my campaign. Posters, advertisements in print and radio, T-shirts and door knocking, I plan on going all out to give back to the society I love and treasure.

But let me get to some statistics:
An estimated public health bill (primarily from psychiatric care) in the billions.
86% of Australians suffering related trauma before the age of 16.
Profiteering pirates raking in over 6.5 million dollars a year.

The list goes on.

White Linen Pants must be stopped.

The vision of flesh coloured underwear vainly trying to remain inconspicuous under the translucent billowing of tailored white linen is enough to induce stroke. Desperation to make the horror stop induces suicidal tendencies in the most balanced and affable individuals. Liberace is veritably demure when compared to the eyesore – nay, violent offence – that is the WLP.

But there is a cure. Simple and, unbelievably, free. All we need as a society to banish this affliction to the curios of history is a collective, concerted effort. I urge everyone to join me in saving aesthetic decency and avoiding any more unnecessary spontaneous hemorrhaging.

Every time you witness the WLP, follow these four safe, simple steps.

1. Stop dead.

2. Point dramatically with one hand, cover the mouth in an expression of repulsion with the other.

3. Hold.

4. Keep holding – be strong – until the offending WLP clad creature has scurried back to whence they came.

Together, we CAN make a difference.
…………………………………………

Would the real Mr Eastwood please stand up?

How much could I reasonably expect from Clint Eastwood?

His directorial debut, Play Misty For Me, featured compelling performances and hideous hair, and ground down to a predictable snoozefest before half of the hundred minutes were up.

His iconic Dirty Harry performances have dated appallingly - in no small part because their rampant chauvinism is now not even ironic.

Of course his wry humour, humanist touch and political conscience give his work as a director relevance beyond the quality of each film. Nonetheless his back catalogue is liberally littered with overly earnest misfires (Blood Work, the second half of Million Dollar Baby), genre clangers (The Rookie, Firefox) and out-and-out head scratchers (Space Cowboys).

Still, he has earned his reputation as a director always worth watching and deserves the benefit of the doubt with projects that seem fraught.

Which is why I was disappointed with Gran Torino. As a film, its...fine. The wonderful acting evens out the implausibility of the story, the excellent cinematography disguises the issues in pacing, the satisfying ending halfway substitutes for real empathy while the thematic intent covers most of the distance left. The problem is that every positive of craft is undermined by a negative of storytelling - in the end everything evens out so that it becomes eminently forgettable. I'd just come to expect more from Clint. More of a visceral experience. More of an emotional kick in the guts.

Maybe because this is his last film as an actor, he was too focused on going out with the same snarl as he started with. He's earned that right I suppose. It just doesn't make for a very complex film experience.

Homework

1. Compile a playlist of the songs most under your skin at the moment. Forget cool or hip - only the ones that really do something to your mitochondria.

2. Burn CD.

3. Label with an adjective.

4. Drop in a letterbox at random.

5. Wonder. Enjoy the wonder.

[Not new, but lovely.]

So You Think You Can Beyonce?

So, I'm pretty late on this. Like most things bling and/or popular culture. But after much urging from fashion-ally knowledgeable and hip-ly pulse taking friends, I tracked down the film clip to Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) by Beyonce on the interwebs.


It is. Mind. Boggling.


Not mind blowing - the dancing is phenomenal and the design impressive, but not totally out of the projections of mental possibility for a film clip. But what those three posterior-centric dancing girls are actually doing, as in the meaning of their bumping and grinding, makes the mind truly boggle. It borders on porno mime. Think about that. Miming pornography. What's the point? Are they trying to tell a story? Sexless titillation? Liturgical dance in the church of booty? I have no friggin idea.


In any case it was absolutely magnetic. And I felt like I needed to apologise to some women in my life afterwards. Any women. For no particular reason. Like I said, mind boggling.

Postscript: Apparently Beyonce talks with a completely straight face about her stage alter ego Sasha Fierce. Umm...okay. Sasha. Ms Fierce.


Beyonce will refer to a particularly raunchy sequence as Sasha's idea, and credits/blames Sasha for the consumerist blingbling post-feminist parts of her work. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that doesn't make it alright. Although it does make for some fascinating crazy-watch time.

GFC? What GFC?

An astute student of fashion and cool - such as your humble author - will have noticed a recent resurgence in the adornment of lapels and pleats with wooden brooches, matte pins and spangly clips. Retro glamour or cutesy handmade seem to be the favoured poles of this world of adornment. (See how well I've noticed, all by myself? Fingers, pulse. That's all I'm saying.)

Anyways, this renaissance of accessorising - presumably a renaissance from glamorous 50's Hollywood and obnoxious 80's - got me thinking of one of the highlights of my misspent youth. Tony Barber. Ok, not Tony Barber without a context. Specifically Tony Barber excitedly offering the bewildered runners up on Sale of the Century a take-home cardboard version of the game show they just lost, and a commemorative teeny tiny sterling silver pin from Germani Jewellers. A commemorative pin! Of an iconic and retro cool TV show! These pins must be worth an absolute fortune to the fashionistas clamouring to add some detachable pizazz to their outfit. And Sale was a long running show - there were thousands of losers! And thousands of losers means there must be thousands of commemorative pins! Tens of thousands even!

And I, dear readers, will buy them all! I will sell them to a pop-culture-hungry public at hugely inflated prices! And I will thumb my nose at this so-called Global Financial Crisis!

[Cue maniacal laugh] Muah hahahahahahahaha!

Jonesing for some joy

Now, I realise basketball isn't for everyone. God knows given my Jekyll/Hyde affliction I understand the aversion to competitive sport in general. But I implore, nay vehemently urge, every one with a zest for life to have a look at even a single one of the podcasts put together by a trio of Canuck chaps under the moniker The Basketball Jones.

The fact that the name of the show is a reference to a dodgy Cheech and Chong "comedy" record is alone testimony to their awesomeness.

But these guys, five days a week during the eight or nine months of the US NBA season, haul their asses out of bed into the Canadian frost to deliver twenty odd minutes of analysis, mockery and musings on happenings in the league.

How three guys not getting paid to do this can have so much fun is beyond me. Even further beyond me is how much I wish I was doing exactly the same thing. Just downright revelry in what they love.

So check it out. http://www.thebasketballjones.net/

And - as they say on the show - embrace the day, people.

Favourite chitlins

I've heard some word of mouth reviews of Poor Boy, the debut offering for the new fangled Melbourne Theatre Company. (Well, the building at least is new fangled. And how!)

Anyway, one of the repeated criticisms of the show is that while the songs of Tim Finn are pleasant enough on their own, they have been crowbarred into this magical realist tale, and their unsuitability serves only to highlight their beige-ness.

It got me thinking about the senior Finns. Mr and Mrs Finn. New Zealandish Ma and Pa Finn.

I'm not a particular fan of either Split Enz or Crowded House, but I think it's patently obvious to all but the most zealous Tim devotee that Neil (the driving force of Crowded House) is a vastly and consistently more talented songwriter than his bigger bro. I can't shake the feeling that as much as they love both their musician sons equally, the senior Finns have every single Crowded House album on display, but only show the Best of Split Enz. How could they not play favourites a little bit?

Come to think of it Joe and Katherine Jackson probably own all of Michael's catalogue, and most likely Janet's too, but I'd be damn surprised if they ever gave La Toya's solo outing a spin these days...

Oh, the burdens of parenthood.

Did you shear the one about...

Has anyone else wondered if pinking shears are named because of their unnervingly utilitarian design for cutting off little fingers? The serration. The size. The sturdiness.

As an object they nestle right at home in Rold Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, or the Triad in Rising Sun (I think that's the film - Wesley Snipes, right?).

Wikipedia cites the etymology as originating from the serrated edge of the carnation mirroring the blades of these kind of shears often used to cut flowers. Or something. I'm calling bullshit. It's because they cut off pinkies. Messily. Beware the shears...

With friends like these...

"A close friend of the Tomb Raider star says that Ange was furious with Jen's repeated attempts to cosy up to her man Brad."

"Friends are worried the couple might have bitten off more than they can chew with the recent rapid expansion of their family."

"Sources close to the couple confirm that the relationship is on shaky ground."

...These guys definitely need to get some classier friends. Fo real.

In-seamed whimsy

I have only ever owned two suits in my life - one for my year 10 formal and the other for my year 12 formal. Both times I made a mockery of the tailoring profession with how I filled out those patches of cloth.

I had cause to rent a suit once since then, at the beautiful summer wedding of two of my best friends. The beautiful but swelteringly hot wedding of two of my best friends. My squirming through the sweat did no justice to the snappy cut and fancy weave.

For some reason now, for the first time in my life, I want to own a suit. I want an occasion to own a suit. Several occasions to make it worthwhile.

Unfortunately I think I have maybe a three month window between being grown up enough to want a suit and still having any kind of shape to wear one with style. I'd better get cracking. Any ideas appreciated...

Taking it personally

I’m a pretty passionate guy. I get fired up over small injustices, I get carried away with points that don’t matter, and anyone who really knows me is right now choking back indignity at the magnitude of such an understatement. I take things to heart and then stitch it all to my sleeve. I rant. I rave.

Someone close once suggested I could take life about one thousand percent less personally and be just fine, not to mention immeasurably less stressed. I protested that you don’t make friends with salad. A bit obtuse to count as a serious rebuttal, I went on to argue that they were mistaking my cynical realism with taking the world too seriously. Just because I think things by and large don’t work out and the universe is overwhelmingly disappointing doesn’t mean I don’t think it is worth trying for a better world. I lost the argument.

The thing I’m interested in is the inconstant but very real threshold of frustration where playing competitive sport changes from healthy catharsis to compounding anxiety. I love – really LOVE – playing hard on the basketball court. There are few things more satisfying, win or lose, than leaving every skerrick of energy out on the court. Having had a difficult week or personal disappointment can be fuel to channel so much negative energy and transform it into focus and drive and release.

But there is a point, an unknowable point, where the negative energy overwhelms the possibility for transformation. No matter how much I want a game or how hard I play or how determined I am to leave all the other shit at the door, I’ll never play well. I’ll never feel the release. Those games are always bluntly personal. And of course there is an exponential relationship between the possibility of playing well and the possibility of letting go of everything else. Like compound interest in the worst tangible way.Those days I just shouldn’t play, but the promise of relief is so seductive. I just don’t know any way of coming down far enough on those days, to a calm enough headspace that the game will just be a game. I mean, it’s all well and good to WANT to take life one thousand percent less personally. Much harder to do when life is so damn personal…

Review: The Wrestler

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m a fool for a quietly rendered story of existential crisis, human failing, and the arbitrary casualties of life. It just…it hits me. In my heart bone.

So there was every chance I was going to fall for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. For one – as is well documented – Mickey Rourke is a living, breathing, slightly angrier real life manifestation of this kind of tragedy. After being touted in the early 90’s as the saviour of the cinema ‘tough guy’, he spectacularly fell from grace, bang into a wall of drugs, alcoholism, abominable plastic surgery and other acts of disastrous hedonism. He plumbed the depths of personal and cinematic disgrace, until Tarantino and Rodriguez threw him a lifeline by controversially casting him in Sin City. On the back of his bristling, electric performance, Aronofsky fought tooth and nail to have Rourke play Ricky ‘The Ram’ Robinson in The Wrestler. Several financiers spooked and abandoned the project but Aronofsky wouldn’t budge on the casting, meaning the scale of the film was seriously downsized.

Rourke paid back that faith with interest, delivering a muscular, nuanced and utterly compelling performance. Pathos, you ask? In spades. Heaped, fresh spades. He is revelatory and utterly convincing at once, and deserves more than his Oscar nomination. Rourke deserves to hold the statue aloft.

Robert Siegel’s script is deceptively simple – essentially a two hander between lost souls, wonderfully reminiscent of the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront. Evan Rachel Wood makes a stunning turn in a handful of scenes as Ricky’s estranged daughter, but the real revelation – even more so than Rourke – is the usually beige Marisa Tomei delivering a performance of gravity and charm as a single mother stripper striving for a better life.

Ambition and desperate loneliness birth each other as the arbitrary turns in life throw these beautifully tragic characters through the alleys of life. The Wrestler is pessimistic and unapologetically bitter at times, but rarely have I spent such satisfying time in the cinema.

Life doesn’t have to be pretty to be spectacular.

When its been over 40 degree for three days in a row

How great is it when people can't resist commenting "Gee, its hot out there" or a rhetorical "How hot is it?"

Seriously. I'm aware of the heat.

Sheesh...

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Why is everyone so enamoured with the turgid, slight, flawed romance of Slumdog Millionaire? The protagonist is largely inactive, devoid of empathy and seems incapable of anything but a bewildered glare. Satisfying character development is shelved in favour of cheap plays at the heartstrings with scenes of poverty and violence. Of course it is tragic that millions – nearing billions – of people, many of them children, live in abject poverty and squalor. But in a narrative sense, showing flashbacks of a child’s mother beaten to death or his friends deliberately maimed for begging does not actually explain his present day motivations or necessarily create a connection to the character. Bad things have happened but the guy is still a motivation-less dead fish on screen. Likewise we see how he knows these ‘impossible’ answers. But why he is so desperate to prove himself and why this girl is the answer to his happiness – what should be the driving questions of the film – are so hastily pasted into the clever tapestry of sights and sounds that they disappear into insignificance. (And no, “It is written” as a plot justification isn’t remotely strong enough to hold together a feature film. It is the cinematic equivalent of an eighth grade creative writing task hastily concluded with “Then I woke up”.)

The shambles that is the script is a crying shame for many reasons; Danny Boyle is a supremely talented director; the central story structure of showing through flashback how this poor boy circumstantially knows the answers to these questions is novel and interesting; and the child actors are compelling if raw talents. In the end the central character is uninteresting and the central romance is flat out disappointing. No mean feat for a character driven romance.

Other elements of the film were frustrating – the jarring motion-blur of the action sequences and the distractingly frenetic editing masking the plodding pace of the story to name a few. Still, these are personal aesthetic preferences rather than inditements on the movie as a whole.

But returning to the central frustration, why is this film so loved and lauded? Does it tap into Western guilt over the state of a former colony, offering an unthreatening, rise-against-the-odds protagonist to purge our discomfort? Do we so desperately need to believe that the people we indirectly oppress every day can be saved by a bit of determination streak of improbably luck? Are we willing to absolve the sins of the world in romanticism so easily? Slumdog Millionaire is a feelgood film, but given the chasm between its cinematic quality and its reception, I suspect it is feelgood for all the wrong reasons. Proceed with scepticism…

Film: Bustin' Down The Door

The pop culture feature documentary is a strange beast. More so than other big screen documentaries, chronicles of movements, events or trends within living memory are faced with a greater than usual question of subjectivity and a resulting need for editorialisation. Is the purpose to nostalgically relive the good ol’ days or to use the luxury of distance and hindsight to make a point?

Bustin’ Down The Door is an energetic and unashamedly fond account of the turning point of surfing from a pastime to a legitimate professional sport in the mid 1970’s. The film focuses on a handful talented Australian and South African surfers who took up residence on – and took over – Hawaii’s North Shore in the winters of 1974, ‘75 and ’76. While there are codas glimpsing at the private lives of surf royalty Shaun Tomson, ‘Rabbit’ Bartholomew, Mark Richards and Ian Cairns, the film focuses squarely on the pursuit of these guys to make a living out of what they loved, gain respect as the best in the world, and legitimise surfing as a professional sport.

Director Jeremy Gosch is at pains to show the motivation of these mavericks was a kind of fame above fortune. They wanted to make money, sure, but only enough to support their lifestyle of surfing the globe. For these guys it was about respect and acknowledgement and adulation. Rabbit and Cairns and Peter Townend (PT) found themselves prime targets for the angry, pride-wounded Hawaiian locals because they were so zealous in pursuit of this fame rather than fortune.

How this tension played out – the low key Hawaiians being publicly insulted in the surfing media by the upstart Australians – is easily the most compelling part of the film and provides a fitting climax. And yet something rang hollow almost immediately that the credits began to roll.

The whole premise of the film is a celebration of the achievement of these guys to legitimise their sport and make a living for themselves. Then for a few, gaudy moments, we see what their legacy has become. The oversized cheques for ridiculous sums of prize money being doused in champagne at the prestigious Triple Crown presentation. The rock-star lifestyle of tour surfers, sponsored by multi-billion dollar surf lifestyle companies. The film even opens with a shot of Kelly Slater rocking up to the ASP (Association of Professional Surfers) awards night in a black Maserati.

Yet none of the men this film was created to celebrate – not one of the central figures that, according to the doco, were directly responsible for the current state of the sport – is shown to comment on what their legacy has become. And I want to know damnnit. Gosch shows the contrast between what these guys wanted to achieve and the circus it has become, but doesn’t have a single comment on how they feel about that evolution. Don’t bring it up, leave the film as a rose-coloured nostalgia trip, or ask the hard questions.

In a similar vein, while most of these pioneering guys seem to have survived the years relatively unscathed, South African charger Michael Tomson is clearly, painfully worse for wear. Tomson always played second fiddle to his more successful and well-liked cousin Shaun, but Michael was one of the most influential figures in the surf wear and surf lifestyle industry. He founded Gotcha and set the design tone for the whole industry for most of the 80’s and early 90’s. He sold the brand in 1997 after it lost it’s way financially and ideologically. The same, apparently, could be said for Tomson. Michael lived hard, partied hard and bought into the lifestyle he was selling – sex and drugs and waves. His face, and his broken voice, shows it. Although still well respected and relatively well off, Tomson still qualifies as a casualty of the industry these guys gave birth to. But not a single hard question is asked of the man. Just fond, embellished backslapping.

Although not immediately apparent even to the relatively informed viewer, the sense that these incisive and important questions are left unasked is still tangibly frustrating. And no amount of hard-childhood stories from a likeably-greying Rabbit or earnest tones of Edward Norton’s narration can paper the cracks of this jumbled together doco.

2.5/5