Hollywood

'The Clock' by Christian Marclay

By Luke Davies

The Clock’s joys are as delightful as they are improbable. Though it’s usually described as a video installation, I prefer to think of it as a majestic, circular film (it is exactly 24 hours long). It demands of its viewers their stamina, repaying them with a singularly interesting experience. Christian Marclay, who surely harnessed some rather obsessive–compulsive tendencies in constru

'Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend of the World’s Most Famous Dog' by Susan Orlean

By Michelle de Kretser

In World War I, trained ‘mercy dogs’ roamed among the wounded on the battlefields of France. A soldier could call one over and hold it for comfort while he died. It’s one of the affecting factoids that stray through Rin Tin Tin, New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s exhaustive study of the most famous German shepherd in history. Rin Tin Tin was a puppy when an American soldier called L

Anna Funder’s 'All That I Am'

The Magic of Exile

By David Marr

To those who fled the Nazis in the middle of the 1930s, the British gave only temporary protection. Their visas stipulated “no political activities of any kind”. So the German exiles in London lived in constant fear that agitating to alert a world still blind to the evils of Hitler might see them sent back to their deaths by Scotland Yard. In Anna Funder’s All That I Am (Penguin, 384pp; $29.95), Ruth Becker describes the predicame

Meeting Alex Dimitriades

The Kid Grows Up

By Peter Robb

Nearing 40, a man’s body begins to die. The body knows this. So does the mind, though it can take a long time before the mind knows what it knows about the body, and longer still to become reconciled to mortality. Between first intimation and final acceptance come anguish and uncertainty – a sense of entrapment and anger. Foolish decisions are likely to

Tom Hooper’s 'The King’s Speech' and Derek Cianfrance’s 'Blue Valentine'

Failure to Communicate

By Luke Davies

“Do you know any jokes?” asks a speech pathologist of his newest patient, a stammerer. “Timing is not my strong suit,” the uptight patient replies. It’s the early 1930s and the Australian pathologist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), known for his unorth

The Gaza Strips

By Christos Tsiolkas

I’m ageing; I’m becoming the old fart I never wished to be. I am succumbing to nostalgia and its lethal evil twin, bitterness. I listen to the radio – or, recently, more often a 30-second grab of a song on iTunes – and I think that popular music just c

Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis' 'Machete' and Sean Byrne’s 'The Loved Ones'

Tools of the Trade

By Luke Davies

“Every time an illegal dances across our border,” says Senator John McLaughlin (Robert de Niro) at a rally, “it is an act of aggression against this sovereign state.” This Texan politician, the “Independent from Cocksucker County”, is running for re-election

Tim Burton: The Exhibition

Primal Scenes

By John Baxter

When I taught at an American college in the 1970s, my students asked if I’d mind finishing my afternoon lectures early: local TV was re-running Dark Shadows and they didn’t want to miss a minute of it. I had to have Dark Shadows explained to me, and even t

Vampire Weekend at Brisbane’s Tivoli

Out on the Weekend

By Robert Forster

The big discussion has been about Ezra’s hair. Recent photos have had it fluffy and a little out of control. No problems tonight, though; it’s clipped and up over the ears, with a fringe that curls just above the left eye. He’s in old-school trainers sans socks, t

PL Travers and Mary Poppins

Something about Mary

By Alan Saunders

“I’ll stay till the wind changes,” says Mary Poppins to the Banks children after she swept in on the east wind and, overwhelming Mrs Banks, became their nanny. Well, clearly the wind has not yet changed, because Mary Poppins is everywhere these days. She

Michael Haneke's 'The White Ribbon' and Jan Kounen's 'Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky'

As Long As It’s Black

By Luke Davies

Michael Haneke is an unforgiving film-maker who explores suspense in various permutations without ever quite creating a thriller. Yet despite being an intellectual, even conceptual, director, his films hold us gripped in the stomach. His theatre of operations

Australian Style

Blankett Slate

By Clare Press

“Are not the colours exquisite? And see how intricate the patterns.” So said the two swindlers intent on convincing Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor that his new clothes were indeed the proverbial bee’s knees. Alas, the Emperor’s subjects could see his knees

Saga

By Cate Kennedy

It’s one minute past midnight and we are gathered, hushed, in our thousands across the country, trembling in anticipation like a coven of die-hard cultists. Or perhaps that should be Twi-hard, because the altar at which we are here to worship is one of dozens of Australian cinemas about to screen Twilight: New Moon, and we are being given a stern, pre-empt

John Waters

Divine Intervention

By Peter Conrad

Australia’s girdling oceans used to serve as a prophylactic, our defence against the infectious depravity of the northern hemisphere. The Customs Act 1901 fiercely preserved our innocence; during my adolescence in the late 1960s I made an impatient inventory of the prohibited books and films I intended to catch up with as soon as I got overseas. Nowadays culture spreads through the ether like a

John Keats and Fanny Brawne Revisited

Bright Stars

By Sophie Gee

John Keats’s last letter is just about his most powerful piece of writing. He was in Rome, dying of tuberculosis. He’d gone there in a final attempt to stave off the death he knew by then was inevitable. He was separated from his beloved fiancée and her f

Australian Film

Nowhere Near Hollywood

By Louis Nowra

I set out to watch most of the Australian films released this year because I wanted to grasp the condition of our industry. On a practical level, it was often hard to find these films; they seldom stayed in the cinema long enough. I became used to tracking the

Fashion's Coming of Age

This Year's Model

By Clare Press

Those with an appreciation of the firm and youthful female form may be interested to ogle Terry Richardson’s photographs of the latest crop of young ‘supermodels’ in this year’s ‘Pirelli calendar’.Richardson is best known for creating raunchy ads for the lik

Hollywood Ending

By Leigh Sales

It's Saturday night and Steve Carroll sits behind the counter in his suburban video store watching the door and hoping for customers. Once, back in the "halcyon days", as Steve calls them, he needed two staff for the hectic Saturday shift. Now the action mostly comes from Heath Ledger's maniacal ranting on a wall-mounted TV playing The Dark Knight.At 5.45 pm, a man and a woman in their twenties wa