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Luke Davies
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“Life’s a bitch ’n’ then you die,” sings the rapper Nas on the soundtrack of Fish Tank (released nationally on 11 March), Andrea Arnold’s gritty and engaging British drama about a young girl growing up without anchor or compass on a drab Essex council estate. “That’s why we get high,” the song...
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Luke Davies | Arts & Letters | Film | February 2010 | Society & Culture
In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and deferential, Malik is hard to read at first. The little...
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Luke Davies | Arts & Letters | Film | November 2009 | Society & Culture
The opening five minutes of Antichrist (released nationally on 26 November) are a compelling symphony of exquisite film-making. In hyper-stylised black-and-white ecstasy – in super-slow-motion – the characters played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg make love, apparently unaware of the...
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“There’s nothing to a piece of man,” intones the mellifluous voice-over (in Gaelic, with subtitles) late in Jonathan auf der Heide’s strange – and strangely compelling – Van Diemen’s Land. The voice-over runs sporadically yet hauntingly through the film and is at times reminiscent of that in...
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Luke Davies | Film | September 2009 | Society & Culture
In what passes for context-setting in a porn clip I found on the internet as research for this review, an off-screen cameraman asks porn star Sasha Grey to tell a little about herself. “When I’m not fucking,” she smiles, “I like seeing a good movie, or writing, or fooling around with music.” It’s...
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In the book Dispatches, Michael Herr’s virtuoso memoir of the Vietnam War, Sean Flynn – Errol’s son – an actor and photojournalist who went missing in action in Cambodia in 1970, is portrayed as a kind of philosopher-adventurer, bounding like a fearless young pup into the centre of the action while...
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Luke Davies | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Film | Society & Culture
Television’s police-procedural dramas have suffered for some time now from a disease for which there is as yet no apparent cure. It hasn’t been adequately studied or named, but might best be thought of as Forensic Overkill Syndrome. It multiplies by the day, virally, exponentially. You...
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A woman in her thirties, a mother of two, suffers a debilitating aneurism. When the initial shock and panic have passed and she begins to recover from the trauma of brain surgery, a doctor tells her that she's OK for now but that she should consider the stroke a yellow card. ("That's...
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Luke Davies | May 2009 | Arts & Letters | Film | Society & Culture
The specific nature of the sins committed by the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah has been the subject of much speculation. Contending offences range from widespread sodomy and "going after strange flesh" to general inhospitality and being "impious to the Divinity". God's punishment, on the other...
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"Just so you know: I can't be your friend," says Eli (Lina Leandersson), an ethereal, bedraggled girl, to Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a lonely, curious boy desperate to connect with someone kinder and less frightening than the school bullies who constitute his only apparent social contact...
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"I'm in San Francisco and I'm gonna take it all in," Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1965 novel, Desolation Angels. "Incredible the things I saw." He was harking back to the late summer of 1956, when he was still just a dharma bum, hitchhiking or riding the freight trains in...
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In the staff room at the beginning of a school year, François (François Bégaudeau), a French teacher at a Parisian middle school, chats with the new history teacher, who is outlining with matter-of-fact certainty his term plan for Year 9. The teacher's ideas seem grand and ambitious. "The...
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"The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages." So wrote the editors of the New Yorker recently, before clarifying: "The Presidency of George W Bush is the worst since Reconstruction." In an unusually partisan collective editorial published before the...
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In file footage from 7 August 1974, a New York City police officer speaks at a press conference. "Officer Meyers and I observed the tightrope dancer - because you couldn't call him a walker - approximately halfway between the two towers. Upon seeing us, he began to smile and laugh."...
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The Israeli director Ari Folman's audacious Waltz with Bashir is called an animated documentary feature by its producers. It is much more than that - or at least, that is only one convenient way to describe it. The film moves towards a real mystery - a hole in memory - and it uses real people,...
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Luke Davies | The Monthly Essays | September 2008 | Foreign Affairs
In Kerobokan, there are long, idle hours for activity such as that. The hours are only broken by the visiting periods, six days a week, when friends and relatives of the prisoners squeeze into a tiled courtyard about half the size of a basketball court, jostling for space and sitting on reed mats...
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"And when he overcomes the gravitational forces, it turns out that one universe is real and the other is fiction." Two young men, barely more than teenagers, out on a lake in a small sailing boat, are discussing the premise of a science-fiction film. We know this kind of nerd. What he...
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Early in Matt Norman's documentary about the controversy surrounding the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics - and in particular, the involvement of the Australian silver medallist Peter Norman in that controversy - there is a shot of the stadium scoreboard at the opening...
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Luke Davies | Literature | Poetry | Public event | Sydney | Sydney Writers' Festival | Culture
In this segment of the 'Writers as Readers' session at the Sydney Writers' Festival 2008, Luke Davies speaks about the inspirations and influences on his writing.... » play video
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Two friends walk along a New York street as the camera tracks backwards with them. We catch them mid-conversation, or perhaps they are just used to throwing random thoughts out to the heavens. "Man," says Jemaine, the nattier dresser and taller of the two, with thick black hair and...
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