OnlyFans and the adults in the room
The emerging OnlyFans community offering training and support to adult-content creatorsOctober 2012
Arts & Letters
The Best of Australian Film 2012
A survey of the last year’s films seems to reinforce the notion that our filmmakers stick to – or are inexorably confined by – well-trodden genres. There were cutesy comedies – Kath & Kimderella, PJ Hogan’s Mental and Working Dog’s insufferable Any Questions for Ben? – and dramas that played like made-for-television movies with visual affectations thrown in, such as Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here. Also present were braver films taking on weighty social and historical issues – Cate Shortland’s Lore and Tony Krawitz’s Dead Europe – but whose directors’ ambitions weren’t matched by their command of the form.
We can, however, look to the no-budget digital filmmaking scene for the latest surge of innovation within Australian cinema. Bill Mousoulis’ Wild and Precious, filmed across several countries, has an immediacy and insight that far better resourced directors must envy. But the year’s stand-out is a comet that seemed to shoot in from nowhere: Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Hail.
There is an unsung tradition in Australian culture – in the plays of Daniel Keene, for example, or the films of Alkinos Tsilimidos – of gazing into the lives of ‘battlers’, but not being content to find there merely the proof of some sociological thesis concerning deprivation or alienation. Against the setting of desperate lives, then, are played the most elemental passions – love, loyalty, revenge, honour.
Hail takes such a perception to a visionary level. Daniel P Jones and Leanne Letch – playing characters based on themselves – are dogged by the usual raft of ‘underprivileged’ problems: unemployment, addiction, a criminal record, shady contacts. But their love for each other is fierce and absolute, and Courtin-Wilson renders this emotion in a mode that mixes the seeming spontaneity of John Cassavetes’ movies with the kinetic, abstract texture of the French audio-visual artist Philippe Grandrieux.
Plot-wise, only one major thing happens in Hail – and I won’t give it away. Suffice to say, Courtin-Wilson aims to get right inside Jones’s troubled psyche, and to convey, in richly cinematic terms, his inner turmoil. No previous Australian feature has gone this far into a disturbed sensory world – beyond both mundane realism and the comfortable middle-class distance of ‘social concern’.
The quip and the dead: Steve Toltz’s ‘Here Goes Nothing’
A bleakly satirical look at death and the afterlife from the wisecracking author of ‘A Fraction of the Whole’
Ghost notes: Simon Tedeschi’s ‘Fugitive’
A virtuoso memoir of music and trauma, and his experiences as a child prodigy, from the acclaimed Australian pianist
One small step: ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ and ‘Deep Water’
Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped film evokes the optimism of late-1960s America, while Patricia Highsmith’s thriller gets another disappointing adaptation
Art heist: The landmark conviction of an Aboriginal art centre’s manager
The jailing of Mornington Island Art’s chief executive for dishonest dealing has shone a light on ethics and colonialism in the Indigenous art world
The avoidable war
Kevin Rudd on China, the US and the forces of history
Election special: Who should you vote for?
Undecided about who to vote for in the upcoming federal election? Take our quiz to find out your least-worst option!
Remembrance or forgetting?
The Australian War Memorial and the Great Australian Silence
Property damage
What will it take for Australia to fix the affordable housing crisis?
