YES YOU CAN HAVE MORE!
Oliver! is one of the great tales and the Ballina Players are bringing this Dickens story to the stage. In Victorian London young orphan Oliver (Landon Broadley) escapes from the workhouse and an undertaker to whom he had been sold, and falls in with a ragged bunch of orphans. He is befriended by the Artful Dodger
Culture
(Sam Green), who takes the innocent Oliver to the lair where the elderly, conniving thief Fagin (Graeme Speed) teaches young boys to pick pockets and exploits them shamelessly. Oliver has no idea what they are really doing. Ten-year-old Landon Broadley brings extensive experience in music and theatre to the role of Oliver. Sam Green, the Artful Dodger, is twelve. He also has had considerable involvement in youth theatre including the Players’ Sound of Music.
Oliver! will be staged at the Players Theatre from 12 June to 4 July. Evening performances will commence at 8pm and Sunday matinees at 2pm. Opening night on 12 June will be a special event, with pre-show champagne and finger food. Book online at www. ballinaplayers.com.au or at Just Funkin Music, 6686 2440.
FIRST IMPRESSIONISTS The Impressionists and The Man Who Made Them, part of the
Exhibition on Screen series, charts Durand-Ruel’s relationship with artists including Manet, Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir and Pissarro, and his determination to support them in the unforgiving environment of 19th-century Paris, through the Franco-Prussian war, while dealing with the tragedies and struggles of his own personal life – losing his wife and caring for their five children. From the artists’ early struggles to be accepted at the Salon, to the widespread ridicule and derision that followed when their work was exhibited in Paris, to his brave decision to exhibit these revolutionary and radical new artists in America, the film follows Durand-Ruel’s extraordinary story, which finally brought the Impressionists the worldwide respect that they sought – and changed the art world forever. As well as the opportunity to see some of the Impressionists’ most famous works up close on the big screen, the film offers diary extracts and insights from Durand-Ruel and the artists in their own words, with DurandRuel voiced by acclaimed stage and screen actor Robert Lindsay.
The Impressionists screens at Palace Byron Bay Cinema at 1pm on Saturday and Wednesday.
GET DOWN WITH MR BROWN
Rob Brown brings his satirical, cheeky, out-of-the-box views on the world to the stage when he headlines the Ballina RSL’s free monthly comedy night The Big Gig. Rob draws on his diverse background – from growing up in a trailer park, working for more than a decade as a prison officer in maximum-security prisons, his time training security services in Iraq and Afghanistan, his family life – children, and marriage. With headline performances in Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, UK, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Bali, Papua New Guinea and Prague, just to name a lot, Rob can truly be called an international comedian. Rob now shares his time equally between Los Angeles and Brisbane. So when he comes to town you don’t want to miss him. Fiona McGary as support. Catch this show on Thursday at 8pm.
WEDNESDAY
27 MAY to
MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
My companion, who worked briefly on the scenes of this movie that were shot in Sydney, nudged me confidingly. ‘See that one with the red hair?’ Fanging across the desert, Max had come upon five gorgeous girls in varying degrees of white undress. ‘That’s Elvis’s granddaughter. She’s the one who married the stuntman from Dunoon.’ We whispered for a while about whether she resembled the King. Nobody would have heard us above the racket, nor would anybody have missed any dialogue for, though we were perhaps thirty minutes into proceedings, it seemed only a dozen words had been spoken. As Max, Tom Hardy has barely more lines than Jean Dujardin in The Artist. I appreciate that words count for nothing in an action flick, but this is ridiculous. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is a female version of Max. She’s trying to make her way home across a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled by enslaved, grotesque humans from the worlds of Bosch and Jodorowsky’s El Topo. They become allies and are chased hither and yon by fabulously outfitted and luridly painted bad guys. Narrative’s usual requirements are accorded grudging acknowledgement, as the ‘screenplay’ deals fleetingly with the dire future of water on our planet and superficially with the foolishness and manipulative nature of religion – Nux (Nicholas Hoult) believes that if he dies he will live again – otherwise there is nix in the story. To be fair, there are some praiseworthy elements in George Miller’s hysterically hyped resurrection of his leather-clad road warrior, not least of which is the number of roles found in it for so many jobbing Australian actors. The CGI is astonishing, the blokes swaying on poles attached to speeding Humvees is cool, and Furiosa’s prosthetic arm is very convincing. But for some of us – clearly not in a majority that might affect the box office – it is dismaying that the art of cinema has come to this: two hours of smoke and mirrors, of head-hammering, projectile bullshit. My companion and I concurred – Riley Keough does look like Elvis.
24 May 27, 2015 The Byron Shire Echo
WEDNESDAY
WOMAN IN GOLD
Movies can speak to you on different levels. Driving home after watching this, I heard our horrible prime minister say ‘nope, nope, nope’ when asked would Australia help resettle any of the Rohingyas stranded at sea. Will Australia one day be held to account for its inhumanity in the same way that Austria has been for its treatment of Jews?, I wondered. The link was inescapable… And then there is Gustav Klimt’s magnificent painting, of ‘the woman in gold’. I’d only ever seen it reproduced in books, but the opening shot, a recreated close-up of gold-leaf being applied to the canvas, and later visual studies of it, made me swoon with its gilded beauty. The history surrounding the masterpiece is intriguing and told with only a small degree of forgivable bias in Simon Curtis’s telling of it. Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), a California shop-owner, fled Vienna in 1938 shortly after the Anschluss. Left behind in the family home was Klimt’s portrait of the aunt Adele whom Maria doted on. Fifty years later, with the government of Austria embarking on a policy of reparation, she undertook the challenge of retrieving the painting. Assisting her was lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), himself a descendant of Austrian refugees. Curtis’s flashbacks to the grand capital of the Hapsburgs is as gloriously evocative as is the dark shadow that engulfed it alarmingly familiar – Maria and her husband’s flight from the jackboots is charged with a terror that none of us would wish to experience. As always, Mirren is wonderful as the feisty old lady who is eventually worn down by the obfuscation of officialdom, only to have her baton carried on by Randol, representing a member of a later generation whose conscience has been pricked after being exposed to the tragedy of the past. ‘People forget,’ Maria says, and to me that is what this enlightening and moving film is all about; not who is entitled to own a picture, but how forgetfulness can encourage the hatefulness of ‘nope, nope, nope’.
3 JUNE
29-30 MAY 2015 PALACE BYRON BAY
OPENS THURSDAY
FRI/SAT ONLY
AUDI FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS 2015 goethe.de/ozfilmfest (No Free Tickets) Opening Night Special Event: Fri 7.00pm WHO AM I NO SYSTEM IS SAFE (15+) Sat 11.00am RUBY RED (15+) Sat 3.15pm BELOVED SISTERS (M) Sat 6.00pm THE WHOLE SHEBANG (15+) Sat 8.30pm SUCK ME SHAKESPEER (15+) ROYAL OPERA: RISE AND FALL OF THE CITY OF MAHAGONNY (CTC) (No Free Tickets) Wed 27 11.00am EXHIBITION: THE IMPRESSIONISTS (CTC) Sun/Wed 3 1.00pm TOMORROWLAND (PG) (No Free Tickets) Thu-Fri/Mon-Tue 10.30am, 1.10, 6.20, 9.10pm Sat 9.00, 11.40am, 6.50, 9.15pm Sun/Wed 3 10.20am, 1.50, 7.10, 9.10pm Enjoy our licensed bar
Lavazza Espresso Coffee
NOW SHOWING
WOMAN IN GOLD (M) (No Free Tickets) Wed 27 9.50am, 4.30, 6.45, 9.00pm Thu-Fri/Sun-Wed 3 12.00, 4.30, 6.50pm Sat 9.20am, 4.45, 7.00pm MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (Ma15+) Wed 27 1.50, 4.20, 6.50, 9.20pm Thu/Mon/Tue 2.00, 3.50, 7.00, 9.00pm Fri 2.00, 3.50, 9.00pm Sat 2.15, 4.25, 9.25pm Sun/Wed 3 11.20am, 4.45, 7.00, 9.30pm WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (M) Wed 27 11.45am, 4.50pm Thu/Mon/Tue 4.45pm Fri/Sun/Wed 3 4.40pm Sat 9.00am A ROYAL NIGHT OUT (M) Wed 27 9.40am, 2.30, 7.00pm Thu-Fri/Mon-Tue 10.00am, 12.00pm Sat 1.30pm Sun/Wed 3 9.15am, 3.00pm PITCH PERFECT 2 (M) Wed 27 12.10, 2.30, 9.10pm Thu/Mon/Tue 9.40am, 2.20, 9.30pm Fri 9.40am, 2.20, 9.20pm Sat 11.40am, 2.00pm Sun/Wed 3 9.40am, 2.20, 9.45pm Gift cards are the perfect gift
Group Bookings available
108-110 Jonson Street, Byron Bay 6680 8555 | www.palacecinemas.com.au
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo