arts & entertainment / cinema
theatre
Gentle Tim takes to being a gangster By Helen Musa
“ Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear And it shows them pearly white Just a jack-knife has old Macheath, babe And he keeps it out of sight.” Bryan Cranston as Trumbo... his Oscar nomination is thoroughly merited.
Brave struggle beyond the script By Dougal Macdonald
“Zoolander 2” (MA)
“Trumbo” (M)
THIS farrago of stupidity, noise, bad taste and dramatic ineptitude is the brainchild of writer/director/principal actor Ben Stiller who, in 2001, teamed with Owen Wilson to make the original “Zoolander” something of a cult movie. Or so I understand. I never saw it. Was that wise? Or merely unfortunate? The omission wasn’t deliberate. In those days, I was writing for another publication whose arts editor told me what to cover. It certainly deprived me of the back story, in which Zoolander (Stiller) apparently murdered his wife and got away with it. Since then he’s been searching for his son, now in his teens. His one-time colleague Hansel (Wilson) has received an invitation for the pair to resume their earlier careers as fashion models. Real-estate mogul Mugatu (Will Ferrell) is up to no good in the fashion season. The head of Interpol’s Fashion Division (Penelope Cruz) wants Zoolander and Hansel to solve that problem. That’s the core of a very floppy plot. Zoolander was never the child of a graphic novel. But this is a sequel. And a sequel seldom equals its predecessor. Certainly Stiller and Wilson don’t have the acting chops or other kind of creative clout to sustain this one. A gaggle of supporting cameos from guests with nothing to lose but their reputation for judging acceptance of roles wisely does nothing to fill the void. Identifying them creates this sequel’s few
“HE was a Communist in the late ’30s and early ’40s, when that meant you were pro-labour and anti-Jim Crow, and you fought for civil rights for African-Americans. It had nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with how an already great country could improve itself.” So wrote Niki Trumbo (quoted in the voluminous production notes for Jay Roach’s bio-pic about her father Dalton, the most successful screenwriter of his, and perhaps any, time.) John McNamara’s screenplay is redolent of not only cinema in the era when Trumbo was writing but also of the man himself – “fiery, intelligent, self-righteous, charming, entertaining and funny” (quoting the same source). Bryan Cranston replicates Trumbo as to both delivery of the dialogue and presentation of physical attributes. His Oscar nomination is thoroughly merited. His mastery of the role’s intense emotional pressures delivers nuances that are a joy to observe even when negotiating adversities that might destroy a less-robust character and clear perceptions of what powerfully-placed enemies were working to destroy in him. Its themes range over a wonderful gamut – freedom of speech and other public expression, the rule of law and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the tribulations of the Hollywood Ten and Trumbo’s circumvention of the blacklist, film-studio gossip, power plays and other politics, nostalgic archival visits to all sorts of Hollywood occasions and more. The enormous cast list manifests a certain courage. After all, what modern actor could exactly replicate Edward G Robinson, Otto Preminger, Kirk Douglas, Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren being superbly bitchy), John Wayne and other great names from that era of cinematic magnificence? At Palace Electric
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challenges. The rest is over-ripe, undercooked balderdash of no perceptible merit. At all cinemas
“Deadpool” (MA) THE visual elements in Tim Miller’s directing debut include giant junk heaps, an aircraft carrier in the breaker’s yard, automotive mayhem, gunfire involving men who can’t shoot straight, varieties of brutal treatment from which no real human might get up and walk away and other improbabilities. “Deadpool” is the nickname for a former soldier (Ryan Reynolds) who has acquired special powers during post-trauma recovery. He’s going to need them to survive the conflict against Warlord (Michael Benyaer). Deadpool has a small coterie of chums – particularly a giant Russian played by two people, one for voice, one for facial expression, and a small woman who morphs into a ball of fire when necessary. The ideas underlying these shenanigans come from Marvel Comics, publishers of graphic novels for people who find reading tiresome but can get an idea of storyline from pictures. Expanding graphic novels into moving images is not cheap. Marvel Comics knows that there is an audience out there prepared to pay production costs and profit. I’m sure Marvel Comics also understands the intellectual level of that audience. If you can read this review, yours is above it.
IT’S a fair bet that you know the tune, but an equally fair one that you haven’t given much thought to the words. Mac, Mackie, is the modern version of that dashing highwayman Macheath, filched by Bertolt Brecht from John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” and turned into the antihero of his 1928 hit “The Threepenny Opera”, soon to be seen at Theatre 3 in a production by Aarne Neeme. Busy Canberra actor Tim Sekuless gets to play the amoral, cynical gangland chief Macheath in a musical full of fabulous songs by Kurt Weill, many with lyrics snitched from François Villon and Rudyard Kipling, for Brecht was, like Shakespeare, the master of plagiarism. It’s a far cry from Sekuless’ last role, Baby Bear in “Goldilocks” or even his most recent role for REP as Feste the clown in “Twelfth Night”, but armed with one of his favourite books, “Freakonomics”, he has embarked on one of the great roles of theatre. This is no dashing romantic Captain Macheath. Mackie is the King of the Crims, a cynic, a serial womaniser, not too clean behind the ears
Tim Sekuless in “Twelth Night”.
At all cinemas
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and the apostle of the “Godfather” principle that everything is “just business”. It would be hard to find a dirtier set of shysters anywhere in dramatic literature. Mr Peachum is running a profitable business putting beggars on to the street; his sweet, young daughter Lucy turns out to be a shrewd criminal businesswoman; Chief of Police Tiger Brown is in league with Mackie; Lucy, his daughter, might be Macheath’s wife and Mackie’s former girlfriend Jenny Diver is a sharp-eyed Marxist analyst of the world. With theft, murder, corruption, domestic violence and unwanted pregnancies abounding – all of which seem amazingly contemporary – there’s also a withering attack on the celebrity cult that sees an unsavoury character like Mackie getting off scot-free. What, one asks, might Brecht have made of the Kardashian cult? As the narrator sings to the “Mac the Knife” tune, celebrities get a better deal than ordinary people like us – “Those you see are in the limelight, those in darkness you can’t see.” Sekuless, mild-mannered Department of Health officer by day with a love of maths and data charts almost as great as his love of theatre, is over the moon at tackling the role of Macheath and even more at working with Neeme. “Macheath is Brecht’s mouthpiece,” Sekuless says, “and as a performer you want to love your character.” But Macheath is an out and out swine and here’s where Neeme comes in. “Aarne is such a wonderful director… he is totally ruthless if he sees me showing the slightest sympathetic interest in Macheath, he simply pulls it out, keeping to Brecht’s intentions,” says Seckuless. “The Threepenny Opera”, Theatre 3, Acton, February 26 to March 12. Bookings to canberrarep.org.au or 6257 1950.
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ERINDALE THEATRE
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