ENTERTAINMENT CONT FROM P 35
TICKETS FOR THE DRILL HALL BALLAD OF EDGAR AND MARY The Ballad of Edgar and Mary was commissioned by the Drill Hall Theatre Company with assistance from the Anzac Centenary Program. The work is co-written by Claude Gonzalez and Gregory Aitken and it tells the story of a Mullumbimby soldier serving in France in WWI, and his wife, who has aspirations of becoming a music-hall singer. Only ninety tickets are available for the opening on Friday 9 October of The Ballad of Edgar and Mary. Tickets can be purchased online at www.drillhalltheatre.org. au and this week at The Bookshop Mullumbimby if the opening and closing events have not sold out. The closing event is 1pm for 2pm on Sunday 25 October. Described as a boutique musical, the entertainment is the beginning of the centenary season of the Drill Hall. Tickets for the gala opening and closing events are $30.
MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS Legendary Hollywood producer David O Selznick (Peter Harding) has suspended his scriptwriter for the film Gone with the Wind. His choice for a replacement, writer and playwright Ben Hecht (Trevor Stone), is available for one week only. Hecht arrives and drops a bombshell. He has only read the first page of the book! This is a disaster. Selznick has also fired his Gone with the Wind producer and he pulls producer Victor Fleming (Mike Sheehan) from finishing filming of The Wizard of Oz. Selznick locks the three of them in his office for five days and feeds them nothing but bananas and peanuts, his idea of brain food. They are attended by his assistant, Miss Poppenghul (Jenny Briguglio). The end result must be a film script. Moonlight and Magnolias is based on the true story behind the making of the movie. Moonlight and Magnolias will be staged at the Players Theatre over 4–19 September.
Evening performances will commence at 8pm and Sunday matinees at 2pm. Openingnight patrons will receive a complimentary glass of champagne. Book online at www. ballinaplayers.com.au or at Just Funkin Music, 6686 2440.
THE WORM THAT TURNED Everyone needs to eat and, as Wendell Berry says, ‘Eating is an agricultural act’. So we’re all involved with agriculture, and therefore we all together have the power to change the system by choosing where we buy our food. The documentary The Worm is Turning shows with historical footage where the current corporate model of chemical, monoculture-style farming comes from, and how it was spread around the world, using India as the prime example. From dead soil to the ‘cancer train’ in Punjab, we get to see the effects of this
type of agriculture. The film also has amazing examples of farmers – from India, to USA to Australia – showing that ecological farming is better for human health and the environment, a method that is sustainable and restorative. Study after study has shown that small, ecological farms are in fact more productive and efficient with resources, and are the best model for the future. The film connects the dots on global food issues and features Vandana Shiva, Joel Salatin, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Raj Patel, Winona LaDuke, Bob Cannard, Will Allen, Bhaskar Save, Meriel Watts, Devinder Sharma, PV Satheesh, Olivier De Schutter and many more. Screening at the Byron Community Centre on Wednesday at 6pm. The film screening will be followed by Q&A with a panel including the filmmakers. Tickets are $20 and available at Santos stores or at the door. The event is sponsored by Santos Organics.
WEDNESDAY
19 AUG to
WEDNESDAY
26 AUG
NOW SHOWING
OPENS THURS
SHOWING SAT ONLY
SOUTHPAW (MA15+) (NO FREE TIX) Thu-Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 2.10, 4.00, 9.00pm Sat 1.30, 4.15, 8.50 Sun 1.30, 4.10, 9.10 VACATION (MA15+) (NO FREE TIX) Thu-Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 12.20, 4.30, 9.20pm Sat 11.00, 2.00, 9.15 Sun 9.00, 4.40, 9.20 IRRATIONAL MAN (M) (NO FREE TIX) Thu-Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 11.30, 2.30, 7.00pm Sat 9.00, 11.30, 6.50 Sun 9.10, 2.40, 6.40 THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (M) (NO FREE TIX) Wed (19) 2.10, 4.30, 6.50pm Thu/Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 11.50, 4.40, 9.10pm Sat 11.40, 4.10, 9.00 Sun 12.10, 4.00, 8.45 Enjoy our licensed bar
OPENS THURS
Lavazza Espresso Coffee
NOW SHOWING
TRAINWRECK (MA15+) Wed (19) 11.40, 4.00, 6.30, 9.10 Thu-Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 9.50, 1.30, 6.40 Sat 9.10, 4.00, 6.40 Sun 11.00, 1.40, 6.50 LAST CAB TO DARWIN (M) Wed (19) 9.10, 12.50, 6.00 Thu-Sat/Mon-Wed (26) 9.00, 6.30pm Sun 11.10am MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION (M) Wed (19) 10.15, 3.20, 8.30pm Thu-Fri/Mon-Wed (26) 9.15am Sun 9.30am MR. HOLMES (M) Wed (19) 9.10, 1.50pm AMY (MA15+) Wed(19) 11.15am, 9.00pm RSC: MERCHANT OF VENICE (CTC) (NO FREE TIX) Sat 1.00pm Gift cards are the perfect gift
Group Bookings available
108-110 Jonson Street, Byron Bay 6680 8555 | www.palacecinemas.com.au
36 August 19, 2015 The Byron Shire Echo
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Merchant of Venice screens at Palace Cinema this week, the first production in the 2015 Live from Stratford-upon-Avon program screening RSC works live from Shakespeare’s hometown. In the melting pot of Venice, trade is god. With its ships plying the globe, the city opens its arms to all, as long as they come prepared to do business and there is profit to be made. Shakespeare has been performed and celebrated in his Stratford hometown for centuries and the RSC has trained generations of the very best theatre makers since the company was founded in 1961, pioneering contemporary approaches to Shakespeare’s plays as well as staging the work of those who inspired him and the work of today’s playwrights. Screening at the Palace at 1pm on Saturday.
CINEMA REVIEWS
FIVE FLIGHTS UP OPENS THURS
MERCHANT OF VENICE AT THE PALACE
Richard Loncraine made the charming My House In Umbria (2003), and in his latest movie he has returned to the theme of place and how much our lives are ineradicably intertwined with it. Maggie Smith carried the day in Umbria and Loncraine has again called on a couple of veterans of the screen to tell his story – what a rare treat it is to see a film aimed at an audience that needs more than just bullet-proof goons performing in front of a green-screen for its stimulation. Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton are both in fine form as Alex and Ruth, who are confronted with the emotional wrench of selling the Brooklyn apartment that they moved into as newlyweds forty years earlier. At a time when culturally we seem to be obsessed with real estate, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing, it warms the cockles to be reminded of the human factor in such transactions. Not a lot out of the ordinary happens – the usual array of potential punters and voyeurs invade on open-house days while, as Ruth’s niece Lilly, Cynthia Nixon does a brilliant turn playing the agent who pulls out all stops and employs all the jargon in an effort to get the best price for the property. Ruth and Alex, in the meantime, are inspecting apartments that they might move to, and it is a process that inevitably leads them to reflect on their life together. Flashbacks link the past with the present, as they should, but they also open a door into the private world and memories that are part of the bricks and mortar. This is a slow-burn movie, with plenty of gentle and sometimes cutting humour to lighten the everyday drama that confronts the couple. Of the two secondary threads, the trauma surrounding the couple’s ailing dog Dorothy works much better than the inconsequential news cuts to the terrorist at large in the city, but Loncraine never veers too far from what makes us who we are.
HOLDING THE MAN Australian actor Ryan Corr will be in Byron Bay this week for the northern rivers premiere of Holding The Man, a new film in which he has the starring role. The screening is to be held at Palace Byron Bay Cinema on Sunday and is a fundraiser for ACON, NSW’s leading HIV prevention and support group. The film is a wonderfully moving love story set in the early years of Australia’s HIV crisis, and is based on the memoir of Timothy Conigrave, who worked as a health promotion officer at ACON in the early 1990s developing HIV-prevention campaigns. The event is sponsored by an investor in the film, Byron Shire local Peter Waters of Byron Plantation and The Arthouse. Holding The Man had its world premiere at the recent Sydney Film Festival, where it received critical and popular acclaim. Tickets for the Sunday premiere, which also features a Q&A with Ryan Corr, are $25 or $15 concession, and include a pre-film drink. They can be purchased through acon.org.au/HTMByron.
by John Campbell
THE MAN FROM UNCLE
The biography on IMDb of multi-Oscar-winning director William Wyler, who gave us the timeless Roman Holiday, argues that his genius is not recognised because of ‘the lack of an obvious signature’. In our age of baubles, sound bites and ever-bigger splashes, a trend to overvalue the filmmaker who hammers the boldest imprimatur into his work has become rampant. Guy Ritchie is one such beneficiary of this cult of celebrity (though credit where it’s due: RocknRolla was a ripper). His movies are very blokey, in a gay macho way, and his penchant for making an impact through the visually startling has nearly always betrayed an inclination to place style before content. And so it is here. Towards the end of his adaptation of the iconic sixties TV series, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) break into a dockside warehouse. I realised that I was not exactly sure why they were doing that, but worse, I didn’t really care. Ritchie, perhaps fearing that others in his audience might be feeling similarly disconnected, falls back on the old split-screen device to wake us up. The trick succeeds, as eye candy nearly always does, and it leads to a spectacularly welldone set-piece that involves a truck landing on top of a boat – all of it accompanied by contrived music. Indeed, Ritchie’s reliance on soundtrack only highlights the paucity of his narrative (but again, credit where it’s due – the scene with Alicia Vikander dancing in her jammies to Solomon Burke’s Cry to Me is fab). Cavill is fine in the rather anodyne Robert Vaughn role, but the smartest decision that Ritchie made was to not try to come up with a new David McCallum. Hammer is huge and dense, so none of us need fear an overwhelming attack of nostalgia for the snowy-haired original. The two stars work well together, and it is good to see Hugh Grant back doing his shtick, albeit respectably grey and bespectacled, it’s just a pity that the material they’re given is so trite.
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo