frontrow@inpress.com.au
FILM
CAREW
WITH ANTHONY CAREW
SMASHING GOOD YARNS THE IRRESPONSIBLE SERVICE OF COMEDY IS ABOUT TO PLUMB NEW DEPTHS AS CHIEF PISSHEAD SIMON KECK MISLEADS A BUNCH OF HIS FELLOW COMICS ON A NIGHT OF DRUNKEN STORYTELLING. PAUL RANSOM CATCHES UP FOR A PRE-SHOW DRINK AND A FEW TALES FROM MY LIVER. Some things are obvious; even when you’re pissed. Just ask comedian Simon Keck, whose alcohol themed night of stand-up, Tales From My Liver makes its tottering debut this week at Madame Brussel’s. An evening of ‘pissed’ yarns seems like a great comedy idea waiting to happen. It makes you wonder why it hasn’t already been done to death. “I just love those really obvious things,” Keck says. “It’s like, why hasn’t anybody done this before?” Fortunately, Simon Keck is sober enough to promptly answer his own question. “I think it’s because in Australia now we’re trying to project this idea that we’re not a very boozy society and that there’s no drug taking or anything like that; and we’re all quite level headed. But if you look just a little bit under the surface, that’s bullshit.” Indeed there are probably very few of us over the age of fourteen who don’t have a collection of inebriated misadventure tales to tell. Alcohol and the comedy of humiliation quite clearly go hand in hand. “It’s kinda the perfect fit really because most comedy starts out in bars,” Keck notes with raised eyebrows. “I mean, all of the comedians in this show basically live in bars. Every night we’re in one bar or another; maybe not drinking solidly but y’know, that’s just the kinda culture comedy springs from.” Tales From My Liver is obviously an idea with legs (as opposed to being just plain legless). For Simon Keck this week’s show is just the start. “This is kinda like the pilot episode,” he admits. “Everyone has a good drunken story so you can see it really growing. The first one is just a few comics I know
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personally but I’ve lined up a bunch of journalists who are very excited to have a go.” Regaling others with your drunken folly taps directly into the grand comic tradition of self-deprecation. We all love to hear reassuring tales of other people’s mistakes. That is, provided they can remember them. As Keck wryly reveals, “The funny thing is I’ve actually had real trouble remembering stuff for the event. I had to put a shout out on Facebook saying, ‘do you remember a drunken time you had with me?’ That created a whole string of responses; it’s about thirty or so strong now, so I’m really gathering some good material.” Of course, tales of bladdered bravado are often overstated. So, will Simon Keck be leading from the front with a commitment to comic truth? He smirks at the idea before saying, “My girlfriend always tells me that one of the most annoying things about me is my need to tell the truth, particularly in comedy. I always seem to go for these really honest, cringy stories. That’s probably what attracted me to this idea.” Joining him in the trashed confessional will be an intoxicated rabble of Melbourne comics including David Quirk, Tommy Dassalo and Tegan Marie Higginbotham. With the refined but avowedly decadent surrounds of Madame Brussel’s as the backdrop, Tales From My Liver aims to make light of drunken disaster and take the piss (so to speak) out of the responsible drinking clique. It should be a night to remember – and then promptly forget. WHAT: Tales From My Liver WHERE & WHEN: Madame Brussels Wednesday 29 June
For Western cinephiles, the best-known name in Thai cinema is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which gives a distorted sense of the national cinema of Thailand: where every arthouse export is seen through the prism of one the most strange and singular new millennial filmmakers. Mundane History enables this notion: Anocha Suwichakornpong’s debut feature bringing out connections tangible, and intangible: Weerasethakul’s editor Lee Chatametikool is at work here, making his presence felt as he creates the rhythms and brings the shuffled chronology of the story into life; the film featuring the kind of non-generic plotting and leaps of logic (if not the definitive genius) that populate Weerasethakul’s work. For the most part, Mundane History is a dry, realist, rural drama about a new carer coming to work for a wealthy family, looking after their depressed paraplegic son. There’s mutual coldness between the two, but slowly it thaws; most of this is fairly unspoken, and only gently implied. Through this narrative, Suwichakornpong scatters in moments of washed-out memory, pseudo ‘flashbacks’, pointed critiques of Thai society (as symbolised through the family/servant divide), and fantastical flourishes bordering on psychedelic; as cresting post-rock hits feverish crescendos and the wheelchair-bound boy pirouettes through imagined hallucinations of the cosmos. His love of astronomy brings with it a more profound appreciation of the cycle of life — the birth and death of stars as relating to the birth and death of
TV
REVIEW
THIS IS MY PICTURE WHEN I WAS DEAD
humans — and that, in turn, brings hope he can rise above his own bitterness, his own anger, his own selfloathing. It all culminates with a real video footage of a birth by caesarian and more post-rock: this, now, the cycle of life made big and dramatic at incongruous tenor to the still, slow drama that’s preceded it. In The Realms Of The Unreal: The Mystery Of Henry Darger arrives on local screens, at ACMI, next week, a full seven years after it was made. It seems strange, but, then again, strange is Darger’s metier: the celebrated outsider artist a janitor whose 15,000 page novel The Story Of The Vivian Girls, In What Is Known As The Realms Of The Unreal, Of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused By The Child Slave Rebellion and library of related artworks were
discovered after his 1972 death. Darger’s been a popular hipster figure for years — Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective have both mounted explicit homages — but Jessica Yu’s documentary tries to take him to a mass audience; bringing personal journals and Vivian Girls narrative to life with voice-over recitations and loving looks at his tiny paintings. And, thankfully, there’s not a celebrity fan in sight. The Arab Film Festival is weirdly tiny (three features!) and one-weekendlong fleeting; yet another minor festival in a cinema schedule already loaded with them. Its insignificance is due, one suspects, almost entirely to the Melbourne International Film Festival’s long-running embrace and exploration of Middle Eastern cinema; every MIFF housing its own Arab Film Festival
within. The programme is built around a pair of soap operas that don’t meet the quality-control of the big festival; The Cry Of An Ant a folksy, witless picaresque that, cynically, cuts in footage of the Egyptian Revolution to give it added cultural credence (or, moreso, to help it shift tickets locally); Stray Bullet a one-day-in-’76 mood-piece melodrama in which a would-be bride, two weeks prior to her loveless wedding, walks through the suburbs and woodlands of Northern Beirut, her every emotion loaded with double meaning, the nascent Civil War looming in every artful shot, explosion of hysterical drama, and comicallyobvious piece of symbolism (runaway dogs being shot!). If there’s a saving moment from the AFF’s few films, something to justify its existence, there’s Mahmoud al Massad’s This Is My Picture When I Was Dead, the political poignantly personal as the cinematic memoir of political cartoonist Bashir Mraish becomes an ad-hoc history of the PLO and a lament for the lost dreams of an independent Palestinian state. Mraish was in a car with his father, a PLO soldier, when a veritable mob hit took them out; both were corpses on their way to a morgue when doctors twigged that the kid’s heart was still beating. Thus the title, and thus a film in which an adult digs into the memories of a halfremembered father, sifting through old photos and the recollections of others. Al Massad’s portraits makes individual grief societal; Mraish not just eulogising his father, but grieving childhood innocence, the independence movement, Arafat, hope.
SET
WITH ANDREW MAST It began as a hokey cash-in on the success of the renewed Doctor Who franchise in 2006, but now Torchwood is a big budget multi-national co-production that is being aggressively marketed as a flagship series for its American and Australian broadcasters. And yes, this is another TV Set dedicated to Who-related programming. The BBC-originated science fantasy monster-of-the-week show Torchwood was closer to ’80s Who than the revamped ratings hit it spun-off from (Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who). The Cardiff-based team of alien hunters tracked down shonky-looking CGI’d visitors from outer space, led by the pantomime camp of Captain Jack Harkness — a recurring Who regular played by musical theatre entertainer John Barrowman. As with those years the Doctor spent hanging with the likes of Adric and Ace, Torchwood had heart. Its most suspenseful episode being the first season’s Countrycide, where the writers eschewed aliens in preference of human cannibals as the story’s Big Bad. Something clicked around this time and Torchwood began to develop a serial story arc based around their very human relationships. A work affair, a gay romance, and complicated back stories moved to the fore with the galactic crime-fighting becoming a mere backdrop. But it all came too late for the costcutting BBC and Torchwood teetered on the brink of axing after two seasons. In an attempt to save the show, a third season was commissioned as a fiveepisode ‘event’ that screened across consecutive nights as Torchwood: Children Of Earth. With most of the original cast killed-off (and another to bow before season’s end), storylines were tightened to create a tense alien armegeddon plot that featured The
Thick Of It’s Peter Capaldi in a role as tensely understated as Barrowman was overstated. This also meant a meatier role for Harkness’s partner in alien-buttkicking Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) and more time given to her relatable family dramas (hubby doesn’t like her playing martyr for humankind and he may even be a tad jealous of her bi-furious boss). The season was a runaway hit. But BBC budgetary restraints meant producers would struggle to top the action-packed climax to their pedicidal spin on Children Of The Corn. In stepped US cable network Starz looking to build upon its new found success producing original material in Party Down and Spartacus. And so, BBC/ Starz co-production Torchwood: Miracle Day (Saturday 9 July, 8.30pm, fasttracked to UKTV) was conceived. The pimp’d-up Woody splits its action between Wales and LA, and within the first hour we are treated to a helicopter chase, a gruesome road accident, lots of explosions, leaps out of windows, and dateline criss-crossing. All this while Cooper nurses a newborn, an ailing father, and nagging husband (in a nod to John Woo, she even brandishes heavy artillery in one hand and baby in the other). Reunited with Harkness, the pair are ready to figure out what the fuck has caused the world’s population to stop dying. So confident are the BBC with the amped-up action that the first episode was previewed in cinemas — sure beats sitting through another Transformers. [Ianto, we’re not in Cardiff anymore.] Who re-animator Russell T Davies is still at the helm with longtime Torchwood writer John Fay and UK director Bharat Nalluri (Life On Mars, Spooks) on-side. His US team features sci-fi heavyweight Jane Espenson (Buffy, BSG) and writer/producers John Shiban (X-Files, Supernatural, Vampire Diaries, Breaking
TORCHWOOD
Bad) and Doris Egan (Smallville). The cast is also pumped up with US talent including Bill Pullman, Lauren Ambrose, and Diaries vamp Dillon Casey (he was Noah in S1) — along with a trio of once-big-in-the-’80sactors Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), C Thomas Howell (The Hitcher), and Mare Winningham (St Elmo’s Fire). Of course, there’s a token Aussie — Dichen Lachman (Neighbours, Dollhouse).
Best news of all is that Barrowman no longer acts as if he’s trying to distract from the cheap FX and tones it even further down than he did for his stint in Desperate Housewives. He’s brought it in at a Jerry Bruckheimer-level, that’s almost Wire-like naturalism by his standards. If he, and the show, sustain this for a ten-ep run then you can believe in Miracle.
CORNER HOTEL HOSTS MUSIC PHOTO EXHIBITION The rooftop bar of the Corner Hotel will play host to Close-Up & Personal, a joint exhibition of music photography by Mary Boukouvalas and Ros O’Gorman, featuring works from the past two decades. Featuring the artist’s favourites across live and portrait photography, subjects include The Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga, Prince, Rage Against The Machine, Nick Cave, Joe Strummer, and more. Many of the framed prints will be available for purchase. Close-Up & Personal will be held Tuesday 12 July from 4pm. More info at cornerhotel.com.