Year: 2013
We Steal Secrets, A Gun in Each Hand, Pacific Rim
Saturday, July 13th, 2013 Film Reviews,If ever you had a sneaking feeling that Julian Assange was not the ultimate hero and martyr of our time, Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets will turn suspicion into certainty. The portrait of the WikiLeaks founder that emerges from this documentary reveals a man whose quest for truth has become an exercise in personal propaganda. […]
Philip Wolfhagen
Saturday, July 13th, 2013 Art Column,To appreciate the art of Philip Wolfhagen one must be tolerant of repetition. Few Australian artists are more devoted to the serial approach to painting: fastening on to a particular motif, making small changes in colour and tone on successive canvases until the theme is exhausted. For Wolfhagen’s fans the process is mesmeric, for his […]
Man of Steel & Everybody Has a Plan
Saturday, July 6th, 2013 Film Reviews,When comic book heroes are turned into sensitive brooding souls, there is something twisted in our culture. We’ve seen a tortured Batman and now an angst-ridden Superman filled with anxiety about his true identity and how people might react to his superpowers. To complete the psychological profile the new Superman has a difficult childhood. He […]
The Red Queen
Saturday, July 6th, 2013 Art Column,It’s becoming difficult to remember what Hobart was like before David Walsh started his Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Within two-and-a-half years this Gothic fortress of sex and death has eaten up the city more effectively than any movie monster ever ate Detroit. Every day a steady procession of tourists from all over […]
Anne Landa Award 2013: The Space Between Us
Saturday, June 29th, 2013 Art Column,There must be a name for the sense of anxiety generated by an exhibition of new media art. Neomediaphobia? It’s a bit cumbersome. Even if the syndrome has yet to be titled its effects are very real. Having just taken twenty people into an exhibition of Contemporary Norwegian Video Art in Oslo, I’m in a […]
The Look of Love & In the House
Saturday, June 29th, 2013 Film Reviews,“I started out with a mind-reading act,” says Paul Raymond, ‘the King of Soho’. “I soon realised that people liked to look at attractive girls, and they liked it even more if the girls had no clothes on. So in that sense, and in that sense alone, I could read people’s minds.”The producers of The […]
After Earth & The Internship
Saturday, June 22nd, 2013 Film Reviews,According to British market analyst, Nick Meaney, an incontrovertible algorithm reveals that any film starring Will Smith is guaranteed to make money. No sooner had we imbibed this piece of scientific wisdom than Smith appeared in After Earth, a movie of incontrovertible mediocrity that suggests the algorithm is a dud. No one ever claimed a […]
Edvard Munch 150
Saturday, June 22nd, 2013 Art Column,“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness,” wrote Edvard Munch, from a Copenhagen clinic, where he was being treated for alcohol-induced hallucinations. “Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder… My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their […]
Jeffrey Smart 1921-2013
Saturday, June 22nd, 2013 Art Column,Although he assumed an imposing stature in his later years, Jeffrey Smart was a grafter not a dasher. A careful, methodical craftsman, he had little respect for painters such as Sidney Nolan who might produce dozens of canvases in a week. For Smart a painting had to be constructed with the same care that an […]
Sculpture by the Sea, Aarhus
Saturday, June 15th, 2013 Art Column,For the third time in six years Australia’s most popular exhibition has been transplanted to the coast of Jutland, drawing enormous crowds. Sculpture by the Sea first came to Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, in 2009, at the behest of Crown Prince Frederik and his Australian bride, Crown Princess Mary. Had the Danish Royal Family been […]