Year: 2013
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet & A Lady in Paris
Saturday, June 15th, 2013 Film Reviews,Jean Anouillh (1910-87) was a prolific and successful dramatist in the years after the Second World War, the evolution of whose work reads like a condensed history of modern French literature. He begins as a realist; makes his reputation with plays wrtten in a poetic, neo-classical style; before flirting with absurdism and a self-conscious form […]
Farewell My Queen & Fast and Furious 6
Saturday, June 8th, 2013 Film Reviews,Everyone knows the story of doomed, frivolous Marie Antoinette whose life of pampered luxury was ended by the guillotine. The Queen’s personality was established in filmmakers’ minds by Stefan Zweig’s best-selling biography of 1932, subtitled The Portrait of an Average Woman, and she has never been allowed to deviate too far from that model. Among […]
Venice Biennale 2013: The Encylopaedic Palace
Saturday, June 8th, 2013 Art Column,Every Venice Biennale is a talk fest – a place for the beautiful people of the art world to exchange opinions and business cards at endless parties. Unfortunately most of the talk is of a very tawdry nature: “I just loved the Ruritanian pavilion!” “Oh yeah, I loved it too!” And so on, ad infinitum. […]
The Great Gatsby & Happiness Never Comes Alone
Saturday, June 1st, 2013 Film Reviews,It has become a cliché to call Baz Luhrmann a director of video clips rather than motion pictures, but like so many clichés this one has the ring of truth. The Great Gatsby – long-awaited, much-talked-about, supremely overhyped – has arrived. It shows Luhrmann demonstrating his gift for lavish spectacle and his lack of almost […]
Art Basel in Hong Kong 2013
Saturday, June 1st, 2013 Art Column,Hong Kong is said to have got its name from the smell of incense stored in warehouses by the waterfront. Nowadays in “the fragrant harbour” the dominant smell is that of money, and it’s a perfume most residents find highly agreeable. There was a certain tang in the air last week, as the increasingly successful […]
Lars & the big poo
Tuesday, May 28th, 2013 Blog,At the end of another Hong Kong Art Fair – now rebranded as Art Basel in Hong Kong – one image stays in my mind. On an elevated platform stands Lars Nittve, executive director of the much-heralded M+ Museum, due to open in 2017. He is wearing a brown suit and giving a speech, in […]
5th Auckland Triennial: If You Were to LIve Here…
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 Art Column,After studying the recently announced theme for next year’s Sydney Biennale – “You Imagine what You Desire” – I’d like to suggest an alternative title, borrowed from a video by Singaporean artist, Ho Tzu Nyen – The Cloud of Unknowing. I know this was the name of a mystical tract from the late Middle Ages, […]
The Reluctant Fundamentalist & Sinister
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 Film Reviews,Mohsin Hamid says the structure of his novel of 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was partly based on Fred Zinnemann’s classic western, High Noon. Instead of Gary Cooper waiting for the baddies to arrive, we have a group of militant students in Lahore awaiting the police and a group of American agents. It sounds good in […]
Monet's Garden
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 Art Column,Approaching the National Gallery of Victoria for Monet’s Garden, I expected to find the moat festooned in water lilies, and enter through an archway covered in climbing roses. The reality was slightly different: the same old bluestone façade, with red and blue Mazdas parked by the doors. After so many years of sponsorship, I’m conditioned […]
A Place For Me & Broken
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 Film Reviews,Earlier this year I watched an old Hammer Horror called The Plague of the Zombies. As an alternative title for Josh Boone’s debut feature, A Place for Me, I’d respectfully suggest: The Plague of the Writers. It is a scenario worthy of any horror flick to find a family in which everyone – and their […]