Art Smitten

Arrival is the latest film by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, written by Eric Heisserer and adapted from a short story by Ted Chiang. It’s a science-fiction film in which aliens arrive on Earth and Dr Louise Banks, a linguist, played by Amy Adams, is asked to help decipher their language in order to find out their purpose on Earth. Over the course of the film we join Dr Banks in solving this curious puzzle, as she races against the worldwide chaos caused by the presence of these creatures. Interspersed with the plot of Dr Banks and the aliens is another storyline involving her daughter, which not only adds emotional weight but also ends up being quite a central element in understanding the film itself.

There’s an absolutely brilliant confluence of visual, emotional and intellectual elements that keep you engrossed and awed throughout the film’s duration. Everything just comes together so well.

First, let’s talk about the visuals. In particular, all the things to do with the aliens are immaculately designed. The aliens are these kinds of seven-limbed knuckle squids which in the film they call “heptapods”, and they land in twelve identical ships which seem like particularly aerodynamic skimming pebbles. You might have seen them on the poster. Inside the pods is a long rectangular room with a groovy gravitational shift, and the first time we experience this gravitational shift is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a film this year. In the room there’s a glass screen behind which the heptapods themselves appear enshrouded in a white mist. Finally, there’s the language that the heptapods use to communicate, the language that our protagonist, the linguist Dr Banks, has been hired to decode. Emanating from a tentacular orifice of one of the limbs of the heptapods, the language is basically a black smoky ink which forms circular symbols or logograms that on first glance look like Rorschach tests made from coffee mug stains but really is a set of unique elements that in each circle create an entire phrase or sentence.

Now, I might be biased in my enjoyment of the film due to being a linguist myself, but if anything I feel like a film that involves one’s specialist subject gets put under even closer scrutiny, and the fact that there’s so much actual linguistic basis for what goes on, which I won’t go into, definitely increased how much I got into the film.

This is not even touching the intriguing way the film deals with the passage of time. Towards the middle of the film, we find out a certain piece of information that changes the way conceptualise everything we’ve seen so far and everything we see thenceforth. I’m hesitant in labelling it a twist, because it feels less like a twist per se and more like another piece of the puzzle that the film represents. Though it’s still totally a spoiler, so I’m not going to say what it is. But it comes at the point where Dr Banks unlocks the secret to the heptapods’ language and in doing so is able to look at time in a completely different way. So essentially, by solving the problem of their language and learning this new way of experiencing time, Dr Banks passes on to us, the audience, the ability to see the film differently. It’s really quite a clever narrative technique.

And what the revelation has to do with involves Dr Banks’ daughter, Hannah, who we see in the first few minutes of the film being born, growing up and then dying. Scenes from Hannah’s life are constantly being intercut with the plot of the heptapods, and this really adds a delicate and grounded aspect to the film. There are definitely moments when the film threatens to move into rather oversentimental territory, but its sentimentality always feels earned, or else it pulls back just before getting too sappy. And regardless, the story of Hannah, without giving anything away, is absolutely essential to our grasp of the story of the entire film.

Overall what impressed me was the scale of this film, the way it tied together a worldwide phenomenon to a personal tale, the attention to detail with giant alien ships and tiny wisps of smoke alike, and above all the flagrant optimism for humanity amidst all the flurry of panic and division going on across the world.

Arrival has captivated my imagination the way very few recent films have, and it relays a message of communication and unity that is always relevant, especially today.

Arrival is out in cinemas now.

Written by Ben Volchok

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Erin is joined in the studio with Melbourne comedian Sammy J, one half of the comedy duo, Sammy J and Randy. Sammy J has been busy working on a new stage show since his hit tv election series, Playground Politics, and co-writing and acting in Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane, which was nominated for the 2015 ACCTA award for Best Television Comedy Show. The duo are now reopening Sammy J & Randy Land, which promises haunted ghost trains, velociraptor petting zoos, and the infamous "Sphincter Popping" water slide. 

Sammy J and Randy Land will be touring Melbourne on Thursday, 15th December until Saturday, 17th December at the Athenaeum Theatre on Collins St. Tickets available here or check out his FB page for more details!

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Hacksaw Ridge is quickly turning into the must-see film of the year: the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist army medic who saved the lives of 75 World War II soldiers without ever holding a weapon. It's that powerful combination of a visceral war film, a compelling social justice story and a very poignant biopic that always gets people talking.

Audiences all seem to be appreciating a journey into the hellfire of war that leaves them with more than just a feeling of pointlessness. Critics all seem to be praising the juggling act of depicting such huge scale events on such a personal level. As always, I’m sure the Academy will be very generous with a film telling such an important historical true story. Meanwhile, everyone looks thrilled to see director Mel Gibson bringing himself back into the Hollywood good books.

Screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight chronicle the personal life, early rejection, spectacular heroics and later veneration of the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour. As a Seventh Day Adventist, he refuses to ever physically harm a fellow human being, takes the seventh commandment - “Thou shalt not kill" - in its most literal sense, and recognises Saturday as the Sabbath. Throughout his military training, his superiors and fellow soldiers find all of this supremely irritating. They think he's just trying to get an extra day off, that he's doing all this for attention, that he's a coward who’s too scared to fight but too ashamed to stay at home, or that maybe he’s just insane. Sergeant Howell (a surprisingly credible Vince Vaughn) tries both the stick and the carrot, neither of which can persuade him to leave. Captain Glover (Sam Worthington) tries to convince him that the better translation is "Thou shalt not commit murder," which apparently doesn't apply in a time of war, although of course once you start making exceptions it’s hard to know where to stop. That said, Doss has no political sympathies with Japan. Just like his beloved brother, Hal (Nathaniel Buzolic), Desmond is determined to protect his country on the battlefield, even though their jobs in the shipyard would have made both of them eligible for deferment. As Desmond sees it, the only difference between him and his brother, or any of the other soldiers, is that he wants to serve his country by saving lives instead of taking them. In his words: “With the world so set on tearing itself apart, it don't seem like such a bad thing to me to want to put a little bit of it back together.” This is the climax of the speech he eventually has to give in front of a court martial, which is, in the film at least, the tipping point of his stalemate with the military. While they are moved enough to reconsider sending him to prison, they are still far from truly understanding his views. Needless to say, the day after the Battle of Okinawa, after he spends the entire night trawling through enemy territory rescuing mutilated soldiers, they all come to respect him, and his beliefs. As Glover puts it, the soldiers might not all believe the way he does, but they believe in how much he believes. Similar to Chris Kyle, whose life was chronicled in Clint Eastwod’s American Sniper (2015), Desmond quickly becomes the stuff of legend, someone who makes the men feel as safe as you can when you're heading into battle with the ruthless Japanese forces.

Unsurprisingly, given that this is an American depiction of the war, the Japanese soldiers are largely demonised. After being talked about throughout the first half of the film, and having their handiwork shown by truckloads of bleeding corpses, they make their first appearance in a long, gruelling battle scene, one that perfectly balances chaos and suspense. They are essentially portrayed as scary goons to be blown down. Most of their dialogue isn’t even subtitled. There's really only one character among them, the commander who would rather die than surrender, though he appears far too late to really humanise the enemy side. Every atrocity they committed is foregrounded, so as to prevent the morality of the war effort itself being called into question.

Meanwhile, over in the American camp, an array of the usual colourful characters are introduced from the beginning, though fortunately none of the cliches actually end up playing out. They all feel like real people, probably because most of them actually were, but even the invented or composite characters avoid becoming stock soldier stereotypes. Still, apparently it was too much to show any of the misdeeds they would have been party to on the American side of the battle. Even though the action scenes excel at capturing the scale of the conflict, they end up missing quite a lot of the complexity.

However, Hacksaw Ridge was never meant to be a docudrama about the Second World War. Above all else, this is Desmond’s story, and thankfully the complexities of his religious, ethical and personal beliefs are explored much more fully than the intricacies of the war.

The film introduces a harrowing childhood incident where, as he and Hal are fighting, Desmond picks up a brick and strikes his brother over the head with it, almost killing him. It also depicts their father, Tom (Hugo Weaving) as a raging alcoholic, who Desmond comes very close to shooting in the head when he attacks his mother, Bertha (Rachel Griffiths). This might be a fictionalised and exaggerated version of his early life, but it does retain the essence of the part his upbringing played in shaping his values, and later his choices. For instance, he first meets his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) on the day that he rescues an injured stranger from a fallen cart, drives him to the hospital and makes one of his many blood donations while he's there.

Once he eventually gets to the battlefield, it looks as though this one poignant little story might be swallowed up by the historical monstrosity that is World War II, but it isn't. The battle on Hacksaw Ridge was certainly great and terrible, but to those who knew him, Desmond Doss was even greater.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

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The audience at La Mama Courthouse demanded encore bows from the cast of Rust and Bone on the night of its Victorian premiere performance, which they very humbly gave and most definitely deserved. Caleb Lewis’ three-pronged play asks a lot of its actors, and quite a bit from its audience as well. A trio of male performers - Luke Mulquiney, Adam Ibrahim and Glenn Maynard in this production - play out three of the stories from Craig Davidson's collection of the same title. Ibrahim plays a SeaWorld whale trainer whose leg was torn off by an Orca, Maynard a fading boxer in need of someone to fight for, and Mulquiney a crazed dog fighter who's struggling with his infertility. The narratives are all interspersed, such that Lewis needs to carefully choose when to switch from one to the next, director Daniel Clarke has to think carefully about how to transition between stories, and the actors have to be ready to change gears in an instant. As well as that, each of them needs to have the range to play all of the key supporting characters in the other two stories, most memorably a vigorous American boxing trainer, a bouncy surrogate son, a long-suffering wife and a lively new girlfriend. It’s always impressive when actors can play different ages, genders and nationalities without falling into stereotypes or farce.

It certainly changes the equation when multiple stories are being told at once. It can make it harder for the audience to orient themselves at the beginning, and easier for them to drift away in the middle. The strong characterisations certainly help here, as does the very tight choreography by Ingrid Voorendt. For her, a boxing punch, the shattering of rust and bone, becomes a very effective motif to express the torment of these three characters. It definitely makes for the cleanest transitions, and, if nothing else, snaps the audience out of any confusion.

Certain parts of each story feel very similar and almost interchangeable, which often seemed intentional. Of course, all three protagonists are men who are frustrated with the limitations of their bodies, and who loathe themselves much more than those around them ever could. There’s always something exhilarating about watching parallel lives play out in such tantalising proximity, both literally given it’s a small stage but also in terms of their inner experiences, even if their outer experiences might be wildly different.

Making this many hops between the three stories, Lewis doesn't always land gracefully. Not all of the threads get tied securely, and some of the most thought-provoking moments are barely given any breathing space. No doubt, for each audience member, one narrative will probably emerge with all the connections intact while another might have a few pieces missing for them. It all depends on what makes a greater impression on you: the spiritual escapism of the whale story, the primal intensity of the boxer's tale or the urgent pathos of the dog fighter's plight.

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Hosts Ben and Andrew are joined in the studio by playwright and actor, Nakkiah Lui, the playwright behind Malthouse Theatre's production of Blaque Showgirls. Loosely based off the movie, Showgirls (1995), the story is set in Brisvegas, where a young Ginny Jones seeks to join the Blaque Showgirls. 

Christian Tsoutsouvas' review can be found here!

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Blaque Showgirls is a merciless interrogation of Australian racism in the form of a stage parody of dance movies, including, of course, Showgirls (1995). Written by Nakkiah Lui, the acclaimed Aboriginal activist and playwright who recently worked on the ABC’s Black Comedy, it’s a play that mocks and borrows from film and tv in equal measure. Eugyeene Teh’s set design even resembles a television set as well as a theatre within a theatre, something that director Sarah Giles takes full advantage of. Voiceover abounds instead of theatrical asides. Jed Palmer’s musical score provides the cheese while the cast brings the delicious ham. Humorous captions race above the actors’ heads, and are easy to miss unless you’re paying close attention. Naturally, it ticks of all the obligatory dance movie scenes, albeit with more than a slight twist: a “montage of moderate success”; the arrival-in-the-big-city scene; the audition poster that blows into our protagonist’s face at just the right moment (here the wind is a stagehand carrying a pole); the jealous antagonist dancer throwing a tantrum at her dressing room mirror just before she hatches her third-act scheme.

Lui’s story follows the blundering young Ginny Jones (Bessie Holland) an orphan from the town of Chitole (pronounced shi-toll). She dreams of moving to Brisvegas and joining the Blaque Showgirls. She might not be black, but she refuses to let that stop her, no matter how much people mock her for it. Apparently her mother was the best Aboriginal dancer in the country. She is adamant that she can remember looking up at her brown face when she was a baby, just before she was accidentally killed during smoking ceremony that apparently gave Ginny brain damage. In any case, the local Indigenous community are happy to see her go. One elder in particular, her would-be mentor figure (Elaine Crombie) is fed up with her thoughtless lack of cultural sensitivity and is happy to let Brisvegas knock some sense into her. It doesn’t.

The moment she steps in to audition, she is brushed aside by the indomitable star of the show, Chandon Connors (Crombie again) and her arrogant but airheaded manager, cheekily named Kyle MacLachlan (Guy Simon). This is when the sprightly Molly (Emi Canavan) comes to her aid. She is the Japanese hostess of a club called the Kum Den, and, just like the Blaque Showgirls, she has had to make a living off selling her culture to white people, most of whom assume she’s Chinese and refuse to be corrected on it. She offers to help Ginny if she will later help her.

All Ginny needs now are some culturally appropriative dreadlocks and an Aboriginal dance teacher. She finds one named True Love Interest (Simon again!) with crudely painted-on abs. Of course, all of their scenes together are built from the worst “dramatic” dialogue ever written for the screen.

This part of the satire is probably the most fun to laugh at, since it makes everyone in the audience feel smart and sophisticated. Ginny is just generally good for a laugh right from the beginning, although, for the white members of the audience, the amusement turns to more of a self-reflective cringe once you realise who she really is. She’s not just clueless, she really is selfish and wilfully ignorant. As much as she might seem like one, she’s hardly an underdog, given that all the real power over the Blaque Showgirls is held by the unseen, ghostly white board of directors.

Surprisingly, even True Love Interest has more substance than she does, and unsurprisingly, the formidable Chandon turns out to be much more than just a self-obsessed diva. As the most powerful Aboriginal woman in Brisvegas, poised to rise up through the ranks of the company just before Ginny showed up, she is actually the closest thing we have to a hero here.

However, in writing this sly revelation of our racism past and present, there is one trap that Lui very nearly falls into: she does make more than a few jokes at the expense of Ginny’s supposed brain damage and speech difficulties, enough for the audience to start linking it to her social ignorance. Of course, fighting racism with ableism basically defeats the purpose, though fortunately she doesn’t dwell on it too much. Also, towards the end of the play there is a priceless gag attacking wheelchair inaccessibility that is rather redeeming.

The lasting feel left by Blaque Showgirls is one of utter frustration with the way things have been, still are and probably will continue to be for a while. It’s a hard-bitten, feel-good and then feel-bad comedy that tricks you into caring.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

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As fantastic as it is to see Arrival gaining so much traction, I do hope that Amy Adams’ other big release, Nocturnal Animals, still gets enough attention. Tom Ford’s second feature, after A Single Man (2009), sees Adams playing an equally sleep deprived but much less scholarly professional at the peak of her career. Susan Morrow is the jaded owner of a glitzy contemporary art gallery, a realist in a world that is anything but reality. 

She first entered the creative world when she wanted to a bohemian herself, back when she was engaged to Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal). Edward was just the kind of carefree romantic that her mother, Anne (Laura Linney), had always hated, and Susan has always hated her mother. She only has one scene, naturally the one where Susan announces her engagement, but that’s all we really need of her. She's the classic classist, conservative parent that any protagonist would want to rebel against, especially by running off with someone she looks down upon.

Being married to Edward was supposed to stop Susan turning out anything like her, but, just as Anne warned her she would, she soon finds that he isn’t enough for her. The last thing she tells Susan, before they basically never see each other again, is that no matter what they do, everyone eventually turns into their mother. 

All of this is told through flashbacks. The present-day Susan is married to the much more ambitious and money-minded Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). They’re the kind of business couple who spend more nights away from each other in hotel rooms than they do at home. The world of the gallery where Susan works is an eerie mix of avant-garde artistry and sterile opulence. Funnily enough, it’s very reminiscent of the modelling universe of The Neon Demon, especially since Jena Malone and Karl Glusman are in the cast of this film as well.

That said, most of the film takes place away from this narrative anchor, as it were. Ford is well aware that those tumultuous years with Edward are much more interesting than Susan’s current life with Hutton, even if the divorce is foreshadowed a bit too overtly. Many more years pass until she hears from him again, with the delivery of his latest manuscript for a novel entitled "Nocturnal Animals" that is dedicated to her. He used to call her a nocturnal animal when they were together, since even then she was a night owl.

The book is a shockingly violent thriller about a family that go out on a camping trip in the middle of nowhere. After they've driven outside of any phone coverage, they are stalked, run off the road and harassed by a local gang. The dad tries to outplay them and get his wife and daughter to safety, but their assailants end up holding him down, forcing the two women into one of their cars and taking them far away, leaving him behind feeling useless and powerless.

This is definitely the most intense, drawn-out and harrowing scene that this film delivers. Understandably, there were quite a few walkouts when it reached its darkest point. Most films only hint at or threaten to show these kinds of horrific occurrences, but this one goes much further with it than anyone was hoping. Still, it's integral to setting up the gruelling revenge story of Tony Hastings, the survivor of the attack, whose wife and daughter were both beaten, raped and murdered, leaving him with nothing but the raging need to find the men who did this to them.

Often when films contain stories within stories they end up feeling quite trite and idle. They're usually told with wall-to-wall narration, an overdone fairytale aesthetic and double-casting that makes for some very overwrought allegory. Sometimes, funnily enough, it's very hard to be invested in a story that you know is fictional inside the world of the main story, even though the whole film is fictional anyway. However, the story of the novel inside this film adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan, is definitely not your average meta-narrative. It’s told so straightforwardly and given so much screen time that it almost makes you forget about the central story. In fact, this could have easily been just a single narrative film about Tony, although that would have been incredibly depressing. If nothing else, it's a relief when Susan puts the book down and returns to her unsatisfying but much less traumatic life. Compared with Edward’s novel and the romantic flashbacks, the main plot is pretty stagnant, with a much greater focus on characters than events. It certainly needs the two side plots to give it momentum, but equally both of the side plots rely on the central story to give them a more complex purpose.

There is still a striking resemblance between Edward and Tony, not least because Gyllenhaal plays both of them, but even so their connection is much subtler than you’d expect. In one of the flashbacks, Edward defends himself against a bad review by saying that all authors write about themselves. Indeed, both him and Tony have been called weak by people with varying definitions of weakness, and strength. Eventually, both men decide that people see strength as cruelty, and they are done with being weak.

By the same token, Tony’s wife, Laura, is basically Susan, although this connection is slightly veiled. Laura isn’t played by Adams, but, in a very inspired casting choice, she's portrayed by her startling lookalike, Isla Fisher.

The allegory is there but it isn't being forced under a spotlight. It doesn’t have to match the main story beat for beat to make itself known. This is what makes Nocturnal Animals both a fascinating film to pick apart and a totally engrossing one to lose yourself in.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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F. is a theatre production by Riot Stage, a youth theatre company based in Melbourne. It is part of Poppy Seed Festival, Poppy Seed is in its second year, it aimed producing shows made by independent and emerging theatre companies.

F. followed a lives of a group of teenagers, it was composed of short scenes playing out different stories throughout the show, they sometimes became connected and it all ending in a huge stylised movement and piece.

These explored all sorts of themes around being in the world as a teenager in modern Australia. It focused a lot on mental health, queerness and sexuality, the internet and consent.

F. felt like a devised show, but it was written by Morgan Rose, the writing was very naturalistic, almost as if it was verbatim.

Stylistically it was very beautiful it had a strong and clear aesthetic and mood,  the lighting design was very beautiful and precise, although I liked the sound design, I felt like I wanted a bit more, the space F. was performed in was pretty big, sometimes the space felt empty, I feel like it could have been filled up with a creative use of sound design.

The performances from the ensemble were fantastic; it’s great to see a youth theatre still going strong after the youth arts funding cuts. I was sad to see that only the names of the ensemble were listed in the program and they didn’t get a full bio, I can’t wait to see what these performers move onto next.

I felt very connected with many of the characters, the stories they told were very relatable and very realistic. F. was a delightful, dark and intelligent work by a fantastic ensemble of young people. It gave a great insight into what it is like growing up in Australia today in the age of the Internet.

F. has been the most diverse show in Poppy Seed, the lack of diversity within this festival has been disappointing, I hope to see more diversity in years to come, including cultural background, ability, and it would be great to see Poppy Seed giving space for theatre companies from a rural area. I also feel disappointed in the lack of accessibility to the festival venues, the butterfly club has no wheelchair access and I called the trades hall in Carlton and they said wheelchair access was very tricky. To me, being a theatre maker and artist should mean allowing access to people of all abilities to your shows, this may mean diverting funds from other places to book venues that are a bit more expensive but accessible, making sure there is Auslan interpretation and audio description, these things may be expensive but I think it is important, theatre and art should be for everyone.

These issues aside Poppy Seed is an excellent initiative, should and needs to be supported so that they can afford to make the changes they need to with accessibility and diversity, they give independent and emerging artists a great space to explore and put up work on at a main stage, which is exciting and a great addition to Melbourne’s theatre scene, so let’s keep supporting it and making sure future theatre makers get the same opportunity.

F. is showing at The Trades Hall in Carlton South until December 11th.

Written by Ebony Beaton.

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Hosts Andrew and Thierry hop into the new game, Raiders of the Lost Art, the game that uncovers forgotten or underated art forms/styles/trends and asks "why is it under-appreciated?" and, more importantly, "is it worth bringing back?"

This week we question whether the musical style Ragtime, popular between 1895-1918, is worth making a comeback, and whether video games are underappreciated as a recognised art form? 

What do you think? Tweet us @art_smitten or message the FB page!

Thierry, Andrew and Christian discuss the controversies surrounding the 2016 Archibald Art Prize. Between self portraits, twitter followers and distracting backgrounds, the Archibald entries always cause a stir. Which one was your favourite? Check them out as the tour makes its way through Australia.

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