Art Smitten: Reviews - 2016

“Sharp, smart and hysterically funny!”… “A cult hit….gleaming with comic polish.”… “A frothy, sill, saucy and spectacular affair.”

These are just some of things critics have said about 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, a play written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, currently being performed for Melbourne audiences as part of the Fringe Festival.

And it was the reviews that initially attracted me to the show, although, as I realised afterwards, no words could really describe what I had witnessed.

The year is 1956, right in the middle of the Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear disaster. It’s in this context that we meet the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein – 5 feminist widows who are preparing to celebrate their annual Quiche Breakfast.

The 5 women who star in the play are hilariously drawl and camp, and absolutely obsessed with quiche. They tremble and coo as the time for the first quiche tasting draws closer. At this point I thought the play had already reached peak absurdity, and I was wrong.

Suddenly, right after the first quiche tasting, a nuclear bomb goes off and the women are thrown into survival mode. The good news is that the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein centre is bomb proof and they have enough rations to last 4 years. The bad news is that they’ve left the rest of the quiches outside. And as I said, these women really really love quiche.

I’m not going to spoil the rest of the play for you, but let’s just say that the action rises into higher and higher levels of absurdity in such a clever and shocking way that you’re left on the edge of your seat.

The play is flawlessly acted, and sends up the naivety of the white female suffragette with incredible sharpness. In particular, Lauren O’Rourke, who plays a  slightly hysterical and very enthusiastic southern belle, is wet-your-pants funny, particularly when she takes her first bite of quiche and basically has an orgasm.

After the show, I felt utterly entertained, but a little flat. It’s hard to critique this show, but I’d say that the storyline was possibly a little one-dimensional. There was no real tension between the characters – they all had the same motivation – and there was no self reflection within the script.

I think I would have liked this story better if one of the characters, at some point, stepped outside the story world and questioned it, or helped me relate to it to my 2016 perspective.

Then again, that’s perhaps what the show is playing on – the fact that the original American feminist movement, the values and beliefs of these women, can look absurd from a modern perspective. Perhaps, in another 60 years, they’ll be making fun of today’s feminists in absurd comic plays. Instead of a quiche breakfast, it’ll be a feminist club meet up over lattes at a hipster café.

Written by Beth Gibson.

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Francofonia is the latest film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is perhaps best known for his 2002 documentary Russian Ark, an ambitious and awe-inspiring one-take trip through St Peterburg’s Hermitage museum during the Russian Revolution. In Francofonia, Sokurov once more returns to the themes of art and war and museums, this time focussing on the Louvre during the Nazi occupation of France.

As someone who doesn’t get on terribly well with documentaries, I found Francofonia rather intriguing as it played with the documentary form and fused narrative with truth and reconstruction, past with present. We see Napoleon wandering the halls of the museum, we see the German officer in charge of dealing with the Louvre meeting with the then head of the museum. Sokurov himself narrates the documentary and appears on screen as one of the film’s central figures, talking to the characters while also being depicted as trying to piece the film together and not knowing how because the nature of culture is too overwhelming.

But the film itself is not a failure – the nature of culture is overwhelming, and this is intentionally presented in the daunting and elusive way that it is. The fragments of history are all woven together in a way that urges us to draw our own conclusions in the way that Sokurov tries to over the course of the film.

While at times disappointingly Eurocentric in its analysis of culture and the significance of culture, Francofonia still provides plenty of food for thought. What is culture? How much is it worth and who needs it? Who has a right to it? Perhaps the most interesting facet for me was the parallel drawn between Germany capturing the Louvre during its invasion in WWII and Napoleon invading other countries during his reign and bringing back countless artefacts to be displayed in the Louvre. Plus there’s a lot of fascinating snippets about the museum’s formation and the particulars of what it went through during the Second World War.

Complex and at times confusing – in a good way – Francofonia has a lot to offer, even if we have to do a bit of work to piece it all together.

Francofonia opens October 6.

Written by Ben Volchok.

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Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk.

Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beach sexual awakening narrative while Rose undergoes Dr Gomez's treatment. As the reliability of the mother who so shapes Sofia's life and identity becomes shaky, the importance of her relationship to her father and his Greek heritage becomes a new fixation.

Levy's writing is lucid and evocative. Images recur, morph and intermingle in unexpected ways. Her exploration of what it means to form an identity around illness and what it means to form an identity in inverse to somebody else is arresting and important.

We are drawn immediately into Sofia's inner world, a stilted filter on reality. Even the dialogue felt unnatural, characters voices indistinguishable from Sofia's own. At times this claustrophobia was transfixing, but at times it felt like there were links we were missing.

Perhaps it was the many strengths of Levy's work that left me feeling so ambivalent towards the end product. Despite its compelling subjects and beautiful prose, Hot Milk lacked any real sense of cohesiveness. Ideas and narrative were not coherently woven together and the result was just a sense of loss at what could have been. The scenes in Greece, for example, could have occurred at almost any place in the book, so separate they were from any other element. Hot Milk is by no mean's Levy's first work, so I think these failures felt greater than they would have had it been a debut.

To be honest I am surprised and a little disappointed that Hot Milk made the shortlist. I haven't read the full longlist, but for me, The North Water and My Name is Lucy Barton at least were both stronger works than Hot Milk.

All that said, I know there are lots of people who have loved and will love this book. I think perhaps a difficulty in reviewing book and especially books nominated for a prize is that the craft of the work is placed on equal footing to that craft's effect, whereas I think when we read a book without this consideration the effect is our primary interest. Hot Milk did not come together for me, but perhaps it would have if I had not had reviewing it in the back of my mind as I read it.

With last years Booker for example, lots of writers I saw felt that, although they had been profoundly emotionally involved in Hanya Yanigihara's A Little Life, that the strings used to emotionally effect us were too present for Yanigihara to deserve the win. I think this is a reasonable and even important consideration to make, but I guess it does beg the question why or even whether it is worth paying attention to these awards at all if their priorities are so different to that of the average reader.

I guess the very fact that I've undertaken this project means that I must think they are, but I think it is important to act in dialogue with the institutions you give power to.

Please stick around next week as I continue to discuss the rest of the Man Booker shortlist and question the very premise of this project!

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Thursday, 1st September marked the seventh year for the Korean Film Festival In Australian (KOFFIA). ACMI hosted Melbourne’s festival and invited guests to share canapés of kimchi, cocktails and listen to traditional music on the Gayageum. This festival boasts twenty newly released and critically acclaimed Korean films, however it was the film titled 4th Place, written and directed by Jung Ji-woo, which opened the festival.

Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, 4th Place delves into the brutal world of competitive sports and questions whether, in the pursuit of success, does the end ever justify the means.

Opening with a black-and-white prologue, we are introduced to fresh-faced competitive swimmer, Kim Gwang-su (Jung Ga-ram), who has been tipped as Korea’s future for Olympic success. After returning from practise and looking for dinner, he meets one of the swimming reporters Young-hoon (Choi Moo-sung) and they both partake in a night of heavy drinking. Despite this, Gwang-su swims exceptionally well the following morning and is on track to break records at the International Competitions in the next few weeks. Confident with his progress and times, Gwang-su cuts practise to gamble and drink, missing vital training sessions. His coaches eventually find and punish him for his recklessness, through the method of caning him with wooden pool brooms. After coping several lashes, he storms out of the complex and alerts Young-hoon to write a report about these acts of violence.

The storyline skips sixteen years on, now in colour, and focuses on eleven-year-old swimmer Joon-ho (Yoo Jae-sang). Despite high expectations placed on him by his mother, Jeong-ae (Lee Hang-na), he only seems to place fourth at junior competitions. Through the power of prayer and persuasive donations she tracks down a competent coach with unorthodox training methods. Enter Gwang-su (Park Hae-joon); a husk of the once professional swimmer, and now a worker at the local aquatic centre. It starts out with the common sports narrative; an apathetic coach, whose glory was snatched away prematurely during his youth, meets a competent underdog who has a chance at the success he missed out on. Gwang-su commits himself to the project and, as he becomes more desperate to win, his relationship with Joon-ho gradually becomes violent. He begins beating the boy in the same fashion that his coach did to him when he was a young swimmer. Gwang-su plays both the aggressor and consoler; comforting Joon-ho that it was for his own good and that he’s inspiring ambition.

The relentless pressures to succeed bleed into Joon-ho’s dreams, and it becomes more apparent he only wants to win for the sake of others. His own drawing of a gold medal hanging on the wall above his bed is enough for him, but it cannot satisfy his mother or Gwang-su. Even after his mother discovers the bruises on his back, Joon-ho is pushed to continue training, in light of his recent second-place win. No one steps in until Joon-ho’s father accidentally learns about the coach’s brutality, and even then he only bribes the coach with money to stop caning their son. 

Jung’s artfully constructed film points to our performance-driven culture, unhappy with anything less than first place. Lee’s performance as Joon-ho’s mother perfectly embodies the overbearing and paradoxical weight of society’s expectations for each child to be a winner. Park Hae-joon, playing the older version of Gwang-su, is riveting to watch; he has the ability to both terrify and charm, a technique that works on Joon-ho and the audience.

A noteworthy scene from the film is where the mother is walking back from the church with her youngest son, Ki-ho (Suh Hwan-hee), and he asks what she prayed for for each family member. She prayed for Joon-ho to come first, and for Ki-ho to attend college when he’s older. When he asks about her own prayers she states she prayed for “nothing” for herself. Her children appear to be her biggest achievement and treats their achievements as her own.

Jung navigates the heavy topic of child abuse with sensitivity and grace. It is littered with light-hearted exchanges between all characters and captures the complexity of human nature. It is also beautifully shot, especially the underwater dreamscape scene where Joon-ho tumbles around the shimmering lights refracting underneath the surface of the water. My only criticism is that the relationship between Joon-ho’s father and coach was not fully explored, and as a result Gwang-su’s admission at the end of the film was a little underwhelming.

4th Place will screen in Adelaide’s Palace Nova Cinema on Thursday, 15th September and in Perth’s Event Cinema on Thursday 22nd of September.

Written by Erin Connellan

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On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced. For those of you not in the know, the Man Booker is a prize given for what the judging panel deems to be the best novel written in English and published in the UK each year. For many including myself, the Booker is the Prize to watch, the AFL Grand Final for nerds.

This year's shortlist consists of:
Paul Beatty's The Sellout
Deborah Levy's Hot Milk
Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project
Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen
David Szalay's All That Man Is
Madeline Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The Booker somewhat controversially opened the prize up to all english speaking countries in 2015 (previously only awarding the prize to those in the Commonwealth), and this years longlist contained notably more american authors than the one that preceded it.

For the next six weeks I'm going to be looking at each of the Man Booker Shortlist picks, with occasional help from some of your other favourite Smitteners, talking about why these might have made the shortlist and who might take out the final prize. I am excited and a little scared and I hope you all enjoy the journey.

 Now onto my first review.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing, by Madeline Thien, has somewhat cynically been described by many as the classic Man Booker pick, for its complex, political, intergenerational narrative.

 The novel begins in the voice of our youngest character, Marie:

 "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life."

 From here, Thien takes us back to the start of the Chinese Communist Revolution, through the Cultural Revolution and up to the Tiananmen Square Riots.

 I think from the distance of the West, it is easy to lose the human impact of international tragedies, particularly when they star people of colour. I am one of few people I know who was presented a unit on modern Chinese History in high school, and even this had gaping holes in it. If you do not already know a little about the events Thien is describing you will not be completely lost, however you will probably find yourself compelled to seek further reading once you've put the book down.

Through Thien's characters, the widespread devastating personal impact of these events is impossible to miss. There is an almost folktale like character to the events of the distant past that is slowly stripped away as we are brought through the horrors that her characters sustain.

Thien explores characters that are often not wholly good or evil, but shaped by circumstance. She carefully examines those who are influenced into acts of violence and betrayal, treating them with care but without total forgiveness. Her characters cannot be completely redeemed from what their political context has condemned them to.

Music is heavily weaved through one generation of the families in particular. Studying classical music, I am often wary of novels that invest parts of their narratives in music. To me, it can often feel like pretentious name-dropping at best and often adds little to the story. To get a bit less literary, it sometimes feels like the scene in Pitch Perfect where Beca acts like David Guetta is some underground, unappreciated genius.

To me, Thien was not too heavy handed. The pieces referenced were not the absolute standards and were described in terms of the emotions they induced rather than just as name-drops to remind the reader that the characters enjoyed music. Knowing the works was a bonus but not necessary to understand what she was trying to evoke in mentioning them. I will say some of these references went over even my head, as, as a self-centred violinist, I am less familiar with piano works that were often discussed.

The books one weakness was something common to many works coving such a large time period and cast. Although for the most part, Thien's characters felt remarkably well realised, Marie, whose voice starts and ends the book,  was not as strong as I would have liked. We see small snippets that are supposed to provide character—that she studies maths for instance—however we never truly get to understand her in the way we do her predecessors. When we start to delve well and truly into the past I was not quite content to leave the present, and whilst details of the dual narratives slowly serve to illuminate one another, I never felt like I was quite done witnessing Marie's own experiences.

I think it's also worth mentioning that Thien's prose is impeccable. Although she moves between different styles of story telling, no voice felt less powerful than any other and the choices made in differentiating them did not feel arbitrary. She pushes the narrative forward with a compelling lucidity that makes the book difficult to put down, no mean feat for such a complex work.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a powerful book on an important topic, however it is not for this reason along that I believe it has been shortlisted for the Booker. Weeks after reading it, I still feel profoundly affected by Thien's writing and characters in a way that is rare. Although I am a little disappointed Marie's character wasn't explored more deeply, I would still not be at all upset if this book ended up taking home the top prize.

Written by Adalya Hussein

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Rupert Burns is Kelvin Campervan. Or is Kelvin Campervan Rupert Burns? They seem to get along pretty well in the one body, but can never quite decide who is the artist and who the creation. The one man show explores the nature of a person's relationship with themselves and their history. It is set from the vantage point of mid life, but even at my age of 21 I was inspired to be existential about my own history of years and to ponder their value, as well as the missed opportunities I have already tasted.   

I would have to compare the performance, to any Harry Potter fans out there, to the 'ridikkulus' spell. This magic is designed to defend against the mysterious being called the 'boggart', that tends to hide under beds and in cupboards, and transforms into people's greatest fears when discovered. The spell 'ridikkulus' works by altering this fear, forcing the boggart to take on a ridiculous aspect. For example, if you are terrified of giant spiders, then the giant spider will now be wearing roller skates and slipping all over the place. The thing boggart's hate most is laughter, and when you laugh, it loses its power.

Burns hit flush those existential fears that will attend us all in our lives with his magic.  He has very successfully converted that profound unease at ageing, missed opportunities and faded dreams into  laughter and contentment. He shows us the other side of the abyss, which is still an abyss, as Kelvin reminds us - 'I learned that there was no ceiling to the universe...I also learnt there was no floor'. It is a very true sort of freedom he describes. Burns achieves his aims through the most unusual, hilarious and quietly beautiful ways.  

We witnessed Kelvin levitate before our eyes, contort his body into the most freakish positions, devour his own tongue and order a group of perfectly trained wonderdogs to literally jump through hoops as he willed it. I won't ruin the performance, but know that while these amazing feats are in one way completely flawed, for me, they emphasised a simple and elegant critique on our existence. Such amazing things we dare to aspire too in youth: I wanted to be an astronaut, for example, and an artist that was famous by the time they were eighteen, and also, an AFL star.

I didn't do those things, and yet, even though I essentially dreamed to levitate, as Kelvin does, I did something which was equally as funny, exciting, interesting an engaging for myself and those around me. And that is, as surprising as that is, sufficient. Things will get sad at times, as the best theatre and comedy does. For when Kelvin gets you laughing again, it is so much sweeter.

Kelvin Campervan's Mid-life Crescendo is playing until the 23rd of September showing every day except Monday between then and now. It's a short and highly palatable show at only 45 minutes long, so prepare for a wild and bright adventure that is guaranteed to please.

Written by Jim Thomas.

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Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (played here by George Banders), the fictional Chicagoan crime lord, is of course Bertolt Brecht’s parodic and blatantly allegorical version of Adolf Hitler, rendered comprehensible for an American audience in 1941. Since the play took 22 years to make it to Broadway, it has only ever been performed in front of already well-versed audiences, and never as an introductory education on the history of Nazi Germany. Before they’ve even sat down, this 2016 Australian audience will already hate the infamous dictator just as much as the play’s 1963 American audience would have, but their prior knowledge of Brecht and Epic theatre will be less certain. In this production, Rouse bombards the audience with countless lines of text for the same purpose that Brecht once did: to give the audience all the facts they need to follow the allegory and understand his message, without being “distracted” by the fictional story he is telling. In contemporary theatre making this is known as heavy-handedness, but in the 1920s the idea of using theatre to shamelessly recruit people as political activists was a novel and exciting one. However, even today Rouse gets away with it by embracing this style of alienating the audience from the pathos of the story, and by having his own anti-right wing political agenda to parade around. The text on the screen and a handful of throwaway lines make it abundantly clear that Donald Trump is the politician he is truly taking aim at, with the original Hitler allegory itself becoming an allegory for a much more contemporary issue. There is also another, much more subtle comparison made between the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis, which interestingly is pulled off without the assistance of the fact slides. However, there are times when the three story levels, one literal and two allegorical, feel like they are about to crumble in and collapse on one another. It was also a questionable choice in the otherwise sound set design by Martelle Hunt to put the screen so high above the actors. Much of the opening dance sequence and character introductions will likely go unseen by audience members who are reading the opening text, and likewise, many important pieces of text shown throughout the production will go unread since there is rarely anything to direct people’s attention all the way up there. This is why Brecht would project his text at the back of the stage, so that it was always in view. Also, despite all the text, the self-aware jokes and the intentional breaking of character, there is one Brechtian technique that Rouse uses only very sparingly: bright lighting. There is a brief moment where the entire theatre is strongly illuminated and an awkward false curtain call plays out, but, for the most part, Rob Sowinski and Bryn Cullen’s lighting design is surprisingly traditional, putting the audience at a very comfortable distance and ultimately making the viewing experience too passive for this sort of material. Part of the intention of a show like this is to disorientate the audience, to pull them out of the story and keep the focus on the message, but until the very end of the play, the message within the message tends to make the space outside the story just as murky as the story itself. Fortunately though, each time both the narrative and its social significance become unstable, there are always the characters to fall back on. One of Brecht’s greatest inconsistencies was that, despite his frequent postulations on the importance of emotional distance, he had an irrepressible knack for writing vivid and endearing characters. Here we have the ruthless Ernesto Roma (Peter Paltos), Ui’s tough mentor in crime who turned a spineless common thief into a deadly rabble-rouser with the nerve to eventually kill him. In a “parable play” that draws heavily on Shakespeare, and even goes as far as flat-out copying a few scenes from Richard III, Roma, and his real life counterpart Ernst Röhm, are both the Banquo and the Lady Macbeth in Ui and Hitlers’ origin stories. Paltos not only masters his menacing presence, but, with the right makeup on, he also happens to look a lot like Laurence Olivier. Of course, the other standout characterisation here is Ui himself. Banders certainly has the right stuff and isn’t afraid to get up close and personal with the audience while in character. He consciously breaks the fourth wall in a glorious moment of theatrical self-reference and, in one scene, he impressively manages a dexterous run through the audience. Thanks to the talents of Banders, Paltos, Brecht and Rouse, the great anti-hero and his seedy keeper have a life beyond the confines of the allegories, something they probably weren’t supposed to have in theory, but in practice is really what allows this piece to work as a two-hour play. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas.

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On Thursday night I showed up at La Mama ready to see The Ribcage Collective’s new work of experimental theatre. The Ribcage collective are a collaborative group of young theatre makers from varied theatrical backgrounds. For a second year running they have written, devised and performed works of immersive, sight-specific theatre at La Mama in Carlton. Their previous show was described by ArtsHub as “an intimate theatrical experience enough to reawaken a childhood sense of play”. That sounded pretty good to me. At the beginning of the evening we found out the recent arts funding cuts had just forced the closure of Platform Youth Theatre, the organisation that had brought these performers together. The kind of theatre we were about to see – youth-driven, experimental – is becoming harder and harder to make, even though it seems essential that young people have opportunities ambition, funded work. The show was based around a new Australian myth written by the group. It followed a family through three generations and a lot of hardship – from earth to hell and back again. The myth was told by a woman dressed as the sun; a “very wordy sun” as my viewing companion put it. The sun was so wordy that neither of us were able to follow the story, although that didn’t necessarily matter, we were told, because the three acts that made up the bulk of the work were also designed to be experienced separately. The audience was split into two, each group led by a guide through three site-specific pieces. The stories were vivid, each with a unique sense of place and drama. In one, a woman seems to be drowning in a bath of silver while another woman looks on, calmly smoking a cigarette. In another, a brother and sister quarrel as they are trapped in their dead fathers home. In my favourite story, a young boy philosophises with his fish, only to find the fish has come alive and is gyrating on his bed in a slinky dress. All of the stories had a great sense of playfulness and surprise. Moments like the fish coming alive, or a woman being dunked in silver liquid, were thrilling to watch. The spaces – some more ‘traditional’ than others, were cleverly used. A hole in the ceiling of one space allowed the silver liquid to be dunked secretly, a decrepit staircase became a dramatic entrance way. Some moments in the piece did feel little heavy-handed. Metaphors were either obvious – a chain is passed from actor to actor ‘linking’ the 3 pieces together – or too abstract and complex to be accessible. “What did the silver stuff mean?” someone asked later. Talking to audience members afterwards, there was a general sense of confusion – what did that mean? How did the stories link together? We couldn’t figure it out. It was a relief to slip into the Q+A session afterwards and find a panel of enthusiastic performers keen to answer our questions. It because clear how much thought had gone into every element – the metaphors may have been confusing, but that wasn’t because they lacked depth. Hearing the performers talk afterwards somehow made the work as a whole more enjoyable for me. Their thoughtfulness and passion redeemed the show’s weaker moments. It was during the Q+A that I realised we were in the company of a school group: young girls about to go into Year 12 drama. They asked about the world beyond high school plays and the performers willingly shared their knowledge. It was the innocent being led by the less innocent, a charming moment slightly overshadowed by the recent funding cuts. One performer said “There aren’t many opportunities left, so you’ve really got to put yourself out there.” Another chimed in “but if you do, you will find people willing to help.” And, if there is hope that courageous youth theatre will not only endure, but thrive, the Ribcage Collective are certainly a shining example. Written by Beth Gibson.

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Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers is one of the most bafflingly entertaining films of the year. A part-time cheesy teen movie, part-time goofy horror flick and full-time American satire of Canada, Nazis, Canadian Nazis, ‘kids today,’ and of course yoga, it never really asks to be taken seriously, just to be enjoyed. It's a follow-up to Smith's previous film, Tusk, with Johnny Depp reprising his role as the eccentric Guy Lapointe. However, it still works as a standalone film. Those who haven't seen the first movie will be a bit confused by the odd reference to a man being turned into a walrus, but with a script this off-the-wall those moments will hardly stick out. Yoga Hosers follows the misadventures of Colleen McKenzie (Harley Quinn Smith) and Colleen Collette (Lily-Rose Depp), two best friends who are almost never apart. Together, they are taking yoga classes run by Comic Side Character Yogi Bayer (Justin Long) who teaches a very unusual type of yoga. They also sing in a band together, where they mock Oddball Sidekick Ichabod (Adam Brody) their long-suffering drummer. They rehearse in the back room of the dreaded general store that they both work at. They hate their jobs. They can’t stand the customers, or the fact that they’re working for Daggy Dad Mr Collette (Tony Hale) and his new girlfriend, Evil Stepmother Tabitha (Natasha Lyonne). One day, their daily drudgery is interrupted by the arrival of Hot Guy Hunter Calloway (Austin Butler) and Gross Wingman Gordon Greenleaf (Tyler Posey), two senior students who invite them to a wild house party happening tomorrow night. However, they are gutted when Tabitha whisks her bumbling Bob away on a surprise trip to Niagara falls, purposely leaving the Colleens with the store to run on the very same night of the party. On top of that, Mean PE Teacher, Ms Wuckland (Genesis Rodriguez) has done the unthinkable and confiscated their phones for the day, which of course pretty much puts their entire lives on hold. Until they can collect them from Wacky Principle Invincible (Sassier Zamata), they might as well pay attention to Exotic Exposition teacher Ms Maurice (Vanessa Paradis) as she teaches the class a backstory about Canadian Nazis, one that will become very important once this movie's scary sci-fi subplot kicks in. Even before it does, however, Yoga Hosers doesn't feel like your typical trashy teen horror film. Evidently, as far as plot and characters go, it follows the formula to the letter, but in terms of tone it is much more sardonic than your average high school movie. For instance, the audaciously named Principle Invincible slips some biting remarks on racial privilege in between the standard routine for her character trope. She and the rest of the cast are also all in on the wall-to-wall Canada jokes. This ensemble of mostly American actors speak in a hilarious hodgepodge of their native accents, a touch of Québécois and as many oots as Smith could write into the script. Once the plot starts swerving in all sorts of directions, the fun quickly increases, and just occasionally decreases. Each twist is certainly unexpected, though largely because no groundwork is really laid down for any them before they arrive. They're not exactly believe, but they don't aspire to be. They are mostly there for novelty, not complexity, and the film only truly suffers when that novelty wears off in between the scattered climaxes. If this were an artistic film, it would probably be called an "eclectic mix" of genres and characters, but as a piece of mainstream entertainment it is more likely to be called "a mess," but what a glorious mess it is. Each subplot is basically a vehicle for the surprisingly star-studded cast to engage in some self-parody. It is very satisfying to see Hayley Joel Osment and all of the other young adult stars subverting their usual roles. There are also many memorable pop culture gags. Most of them are very contemporary, such as the uproariously paradoxical reference to Orange is the New Black. Has Collette just never noticed that her dad's new girlfriend looks and sounds exactly like Nicky Nichols? Or the actor who plays her? Oh well, who cares. Meanwhile, some of the more classically educated moviegoers in the audience will appreciate the older references, which all come from Ralph Garman's gallery of impressions. As one of the funnier Nazi caricatures that we've seen recently, Garman does flawless impersonations of actors like Al Pacino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the lisping Ed Wynn (best known for Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland). All of these are lost on the young Colleens but Guy Fontaine is very impressed by them. It might just sound like Hollywood nepotism to have Lily-Rose Depp share scenes with her mum, dad and even her little brother, Jack, all while Harley Quinn Smith is being directed by her dad, but the Depps really do bounce off each other well, and Kevin Smith does get a good performance out of his daughter. The results here might not exactly be cinematic gold, but they are nothing like the debacle that was After Earth or The Godfather: Part III. It's also very refreshing to see a film with two female protagonists who both remain happily single from beginning to end. Yoga Hosers is silly, lightweight fun that usually knows where its limits are. It doesn't attempt to hold its audience's interest for more than 90 minutes, but it does still expect them to engage with its fight scenes, even though no suspense is ever properly built for them. Sometimes Kevin Smith seems to forget that, although the Colleens are likeable and enjoyable to watch, since there is no emotional investment made at the start, there can be no dramatic payoff at the end, even though there are plenty of comedic payoffs. Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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Heavily stylised and endearingly quirky, Girl Asleep could be very easily described as “Wes Anderson does Napoleon Dynamite”, but in reality it’s much, much more than that. Sure it’s full of dorky humour and a kitsch yet meticulous 70s aesthetic, but it’s got a unique and very sweet take on the coming-of-age story. The girl of the film’s title is 14-year-old Greta, who’s just moved to suburban Adelaide and is having trouble fitting in at school. She meets another outcast kid named Elliott and the two strike up a nice friendship. Soon after, her parents decide to throw her a 15th birthday party, and reluctantly she agrees. There’s bullies, there’s sibling rivalry, there’s anxiety over appearance and romance, all the standard teenage things. It all sounds like such a simple premise. But that’s basically the point. It all sounds like such a simple premise because it is, and deliberately so: that which is generic is of course universally resonant. It’s a clever touch, as it allows the filmmakers to take this generic story and turn it into something truly original, and it means that it’s the stylistic oddities that shape the film as much as the story and characters. The visual flourishes, such as expositional “later that night” type text appearing on objects in the film or spontaneous dance sequences, are a delight. In addition, it devotes a hefty portion of its refreshingly short runtime to an intriguing dream sequence – the asleep part of the title – which plays out Greta’s insecurities, giving her closure with the people who surround her and helping her come to terms with her own changing existence. The most visually striking portion of the film, it’s also a portion that threatens to break the flow of the film and is a tad too long for what it needs to be. But I nevertheless enjoyed it and thought it matched the general mood and vibe of the rest of the film; like a true dream, it became a heightened version of the film’s reality. This is a film primarily for teenage girls, but though I was never a teenage girl I still really dug this. It’s funny, it’s a bit weird and it’s quintessentially Australian. Girl Asleep opens September 8th. Written by Ben Volchok.

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