Watching.
photo credit: atomicjeep
Both the ‘Reading’ and ‘Watching’ pages are on pause for the moment, as my thesis slowly crushes my relaxation time. While I am still occasionally indulging in consumption of the arts, it’s not really often enough to write home (or here) about.
2010 Watching List
March:
Movies:
Up in the Air–I walked into this knowing very little about the movie except that it had been received well. George Clooney plays a man who is hired by companies to do mass firings of their employees, flying around the country for almost the entire year while doing so. He lives a life of solitude amongst the masses, having never married or owning a place to go home to, his life philosophy is that to keep moving is to live life. I really liked the way this movie ran its course, with no cushioning of the realist blows that we receive throughout its length. Themes of life ambitions, mortality, relationships, and broken dreams are all tackled realistically and intently; it’s as if the movie respects the audience enough to be honest that there are no Hollywood endings here. Highly recommended, but be prepared to walk out slightly uncertain.
Concerts:
Massive Attack @ King’s Park — Hell yes. Massive Attack have been doing this live concert thing for quite some time, and they’ve certainly got it down. Martina Topley Bird warmed things up with her blend of soul singing, cute percussion, and looping vocals. Once she had very graciously thanked everyone for putting up with her ‘new shit’, the main show erupted. It’s a lucky thing that there was a lake separating the crowd from the speakers, because if it weren’t there the front runners in the crowd would probably have gone instantly deaf. Massive Attack have always been politically aware in the lyrical content, and the light show backed this up. During Babel a variety of text messages seemingly representing communications of an attack by a military force flashed across the backdrop. Other messages included incomes and prices contrasting the rich and the poor, and news headlines illuminated by huge orange and white characters. The guests kept on coming, with Horace Andy, Shara Nelson (I think?), Martina Topley Bird coming back to the stage, and of course the return of Daddy G. The crowd was mostly laid back, until Shara Nelson got the whole crowd on their feet with her soaring vocals in Unfinished Sympathy during the extended four song encore. An absolute class act, they are definitely back and better than ever.
Phoenix @ The Belvoir Amphitheatre – I went in to Phoenix basing my expectations on the last two shows I had seen in the Belvoir: Nick Cave and the Badseeds, and Cat Empire. Those gigs had been relatively mellow affairs, with crowds tending to be older. how wrong I was! Apparently Phoenix has been adopted by the 18-year-old crowd, thanks largely to the airplay they’ve been receiving on commerical radio stations. So I felt a little old in the mosh pit. Mosh pit? I hear you ask. But Phoenix are French pop rock? How on Earth can there be a mosh pit? Well, there was. And brace yourselves, ‘cos I’m going to go on a little rant here, as it wasn’t exactly the best pit I’ve been in. For a start, I go to concerts to listen to the band. I don’t want to hear you and your little junkie friends chatting the entire time about as banal a subject as how wasted you are. I’m willing to suspend my insistence on listening to the band only when it comes to the crowd singing along to the lyrics, but there’s limits there too: my limit is on singing guitar solos. Yes, there were folks there that thought it was their duty to sing tunelessly along to the guitar solos. Along with the usual pushy sods that try and get to the front at exactly the middle point of the concert, there was a particularly offensive bunch of sweaty, waxed, buff teens that decided that being topless and shoving people around was the best way to enjoy the show. but other than that, tip top! Heh, I’m being a grump and showing me age, I know. Anyway, the band definitely made up for it. They genuinely looked to be enjoying themselves, and it showed in their bounds across stage and always playing to the crowd rather than to each other as some bands are wont to do. The singles from their latest album, 1901 and Lisztomania were incredible thanks to the energetics of the crowd, though on the flip side that meant that during the semi-acoustic cover of Air’s Playground Love the crowd got a bit restless, and during the instrumental songs they got positively abusive. But it didn’t matter, because the stars of the show delivered a great experience. The Belvoir has yet to do me wrong, I can’t wait to see where these guys go from here.
February:
Movies:
The Hangover–A bunch of my friends had told me that The Hangover was hilarious, they couldn’t stop laughing, oh that bit with the tiger, etc. so I went in to watching this with the of anticipation of being highly amused. And I was, don’t get me wrong. But I was more impressed by the interplay between characters than the slowly unfolding plot. I admit that there’s not much you can do that will be revolutionary in the ‘massive-party-shenanigans’ genre, so the backwards way that it presented it was about as ingenious as one could hope to get. But I dunno, it just didn’t seem to get me howling. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to? Easily the best party movie I’ve seen, but then again that’s not hard.
Whip It–The Directorial debut of Drew Barrymore, and doesn’t it show. Not the debut part, but the Drew Barrymore part. It’s a little bit kooky, a lot about mother/daughter relationships, and very much a parable about how you must be true to yourself. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if Drew is projecting just a little bit here. Leaving that aside, it’s a cute story. It’s got Juno from Juno playing Bliss (Ellen Page) and Maeby from Arrested Development playing Pash (Alia Shawkat). They’re best friends stuck in a backwater Texas country town who attend a roller derby match, where Bliss decides that’s what her future career is, and hides it from her etiquette-pageant obsessed mother. Cue indie coming of age against the odds. Okay, I’m being a bit glib, but like I said, it’s cute, not revelatory. A bit of fun for a weeknight.
Man of Aran–There was a toss up as to whether to put this one in concerts or movies, but I ended up putting it in movies due to the focus of the night being on the images of Irish settlers on the island of Aran. British Sea Power provided a live soundtrack to one of the most fascinating documentaries I’ve seen. This kind of living doesn’t really seem to exist any more, and though some of the more dramatic scenes were staged by the early documentary film maker Robert J. Flaherty, it doesn’t fail to impress with its very polished tale of life in some of the harshest conditions known.
Concerts:
British Sea Power, Beck’s Music Box–Holy shit, these guys were amazing. A completely different concert than that of Dirty Three, it was the first time they’d been in Australia. I’m glad we took the leap of being the first people to wander up to the stage and grab first dibs on a place next to the singer’s mic, because that meant we had the best position in the house to take in the awesome naval might of this band. I hadn’t realised that there were two separate singers in the band (Yan and Hamilton), but there was, and a violinist. It was pretty demure at first, but that soon transformed into a session of great rock, complimented with various crowd antics by Noble. By the end of the set they were throwing pot plants around and crowd-surfing to the back of the music box and back, kicking their guitars and giving each other piggy backs. I took some pretty nice photos of the event, so keep an eye out for those. Amazing gig, make sure you catch them if they ever come back around.
Dirty Three, Beck’s Music Box–Excusing the fact that the only full-strength beer on offer is the execrable Beck’s, the venue for PIAF’s concert series has always been a favourite of mine. It may be temporary, but it still manages to provide a better staging are for the various artists that prance across its width than most of the permanent venues in Perth. I think it’s the open setting. Anyway, this was the first time I had seen the Dirty Three all together on the same stage: I’d seen Mick Turner and his multi-instrument audio/visual display before Cat Power years before, Warren Ellis with Nick Cave, and Jim White with Cat Power earlier this year. Individually they are stand-out artists in whichever act they happen to be in, but together, hot damn! They were playing their excellent album, Ocean Songs as part of the Don’t Look Back series (in which, ironically, the artists certainly do look back–way, way back in the case of the Dirty Three). The banter between songs was grinworthy and Ellis’ fiddler’s kicks punctuated the soaring soundscapes regularly. Oh, and to the hipster twats standing next to us: if the band isn’t singing it doesn’t mean you have to talk for them, especially if you are going to be shouting inane banter to each other throughout the entire night. Still despite that, great show, great band, great venue.
January:
Movies:
Five Minutes of Heaven–This movie is being presented as part of the Perth International Arts Festival movie line-up this year, and to be honest, I went in expecting to come out horribly depressed. This may be because it’s a film about Northern Ireland and films about Northern Ireland are generally depressing, especially when they deal with that period of Northern Ireland history commonly known as ‘The Troubles‘. Liam Neeson plays Alistair Little, a man who, as a teenager, shot and killed the brother of James Nesbitt’s Joe Griffin. Griffin was merely a boy then, and suffered greatly from the event due to his mother’s grief taking the form of blaming him for not doing something to stop Little. The film shows the event and then cuts to modern day, where a reality television show about redemption and forgiveness has brought the two men together after 33 years. The performances of Neeson and Nesbitt are brilliant in portraying both men as scarred and tense. Both have carried their demons over the huge number of years, and to be able to accurately bring that out (almost manically in Nesbitt’s case, brooding in Neeson’s) in any number of nuances of expression and voice is an achievement. While it’s by no means a cheery movie, you won’t walk away from this one quite as depressed as you think you might.
Avatar–There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t already been said, argued, trolled, reposted, or tweeted about. The CGI was amazing, the 3D was implemented better than the one other 3D movie I’ve seen, the story was unwaveringly predictable and the racist undercurrents evident, and there were numerous cuts that could have been made to speed up the action and not batter us over the head with the ‘lessons’ to be learned. But overall, it wasn’t a waste of money.
Zombieland–Saw this on the plane back from a trip to Sydney and it made me giggle quite a few times. The Bill Murray section was hilarious, and the ongoing reminder of the Rules were great. As much as I love the use of zombie apocalypses as a background for human dramas, I wouldn’t mind if this one should bring to a close that little sub-genre. Also, props to the main protag for being as close to being Michael Cera as you can be without actually being Michael Cera.
Concerts:
Cat Power, Astor Theatre–If there is a reason you go to live shows, then Cat Power perfectly exemplifies it. You cannot possibly emulate the depth and breadth of the power of her voice with a digital recording. You might get close with an LP, but it’d still lose some undefinable element in the grooves. I tried to capture the grace with which she delivers herself in my last review of her live show but to be honest this is one area which our language fails. The Astor was an interesting choice of venue, especially considering its odd mix of both seated and standing room, meaning that anyone who got early and sat in the seats in the first three or four rows got a barrier of people standing in front of them when the main act came on. We were in the middle and so unaffected. A little bit bizzare that. Anyway, yes, still mighty impressed with Ms. Marshall, and I urge anyone who wants to see a powerful performance to try and catch her.
Them Crooked Vultures, Challenge Stadium–Let’s be honest, with names like Josh Homme, Dave Grohl, and John Paul Jones you can’t really go wrong with a band. Another in the long list of super groups that have popped up lately, Them Crooked Vultures were loud, proud, and incredibly polished. The years of experience shared between all of them showed in a performance that was pure rock. Yes, they were showmen to the extreme, bordering on showing off in the form of various unnecessarily long solos. But hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll baby. I’d never been to Challenge Stadium before, but it served the purpose well, with decent acoustics and a good crowd. Great gig, and they deserve their super status.