mamma mia
My mother once told me we couldn’t get a cat because I was deathly allergic to them. Two decades later I found out my mother lied.
beat ebert
Roger Ebert’s Oscar predictions have been unleashed on the interwebs. He has crowned The King’s Speech as the big winner, picking it to snag many of the major awards. Some of his logic is based on precedent, what with past winners of the Directors’ Guild Awards winning a little golden man 90 per cent of the time, but I’d much rather the talkie about the website we can’t live without win. But we’ll save that post for next week. For the meantime, outguessing Ebert carries a US$100,000 prize, and as for The King’s Speech, I don’t think it’s the best film of the year, but it certainly has a sweet poster.
how melbourne found its heart
It’s a blustery Thursday morning in Bundoora, and Melbourne Heart FC head coach John van ’t Schip is leading his charges on their last training session before the World Cup. Their numbers are painfully few; not all of the club’s players are in attendance, and until last month, they didn’t even have enough for a starting 11 and a full complement of substitutes.
A flurry of transfer activity in May has seen the club beef up its roster, most notably with ex-Australian international Josip Skoko and towering Dutch forward Gerald Sibon. But these are not players signed in haste; this is a red-and-white jigsaw assembled piece by painstaking piece, and the club has covered a great deal of ground to get to this point.
the princess and the pique
More TWR stuff.
There is a moment in Tangled, Disney’s 50th animated feature, when the film’s hero Rapunzel has at last liberated herself and her trademark tresses from the tower her mother has forbidden her to leave – but she cannot quite immerse herself in the world she has dreamed of for so long.
Instead, Rapunzel vacillates between guilt and glee, torn between warring aspects of her personality. It is an opportune analogy for the state of play at the House of Mouse: to summon summary at the cost of cliché, Disney is in the throes of an identity crisis.
In August 2009, Disney paid $US4 billion ($A4.03 billion) for Marvel Entertainment, home to a comic-book empire inhabited by the likes of Spider-Man and a burgeoning in-house film studio. More significant was the $US7.4 billion it paid for Pixar Animation Studios in 2006. After an initial three-film production deal proved wildly successful, the creator of Toy Story and Finding Nemo was welcomed to the fold.
But lumping these companies together in the same enchanted castle has made Disney the foster home for thousands of characters it did not create. It hasn’t helped that stablemate Pixar’s star has gone nova: its films have critically and commercially eclipsed Disney Animation’s sputtering output in the past decade.
Which brings us to the burning question: as it gears up to release Tangled, the most expensive animated film ever made, just what is Disney?
sultan of sing
Some Weekly Review stuff for the Queensland Crew.
Dan Sultan is a busy man. We’ve been playing tag for days across various media – missed calls, emails with PR people, texts signed with the curiously affectionate affectation of “D”, and now I’m on hold at a studio while Sultan completes recording and filming for a project that will, coyly, “become apparent”. A brief discussion about tattoos – a bit of a Sultan trademark – is going on in the background, and then he picks up.
“How are you, brother?” he asks. “Thanks for your patience.” And we’re off.
I first saw Sultan at last year’s Falls Music and Arts Festival in Lorne. It was one of those sticky, searing days that tend to spawn discarded tops and farmer’s tans in equal measure, and a security guard by the stage was using the temperature as an excuse to douse the crowd with the combination of a fire hose and a confiscated water pistol. This was probably the reason I could get as close to the stage as I did; Sultan was the reason many of those already in position didn’t want to give up their spot, despite the visitation of aquatic attentions.
He was, in short, quite electric. The Sultan recipe is black hair, blue eyes, and a tremendously colourful stage act; he dispenses the sort of country-fried rock’n’roll that too often gets submerged under waves of synthesisers and indie trappings. You know the kind – it demands shimmies and shakes and pianos and horns, all of which he provides in abundance. It’s a sound and stage presence that have led to Sultan being dubbed the “Black Elvis”, apparently a more appropriate title than the “Australian Elvis”, but one that gets the point across. Dan Sultan is a rock star, and that’s all he ever wanted.
peggy orenstein’s “what’s wrong with cinderella?”
Excellent article, link below.
I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.
“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”
My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”
jessie’s story
“Tell me another,” said the Sultan, firelight glinting off the jewels embedded in his magnificent turban. He regarded the figure reclining in front of him with no little fascination. For a moment, he thought he saw the flames reflected in the storyteller’s eyes, but surely this was a trick of the light. Her face was hidden behind swathes of diaphanous cloth, the better to enhance the subtle inflections of her voice.
“Very well,” smiled Scheherazade, the merest upturn of lips behind veil upon veil upon veil. And this was her tale.
pilgrim’s progress
The journey from page to screen has its fair share of casualties, with characters and subplots often lost in translation, but there’s one thing that has remained constant in either version of Scott Pilgrim vs The World – Scott Pilgrim is kind of a dick.
The film, an adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s riotous series of graphic novels, has a simple-sounding premise – boy meets girl, boy has to fight girl’s seven evil exes before they can be together in electronic dreams. Playing the titular 22-year-old Canadian milquetoast geek is Michael Cera, a 22-year-old Canadian milquetoast geek. His inamorata is brought to life by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, apparently cast based on nothing more than the fact that her eyes are very reminiscent of O’Malley’s drawings of her character Ramona Flowers.
Cera has received flak for doing his usual shtick of playing himself onscreen, but there’s a layer of subtlety to the role that means he is perfectly cast. With anyone else, you’d dismiss Scott as being completely inconsiderate without succumbing to his charms, but Cera nails the required callous charisma. There is a sweet sort of selfishness to the role; Scott is a character lacking not so much self-esteem, but any purpose in life, instead bumbling his way through each day and into and out of a series of romances. Only two characters – Julie (a typically acerbic Aubrey Plaza) and the redoubtably snarky Kim (Allison Pill) – seem to know that Scott is capable of not just leaving a trail of broken hearts in his wake, but is possessed of an enviable superpower: the ability to get over most women faster than a speeding bullet.
how to blame a dragon
Google’s decision to turn its back on China has sent a cascade of ripples through the realms of culture, commerce and cyberspace. HARI RAJ sifts through the fallout.
Once upon a time, the man responsible for a company that makes it billions from watching what the world does online used to live in constant fear of police surveillance. Google co-founder Sergey Brin left his native Soviet Union aged just six, escaping ethnic discrimination and cultivating a healthy disdain for totalitarianism. Three decades later, he would lead the largest internet company in the world to abandon its most populous nation, China’s censorship demands striking a little too close to home. Or, for Brin at least, what used to be.
To him, the first pangs of discomfort came after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, as China ramped up its policing of the internet. The parallels were obvious: at the time, Brin said that “in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling.”
It wasn’t as troubling in 2006, however, when Google first ventured into the enormous, and enormously lucrative, Chinese market. The Chinese government wanted certain web content suppressed; Google acquiesced, agreeing to observe Chinese rules and regulations, which included censoring searches related to issues such as the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Falun Gong sect. But while Brin says discontent had been brewing for some time, it bubbled over this January when the company accused China of hacking the Google-based emails of some Chinese activists. In response, Google said it would stop self-censoring its search engine in China. It made good on that promise on March 23, when the company began redirecting online queries to an uncensored portal based in Hong Kong – which, as part of its British colonial legacy, is a Special Administrative Region that has different rules governing freedom of expression.
why the war on piracy is all at sea
HARI RAJ inspects dodgy downloads and stolen software, and promises to use only one more nautical pun.
Not all pirates are muppets. Just the really good ones.
Any gamer worth their salt will tell you that the wait for a new game can be excruciating. James Burt was no exception; when the 24-year-old Queenslander obtained a copy of Super Mario Bros. Wii on November 6 last year, a week before its official release, he shared the game online, allowing it to be downloaded anywhere in the world. His action sparked a very expensive reaction – in February, the Federal Court ruled that Burt would have to pay the game’s manufacturer, Nintendo, a $1.5 million dollar fine.
Sound like a hefty amount? It is, and it’s caused no share of controversy. But it’s also a hallmark of the digital era – that software can be as profitable, if not more so, than the hardware on which it operates. In the gaming world, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, as well as Sony’s PlayStation 3, is sold at a loss, with both manufacturers recouping profits from the sale of games. Old console hands like Sega dropped out of the console race generations ago to focus on the lucrative software market. But as internet bandwidth increases at a pace in tandem with that of storage capacity, piracy seems inevitable.
