Journalism
COMICBOOKSLUT
Comic book columnist for literary site Bookslut.
This month: “Worse Then, Worse Now”: Joe Sacco brings his brand of comic book journalism back to the Gaza Strip for his hefty new book Footnotes In Gaza.
In an interview for The Guardian, Sacco says those early issues of Palestine prove he couldn’t draw at all. That’s not true, of course, but his style has definitely changed. In Footnotes, it shifts into something different: more detailed, more somber. It’s especially visible in the faces. No matter how many talking heads history requires, they never once turn into generic men with identikit beards or women with interchangeably sad eyes. What’s charming is that while Sacco’s style has changed, he’s kept his own self-caricature almost the same. He doesn’t lavish the same attention on his own face as all the others, and you still never see his eyes. There’s something humble about it.
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Recent columns:
January 2010: “The Red-Headed Poet: Peter Milligan’s Changing Man”.
December 2009: “‘Don’t Fall Asleep!’: The Horrors of Al Columbia’s Pim & Francie“.
November 2009: “Inside Out: Graphic Sickness and David Small’s Stitches“.
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TRIPLE J’s JMAG
Film reviews, interviews, and features every month. Issue #37 out now.
This month, I quiz noted TV academic Jason Mittell on whether television is now officially better than the movies, and Blessed director Ana Kokkinos on this whole “is the Australian film industry producing films that are too damn depressing?” thing:
“I think if we made 15 zany comedies, everyone would be saying “Why can’t we make some serious films?” There’s a level on which I’m really tired of this debate. I’d say that in 2009, we have made a decade’s worth of fabulous films in one year. That’s a freaky kind of situation.”
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And, as always, reviews: the disappointing Men Who Stare At Goats and the language-zombie movie Pontypool.
More on jmag over here.
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BEHIND BALLET
Pop-culture critic for The Australian Ballet’s Behind Ballet blog.
Recent pieces include: discussing Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and the “cultural warfare” of adding movement to music; a response to the death of the legendary Merce Cunningham; and why Jim Henson, Madonna, and Richard Branson are the hypothetical heirs of ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
Something longer? “The Many Dreams of Swan Lake” traces the transformations of the ballet throughout popular culture for The Australian Ballet and Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake:
Classic vampires, political machinations and talking unicorns have all arisen from artists calling on Swan Lake to invoke particular moods, themes or traditions in ways that Tchaikovsky could never have dreamed.
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Read the rest of “The Many Dreams of Swan Lake”, or see more of my work over at Behind Ballet.
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‘GOOD TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART’: AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPPE MORA
Cult filmmaking and cultural cringe in Metro Magazine #161, 2009.
French-born Philippe Mora spent his childhood in Australia before moving to London as a young man to pursue his painting, make historical documentaries, and eventually create the ‘Bretchian musical’ Trouble in Molopolis (1969). When Mora left London bohemia and returned to Australia, however, he proceeded to direct three cult films featured in Mark Hartley’s recent Not Quite Hollywood documentary. Mad Dog Morgan (1976) is a hallucinatory bushranger tragedy starring a scene-stealing Dennis Hopper; The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) is a satirical musical about an alcoholic superhero, pre-dating Peter Berg’s Hancock (2008) by over 25 years; and Howling III: The Marsupials (1987) takes an existing horror franchise and subverts it into something uniquely Australian.
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MIDNIGHT AT MIFF?
The 57th Melbourne International Film Festival 2008 report in Senses of Cinema.
For the past few years, whispers have circulated of the Melbourne International Film Festival’s (MIFF) intention to cull its juggernaut-sized cinema choices down to something a little more curated, a little more manageable. 2008’s festival was certainly not that year. As overwhelming as ever, the steamroller of screenings over 17 days ensured that two different patrons may well attend completely different festivals. Just as it’s impossible to see everything, it’s impossible to discuss everything seen.
Allow me to focus, then, on some of the strange and exciting shifts which made this year’s program unique, and that potentially mark it as a moment of transition for the festival. MIFF 2008 has a newfound interest in the visceral over the intellectual; in looking back towards the past as much as the future; in the sometimes awkward mix of art and cult cinema; and proof that, as Richard Moore said when announcing the line-up, “commercial is not a dirty word”.
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THREETHOUSAND REVIEWS
Two years(ish) of weekly short film reviews for Melbourne’s ThreeThousand online.
Everything from Waltz With Bashir to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Speed Racer to The Twilight Zone .
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MATT FRACTION INTERVIEW
An interview with the writer of Image Comics’ Casanova from the sadly-defunct Atomic Threat webzine, 2006.
“When one’s book features a three-headed robot monk with the brain of a bubblegum sexbot as the hallmark of your supporting cast, one runs the risk of being, shall we say, dismissed as a serious work…”
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TWIN PEAKS: “NO, IT CAN WAIT TIL MORNING…”
Surrealism, Soap Opera, and Mystery in Twin Peaks from Lounge Critic: the Couch Theorist’s Companion, 2004.
Take the opening of second season as Exhibit A. After a series of sublime soap opera cliffhangers (Cooper is shot! Leo too! Nadine attempts suicide! And the mill burns down! Et cetera) the show’s rabid audience had waited week after week for its dramatic return – to be greeted with a full eight minutes of Cooper lying injured while the world’s oldest room service man and the Giant stand above him in turn. Was this the arthouse and TV-unfriendly Lynch returning, refusing to offer us conventional narrative and easy closure? Or just that Lynch was never that interested in Laura’s murder? In fact, he admitted he hadn’t wanted to reveal the murderer’s identity at all…
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Or check out the Lounge Critic book for the full version, intercut with whip-smart discussion of David Lynch’s brand of televisual surrealism by Saige Walton.