Melbourne based singer-songwriter Emma Russack released “Be Real”, the newest single from her upcoming album Winter Blues, due on the 5 July 2019. Channelling 90s grunge and indie rock, “Be Real” is Russack’s reaction to the selfie culture. “[“Be Real”] is about my frustration with phone obsession, social media, hype and trend – the phoniness…
Over the years, a number of well-known names – like John Hurt and Harold Pinter – have performed Samuel Beckett’s one-person, one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape. Now the indefatigable Max Gillies joins them I’m a Gillies fan. He certainly doesn’t let you down as he takes on the persona of a 69-year-old man who looks…
Hands up those who thought we’d grow up to be Nancy Drew, although I will confess I was more in the Trixie Belden camp. But those books, The Secret Seven, The Famous Five and the Three Investigators series probably had a lot to do with anybody around our age addicted to mysteries, thrillers and crime…
Annabelle Comes Home is the third film featuring the sinister doll from the Conjuring universe. Gary Dauberman, the screenwriter of the Annabelle films, makes his directorial debut. Determined to keep Annabelle from wreaking more havoc, demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) drive the possessed doll to the locked artifacts room in…
My 1953 edition of Webster’s Dictionary provides this definition of diplomacy: “dexterity; skill; tact; shrewdness in managing affairs of any kind”. And these are exactly the qualities which writer Cyril Gély has so cleverly enshrined in his masterpiece play Diplomacy. Originally written in French, the translation and adapted version by Julie Rose I’m sure has…
The fourth of the great Stephen Sondheim musicals that Victorian Opera has tackled since 2013, A Light Night Music remains as charming and funny as when it was first conceived nearly 50 years ago. With music and lyrics by Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler, the musical was inspired by the 1955 Ingmar Bergman film…
The world is confusing. Events happen – and are reported – at breakneck speed thanks to digital technology. But that same technology can be manipulated by unscrupulous people. So how do we know what’s real and what’s fake? That’s tough to work out. But the surprising thing is that the latest Marvel movie, Spider-Man: Far…
When I wrote about Burning earlier this year, I mentioned that East Asian cinema was having something of a “moment”. Well, that “moment” continues with Joon Ho Bong’s Palme d’Or (2019) winner, Parasite. A veteran of Korean cinema, Bong is probably best known here for 2013’s Snowpiercer. Sci-fi has been his forte, so Parasite is…
Malthouse Theatre’s production of Wake In Fright is no less harrowing than when the eponymous novel was first published in 1961. But the play will make far more sense if you have an appreciation of the story before you walk in. Otherwise, I think you might understand the pieces, but not the full play in…
Assigning human characteristics to animals invariably makes for cute viewing and that’s the case in the The Secret Life of Pets 2. This film follows the success of the original (2016) in which terrier Max (the voice of Patton Oswalt) had to learn to share his owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper) with a new dog, a…
