A new Australian musical, Bloom hits the right notes. The delivery of effective aged care remains a contentious issue that has brought great consternation to many, before, during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Writer Tom Gleisner has taken that and run with it to create a humour-filled portrait of a facility for the third generation in desperate…
Former Australian journalist Michael Brissenden’s third novel Smoke (after The List and Dead Letters) was inspired by the devastating bushfires that ravaged the Australian east coast in late 2019 and early 2020. But rather than setting his story in that time and place, Brissenden takes the action to another fire flashpoint – the forests of…
Lindy Hume’s darkly delicious production of the Mozart masterpiece Don Giovanni has “hit” written all over it. From the stirring opening overture to the amazing finale, with fifty-odd mostly naked women pushing Don Giovanni to hell, it gripped, titillated, amused, and at times brought gasps of disbelief from a shell-shocked audience. There was no watch…
Inspired by the 2009 Dutch horror film The Human Centipede, Synergy Production Co. has given us a musical parody featuring the same characters. Like the movie, it concerns a deranged German surgeon – Dr Heiter – who kidnaps three tourists and conjoins them surgically, mouth to anus … I kid you not. Dr Heiter is renowned for…
Has the art of movie titling been lost? Following on from the recent Women Talking comes another film that does exactly what it says on the box with Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear. Cocaine Bear is (very) loosely based on real events. Drug smugglers did indeed dump a load of cocaine over northern Georgia and southern…
The ABC has a (deserved) reputation as a standard-bearer for Australian television production. Aunty’s latest crime drama, Harrow, does nothing to harm that. Okay, it might not have the fun of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries or the grit of Jack Irish; but this is a solid drama with enough intrigue to keep you coming back….
If 2020 was a shock to the movie-going system, 2021 was – in many ways – worse. Lockdowns, delays and uncertainty cruelled both the Australian and international film industries. Many studios deferred their biggest releases, hoping for smoother sailing ahead. As a result, it was no coincidence that the two biggest films at the box…
A divertimento is a light piece of music, written just to amuse. But it’s a slightly incongruous title for Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s portrait of the conductor and composer Zahia Ziouani, because the film tackles some pretty heavy themes. To use a current term, this is an “origin story”; telling how a teenage Ziouani went from the…
Featuring 22 tracks from ABBA, Mamma Mia! The Musical is bright, breezy, energetic and heaps of good-natured fun. Whenever it returns, it always goes down a treat and I never tire of seeing it. The show premiered in Oz on the 9th June 2001 and played for four years to more than 2.2 million people in eight…
“This fuzzed-out live set from 1992 documents High Rise at their noise-soaked best.” Album Overview: Even though they are one of the most legendary bands of the 90s Japanese psychedelic underground scene, High Rise have a fairly small body of work, and until recently it’s been hard to get a hold of their records. The…
