Hi friends!

This newsletter has been a long time coming — it ended up being a busy month, loaded up with shoots, rewrites, birthdays, and of course the annual Sydney Film Festival.

Work has been thankfully consistent, Cooee is firing back up, and Samuel & I are still finding feathers around the living room after transforming our home into the Kit Kat Club circa 1931 (ala Bob Fosse’s masterpiece Cabaret) over the long weekend. With the wider world conjuring that Weimar Republic feeling a little too acutely lately, it was a treat to spend a night dancing with reckless abandon like Sally Bowles and friends.

Given I’m playing catch-up this week, I’m going to break my usual mini-essay format and instead share some scattershot thoughts about what I’ve been watching, reading, and loving over this past month, including a bunch of wonderful things my friends have made. Hope you find something of interest, and I’d love to hear what’s been bringing you joy lately too!

A Few of My Favourite Things

• Caught the revival of Jane Harrison’s Stolen at the Sydney Theatre Company, starring the wonderful Kartanya Maynard (one of the leads of Cooee!) and directed by Ian Michael. It’s a raw and harrowing play, interweaving the stories of five Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families in the 1960s, jumping back and forward through time even as the characters are perpetually trapped amidst the oversized furnishing of a squalid children’s home. I’m a bit embarrassed that I hadn’t encountered the play before (it’s an Australian classic first performed in 1998), and god it’s confronting to grapple with how recent this all was — the characters are younger than my parents. Inventive and beautifully acted, it’s playing at the Wharf until 6 July, so I’d highly recommend picking up a ticket if you’re in Sydney!

• Samuel treated me to my first ever Showtime Production (i.e. the Van Grinsven family business) — The Greatest Love of All: A Tribute to Whitney Houston, featuring the incomporable Belinda Davids. I have very little experience with with tribute shows, but my goodness Belinda was extraordinary. Such a remarkable voice and presence, I could have believed it was Whitney. Now if only we could do something about the State Theatre’s ridiculous “no dancing” rule (the poor, poor ushers who had to try and enforce that when ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ played) and the gang of unrepetant drunk ladies sitting in front of us, including one who decided to keep her mate at home included by Facetiming her for the majority of the show…

• Pop princess Charli XCX is back with the aptly titled BRAT. In a year stacked with mournful break-up albums, it’s a treat to bop along to one that’s just unapologetically fun (“You’re all about writing poems / but I’m about throwing parties”). ‘360’ and ‘Von Dutch’ absolutely devour a dancefloor (“Drop down, yeah / Put the camera flash on”) and every track on the concise album is at turns hilarious, frankly introspective, jubilant or effortlessly cool. Her most bracing lyrics betray an insecurity about her peers and her own place in the pop firmament (“I'm famous but not quite / but I'm perfect for the background / onе foot in a normal life”) but Charli’s solution seems to be to turn up the music and dance the night away. Thank goodness for that.

• I’ve been slowly working my way through the novels of E.M. Forster over the past two years, and Howard’s End may well be the finest. I found it a genuinely provocative book which raises questions about class, sex, the attraction of shallow-but-decisive capitalism and the transforming English national character that still feel uncomfortably applicable today. And it’s refreshing to see how Forster is both empathetic to all his characters (at his insightful best he reminds me of George Eliot), whilst rarely concerned with making any of them “likeable”. Next up: Passage to India.

• The latest revival of Doctor Who (under returning showrunner Russell T Davies) got off to a bumpy start, but it’s been picking up steam episode-by-episode. Ncuti Gatwa could be the most purely charismatic actor to ever play The Doctor — the man has effortless chemistry with everything that moves — but the short season hasn’t given him enough time to settle into the role. I am impressed with how experimental (and gay — greetings to guest stars Jonathan Groff and Jinkx Monsoon) the show has been, given it was promoted as a new-audience-friendly relaunch on Disney+: we had an episode where the Doctor was trapped on a live landmine, another where he disappears for 95% of the runtime, and a bleak Black Mirror-esque satire that played out largely via social media feeds. Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s finale ties it all together…

• I’m about 7 years late on this one, but as the lucky new owner of a Switch I’ve been completely transported by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All my gamer mates were right — it’s stunning. Whilst nostalgia is definitely a factor (untold hours playing Ocarina of Time on the N64 will be etched on my spirit forever), I’m astounded by how expansive the game is, and how intuitive it is to play. It’s a delight to explore the ruined Kingdom of Hyrule — foraging for items, dodging enemies, cooking meals, taking on silly side quests — without even touching the main plot. I suspect I’ll be playing this for a long, long time.

• In the world of podcasts, I’ve been loving the new season of Wendy Zuckerman’s Science Vs (check out her even-handed episodes on Ozempic and Trans Healthcare), the ‘Erotic 80s’ mini-series of Karina Longworth’s Hollywood history standard You Must Remember This, and a great run of conversations on Melvyn Bragg’s eclectic In Our Time covering philosopher Philippa Foot, Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, and Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate.

• I had the pleasure of watching Exposure, the new Aussie mystery series, in its 6-episode entirety at SFF last weekend — always a treat to see the work of DOP-extraordinaire Aaron McLisky on the big screen! It’s a thorny and deeply-felt piece of work, slowly paced but worth sticking with, particularly for the phenomenal performances by Alice Englert, Mia Artemis (another Cooee alum!) and Essie Davis. It debuts on Stan this week.

Wrapping up SFF 2024

That magical winter treat has come and gone… the Sydney Film Festival. I wasn’t quite as prolific as last year, when I effectively took a week off work to camp out at cinemas across the city (I regret nothing), but still made it to over a dozen screenings, and saw some damn good films. I made the life-affirming decision to skip every post-film Q&A this time, which spared me the inevitable spectacle of watching a talented-but-jetlagged filmmaker be confronted by passive-aggressive audience statements masquerading as questions (e.g. “why is it so violent?” “why did the character act differently to how I would?” “Can you explain the ending?”). I beg you SFF, please adopt the Melbourne system of filtering audience questions through a moderator.

I prefer it when the films get to speak for themselves — no introductions, no explanations. I always try to go into festival screenings with little-to-zero knowledge, and hope that I’ll encounter something utterly surprising and transporting. To be honest, this year I encountered a lot of accomplished films, but few that totally blew me away (compare with SFF 2023, where Monster, Passages, Anatomy of a Fall and Perfect Days awed me day-after-day). As a whole it feels like cinema in 2024 hasn’t quite caught fire — but I still hope!

Thoughts on a few of my favourites:

• Problemista (dir. Julio Torres) — Without a doubt the most fun I had all festival. Julio Torres throws absolutely everything at the wall, willing to take any detour for the sake of a good joke. It’s frequently surreal, silly and even downright stupid, but somehow never devolves into outright chaos (and even ties together impeccably!). Tilda Swinton is hilarious and panic-inducing as the über-Karen, a fearsome woman who wields her entitlement like a sword, yet nonetheless merits our admiration and grace. Julio Torres has clearly also worked in customer service and been forced to reckon with obsolete file management software, and survived to tell the tale.

• Viet and Nam (dir. Truong Minh Quy) — A slow and sumptuous romance that never quite escapes the shadow of Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose dreamy-but-might-put-you-to-sleep brand of cinema (i.e. Tropical Malady, Memoria) has stealthily become ubiquitous in the indie cinema scene — perhaps it’s the ultimate antidote to incomprehensible effects-loaded blockbusters? Despite the familiarity, I think Quy’s film ultimately comes into its own in the final hour, heralded by the arrival of a mystical medium in a pink shawl, and a focus on family secrets that feel unstuck in time…

• The Outrun (dir. Nora Fingscheidt) — Do I love this film, or do I simply love Saoirse Ronan? She gives one of her finest performances as an alcoholic struggling to hold onto her sobriety as she retreats to her family home on Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The addiction narrative is very well-trodden territory, but I think this slickly made film works thanks to its specificity, with flourishes that explore the culture, history and myths of the remote Orkneys.

• City of Wind (dir. Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir) — A gentle mediation on the clash between tradition and modernity, embodied by a Mongolian high-schooler who moonlights as a shaman for his outer-city neighbourhood. It’s observant rather than didactic, full of generosity, and centred on a sweet romance that’s both naive and earth-shattering, in the way first love so often is.

• The Seed of the Sacred Fig (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof) — The most impressive and audacious film I saw all week. Sacred Fig is genuinely rare beast: an openly anti-regime film out of Iran. “Escaped from Iran” might be a more appropriate phrase, given it was shot in secret and smuggled out of the country. Many of the cast and crew are currently exile, detained or imprisoned. Yet despite those circumstances, the finished film is more than agitprop or a political screed — it’s a fully realised slow-burn thriller and nuanced character study, which uses the faultlines within a single upper-class Tehran family to explore the rebellion and unrest simmering beneath the surface in Iran, poised to boil over.

• Kinds of Kindness (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) — Cruel and capricious Yorgos is back! After playing footsie with sentimentality in Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels like a provocative correction; it’s as nasty as his earlier Greek work, and just as concerned with coercion and power. Effectively made up of three short(-ish) shorties, told over almost three hours, I found the experience frequently gruelling (did I mention it’s nasty?) and darkly hilarious, but never, ever dull. Plus it’s one hell of a showcase for Jesse Plemons, who delivers his finest-ever work across three distinct roles, and seems uniquely suited to Yorgos’ deliberately stilted dialogue.

• The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat) Proudly declaring “subtlety is for cowards”, this celebrity body-horror satire is unrepentantly deranged. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley give everything, body and soul, to sell this vicious fable of Hollywood age-aversion gone very, very wrong. I was either laughing, covering my eyes, squirming in my seat, gasping, holding my breath or outright screaming for pretty much every single minute. Whoever chose this as the Closing Night film either deserves a caution or a raise; possibly both. Not for the faint of heart or stomach.

Plus a special mention to the trans & Buffy-coded I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun), which I had complicated feelings about — and some friends absolutely hated — but inspired more fierce discussion than anything else at the festival. And yes, after all my Francis Ford Coppola talk I missed the single IMAX screening of Megalopolis… but thankfully it has an Australian distributor, so we’ll get to find out if it’s a disaster or a work of genius for ourselves in a few short months.

Odds & Ends

• A fascinating new archeological find: a 4,600-year old Egyptian skull with evidence not only of brain cancer, but of surgical attempts to study and even treat it! It goes to show how advanced Egyptian medicine was, and how similar we are, body and spirit, to our ancient ancestors.

• Settlers of Catan is now fighting the climate crisis! Well, it’s releasing a new version set in the 21st Century that uses the temperature rises caused by burning fossil fuels as a gameplay mechanic. Honestly, I’m keen to give it a try.

And saving the best for last — Pleasant Avenue, the comedy web-series I 1st AD’ed last year, has now released all of its episodes online! Written & directed by the wonderful Aimée-Lee Xu Hsien, the series skewers the foibles and pretensions of inner-city community groups and is absolutely stacked with top-notch “wait I know him/her!” local actors. I found the scripts so delightful and funny that I broke my “no shorts or web-series” resolution last year to jump on board. Check it out via YouTube or Facebook — the series is made up of five x 6-8minute episodes, so it’s a perfect little bite-sized watch over brekkie or before bed.

That’s all from me this week, thanks for reading! Next time I’ll be back with a little less cinema, a little more history…