Art Smitten: Reviews - 2017

For those who haven’t seen David O’Doherty’s comedy before, like myself, if you decide to see him in action you’ll be greeted by one of the most refreshing examples of comedy in modern day times. O’Doherty blends his own down to earth comedic vibe with music seemingly created on the spot in front of the audience. He covers both the biggest issues that the world faces today such as the rise of fascism, to the smallest such as bad twitter sponsorships. It’s nice to see both topics handled off hand, putting a light touch on even the saddest of events our world faces today. Performed at the Forum Theatre under a wash of blue, red and multicoloured lights, David O’Doherty keeps the crowd focused through his consistent switch between musical performance and stand up comedy, as he prances around the stage displaying his own brand of characteristics. You become so immersed in what he’s saying occasionally that you forget to notice him lying sideways on the stage, his le

Aunty Donna’s new show hits the MICF under the title Big Boys, a show about boys, who are now big. The title is more than just a gag or joke to go with the show. The title incidentally refers to the three boys who are Aunty Donna, who have now become big after years of being together as a group; Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane. The three are perfect for each other, and after years of performance their blend of slapstick comedy, alternative sketch and surrealism creates a hilarious show which might not be for everyone, but has an incredibly big following. The trio are most successful for their online content, in which they create web series and musical sketches, which gain up to millions of views. There comedy show, Big Boys, blends what they do on the small screen with stand up comedy as well as a mix of audience interaction. Big Boys shows what each member of the group bring to the table, or stage in this case, and how they can do more than just planned sketches. Some of the funniest parts

I haven’t been too a lot of shows when the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is on, but this year I’m starting off strong by seeing both big and smaller shows that the festival has to offer. To kick this season off, I checked out the preview show of Gavin Roach’s All The Songs I Can't Sing, a just under 50 minute show that is about just that; all the songs that Gavin Roach cannot sing. It’s an amusing title which follows through in the show. Roach structures his show well, telling a funny story from his life which follows into a song which has special meaning with that story. This rinse and repeat idea works, but does become a little tiresome after awhile, although the show is quite short. Roach also changes costumes in between stories, which takes a little while meaning there are moments of nothingness on stage, however you can see the costume changes as a mirror on the wall reflects it from behind stage. It is Roach’s personality which really sells the show, rather than h

Stellar Project is a premier dance work by Prue Lang, it is an hour long contemporary dance piece, with 5 performers. It was presented in several parts, first was a dimly lit gentle dance piece, then the lights came up and the dances congratulated each other saying good job etc etc, like they had just finished a improve or something in a dance class, they then took turns performing solo dances and then the other people had to guess what they were doing, whoever guesses correctly got to do a solo dance. There were several other parts, some of which I have forgotten, because at times I found myself drifting off, it may have been because the show was on quite late at night and it was very hot which in combination made me feel very tired, but overall I did have a nice time, the show was very gentle, soothing and sweet. My favorite part was when the dancers formed a solar system, one person was in the middle representing a star, the others orbited the star and offered a little dance wiggle thing to the star, if th

Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting is a one of a kind movie; back when it was released it was different, new and explosive, something not many had ever seen before. The same can be said for the stage adaptation, Trainspotting Live, which is literally in your face the entire way through. It takes immersive to a new level. If you’re a fan of the movie then you might be pretty confused when first going into Trainspotting Live, as it strays vastly from the original. I haven’t read the novel, but from what I gather I’m assuming the stage adaption takes more cues from the novel rather than the movie. For instance, Spud’s character doesn’t appear, rather Tommy takes his place as another drug addict instead of being a clean cut athlete as presented in the film. Major plot points are also missing from the film adaption, such as the robberies, court case and baby head turning. There is a baby scene, however it's presented slightly differently to the film. The main selling point of Trainspot

Deep Sea Dances was a new contemporary dance work by Rebecca Jensen. The performance space is in The Stables are Arts Houses’ Meat Market, we entered into a large space with beautiful projections on the walls, we were asked to remove our shoes and socks and entered into another large space in the building, the floor was covered with squishy plastic and there were chairs and pillows either side of the long room to sit on. Deep Sea Dances was performed by a large ensemble of trans femme and trans women, and female identifying people, it was presented in what I felt like several ‘parts’. The performance began with a dance choreographed by Dorris Humpfry in 1928, she is often forgotten and her experimental choreography is often credited to men who created work in the 1950’s. After the dance was finished Rebecca came out and told us what we had just seen, acknowledged the traditional custodians of the land which we were viewing the work and announced Deep Sea Dances would now begin. A big roller door then open

Waiting in dark anticipation in La Mama theatre with foreboding music in the background, you could sense the experience of the director, Lloyd Jones, in non-text based performance theatre. Windows, written by Ayse Bayra-moglu, is a new work which has undertaken some swift development from play-reading to fully mounted performance in the last year. It still retains the casual essence of play-reading with the stage manager, Lisa Edman, announcing the scene and stage directions at the beginning of each scene. I thought this was a clever way to add to the audience's experience of rawness, and believe they could have taken it even further by having the two actors, Anna Ellis, who plays Esme, and Zac Kazepis who plays Huso, preparing in between scenes on the stage rather than hiding next to the seating banks where they could awkwardly be seen and heard quite clearly. Not having the luxury of wings could be used quite powerfully rather than ignored.   It's sometimes really difficult watching adults play childr

Rebi, Jim and Molly interview Rachael Beesley a solo violinist and musical director, performing in Italian Romance, an upcoming concert from the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, taking place at the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall of the Melbourne Recital Centre (MRC) on Friday March 24 and the City Recital Hall, Angel Place in Sydney on Saturday 25 March (both at 7.30pm) featuring Beethoven and Mendelssoh, and directing the Revolutionary Romance chamber concerts, featuring Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, in Sydney on Sunday 17 September at 2.30pm and in Melbourne on Friday 22 September at 7.30pm.

David Stratton is a pioneer in both critiquing films, and Australian films themselves. If you ever want to be a critic, you should take a good look at some of Stratton’s reviews, as they emphasis what is important about filmmaking, and how to perfectly break it down, dissect it, and give a professional opinion. David Stratton: A Cinematic Life, reveals a lot more about the man behind a critical perspective than you would ever imagine. However, it also reveals things that you could assume and gather from him, as a bit of Stratton is in every one of his reviews which have been in Variety, The Movie Show and At The Movies. Directed by Sally Aitken, the documentary does more than just explore David Stratton’s fascinating life; it gives a wonderful homage to Australian cinema, and how far its come over the years. The documentary is wonderfully broken down by certain Australian films, and how the both impact and reflect Stratton’s life. I feel bad saying that the majority of films on screen that a

Logan is the brand new marvel film under the banner of 20th Century Fox, adding to the long running series of X-Men Films. Logan concludes the trilogy of Wolverine, the two previous films, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and The Wolverine, being mildly successful, but for the most part not critically rated very highly. This all changes with Logan, which has been met with massive praise, easily trumping the average reviews of the previous films. However, does the film really deserve the praise? I went into Logan ready for the best superhero film I’ve ever seen, as that is what I got from the reviews. I was prepared for the best Marvel film I’ve ever seen, and I’m not a big fan of marvel films. To begin, I agree wholeheartedly that Logan is the best film in the trilogy of Wolverine films. It deals with some very real issues, the acting is great from all performances, and it reflects on the long X-Men trilogy in a simple, brutal light. However, for myself, it was not the best superhero film I’v

The Dancer (or La danseuse) is the feature debut of French director Stéphanie Di Giusto starring Soko as the revolutionary dance pioneer Loie Fuller. To start with, this film is beautiful. In the locations, in the cinematography, in the dance - the film itself captures and mirrors the longing of the protagonist Loie Fuller for the beauty she is searching for in dance. The film opens in the American Rocky’s where she is living in the wilds with her mad french father who encourages her love of art and her seemingly odd desire to become an actress. There are some charming scenes of a wild maned Soko soliloquising into the air or at taxidermy, perhaps as a set up as the humble roots of greatness but to my view represented a sheer singleness of mind on focused on stardom. Men are quite appalling throughout the film and it is shot in such a way that Loie is suggested to only find ease and success in the companionship of women. There are some amazing scenes of her and her troupe of dancers frolicking th

Sandra Thibodeaux’s The Age of Bones is an ambitious, playfully political Indonesian-Australian coproduction now being hosted by La Mama in Carlton.  For a play that extols (and some might say preaches) the virtues of working together across national and natural borders, it’s very pleasing to see how the production itself has exemplified this cultural harmony at every stage of its development. It also comes to Melbourne as part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts festival, which, for some of the younger audiences of La Mama, might be delivering them their first taste of surtitled theatre, except for maybe opera. This will certainly be a very gentle introduction for them. About half of Thibodeaux’s dialogue is performed in Indonesian, while the other half is performed, unsurprisingly, in English. It also makes magnificent use of puppetry and projections as a backdrop to this story of a 15-year-old boy, Ikan (Imam Setia Hagi) who is lost at sea. Lost because that is the last

The Homosexuals, Or Faggots, is a new stage production at the Malthouse written by local theatre maker Declan Green, of Sisters Grimm, and directed by Griffin Theatre Companies artistic director Lee Lewis. I’ve been a fan of everything I’ve seen of Declan Greens works, and The Homosexuals, Or Faggots is no exception. It is a contemporary farce, set in a luxury apartment in Sydney owned by a married gay couple Warren and Kim,  played by Simon Burke and Simon Corfield, Kim and Warren are both white cis gay man, Warren is a journalist and Kim is a university lecturer on gender. The events of the play take place over one night, during mardigra, Warren is setting up to do a photo shoot with a young male model Lucacz, played by Lincoln Younes when Kim unexceptedly arrives home from a conference after being ‘cyber bullied’ by a student Bae Bae played by Mama Alto, Bae Bae, publicly critisized Kim for using the term ‘biological gender’ during one of his lectures. Warrens frien

Smithers reviews actor turned writer Camilla Blunden's solo show All This Living. Click here to listen to our interview with Camilla.

Aquarius is a three-part feature film depicting the life and struggles of its central character Clara, an ageing music critic played by Brazilian actress and former Golden Globe nominee Sonia Braga. The film opens in 1980, where Clara lives with her family in Aquarius, an elegant nineteen forties apartment on the beachfront of Recife, a seaside town on Brazil’s east coast. During a family celebration, it is revealed Clara is a breast cancer survivor. Flash forward thirty-six years, Clara is a 65-year-old widow, addressed as Dona Clara, who faces disaster when developers threaten to tear down the old building and replace the Aquarius with a modern luxury condo.   As the last remaining tenant, Clara is faced with increasingly sizeable offers from the company headed by Diego, a young ambitious business graduate. Attached to the apartment’s sentiment and memories, Clara refuses to leave despite obvious pressure from her three children, who are keen to bolster their wealthy late father’

The Love Witch is a 2016 release written and directed by Anna Biller. It follows the story of a young beautiful witch Elaine, played by Samantha Robinson, who uses spells and potions to make men fall in love with her and ultimately kill them. The movie itself is shot on 35 mm film and is visually a homage to technicolour 1960s and 70s sexploitation cinema. The use of this film gives the movie a soft visual quality and sort of decentralises it in time - this is emphasised by the 70s costuming but with modern cars and mobile phone technology.  The film opens on Elaine driving away from San Francisco with her narrating how she had to leave after the overdose and death of her first husband. This scene uses rear projection photography to film her driving from the bonnet of the car - much like in Hitchcock’s The Birds. This allusion to a period thriller and the blood red of her car, outfit and lipstick suggest that there in something sinister afoot. She is then pulled over by a police man - raising the t

Casey Affleck has been in the paper a lot recently for not the right reasons. Without getting involved or placing an opinion of the alleged allegations against Casey Affleck, I believe his career in Hollywood and acting should not be judged by his actions outside of acting. This is my own personal viewpoint, and shall be throughout my review of Manchester by the Sea.   Directed by Kenneth Lonergan, Machester follows the events from the perspective of Joe Chandler, a handyman from Quincy, Massachusetts, after he receives a call of word that his brother is having a heart attack. Arriving too late in Manchester, Joe is given the guardianship of his brothers son Patrick. The majority of the film is in the present day as Joe tries to figure out what to do with Patrick, whilst having a total disconnect to the town itself. For the rest of the film, flashbacks are used as exposition to explain why Joe is the way he is, and how he came to leave Manchester to live in Quincy in the first place. Without spoiling any

Gill and Molly discuss their thoughts, feelings and impressions of Aaron Posner's play Stupid Fucking Bird, before, after and during the intermission of its new production byLightning Jar Theatre, playing at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute until February 26. Click here to listen to our interview with director Peter Blackburn

The Family is Rosie Jones and Anna Grieve’s ominously titled documentary about a bizarre Australian cult that was finally discovered by police in the late 1980s. Consisting mostly of corrupt doctors and forcibly adopted children, its leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, proclaimed herself to be the female reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She had prophesised a coming apocalypse and was desperately trying to build a master race of bleach-blonde stolen children that could survive it. Anne’s sect had the numbers, the resources and the influence to secretly spirit away 28 children from teenage pregnancies to her remote property in Eilden, Victoria. Anne could tell any member of “The Family” who to marry, who to divorce, where to work, where to live, and when to drop everything and relocate to avoid detection. She told them they would be punished for eternity if they dared disobey her. Her “children” never questioned this, since being starved, beaten and bullied with the promise of eternal

Theatre review, An intimate look into the human cost of China’s decades long one child policy. Playing at the Malthouse A’beckett Theatre, Melbourne. A tale of two cities one family, and the reflective story of a billion, Director Wang Chong navigates the immense human consequence of the One child Policy, with an ambitious production, that overthrows many old stage techniques in favour of relevance to the 21st Century. The story in which our characters navigate is one that is highly symbolic, frequently changing between English and Mandarin and contorting time and space to convey states of mind and connection between the characters. For instance Kevin speaks to his mother Diane via the phone her face projected onto the backdrop, but she speaks to him directly through the tapestry which backdrops the set, to punctuate a particular point and thus breaks the illusion of distance, as though it were always an illusion. There is a rhythm and timing to this play that is wonderfully executed. The play beg