Here’s a good idea: take a watershed moment in contemporary music history and recreate it for the big screen, minus the music! That’ll work, right? Actually yes, it works a treat in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.
Reviews
Film review: Inglorious Basterds — gimmicky bastardry
Luke Buckmaster reviews Quentin Tarantino’s much-hyped new flick, Inglorious Basterds, but is not as impressed as many other critics. The film has its compelling moments, he says, but is a strange and inconsistent beast.
Vogue and the chill of Wintour
Culture Mulcher reviews new film The September Issue a documentary about Vogue magazine and its notoriously icy editor, Anna Wintour.
Film review: The 10 Conditions of Love
Luke Buckmaster reviews the new film about the life, career and advocacy work of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, that has caused so much controversy for the government and Melbourne International Film Festival. Whilst highly topical, he says, it’s a listless and un-enticing documentary.
Inglorious Basterds: unendurably, unbelievably tedious
Quentin Tarantino’s new flick Inglorious Basterds has been receiving accolades from all over — but not from The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who calls it a “transcendentally disappointing dud”.
Album review: Eilen Jewell’s Sea of Tears
Crikey’s music blogger Tim Dunlop reviews the latest offering from alt-country songstress Eilen Jewell: It’s a keeper.
Film review: District 9
District 9 is a pulse-pounding, convention-bending sci-fi romp, that proves there is much extraterrestrial life left in the well-worn genre of aliens-on-earth movies, writes Luke Buckmaster.
The grand illusion of David Copperfield’s appeal
Erdem Koc watched $300 magically disappear when he went to see the world’s most famous magician, David Copperfield, perform live in Melbourne, and found the illusionist has nothing of interest up his sleeve.
Film review: Food Inc.
Food Inc. carves its way into the cinematic cavities of the 100% Prime Beef guilt trip genre, offering a shocking exposé about the stuff we put in our mouths. An engaging, important and entertaining documentary, says Luke Buckmaster.
Film review: Public Enemies
Director Michael Mann re-enters the biopic genre post-Ali with all tommy guns blazing in Public Enemies, says Luke Buckmaster.
The most eye-opening show of Aboriginal art ever
Graphic designer and culture mulcher W. H. Chong looks at ‘Ancestral power and the aesthetic’, an exhibition displaying the first shoots of the now enormous forest of the Aboriginal art industry.
Brüno is like a Rorschach test
Sacha Baron Cohen’s film — and character — Brüno is such an extreme exercise that how a reviewer reacts is a pretty good indicator of that reviewer’s tightness of grip on his or her sense of decorum, writes W H Chong.
Liberal Rule vs. The Howard Years
Does SBS’s new series Liberal Rule provide a better look back at the Howard government than the ABC’s The Howard Years? Peter Brent ranks the retrospectives.
5 gum: chewy for blokes
Masticating just got manly, with Wrigley’s latest addition to the gum world: 5. Andrew Tijs looks at how the company has taken something so seemingly benign, and branded it butch.
Balibo: another great Aussie film
Balibo — based on the true story of five Aussie journalists (aka The Balibo Five) who were murdered by Indonesian militia — is knock out stuff: taut as all hell, a stick of dynamite lit and tossed into the audience’s faces.
Harry Potter film #357: what critics are saying
Nourish your inner child — well more like your inner gawky, slow-blossoming teen — with Crikey’s gratuitous look at what critics make of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Noel Pearson: impassioned, nasty, intellectual, inspired
Noel Pearson’s collection of writing in Up from the Mission has provoked me, deepened my understanding of contemporary Aboriginal realities and confirmed my opinion of his import, says Eve Vincent.
ouch! Alain de Bott to critic: “I will hate you till the day I die”
Celebrity schadenfreude involving an author, and a philosopher at that, elevates it far above the midden material of a Britney or TomKat or Christian Bale fracas, writes WH Chong.
If you read only one book on the GFC…
The credit crunch has created a boom in financial publishing, says The Economist as it sets out to find the best of the lot.
Lobotomise before seeing: Transformers 2 reviewed
Director Michael Bay’s treatment is so excruciatingly laboured, heavy-handed and downright un-fun that Transformers 2 commits the one unforgivable sin in blockbuster moviemaking: it bores.
Australia’s greatest lyricist comes a gutser
Don Walker — the man who wrote the lyrics to Flame Trees or Khe Sanh — is probably Australian rock’s greatest songwriter. But nonetheless, I call bullshit on his memoir, says Tim Dunlop.
ouch! “A horrible experience of unbearable length”: Transformers reviewed
“If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell…” writes the film critic of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Down and out with Jack Charles
Documentary Bastardy captures the beggared and destitute recent years in the life of prolific Indigenous actor Jack Charles. Sad and pitiable, but there is something pleasantly candid about Charles’s eloquence.
ouch! 
Sydney: ordinary, dubious and crawling with merchant bankers
Hot on the heels of Louis Nowra’s Sydney bashing in The Weekend Oz, Richard Ackland throws a new punch: “Sydney makes Dallas look like Paris.”
The Hangover: low brow but good low brow
This film — guys wake up in Las Vegas with alcohol-induced amnesia — is low-flying stuff, but it’s also funny and smartly directed, with small flashes of style, says Luke Buckmaster.
