Melbourne Animation Festival 07

Right, so - I had great plans, for a nicely formatted blurb about each of the movies I saw at the animation festival here in Melbourne. It was amazing, by the way, and I highly recommend finding the time to go see any/some/all of the movies on offer in 2008. But as all great plans of mish and men, mine got whittled down to this - to me writing this goofy non-intro then hiding the bulk of my unformatted brain-dump (unsent emails) by publishing this in August and dating it July but if I don't post this now it will be time for the next animation festival and I will truly suck.
Read More

Sleeping Beauty - Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne

"Michael Kantor’s Sleeping Beauty is a blood-pulsing, dream-scouring take on one of the great stories of our collective consciousness where fear and desire are as interchangeable as twin blades." Yeh, nah. Fox wonders what the heck is going on please, and Michelle is a little bored: tasting notes for Sleeping Beauty at the Malthouse in Melbourne Three points of note during the play:
  1. near the end of Act One, our heroine has glitter rain down upon her - fine, gold glitter, that sticks to her hair and her legs and sprinkles in soft showers as she hurtles from one side of the stage to the other showing us her portfolio of acting faces she learned at Drama School (she stopped doing so much of that in Act Two: bless) and I remembered just how much I like glitter (bored already, Michelle?)
  2. as Act Two starts, I start to worry I've become one of those middle-aged women who buy tickets and go to plays in town after reading about them in The Age to then discover she's $47 out of pocket and a bit lost - maybe I'm just past it and can't understand what's going on because I'm just not smart enough, not cultured enough, not read the right books, got the right in-jokes, found the right groove. Then I remembered that I'm me, and I am excellent LOLz, and the truth is: this play just isn't very good.
  3. plugging our way through Act Two, our heroine has confetti rain down upon her - I wish her character would do the decent thing and kill herself so the play can end.
Michelle: So, this is what I think.. I think that the play was about growing up. The family unit, right? mum, dad, daughter and son and they adored the daughter and they have plans for her life and that's when the box came down on her bed while she was in it, they pigeon-holed her into her future and she fought against the box, well.. not very hard but she had just pricked herself on the spinning wheel - was that a drug metaphor or a sexual reference? the "prick" was red, maybe she got her period - so, anyway, she gets out of the box and that's like she's rebelling against their ideas, their plans, their idea of how her life should be. She goes out in the world and it's scary and she doesn't cope so well at first but then she kinda gets the hang of it, but falls into and out of love and is hurt and mucks up and finds drugs and alcohol and music and parties and all that stuff and when she gets a bit older she wants more from her relationships and her life and she longs for her childhood again, for the safety of home, and so she goes home, she takes off her shoes and her pink chicken coat and .. well, okay.. this is where it got a bit weird because I couldn't work out why she was kissing her brother (the guy in the white chicken coat) so maybe he was never a brother but a next-door-neighbour who used to sit on their couch and watch their tv, and was now out (Out?) in the world too but strangling chickens or whatever it was he was doing with all that blood on his hands and I'm not even gonna go anywhere near why he was tied up and blindfolded for a while there - did you notice that his hips moved independently to the rest of his body? he was a weird moving dude - so she falls in love with him and the Mum and Dad are really happy to have their girl home and she and the next-door-neighbour-boy are really happy and they snuggle and canoodle and the Mum and Dad party like it's 1999 but then another box comes down and covers them both and maybe this box represents all the expectations their parents and society bestow upon them now they're a couple and have a set path to follow and then suddenly everything falls apart and life sucks and he's gone and she's alone and is just gonna end up old and pointless like her parents but more alone because the boy-next-door has mysteriously disappeared (probably turned out he was gay or too deep into the BDSM scene), but then she finds God with a bunch of Christians including the boy-next-door-exhusband (the Christians must have cured him of his wayward ways) who convince her that suicide is not the way even though they sing her there's life after death, which is a good enough reason to let her go see, I reckon. She decides to love life, honour her parents and praise the Lord and the whole world (cue: mirror ball) is in her hands and BONUS, there's life after death. The End. That's my best stab at what I think that play was about. Fox: Well if that was your best stab at the play, I wish you'd stabbed it a lot harder.
Read More