Reviewing the old school: Die Hard (1988)

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So I wanted to do a Christmas movie this week since, y’know, Christmas. Took me a little while to decide which one, since there are quite a few of them (many of them actually pretty shit). Then I remembered I hadn’t watched the original Die Hard in a while, and the choice was made. I procured a copy, ordered a curry and sat back to watch what remains one of my favourite action movies ever.

Released in 1988, the film stars Bruce Willis as John MccLane, an NYPD cop visiting his estranged wife at her work Christmas party (in an incomplete skyscraper in Los Angeles). Then a bunch of mostly European thieves masquerading as terrorists take all the party guests hostage. Hijinks ensue.

But you should already know all this, because you should have already seen this movie by now. In all honesty this should be on that 1001 Movies to See Before You Die list if it isn’t already. It’s a classic action film that holds together incredibly well nearly three decades later (holy shit Die Hard turned 27 this year). The fight scenes are appropriately brutal, the set pieces are spectacular and the coincidences never feel as contrived as they do in a lot of other films (including, if I’m being honest, Die Hard 2). The music, as well, is fantastic. It’s something I hadn’t really paid much attention to until I rewatched it this week, but it manages to add tension in the necessary scenes and avoids the unnecessary synth-rock that’s left the soundtracks to so many other movies from the 80s so dated. Best of all it manages to keeps a Christmas theme going throughout the film.

It’s little stuff like that which makes this movie so much fun and the it never treats the audience like an idiot. It talks through particular scenes without feeling like it’s spoon-feeding us through Bruce Willis’ conversations with the Hans Gruber (the villain), Al Powell (his lifeline on the outside) and himself (you’re only crazy if there’s someone around to hear you). It also has a surprisingly high opinion of intelligent characters. John MccLane is not an idiot. He’s good at improvising and working through problems. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber is witty and charming, very capable of getting his hands dirty, able to think clearly, rationally and keep an eye on the prize throughout. Idiotic behaviour, however, usually results in the death of that idiot, as we see with Ellis and the FBI agents Johnson and Johnson (no relation). Going in guns blazing doesn’t work, and I wish more action movies would take this lesson to heart.

There are flaws, of course. Holly Gennaro, played by Bonnie Bedelia, has little to do aside from being someone for John MccLane to save. Reginald VelJohnson’s character Sergeant Al Powell tells a story about shooting an unarmed 13 year old boy, meant to garner sympathy for the cops, comes off a little sour given recent events (and probably should have given contemporary events as well). Some guns never seem to run out of bullets until it suddenly ‘matters’. The territorial police commissioner trope, furious about property damage and glass, is a little overdone. As is the henchman who just will not fucking die.

But it’s easy to overlook these flaws. Especially ’cause this movie gave us Alan Rickman. I mean, yeah, Bruce Willis was also a fairly fresh face known for his TV and commercial work propelled to Hollywood fame by this film, but he didn’t play Severus fucking Snape in the Harry Potter films. Without Die Hard Rickman may have remained a relative or complete unknown. And that would have been tragic.

So, yeah, watch this film if you haven’t already. But I expect just about everyone likely to read this already has, so, watch it again I guess? Yeah, watch it again.

Have a Happy Christmas (or Chanukah or Winter Solstice or just a grand public holiday for the many people who don’t celebrate it). Let’s see if I can think of a good New Year movie for next time.

Irrational irritations and other unnecessary issues (8/12/2015)

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So it’s December in Vancouver (and the rest of the world that uses the Gregorian Calendar for that matter) and apparently that means rain. Quite a bit of it in fact. Funnily enough I’d be willing to make the claim that it’s a bit similar in Australia, except the rain would be part of a tropical storm in the worst cases and a spectacular thunderstorm after a scorcher of a day in the best. Vancouver doesn’t seem to get thunderstorms. I miss them quite a lot. Ah well, not here to talk about thunderstorms. No, umbrellas are the topic today.

More accurately people who use umbrellas but have the spacial awareness of a three year old driving a ute (pick-up truck for my non-Aussie readers). Y’know, the kind of people who just don’t seem to give a shit exactly where they’re swinging their temporary shelters, and the potentially eye-taking spikes that hold the whole thing together, making you wish they handed out goggles (“they do nothing”) whenever you left cover and turning a walk down the street into a Matrix scene where you’re performing amazing contortions in order to avoid these people’s twirling hexagons of doom. In slow motion of course.

And getting past these people is no easy feat. Unsurprisingly the kind people who have no idea where their umbrellas are swinging are also the kind of people who have two speeds: so slow they couldn’t even get next door in any time-frame that could be referred to as “soon”; and stationary. So staying behind them is never an option for us busy, go-getting millennials. But try and overtake them at your peril, because they always seem to choose the moment you’re right beside them to suddenly veer towards you while laughing raucously, sending the sharpest point of the six or seven they’re carrying into your unprotected ear. Your poor, soft, fragile ear. The bastards.

And don’t expect it to be any safer when their umbrellas are down. No, that simply means there’s more power behind their thrust and swing. If it’s a long umbrella, probably gives them more reach as well. And since they’re not limited by the need to keep the thin synthetic membrane stretched across four to nine spears between them and the rain, they have much more freedom to include their umbrella in grand expressive movements that are a danger to everyone within two metres. No, you’re never safe from these people, not as long as they’re permitted to carry such deadly instruments.

Now, I know these aren’t bad people. Simply unaware. And some people have a valid excuse, they’re tired or sick or thought they were in fact carrying rather large novelty candy canes. But please, when you’ve got your umbrella up this season try and be a bit more aware of the people around you. Try not to stab anyone in their poor, fragile ears.

Reviewing the old school: Troy (2004)

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Mate, there is so much wrong with this film. I think the worst part is that it could have been so much better if they’d actually used the source material properly. Y’know, with all the gods and magic and not trying to make us sympathise with Paris of Troy. Seriously, you read the Iliad? You know what we’d call that guy in the modern parlance? A date-rapist. Doesn’t matter that he had help from the Goddess of Love instead of roofies, he still fucks Helen without her conscious consent. That ain’t right.

I don’t get why they cut all the supernatural stuff out of the story. It certainly wouldn’t have made the movie any worse, and it certainly could’ve made the story a whole lot more interesting (imagine Sean Bean’s Odysseus having a D and M with Athena, the Goddess of Just War and Wisdom herself, on the beach beside his ship, or perhaps Ares, the God of War, stalking the battlefield with a leering smile at all the carnage). Could’ve been epic. And it’s not like we’d have a problem with the whole ‘Gods and goddesses interfering with the lives of mortals’ thing. I mean, The Mummy and it’s sequel came out five and three years before, respectively, and they did pretty well with the whole weird foreign supernatural thing. Hell, bloody Disney went and covered the same sort of ground as Troy, but including the divine intervention, with its animated film Hercules (and the great spin-off series about his high school years).

Maybe they were worried that if there was too much Deus Ex Machina going on we wouldn’t be able to take Brad Pitt’s flowing golden hair or Eric Bana’s tinted curls seriously. Maybe they were worried that they’d have to make Orlando Bloom the bad guy who dooms his whole city because he just couldn’t keep it in his pants when he met a hot girl who wasn’t interested. Maybe I’m giving the rest of the film too much credit and it would still be shit anyway.

Probably that last one, but the point still stands.

The acting isn’t great. Brad Pitt and Eric Bana ham it up with that weird pseudo-English accent that non-English actors are expected to put on whenever they’re in a historical period earlier than the 1600s. While Brad Pitt never seems to take it seriously (understandably), Bana actually seemed to get better as the film went on and I think he was the right choice for Hector, noble and doomed and the only one with the common sense to say “let’s just give Helen back to the Greeks, Paris will get over it and even if he doesn’t it isn’t worth going to fucking war over.” There’s a lot of great actors in this film, and they do their damned best with the material. Special props to Brian Cox who plays the role of the villainous, prideful, megalomaniacal Agamemnon with a surprising amount of subtlety. Sean Bean’s Odysseus seems woefully underused. I mean, they don’t even kill him. How you can put Sean Bean in your movie and have him play the one character that everyone knows is gonna survive?

The direction and editing are an overlong mess. It’s a two and a half hour long film and not nearly enough of that is filled with the kind of character moments to actually make us care. Some of it just seems painfully unnecessary. Case in point, the film opens with a map of the Aegean. No voice over, no music, no intro credits. Just a fucking map on the screen for like thirty seconds to a minute. Maybe that minute could have been spent fleshing out Ajax a little more, so we actually give a shit when he dies. Patroclus’ character could’ve been fleshed out a little better as well. I think fantastically named director Wolfgang Petersen was trying to channel old classics, the grand Biblicals and biopics like Ben Hur, Spartacus and Julius Caesar but it just doesn’t work. It’s too slow and not nearly as epic as we’d come to expect by then.

For all its flaws, and it has a lot of flaws (a lot of flaws) I absolutely love this film. My mates and I can basically communicate in movie and television quotes. Simpsons make up the bulk of our source material, with the two Hot Shots! films, the two Airplane (Flying High!) films, Gladiator and Lord of the Rings trilogy filling out the rest of our situational conversations. Troy occupies a special place for us as being the soundtrack for some of our most (or, I suppose, least) memorable nights of drunken debauchery. Someone refusing another beer would be met with a bellow of “Drink you lazy whore! Poles are sobering!” (several of my friends being of Polish origin). Midway through the night you’d likely hear a cry that “The taxi waits for us, I say we make him wait a little longer!” Someone skoling back beer after beer would be cheered on with “The man wants to die!” There was more than one occasion where we’d take Achilles’ speech at the prow of his ship before hitting the beach of Troy and adjust the wording, to fit our school and desired outcome “…my brothers of the schooner… do you know what’s waiting on the other side of the bar? Immortality! Take it, it’s yours!” I watch this film and I’m not thinking about the acting or the plot or the story, the dramatic lines are triggering memories of long nights and close friends.

So yeah. It’s a bloody terrible movie, but I love it dearly. Still, don’t watch it. It’s not worth it and might sour you on a couple of great actors. Read the Iliad and Odyssey instead. They’re classics for a reason.

Irrational irritations and other unnecessary issues (24/11/15)

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Evening all. Or afternoon. Or morning. Whatever time I post this/you read this. How we all doing? Bloody cold over here. Really bloody cold. Not as cold as a lot of other places in Canada, but still lower than what I’m used to.

So, something I’ve noticed as more and more people are wearing hats to stave off the cold, is the number of people who don’t take them off. Fedora, snapback, tuke (that’s “beanie” in Canadia, aren’t they kookie?), stetson, flatcap, whatever. People wearing hats will enter a restaurant, a bar, someone’s home, a police station, whatever, sit down at a dinner table, bar top, warm rug in front of the fire, interrogation table, whatever, and not remove whatever headgear they happen to be wearing. And this annoys me.

Like, when did this stop being impolite? Was this ever impolite? I was always taught that it was impolite to wear your hat at any indoor table. You sit down, you pull it off. Shit, you go indoors you pull it off. Sign of respect and all that. I’m not sure exactly why, probably something Biblically related (I wonder if a monk’s tonsure runs in the same vein) or to show weakness. “I have pulled off my helmet because I trust that you will not bash my skull in while we are having tea” or something. Maybe it was an insult if you left your hat on, like saying “you can’t even heat your fucking castle properly so I have to keep my hat on, you pathetic excuse for a host. And the tea fucking sucked! I asked for Earl Grey, not Green! That is a completely different type of tea!” I really should search for the origins of taking your hat off indoors. Point is though that I was taught that if you aren’t eating or drinking or discussing the political ramifications of whether or not Her Majesty’s heirs are tea or coffee drinkers over a beer outside, in the blazing Australian sun (that’s about to turn into a blazing Australian thunderstorm), then you take off your goddamn hat. Allowances are also made for when you’ve been skiing for hours and it’s almost as cold inside as out.

But people don’t do that. They leave their hats on. At first I thought to myself that this was a Canadian thing. But then I trawled through my memories and realised that, no, I’ve known plenty of Aussies and others who left their hats on when they shouldn’t have. I’ve just noticed it more often now that I’m working in an industry where I see dozens of people sitting down to eat a day. And I’ve realised that people don’t take their hats off.

Maybe I was just taught wrong. Maybe I’m a focusing to hard on an Anglo-Judeo-Christian perspective on manners. But you know what, I’m still gonna pull my fucking hat off. Because it’s polite. Am I fuckin’ right, or am I fuckin’ right?

Reviewing the old school: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

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I’ve struggled a bit writing this. I hadn’t watched this film in a while, and it seemed like a decent choice for an old movie review. It’s bloody fantastic. Problem is, to be honest, just about everyone probably already knows that. It’s Hayao Miyazaki, often cited as the first of Studio Ghibli’s long run of amazing films (even if the company hadn’t technically started yet). Of course it’s good. Of course it’s been praised, dissected, critiqued and analysed by a million others before. What can I possibly add to the discussion? Fucked if I know, but maybe if I ramble on for a bit I’ll think of something.

So, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (or Kaze no Tani no Naushika). The story takes place on a post-apocalyptic world a thousand years after industrial human society had been destroyed in the “Seven Nights of Fire” (this being a Japanese film, titanic organically grown robots with surprisingly uncreative names were involved). Much of the planet has been claimed by the Toxic Jungle, that releases poisonous spores into the air within and around, and is gradually claiming human settlement after human settlement. Nausicaä is a princess of the kingdom known as The Valley of the Wind (hence the title of the film). Far and away one of the hardest bastards in the film (there is one other character who kicks as much arse and he needed to be voiced by Patrick Stewart to do it), she’s also a committed pacifist with a talent for calming, charming and redirecting the deadly insects that protect the Toxic Jungle rather than following the trend in other human kingdoms to kill everything remotely threatening with fire. Aside from a dying a father, everything’s going pretty sweet in the valley until an enormous airship from a neighbouring kingdom, Tolmekia, crashes into the valley and just ruins everyone’s day. Partly because it was carrying spores from the toxic jungle. Partly because it was carrying a foreign hostage who died after the crash. Partly because it was carrying the… embryo… of one of those giant robotic killing machines that I mentioned destroyed the world earlier, that the Tolmekians want back. Anyway, several hopeful anti-war and environmentalist lessons later, everything turns out relatively alright.

It is a beautiful film. The animation is smooth and hold up well for a thirty-one year old film. The art-style makes intimate moments seem grand and grand moments feel intimate, as well as finding the beauty in in what are honestly some fucking horrific-looking beasts. There’s this scene early in the film, when Nausicaä is searching a cave for resources and she discovers the shell of an enormous insect called an ohm. Like, really bloody enormous. It’s presented like a religious experience, a pilgrim entering a cathedral and seeing light fall upon an altar. A lot of blue and white in this moment. A few minutes later the beast that left the shell behind is a nasty, snarling monster chasing after that character voiced by Patrick Stewart (an unforgivable offense in my book, but Nausicaä’s a far better person than I am). Red eyes and a black shell, stark in the desert outside of the cave. Another minute later and the monster has been calmed and is heading home with a surprising grace. Red has been turned back to blue.

Given this focus on colour, the cinematography, the characters and the message that humanity’s best chance of not killing itself is strong anti-war and environmentalist leadership (not to mention the post-apocalyptic setting), I kept comparing Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to, of all things, Mad Max: Fury Road. No, seriously. There’s a tonne of parallels there that I don’t have the time to go through in order to get this up before a self-imposed deadline, but if I ever meet George Miller I’d be inclined to ask how much of an influence Hayao Miyazaki is on him. I might even write a much longer post on the subject sometime in the future. We’ll see. I’m not saying that if you enjoyed Fury Road you’d enjoy Valley of the Wind. Except I actually am. And vice versa.

So, have I added said something interesting in all of this? Maybe. That last bit sounded good, even if it was a bit short. Fuck it, that’s good enough. Point is, if you haven’t seen Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind before, you should definitely watch it. If you have seen it before, well, you should watch it again.

Leave a comment. Thoughts are always appreciated, ideas for future Old School Reviews will be politely considered.

Not just a face on our money

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It started with a conversation about replacing Alexander Hamilton on the US ten dollar bill. It was a bit of a laugh, bit of a joke. I confused Alexander Hamilton, arguably one of the most intelligent and influential men in American history, with Andrew Jackson, the nutjob who occupies the twenty dollar bill, mistrusted paper currency and declared one of his great regrets was never shooting his Vice President. Yeah, not a hundred percent on my American history. Probably comes from not being from (or even living in) the land of the free, home of the brave. Or something. (This was also before Lin Manuel Miranda went and conquered a fair bit of social media with his Broadway hit). Where was I? Right, the ten dollar bill.

The yanks are currently in the midst of plans to put a woman on their tenner, replacing or sharing the spot with Hamilton. Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery then helped found the underground railway, seems the likely candidate with the most votes and public support in a Treasury survey. Seems like a good choice. It’d seem like a better choice if they ditched Jackson off the twenty and put Tubman, or a woman like her, on that. But it’s the ten that’s apparently due for change, so if that’s where she ends up that’s where she ends up. Not my choice. Not my problem.

Thing is it surprised me a bit that this was even an issue. I mean, it’s weird how scared yanks are of change, especially with regards to their currency. Seems like someone suggests getting rid of the penny, and they get accused of hating Lincoln or something. Fucked if I know why they’re still using paper while most proper nations have already made the switch to plastic notes (yeah, I know they technically use a cotton-composite or something, but it still won’t survive a trip through the washing machine, rain, or a particularly humid day). But, I mean, the USA has had at least a couple of great women in its history. You’d think they’d have put a few women on their money by now.

Maybe, though, I just can’t ever remember not having women on Aussie money. That was kinda where the above conversation ended for me, I began thinking of the people on our own colourful currency. Showing my own biases the names I thought of first were the old white men, but men worthy of respect for more than a few reasons. Banjo Patterson, obviously, on our ten. Sir John Monash, arguably Australia’s greatest general and also Jewish at a time when it was not good to be (though when has it ever?) on one side of the hundred. Reverend and Doctor John Flynn who established the Royal Flying Doctor service. I struggled a bit with the famous women on the notes. Dame Nellie Melba, the great soprano on the other side of the hundred, was easy enough to remember. Her name rolls out of the mind and off the tongue nicely. I have a lot more trouble remembering Mary Reibey’s name than her achievements, a convict turned extremely successful businesswoman with a role in establishing Aussie banking (making her an obvious choice to put on the twenty). I had to Google the others. Edith Cowan, philanthropist, Freemason and first woman in Parliament, her face now featured on the fifty. Mary Gilmore, a great far-left leaning poet and journalist, one who cared very much for her country.

I think I remember Flynn and Monash’s names first partly because they were amongst my heroes growing up. I wanted to join the RAAF for a long time and so great Australian pilots and military men occupied a lot of my attention. Mind you, given that I studied politics at Uni and worked in a bank for over four years I should probably have spent more time learning about Cowan and Reibey. And, hey, given my lousy attempts at writing I should have paid more attention to Patterson beyond the first verse of Waltzing Matilda and paid at least some attention to Gilmore. Fuckin’ hindsight, am I right?

Funny thing is the name that caught my attention the most as I read through the list of famous persons who have appeared on Aussie notes was none of the above notables. It was David Ngunaitponi, better known by the Anglicisation of his surname as David Unaipon. Now this guy, this guy, was one of my favourite people when I was a kid. I half remember making a poster and maybe giving a speech way back in the first half of primary school on his life and achievements. Intelligent and creative, he made a name for himself as a writer (the first Aboriginal to be published in English, including translating and writing down many indigenous stories and legends), a speaker and an inventor (most famous of which were his mechanical shears) at a time when he was often refused room and service because of his race. Shit, he made a name for himself as an intellectual at a time when the Australian Constitution considered him to be part of the native fauna. Unaipon was someone who believed in gradual assimilation into European-Australian society, but in balance with, rather than at the cost of, his own culture, people and heritage (at least that’s my reading of the guy, people who know him better please correct and educate me). The man drew designs for a helicopter (based on the flight of a boomerang) before World War One, back when aeroplanes were still made of sticks and paper held together with twine and hope, and spent much of his life trying to unlock the secrets of Perpetual Motion, Laws of Thermodynamics be damned. I fuckin’ love that. If he was born today I can imagine him trying to build faster-than-light propulsion, tinkering with an engine and muttering the highly articulate and classical-English equivalent of “Theory of Relativity my arse.”

It’s just, I dunno, good to be reading about his life. I mean, it’s like running into an old friend you haven’t seen in years and both having a spare half-hour to catch up over a coffee. As you talk you begin to wonder why the hell you stopped talking, grew apart. Forgot how much you liked this person, how close you were, how important they were to you once upon a time.

Why did I forget about Mr Unaipon for so long? Institutional and personal racism most likely. I probably drifted away in high school, when it was pretty in vogue for young white males like myself to complain about all the ‘Abbo shit’ we were required to learn in the history curriculum. I got over it by the time the HSC rolled around, and complained about the heavily sanitised version of Aboriginal history and culture that we were taught instead (something that we as a people and a community need to demand is fixed). This isn’t helped by the level of anti-intellectualism that haunts Aussie society, our politics and media. A dislike of learning our own achievements outside of sports we play and the wars we’ve fought in. And that’s a shame, because Australians like Mr Unaipon have done things that have, without a doubt, made the world a better place. Will continue to do so, whether we care or not. It comes from how we view ourselves.

A hundred years ago Charles Bean, an otherwise excellent and apolitical war correspondent, lobbied against Sir John Monash (the guy I mentioned on the hundred) being given command of the Australian Imperial Force fighting in the closing years of the Great War. Monash was an urban, Jewish civil engineer who brought a keen scientific mind to making war, completely at odds with Bean’s view of the ideal Australian soldier being the hardy Anglo bushman, surviving on instinct, intuition and determination born from surviving the perilous outback.

We still have these views of ourselves, of what a proper Aussie should be. But maybe we need to expand this image a bit. A proper Aussie should be inventive. A proper Aussie should be educated. A proper Aussie should know how to translate this to the real world without sacrificing the creative dreamer within.

There was this commercial, years ago (I think it might have been on around the Centenary of Federation) where a kid goes up his dad and asks who the first President of the USA was. No problem, it was George Washington. Then the kid asks who the first Prime Minister of Australia was. Oh shit, dad flounders and tells the lad to go ask mum. Most of the rest of the commercial is scenes of senior Australians answering the question easily, (Sir) Edmund Barton. The point of the commercial, if I recall correctly, was to get people thinking about how much they knew about Australian history (beyond Don Bradman’s test average and the date the first ANZACs rushed onto the beaches of Gallipoli). In that same vein I’d like to ask us all to ask a few more questions.

Who’s the lady on the ten?

The guy on the hundred?

The lady on the twenty?

The bloke on the fifty?

Remember some of our national heroes.

Irrational irritations and other unnecessary issues (10/11/2015)

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God I’m sick of hockey. A bit surprised I’m saying that. But I am. I’m sick of hockey. It feels good to say that, and I’ve been saying it a lot. Funnily enough, I’ve found a lot of Canadians (the maddest of the hockey-mad) actually agree with me on this.

Why am I sick of hockey? Why are we sick of hockey? Because it is on all. The fucking. Time. I mean seriously, even in the off-season Canadian sports news is dominated by the hockey. They talk about the upcoming draft season, changes to coaches and managers, replay “classic” games and, going by one muted exchange I tried to interpret while having a beer at a bar in Gastown, what brand of underwear one particularly bearded player wore beneath his uniform (it was an unusual sequence of images). Then there’s the draft, and that’s all anyone gives a shit about for a couple of weeks (especially as far too many people for my liking begin to construct fantasy teams). Then there’s the pre-season, which is where a bunch of the new players try to prove themselves by playing extra hard while the old players try to avoid injury by playing extra carefully. Then the season proper starts, which is about a month old about now, and that’ll go until the Stanley cup finals in, like, fucking May.

It goes from the middle of autumn to the beginning of summer. Then you get maybe two months where they’re just talking about the upcoming season and replaying old games and greatest hits, then the draft begins again.

The thing that gets me though, the thing that really gets me, is just how many games are on. Seriously, check out the NHL schedule for the regular season. There is a game, usually more than one, sometimes more than a half dozen, every fucking day except for a couple around Christmas and the like.

I was out the other night, having a drink at one of my usual spots. And the hockey was on, a couple of knots of people watching as the Canucks were being beaten by a team called the Penguins (I can’t help but feel like naming a team playing an exclusively Northern Hemisphere sport after an exclusively Southern Hemisphere type of bird is a little ridiculous). I asked the bartender if it’d cause a riot to change one of the TVs over to the cricket (Australia was spanking New Zealand in the first test at the time). She nodded seriously and said “probably.”

The game cut to commercial, then cut back with one of those… infographics I think they’re called? Just graphics? Anyway, bright red letters flew across the screen proclaiming “WEDNESDAY NIGHT HOCKEY” and I just began to crack up. Do they do that for every game? There was hockey on Tuesday, there’d be hockey on Sunday, there’d be hockey on Thursday, there’s hockey on every day. Did the person in charge of the graphics ever get it wrong? Did they ever forget to change it or had “[Insert weekday here] NIGHT HOCKEY” flashed up on people’s televisions by accident? So many questions, none of them I have any interest in learning the answers to.

Now I understand sports fandom. I’m an Aussie. We get it. And I’d guess that other countries have just as much of a problem with football (soccer). Shit, I’ve known a few people to care just a little too much about the Rugby League or AFL. But even the most diehard Rabbitohs fans would start to get bored if their team was playing every two or three days. Yes, even Russell Crowe. There’s just such an oversaturation of hockey that it’s become boring.

So yeah, I’m sick of hockey. And that’s a shame because, while I never developed any emotional investment in who wins or loses, I enjoyed watching the barely controlled chaos and violence.

And, hell, maybe if they actually paid proper attention to some other sports they might be able to field a decent rugby team.

Reviewing the old school: Young Einstein (1988)

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I like the odd bit of alternate-history fiction. Usually the more serious stuff, where you take a particular historical conflict and basically go “then the aliens attacked” or “but actually there were magicians there too” or “suddenly, time travel!” Serious stuff. Young Einstein (written, directed by and starring Yahoo Serious – probably not the name he was born with) takes a more comedic route by asking its own grand question: what if, instead of Germany, Albert Einstein was born in Tasmania to Aussie apple farmers?

Well, for one, he still develops the Theory of Relativity in this version of reality, but its first application is to split a beer atom in order to carbonate his dad’s pint. Having succeeded in creating bubbly beer (something apparently impossible to do without causing a small atomic blast) Albert packs his bags and heads to Sydney via Uluru (dammit Jim he’s a physicist not a map-reader!) in order to patent his idea. He runs into (and falls in love with) the lovely Marie Curie (played with some fantastic expression by Odile Le Clezio) who has gone to study physics at the University of Sydney (USYD represent!) for some reason, has his idea stolen by foppish villain Preston Preston of the Perth Prestons (played by John Howard – the actor not the Prime Minister – who is wonderfully pompous, cowardly and greedy), invents rock’n’roll music, then uses rock’n’roll music to diffuse an atomic bomb (saving the lives of thousands, including an apparently still kicking Charles Darwin).

Yeah, you shouldn’t think about it too hard. Or at all. Very little of it makes a whole lot of sense. The plot doesn’t. A fair bit of the physics related dialogue doesn’t. But I like it. And if you don’t think about it too much you might like it as well.

As bonkers as it is, Young Einstein does have a colloquial charm. John Howard hams it up fantastically as Preston Preston in what I’d be willing to call one of his best and funniest roles. The idea that everyone would give so much of a fuck about putting bubbles into beer that the scientific community would give out a Nobel Prize for the effort is so bloody Australian it was probably born in New Zealand. Once he gets out of Tasmania, Yahoo’s young Einstein manages to mix the traditional Aussie stereotype of the self-reliant bushman out of his depth in the big city with the broader stereotype of socially-oblivious genius more easily than you’d expect. The plot might not make any fucking sense, but the fact that everyone seems to rather like the kid does.

Thing is, I can’t bring myself to recommend this film to anyone. It took me a little bit to decide why, mind you, but I can’t. Not to an Aussie audience, not to a foreign audience. The problem is it hasn’t aged well.

So much of the humour is, essentially, a piss-take of what people from outside Australia thought the country was like. Weird puppet Tasmanian devils that can take bites out of metal shovels, wallabies hopping around the Sydney Uni campus and (as mentioned above) indicating that a trip from Tassie to Sydney would require hopping on a train in the red centre. Thing is this may have been how people viewed us nearly thirty years ago but other people have done a better job of having a go at these stereotypes since then, and (if nothing else) the number of Australians traveling around the world (yours truly included) and people who have travelled to Oz has dispelled a lot of the more ridiculous of the myths made fun of in Young Einstein. A fair few of the jokes are winks and nudges at the Australian audience going “how funny is it that dumb-arse foreigners think this is what we were like!” Now we’d just point out that the rest of the world just thinks we’re a bunch of drunken, sports-mad brawlers with a talent for killing spiders and sharks in between smashing back tinnies.

As a result a lot of the humour falls flat. This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the more noticeable cultural references aren’t all that recognisable (I might know that a shot of Einstein riding a horse down a steep slope is a reference to The Man from Snowy River but I doubt that any of my siblings would).

Honestly mate I watched this film for nostalgia purposes. I remember watching this film as a kid. There’s this point at the end where everything’s about to explode and everyone’s losing their shit. Einstein, calm as you like, takes a bite out of an apple and says “Just a moment Marie, I’m having an idea.” I love that calm thoughtfulness. The problem with the rest of the film might be that it’s too goofy. Everything from the high-pitched inflection of the narration to the costuming to the sound effects is played for the easiest kinds of laughs. But this one line, played perfectly straight, eating an apple, it embodies my own sense of humour and how I try and handle a stressful situation. Funny what sticks with you.

So yeah, I like this movie. Is it great? Not really. Should you watch it? Probably not. Hell, I wouldn’t even recommend a rewatch if you’ve seen it before. But if you do, remember to take it for what it is. It’s a relic of what we all thought you thought about us back in the day, true or not. And it’s a bit of clean, stupid fun.

Irrational irritations and other unnecessary issues (27/10/2015)

On By longandshortofitallIn Quick and dirty, Random but worthyLeave a comment

G’afternoon everyone. Getting right into today’s topic I’d like to talk about bagels. I bloody love bagels, those dense doughnut-shaped buns that form part of a balanced breakfast for millions of people everyday. Wonderful things. My basic breakfast consists of eggs, cheese, tabasco sauce and, of course, a bagel. But that’s really only since I moved to North America.

They’re not a huge thing in Australia. I mean, they’re around, you can definitely buy them. It wouldn’t be that hard to find a cafe that sells breakfast bagels filled with ham and cheese or other time-of-day appropriate fillings. But they’re not common like they are up here in Canada and the USA. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course. I haven’t seen the kind of variety in Canadian breads that I’d expect in an Australian bakery or supermarket. Like I don’t see focaccia or pita or Lebanese bread (fuck I miss really good Lebanese bread). And you’re probably more likely to find crumpets or (ahem) ‘English’ muffins on an Aussie table. But we don’t have a lot of bagels back home. And bagels are awesome. I just ate one before coming here to write this. It was delicious.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that when I go home, eventually, in like a year or something, I’m gonna have to find a new source of bagels. They’ve been one of the best parts of moving to Canada, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give them up. Complain as I might about North American domestic beers and the lack of good Thai and Indian restaurants around, well, I can’t complain about their bread choices. Because bagels are amazing. Think I might go eat another in a moment.

So not so much an irritation today (though it might turn into that if I travel somewhere else and there aren’t any bagels), but that’s why we have the other part of the title. Tried to think of something Halloween related to talk about (I carved a pumpkin last night!) but couldn’t. So just think about how terrifying a world without bagels would be.

I fucking love bagels.

View from across the ocean (23/10/2015)

On By longandshortofitallIn In the News, Quick and dirtyLeave a comment

It was an important week back home, as we finally saw an end months in the making. I am of course talking about the finale of The Bachelorette Australia, where Sam Frost finally found love with her new beau Sasha hard-to-pronounce-Eastern-European-name. Frost of course was the lovely lady given the final rose at the end of the last season of The Bachelor Australia, only to be dumped a week later by Blake “you’ve got a stupid name and weren’t good enough for her anyway” Garvey who changed his mind and went with the runner-up. Six million capital city Aussies (that’s more than a quarter of the population of the country) tuned in to see Sam get her happy ending, and what a fairytale it was.

I didn’t watch it, mind you, but I am gonna miss the funny recaps and social media quips by the hilarious people who did. Still glad you two found each other, Sam and Sasha.

Something else that I wasn’t a big fan of but enjoyed all the online piss-taking that just ended? The political career of Joe Hockey. Though that was less ‘fairytale ending’ and more ‘at last the nightmare is over’ as he finally got around to quitting after his boss and biggest supporter got booted out of his own job. Tony Abbott might not be leaving parliament anytime soon, but it’s no surprise that the bloke who (it can be pretty easily argued) was the individual most to blame for that downfall (sorry Peta Credlin haters, Joe pissed off the voters more) has decided to quit while he’s got any scalp left. Or maybe he just wanted everyone to start being nice to him again. Certainly heard a lot of cheery speeches in parliament from his side of the fence congratulating him on years of loyal service to the nation, while his own speech was a self-congratulating belief that he’d left the nation better than what he started. I can’t help but feel that the latter was met by a collective muttering of “my arse,” while the latter was actually a coded thanks that Joe had fallen on his sword instead of making them feed him to the lions in a colosseum filled with cheering swing voters. Except for Julie Bishop, who didn’t give a speech and was promptly accused of, I’m not sure, disloyalty or something? Being impolite? Not lying through her teeth about what a great job she thought he’d done? Something like that. Somehow just as cheerful were the eulogies by all the satirists who’re gonna miss drawing Joe and his cigar. Even I got in on that action once or twice. I didn’t draw the best likeness, but then again I didn’t do it for a living.

Joe Hockey and random talking Edited 23:10:2015 copy

Truthfully though, this was a long time coming and nobody was that surprised. It certainly seemed to cease being one of the main headlines. Turnbull’s managing to keep things steady, talking about infrastructure investment and a changing economy and a plebiscite on marriage equality and not giving a couple of million dollars to a climate change skeptic. So much so that we’re barely paying attention to Cory Bernardi, and Peter Dutton’s offensive use of the word “Negro” hasn’t had nearly as much airtime as it would have gotten under the ancien regime. Mind you, he’s got Jacqui Lambie calling him out on inappropriate use of racist language in his capacity as a member of government, and when you’ve got Jacqui Lambie throwing down the political equivalent of “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, best not to say anything at all” then you really ought to think about your behaviour.

But of course none of this really matters against the fact that Sam Frost has finally found love. Good luck mate, you deserve it!