SBS Blogs

The food van

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:11:08 +1100

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Moved 32 pigs, some by trailer, some by walking them to their permanent homes. Some to the abattoir. Had another seven slips (piglets) born. Hand raked a new seven (of a potential 15!) winter garden beds. Went to the big Launceston food fair, Festivale, with the new caravan and sold free-range hot dogs and free-range pulled pork buns. Cooked a bit at home. Raided the garden a bit. Scoured the brambles for blackberries. Picked blueberries at a local organic farm. Worked the market on Sunday. A bit at the shop on Friday.

It’s a glorious time of year for food. Okay, so the raspberries have finished, and the strawberries continue to be just a trickle. But zucchini from the vine, complete with flowers, ready to throw in a risotto? Beat that. Or new season apples, straight from the tree? Scarlet runner beans. Purple beans. Dutch cream potatoes. Pink eye potatoes. Yellow, purple, white and orange carrots. Beet leaves in a salad. The first of the tomatoes; this week the first black Russian tomato, in a salad with walnut oil. Purple sprouting broccoli. Corn as fresh as corn can come, too, though one was picked too pale and young.

The caravan’s first outing to Festivale came as a bit of a shock. It’s decked out with a full commercial kitchen – stainless steel all around. A gas stove and hot water unit. Three sinks. Two under-bench fridges. And a serving hatch that opens up on one side. Though I should’ve had things sorted a bit earlier.

A quick run to the servo two days before the event not only taught me a thing or two about reversing a caravan. On a narrow dirt road. On a hill. With hydraulic brakes. With a tree across the road where I could turn. It also had Bill the mechanic replacing the bearings, and the tyres that had a 400kg rating. For a 1.6 tonne van.

Luckily, we were organised. The logo went on as Ross and I drove north to the event. The bread was warm in the bags when we picked it up. The cordial (organic strawberry and rose geranium; raspberry and elderflower; rhubarb and bay; and red currant and mace) a folly with no serious thought as to how to serve it. All we knew was that proper hot smoked frankfurters (knackwurst, according to our German smallgoods maker) with homemade mustard and homemade tomato sauce, tasted great. So too Ross’s American-style spiced barbecued pork, shredded and shoved in a bun. All we needed was a few customers, and we were lucky a few customers came. Despite the rain on Friday.

The ute, a very flash 1989 Navara, struggled its way north and south, towing the van, occasionally dropping down to second gear to get over the hills, making a strange clunking sound as we went. And blowing a bit of black smoke. The farm ute performed admirably – we had no choice. In the final hours before we packed the van, Ross and I had three goes at towing, with different cars. The Navara was the car of choice.

We had a few long days in the lead up to the festival. Farm work. Cooking work. Kitting out the van with implements. Packing. Repacking. Long hard days, and that’s before we headed off on the road. Add in an 18 hour day on the Friday. A 14 hour day on the Saturday. It made the 13 hours on Sunday, and getting back to the farm at nearly midnight, feel like a picnic. Funny thing is, I’m already planning on how to do it all again next year.

Touchdown in Malaysia

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Real coffee may be hard to find but Anthony Tan’s delighted to have touched down in Kuala Lumpur for his tenth Tour de Langkawi.

I know this is going to blow your minds – call it a revelation, if you like – but even though I was born in Australia, I do not hold Anglo-Saxon heritage.

(You can get up from the floor now and upright your chair.)

Yes, my parents are Chinese immigrants – Dad’s from Singapore, Mum is from China. When he was 17, my father came out to Oz on his Pat Malone with hardly a penny to his name, seeking a better life… I’m glad he found it (and my Mum).

It wasn’t long before our family began making trips to Singapore to see his family, so he could rub it in that, against the odds, he had made it and they hadn’t. And that he also had a beautiful wife and between them, bore a fetching pair of intellectually-gifted children. (Well, at least my sister was.)

While I didn’t start drinking coffee till I was in my teens, using the beverage to keep my going through the night as I crammed for my high-school exams, I obviously knew what it was and how it was made well before then. Walking past a coffee shop in the morning, admiringly watching a talented barista at work and smelling the roasted beans ground then percolated into a delightful cup of caffeinated goodness still makes me smile no end.

For some reason I didn’t notice this before, but landing in Singapore airport one year for another family trip to see the relatives, I heard the same sound. Or at least I thought I did.

Having taken my bags off the luggage carousel and walking with nuclear family in tow, I was surprised to hear the sound of coffee machines in action. Loads of them.

You see, unlike Australia or Europe, the people of south-east Asia are not known for their proclivity towards this dark-coloured brewed potion. Mostly, they think Starbucks serves the real deal, when it is really the McDonalds of cafes and bastardises everything that a good coffee should be.

It also seemed these people had a preference for ‘il cappuccino’, because among the many machines, I also heard the sound of milk being frothed accordingly. Still, I asked myself as we caught the elevator to street level to catch a cab, why was milk being frothed inside a lift? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

I then discovered the oesophageal truth: the cacophony of what I thought was coffee machines and milk being steamed was in fact people clearing their throats.

Now, whenever I travel to a country like Singapore or Malaysia with a Western colleague who has never been before, I first remind (warn?) them: you can get coffee here… but it ain’t at the airport!

* * *

So here I am in Malaysia again, ready for my tenth tour of duty at the Tour de Langkawi, this region’s most prestigious bike race. Lack of a quality brew aside, I’m excited at the prospect of what lies ahead for this seventeenth edition.

Alexandre Vinokourov (Astana) has opted, after deciding his retirement at last year’s Tour de France was a smidgeon premature, to make this his 2012 comeback race. Six former winners are also here including the past three champions – José Serpa (2009), José Rujano (2010) and Jonathan Monsalve (2011), ominously, all riding for Androni Giocattoli.

The second WorldTour team here, Garmin-Barracuda, has sent a formidable line-up spearheaded by Tom Danielson, eighth in last year’s TdF and Langkawi champ from 2003. The Coloradan will be ably assisted by last year’s Herald Sun Tour champ, Nathan Haas, and idiosyncratic time trial specialist, David Zabriskie.

I’ll also get my first peek at the Champion Systems team managed by long-time DS Ed Beamon, where Aaron Kemps will make his debut with the China-based squad. I also see Drapac-Porsche has sent a strong sextet; team manager Jonathan Breekveldt says he’ll look towards Darren Lapthorne and Adam Semple to score a high GC placing when the race ends in Kuala Terengganu on March 4. Freedom will also be given to breakaway specialists Rhys Pollock and Floris Goesinnen, they say, the latter oh-so-close to nabbing a stage in last year’s race.

There’s a bunch of other Aussies, too – brothers Hilton and Jonathan Clarke and Karl Menzies (all United HealthCare), and Jai Crawford (RTS Racing Team) – making for a total 11 representatives from Down Under.

The 20.3-kilometre opening time trial in the administrative capital of Putrajaya should sort out the contenders from the pretenders but what will really separate the men from the boys will dawn on the sixth stage, a 108km journey from the enchanting Shah Alam mosque to Genting Highlands. Time and time again, top European-based pros have told me the unrelenting 17km monster is virtually unmatched in its severity and brutality – so we might as well refer to it as ‘the Angliru of the East’ right here, right now.

In total, the peloton will traverse a distance of 1415.5km over 10 days, all ridden in the stifling, irrepressible humidity of the tropics.

All we need now is a real coffee!

Twitter: @anthony_tan

Government v Women battle takes a twist

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:35:24 +1100

So it turns out there’s a little more to America’s battle with contraception.

As reported here last week, there are some distractions from the real issues the country should be facing – the economy, war, that kind of stuff. Instead, we have uproar over how President Obama has found a way to mandate free contraception for women.

It turns out women’s health issues will continue to be unwillingly embraced by (usually male) politicians. Government increases its interest in getting involved in what happens in people’s bedrooms and then what happens outside those bedrooms when the things that go on in there don’t play out exactly as planned – literally.

Last week, the state of Virginia passed a law that called for “informed consent” for a woman seeking an abortion. Very good. But wait. The new law demands “every pregnant female shall undergo ultrasound imaging and be given an opportunity to view the ultrasound image of her fetus prior to the abortion.”

David Englin, a Virginia state legislator, explained why he opposed the bill in a statement: “This bill will require many women in Virginia to undergo vaginal penetration with an ultrasound probe against their consent in order to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion, even for nonsurgical, noninvasive, pharmaceutical abortions. The next time Virginia Republicans speak the words ‘government intrusion’ I hope voters will remember this vote and hold them accountable for their hypocrisy.”

In other words, doctors are being ordered by the state government to perform a medically unnecessary procedure regardless of the circumstances as part of a process that must be traumatic enough for anyone undertaking it.

Political debate in America is not always measured and so it is on this issue. Some commentators have claimed that the ruling could be interpreted as state-mandated rape. They may have a point.

On the other side, Dana Loesch, an opinionated right-wing pin up, appeared to suggest the Virginia procedure was little different from consensual sex that gets most women into the situation that they require an abortion.

“There were individuals saying, ‘Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?’ What!? Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.”

Loesch, it should be noted, is hot for controversy. In the wake of a controversial video that circulated on the Internet showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters, she said she’d have joined in given the opportunity. Loesch, it should also be noted, holds certain credibility in her role as a political commentator for CNN.

Can it get crazier? Yes. The Virginia Governor who will sign the bill into law is named Bob McDonnell. He’s a guy with eyes on the Republican Presidential ticket and could be just the guy Mitt Romney needs to broaden his right-wing appeal.

Casting Aspersions: McCarthy, Franco & del Toro

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:52:06 +1100

Cormac McCarthy pens an original script, James Franco stays busy, and Emma Watson becomes beautiful for Guillermo del Toro.

For many years it appeared as if a leading generation of American novelists would never find a place, let alone be prominently translated, into the movies. There were bits and pieces that could be traced back to the writings of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy, but their literary standing appeared to mean little. Of the four McCarthy appeared simultaneously the most likely and unlikely: he wrote what could be classed as westerns, but they placed monstrous horrors amidst beautifully rendered landscapes with solemnly burnished prose; no-one knew how to reduce the likes of 1985’s Blood Meridian to the point where they’d have a chance of at least being rated R.

After Billy Bob Thornton’s tepid and expensive adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, with Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, appeared in 2000, McCarthy appeared divorced from the screen. But then a pair of truncated, compelling novels – 2005’s No Country For Old Men and 2006’s The Road – were released, and both made for fine films in the hands of the Coen Brothers and John Hillcoat respectively. What’s more, the former was highly profitable, and suddenly Cormac McCarthy was the Nicholas Sparks of murder and cannibalism.

McCarthy hasn’t published a novel since The Road, but he’s obviously paid attention to his profile among filmmakers. Six months ago, without warning, the 78-year-old presented his representative with an original screenplay he’d written, sparking instant attention. The Counselor bears some comparison to No Country, for it’s about a lawyer who decides to get involved in the narcotics trade and soon finds himself dangerously in over his head. Ridley Scott leapt to secure the material, and will direct it as soon as he’s finished with his Alien prequel, Prometheus. For the lead role he’s looking at one of the Prometheus cast, and the screen’s man of the moment: Michael Fassbender.

The only person busier than Fassbender, who will have Steve McQueen’s Shame followed into cinemas by Prometheus and David Cronenberg’s Viennese psychiatry period piece A Dangerous Method, is James Franco. The 127 Hours and Rise of the Planet of the Apes star (not to mention lousy Academy Awards host), is starring and directing in an adaptation of one of McCarthy’s earliest works, 1973’s Child of God. Franco will play a violent loner, Lester Ballard, who retreats into the mountains of Tennessee and begins to act out murderous sexual fantasies such as necrophilia. Did we mention that McCarthy adaptations can have ratings problems? Franco also stars in Sam Raimi’s Wizard of Oz prequel Oz: The Great and Powerful, with Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz as witches, and portrays Hugh Hefner in the 1970s porn biopic Lovelace.

After all that, a new take on Beauty and the Beast is light relief. The director will be Mexican fantasist Guillermo del Toro, who is currently following up Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth with Pacific Rim, his version of a Japanese kaiju (giant monster) genre movie. As the young female lead who wins the heart of the titular creature he has Harry Potter star Emma Watson. For the beast? Knowing del Toro it’s hardly going to be conventional.

Berlinale: There's method in the Jury's madness

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

As the dust settles on the awards podium, Shane Danielsen offers an alternate view of Berlin Jury's findings.

That the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival should have gone, in the end, to two veterans—Italy’s Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, for their prison-set Shakespearian drama Caesar Must Die—should have surprised nobody. Wasn’t Mike Leigh, the president of the jury, himself a man of un certain age—and a filmmaker similarly obsessed with the friction between reality and artifice, with modes of performance and what actors (in this case, real-life Italian criminals) might bring from their own lives into their interpretation of a role?

[Full coverage of the Berlin Film Festival}

And yet it did surprise. At 76 minutes, the film felt slight. And the action—a group of cons performing ‘Julius Caesar’ behind the walls of their penitentiary—felt contrived whenever the versifying paused, and the inmates strained to locate parallels between Shakespeare’s text and their own experiences. Shot mostly in high-contrast B&W, and slipping between quotidian reality and theatrical ‘play’ in a way that recalled Peter Watkins’ magnificent La Commune (2000), it was an interesting experiment, but no more than that.

It might well have won Best Screenplay; that would have made more sense—who, after all, can compare with the Bard? But that prize went instead to director Nikolaj Arcel and his co-screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg, for the Danish entry A Royal Affair, a mid-18th-century drama about the romance between the British-born Queen Caroline and her husband’s idealistic physician, Struensee (played, with moody intensity, by star Mads Mikkelsen), who superseded the insane king to enact a short period of revolutionary reform throughout Denmark.

And Kim Nyguen’s War Witch—to my mind, the finest, most surprising and compelling thing in Competition—was rewarded only with a Best Actress prize, for 15-year-old Congolese non-pro Rachel Mwanza, herself a veteran of the very atrocities the film chronicled.

Nor did it go unnoticed (at least by the critical fraternity) that almost all of the films awarded was a German co-production. This is not to suggest any inherent bias on the part of the jury, or any undue influence from the festival; rather, it signifies the country’s essential role as a financial partner for filmmakers across Europe. (Think of it, if you like, as an adjunct to the current economic crisis, with well-fed Germany endlessly stumping up for other, less prosperous film cultures.)

The homegrown German films in competition, meanwhile, proved competent rather than exciting – well-crafted, unashamedly adult. There was not this year the jaw-dropping awfulness of, say, Jew Süss: Rise and Fall, Oskar Roehler’s wretched 2010 entry, and a film which still haunts anyone unfortunate enough to have sat through it.

Predictably, the standout came from Berlin-based writer-director Christian Petzold. Christine saw Nina Hoss as a doctor in 1980s East Germany, exiled from Berlin to a small country town, spied upon by the Stasi and mistrusted by her new colleagues – and all the while, plotting to be reunited with her lover in the West.

It marked the fifth collaboration between director and actress, following their partnership in films like Yella (2007) and Wolfsburg (2003) and Jerichow (2008); and like all Petzold’s films, its approach was cool, measured. It was meticulously composed, elegantly shot; its visual surface, its sound design, was immaculate. And as such the result, at least for some, was more to be admired than adored. (“It was perfect,” remarked one friend afterwards. “So perfect, in fact, that after a while I began to kind of hate it.”)

For me, though, it was mesmerising, and merely confirmed what I already knew: that Petzold, while not perhaps the most commercially-inclined of directors, is the most talented German filmmaker of his generation: a genuine auteur, with a style and a worldview entirely his own. Nevertheless, though heavily tipped to walk away with the top prize, in the end it earned its maker only a Best Director trophy.

Perhaps only genuinely unsurprising award, meanwhile, went to Ira Sachs’ drama Keep the Light On, a roman à clef based on the real-life relationship of the filmmaker and his former boyfriend, a publishing exec with a severe crystal meth addiction. The drama, as protracted as their breakup, started well but soon devolved into a repetitive bore; gay-friendly viewers would be better advised to catch Andrew Haigh’s recent Weekend, one of the best films of the year, which invests similar material with real wit, actual humour, and a beguiling sexiness.

Compared to Sachs’ masterly 40 Shades of Blue (2005), it was a let-down. But the film did pause, in one scene, to show the filmmaker accepting a Teddy Award from the Berlin Film Festival—a kind of deliberate-campaigning approach that yielded distinct rewards, since Sachs left Berlin this time with (you won’t believe it) the very same award!

With this in mind, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce my own forthcoming feature, about my experience winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I expect Stockholm will be in touch quite soon . . .

Pictured (from left): Berlinale Jury members Jake Gyllenhaal, Anton Corbijn, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mike Leigh, Francois Ozon, Barbara Sukowa, Asghar Farhadi and Boualem Sansal attend the Closing Ceremony. (C) Getty Images.

Snowtown ready to shock US audiences

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

The Australian serial killer saga is set to premiere in the US.

Are US cinemagoers prepared to embrace Snowtown, the brutal, confronting saga of the South Australian serial killings?

We’ll soon find out as the film, retitled The Snowtown Murders, is set to premiere in New York on March 2, followed by a national roll-out.

“I’m nervous about US audiences seeing it for the first time,” director Justin Kurzel told SBS Film shortly before he flew to New York for two weeks to promote his movie.

“Like it or not, the film has been really divisive and confronting when it’s played internationally. I’ve seen every single critique, from those who hated it to those who loved it. But I’m confident US audiences will embrace it in some way.”

Kurzel can take heart from the responses of US reviewers who caught the film during Critics’ Week at the Cannes festival last year, where it won the special jury prize, and its extraordinarily high 93 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Following in the footsteps of Animal Kingdom, Snowtown is an excellent counterpart worth experiencing if you also enjoyed that Aussie crime drama,” declared First Showing. Net’s Alex Billington. “Just don't expect to leave the theatre with a smile on your face or any happy thoughts.”

Distributor IFC Films, which snapped up the North American rights in Cannes, kicked off the marketing campaign last week by posting on iTunes a hard-hitting trailer.

Kurzel says the US trailer is similar to the one used in Australia but has a stronger emphasis on the narrative, which makes sense as the Yanks aren’t aware of the infamous bodies-in-the barrel case in the 1990s.

The trailer pulls no punches, featuring quotes pulled from reviews including “profoundly disturbing” and “presents a world of moral nightmare, and sits us inside it, to feel the pulse and the processes of evil as if they were our own.”

Similarly the director is happy with the new title for the US release, which gives the film a clearer context, and he points out in France it was also rechristened, translated as The Crimes of Snowtown.

As a primer for the US launch, the film screened last Friday and Sunday at New York’s Lincoln Centre as part of Film Comment Selects, an annual festival of new works from the fest circuit along with revivals and overlooked movies run by Film Comment, the magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre.

Previewing the event, the influential New York Times’ critic A. O. Scott described Snowtown as “jarringly violent and genuinely disturbing.”

The film, which stars Daniel Henshall, Lucas Pittaway and Louise Harris, also will available on-demand at IFC Midnight, an electronic film festival that offers each month six titles that premiered at major international fests.

The director acknowledges it feels “quite strange” to revisit the film after focussing on writing with his brother Jed a screenplay entitled Ivan Lendl Never Learnt to Volley, a dark comedy about a Russian father who is fiercely determined to train his 13-year-old son to become a tennis champion like the boy’s hero Lendl.

He plans to write another draft with Jed and is looking to start on another project this year, sifting through US and UK scripts sent to him by his US agent CAA.

Fortuitously the material he’s been offered covers a broad range of styles as he notes, “I don’t feel I’ve been typecast into a horror or genre box.”

Berlinale: A study of contrasts

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

A tween idol fails to sink his teeth into a non-vampire role, as two costume dramas square off.

The final days of the Berlin Film Festival have delivered two very different period dramas, one 18th Century Danish-language feature set in the court of King Christian VII, Nicolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair, which is very, very good and one much delayed Guy de Maupassant 19Th Century adaptation, Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Bel Ami, that is rather bad.

One might assume that the world’s reigning box office king, Robert Pattinson, who can do no wrong in the Twilight movies and acquitted himself rather well in Water for Elephants, would be in the strong wonderfully romantic sweeping period drama. Yet that is not the case. It is in fact one very sexy Dane, Mads Mikkelsen, who (in the role of a German doctor) sweeps the queen (stunning newcomer Alicia Vykander) in A Royal Affair off of her feet, while the three more seasoned actresses in Bel Ami, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci are left running for cover.

No wonder Thurman and Scott Thomas were no-shows at the festival. (Ricci’s television series, Pan Am has most likely been axed so she probably had nothing better to do, while Pattinson, who only attended the press conference, said he hoped to widen his audience from the young girls who were screaming outside. Still there’s little chance anything will change for him with Bel Ami.)

Unfortunately neither of the antipodean stars travelled over for the New Zealand film, Two Little Boys, which the Hollywood Reporter cited as one of seven festival films to watch out for in Berlin’s bustling market. The film screened in the Generations 14plus section, and after the festival’s programmer introduced it as “a rough ride” and “very naughty”, Duncan Sarkies, who wrote the book on which the film is based (he co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Robert, who directs) was relaxed as he told the youthful crowd about the film and his two foul-mouthed characters : Nige, played by Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords and Deano, played by Hamish Blake from the Australian comedy duo Hamish & Andy.

The comic lads play childhood friends who have fallen out and come together over the disposal of a Norwegian soccer star called Juergen, who Nige has accidentally killed. Everything happens in a matter-of-fact manner, a trademark of the Wellington filmmaking gang, which also includes Taika Waititi, whose huge success Boy had played in the very same Berlin cinema two years earlier.

“We knew that we’d cast two comedians and Rob would reassure them it was definitely going to be funny but he also had to make sure that a dramatic tension was there,” Sarkies explains. “It was wonderful working with people with such great comic timing.”

McKenzie had been cast first and when he auditioned with Blake they clicked straight away. “It was a standard audition process,” Sarkies continues, “then we held workshops to make sure it was right. Ultimately I loved the commitment both of these guys threw into it because they are not so much known as actors really.”

Two Little Boys and Bel Ami will be released here via Hopscotch. A Royal Affair, which won two Berlin prizes (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard was awarded the best actor Silver Bear for his inventive portrayal as King Christian, while Arcel and his regular co-writer Rasmus Heisterberg won for best screenplay) will be distributed by Madman. Rialto has picked up Elektrick Children, a festival buzz title, which should provide the breakthrough of 18 year-old Julia Garner, who plays a character who believes she's experienced an immaculate conception and is based on the Virgin Mary. Palace Films has acquired the Golden Bear winner for best film, the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, which follows a stage production in a maximum-security prison in Rome.

Doggies get just deserts

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:36:27 +1100

There were more than a few tails wagging at the first annual Golden Collar Awards in Hollywood.

When Bill Murray dissed Sigourney Weaver after she’d transformed into a hellish beast-hound in 1984’s Ghostbusters, his words of choice were particularly cutting: “Ok, so, she’s a dog...” Despite the legacy of such humble four-legged heroes as Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Benji, for a producer to hear ‘Your film is a dog!’...well, it just doesn’t get any worse. Man’s best friend has often been poorly represented to the multiplex crowd. Remember Cujo? Zoltan? Beethoven? Or the Ally Sheedy robo-dog horror film, Man’s Best Friend?

Our canine stars have since regained some of the respect they no doubt felt was overdue with the dishing out of the inaugural Golden Collar Awards at Los Angeles’ Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel. Hosted by Wendie Malick, the butt-sniffing/champagne-sipping went well into the wee hours as the pampered pooches of international cinema gathered to celebrate what has been a stellar year for the silver-screen Canis familiaris.

Given the torrent of award-season love flowing for Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, it was no surprise to see the film’s real star, the lovable fox-terrier Uggie (pictured), take home the Golden Collar for his work in the silent film crowd-pleaser. Despite a video-message from Martin Scorsese (seriously) supporting both the ceremony and the great villainous turn by Blackie the Doberman in Hugo, Uggie – a double nominee thanks to his better-than-RPatz turn in Water for Elephants – was the clear favourite. Having caused a red-carpet stir with his adorable three-buttoned vest, crimson bow-tie, Uggie received a rapturous response from the gathered celebs – surely a further indicator of The Artist’s march towards Oscar glory, right? Owner-trainer Omar Von Muller raised a few eyebrows when he boisterously declared, “He sleeps with us”.

The evening’s most exciting news was when Red Dog’s Koko, Australia’s most famous red headed movie star since Nicole Kidman, beat out a competitive global field – French mutt Laika from Le Havre, and the German Shepherd/Shiba Inu one-two punch of cuteness from Japan’s The Day the Dogs Disappeared – to take out the Best Dog in a Foreign Film Golden Collar. Though not on hand to accept the award (quarantine laws wouldn’t allow for it), the film’s writer Daniel Taplitz introduced a recorded message from Koko, peppered with classic ‘Strine ockerisms.

The Best Direct-to-DVD performance was judged to be juvenile Lab, Rody, as Marley in Marley & Me: The Puppy Years (analysts believe Angel and Rusco, the heavily-favoured frontrunners for their work in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2, may have split the vote and denied themselves Golden Collar glory). Presenters included The Artist’s Missi Pyle and co-star James Cromwell (whose comment, "I'm delighted to be here because I owe my career to a pig," rankled several nearby dog lovers).

Best Dog In a Theatrical Film
Winner: Uggie as The Dog in The Artist
Blackie as Maximilian in Hugo
Cosmo as Arthur in Beginners
Uggie as Queenie in Water for Elephants
Denver as Skeletor in 50/50
Hummer as Dolce in Young Adult

Best Dog in a Foreign Film
Winner: Koko as Red Dog in Red Dog - Australia
Laika as herself in Le Harve - France
Biina as Alf in The Day the Dogs Disappeared - Japan
Ichico as Toa in The Day the Dogs Disappeared - Japan

Best Dog in a Television Series
Winner: Brigitte as Stella in Modern Family
Rocky as Arnold in Entourage
Chunk as himself in Chelsea Lately
Dart as Chance in Hot In Cleveland
Jason Gann as Wilfred in Wilfred
Lambchop as Yakult in Suburgatory

Best Dog in a Reality Series
Winner: TIE - Hercules - Pit Boss; Giggy - The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
Millou - The Real Housewives of New York City
Jackpot - The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
Spartacus - Ice Loves Coco

Best Dog in a Direct-to-DVD Film
Winner: Rody as Marley in Marley & Me: The Puppy Years
Fred as B Dawg in Spooky Buddies
Gaston as Beethoven in Beethoven's Christmas Adventure
Angel as Chloe in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2
Rusco as Papi in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2

Lewd behaviour

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +1100

The news that the Tour of Oman had been hit by lewd behaviour made ripples – and not because someone on the internet finally granted the Broom Wagon's wish and created a Japanese animation/Team 1t4i mash-up called Hello Kittel.

The news that the Tour of Oman had been hit by lewd behaviour made ripples – and not because someone on the internet finally granted the Broom Wagon's wish and created a Japanese animation/Team 1t4i mash-up called Hello Kittel.

The ripples, specifically, rippled out in Belgium, where sports website RTBF picked up a story on Monday about Liquigas riders being detained by Oman authorities.

The action followed a Twitter exchange in which a number of riders swapped sauna photographs – reportedly as an in-joke.

Commenting on the team's arrest, Oman's foreign minister said the government expected cyclists to respect Oman's laws and customs. "We have paid extravagant dollars to the UCI in order to project a friendly tourist environment, and this pornographic behavior is a spit in the face," he said.

UCI president Pat McQuaid was even more colourful, adding: "This isn't some sort of American university frat party. This isn't American Pies. This is cycling. And if they want to race, they have to abide by the rules of all the oppressive regimes where we set up our races."

It will have been McQuaid's mention of oppressive regimes, or possibly American Pies, that tipped you off the story was a spoof. It originated on snark-filled website Cyclismas, who are also carrying a story this week on Alberto Contador's reality TV debut. The perils of internet translation can perhaps be blamed for RTBF's failure to realise the same, and a cautionary tale lies within for all those who combine a cavalier approach to fact checking with their seat-of-the-pants journalism. There but for the grace of God, etc.

The week in ...

... cures

British track queen Victoria Pendleton is relaxed in the build-up to the Olympics, Cycling Weekly reports. Which is lovely for Pendleton and also somewhat startling, given her previous revelations that she is one of the most wound-up athletes in sport. In November 2010 Pendleton told the Guardian she had nightmares in which she was chased by a murderer and would rather stick pins in her eyes than race. Whatever Team GB has found for Pendles that works, perhaps they could bottle it and send it to Graeme Brown. (Perhaps it is the shampoo)

... opportunities missed

Adopted Aussie Koen de Kort slipped into a skin suit in Oman, as revealed here by Cycling Central's own Sophie Smith on Twitter. Disappointingly, it was in regulation 1t4i team colours, and not the full body muscle edition pioneered by Mario Cipollini in the early '90s.

... limbo

Andy Schleck has not yet been upgraded to the status of World's Most Reluctant Tour de France Winner. Meanwhile, Saxo Bank wait to learn whether Alberto Contador's suspension will cost the team its place on the World Tour. L'Equipe compared Pat McQuaid's recent comment on the loss of Contador's points to the sword of Damocles, but Bjarne Riis's team is yet to be informed of a possible downgrade. "This sucks for the team, and also for the whole of cycling," Saxo Bank sprinter Nick Nuyens told Sporza. "Bjarne Riis and the team leaders ... they know as much as we do."

... cooking

"I've got my bin just in case," is not the sort of line you hear from Heston Blumenthal. An already beetroot-red Mitch Docker tests how much chilli sauce can be served to GreenEDGE staff within a single roll of puff pastry.

... anniversaries

Eight years ago on Tuesday the world lost Marco Pantani. La Gazzetta dello Sport pays tribute.

Dispatches from the Twitterverse

my thoughts today go out to all the riders doing Tour of Oman. It's a very tough race, every single pornsite is censored there. Good Luck! - @simongeschke

Ace ventura 2 is on... Is he in real world as crazy and funny like in the movie...!!!?? Already a bit it would be enough... - @f_cancellara

Classic YouTube

This wrap of last month's Berlin Six-Day is a nice snapshot of what happens when track cycling meets Europop, open top coupes, disco balls and sellout crowds. Also: the most unsettling podium music ever. Cameos by Aussie champs Leigh Howard and Cameron Meyer.

Berlinale: Hits, misses and scheduling mishaps

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:00:36 +1100

Shane Danielsen casts his critical eye over the films in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, including a surprising masterpiece – for those lucky enough to have witnessed it.

The films in competition at this year's Berlin Film Festival appeared, on the face of it, a mixed bunch, There were a handful of familiar names – among them, France's Benoit Jacquot, whose opening night selection, Farewell My Queen, a from-the-sidelines look at the French Revolution that was part Rosenkrantz & Gildernstern Are Dead, part Downton Abbey, started shakily, but gained power and assurance as it proceeded, and built to a quietly devastating climax.

There was China's Wang Quan'an (who won the Golden Bear here in 2006 with Tula's Marriage), and Berlin regulars Christian Petzold and Hans-Christian Schmid – and even a pair of grizzled veterans, in the form of Italy's Taviani brothers, now 82 and 80 years of age, whose prison-set Shakespearian drama, Caesar Must Die, while not equalling the achievement of earlier classics like Padre Padrone or The Night of the Shooting Stars, was still livelier and better than anyone had expected.

Otherwise, it was mostly a collection of first-timers and second-stringers: Indonesia's Edwin, with the thoroughly unremarkable Postcards From The Zoo; the ironically-named Brilliante Mendoza, from the Philippines; Hungary's Benedek Fliegauf, with a third-rate gypsy-drama, Just The Wind. And Billy Bob Thronton, whose latest directorial effort, Jayne Mansfield's Car, was at least appropriately titled, being something of a wreck itself.

There was no reason, in all of this, to suspect that cinema was about to change, that some line was about to be drawn in the sand. But according to some critics, that's precisely what happened.

The film in question hailed from Portugal. The director was Miguel Gomes, whose previous feature, Our Beloved Month of August, premiered in Cannes in 2008 to hugely favourable reviews from "serious" film publications like Cahiers du Cinema and CinemaScope, and a kind of bemused shrug from the rest of the world. It was a good, not great film – slightly self-indulgent, a little too in love with its own cleverness. But it displayed a refined aesthetic sense and a fully-developed worldview: Gomes clearly had something he wanted to say (notably, about the friction between documentary and fiction, and the usefulness of various modes of storytelling), and possessed the skill necessary to do it, if not quite the discipline required to make it stick.

He returned this year with Tabu, a B&W drama set between Portugal and Africa, which was, like its predecessor, divided into discrete chapters, their titles harking back (as the film's own title implied) to F.W. Murnau's 1931 classic of the same name. The first section, 'A Lost Paradise', followed the travails of two women in Lisbon, neighbours, one of whom believes her maid is using witchcraft against her. The acting was expressionless, the conversations deliberately banal and inconclusive. All in all, it seemed like a self-consciously 'experimental' work, destined to be championed by a few and ignored by the many.

But it was the second section, simply titled 'Paradise', which shifted the earth. Flashing back four decades, it described the early life of one of those two women, as a privileged colonial expat in an African colony, when she fell in love. There was no dialogue, only voiceover, read by the Italian then-lover of the woman in question, and taken, supposedly, from his memoirs and letters.

Whereupon the mood, theoretical to that point, turned abruptly, swoonily romantic.

Afterwards, praise ran hot among the critical fraternity: "There was the old cinema," said one Canadian critic, a man not exactly known for hyperbole, "and this is the New Cinema. It's as simple as that." Which is obviously a big call: how many ruptures in an artform, after all, can one claim to have witnessed? How many people were at the premiere of The Rites of Spring, or the Salon des Refusés? Or the 100 Club when the Sex Pistols played? These moments come along only rarely.

Consider this, therefore, a confession: Cinema was reborn, transformed utterly – and I missed it. Not out of any particular dislike for the film I was watching, which seemed at the very least interesting; rather, because of a more banal reason: a scheduling clash.

Thus, even as Tabu was shrugging off the affectations of its first part, and transforming into the impassioned and singular love-poem it would become, I'd already walked out of it, and was heading across town, to Alexanderplatz, to catch a film that was screening, for no discernible reason, outside of the competition: the Austrian drama The Wall, directed by Julian Roman Pösler, and starring Martina Gedeck, one of Germany's most respected actresses, best known internationally for her performances in The Lives of Others and The Baader Meinhof Complex.

Based on an acclaimed 1962 novel by Marien Haushofer, it spun a quietly horrifying tale, as a woman (Gedeck) visiting friends in the countryside is left alone while they drive off to get supplies. Weirdly, they do not return that night. Eventually she falls asleep – and then wakes the next morning to find herself imprisoned behind an invisible, impenetrable wall, separating her from the everyday world. A world which seems, anyway, to have come to a sudden and unexplained end.

Oddly, as with the second part of Tabu, the story was told entirely in voiceover, as the unnamed woman reads from her journal, years (we come to realise) after this initial incident. Gedeck was almost never offscreen: her voice, her presence, carried the entire film. But to his credit, Pösler found a visual language appropriate to her internal state: a series of breathtaking, occasionally terrifying images of the natural world, to whose mysteries and occasional terrors she gradually becomes aware, rather like the narrator of an Annie Dillard text.

I have no particular regrets. Gomes's Tabu will doubtless enjoy a long and storied festival life; I'll catch it further down the line. But a work as modest and singular as The Wall, by a director as unfashionable as Pösler, might well sink without trace. Considering that it was by some margin the best thing I saw at this year's Berlinale, it deserves much better.

Shane Danielsen is a former artistic director of the Edinburgh Film Festival.

Jobs creation pushes back rate cut timetable

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:14:47 +1100

Today's unexpected fall in the unemployment rate has seen many economists push back their expectations for the next official interest rate cut.  

46,300 jobs were created in January, which saw the jobless rate fall from 5.2 per cent, to 5.1 per cent.

The numbers go against what seems to be widespread job losses, as manufacturing plants shut down in Victoria and the big banks cull employees.

Today, Qantas said that it would offering redundancies to 500 staff as part of a restructure of its business.

CommSec economist, Savanth Sebastian said that, "The rate cuts late last year will help to support activity in the coming months and provide businesses with a bit more breathing space."

He does, however, concede that trading conditions are difficult and profitability is being affected.

Many economists aren't expecting the jobs market to hold out.

The Westpac/Melbourne Institute Index showed that unemployment expectations in February rose by 6.2 per cent.

Bill Evans, Chief Economist at Westpac said, "The index also showed a further deterioration in job confidence despite a 4.2% increase in consumer sentiment overall."

He's still expecting another two interest rate cuts from the Reserve Bank. "Our best estimate is that the next move, given the clear resolve of the Reserve Bank at this stage, is for the next cut to be in May with a follow up move in June/July."

Savanth Sebastian agrees. "Any escalation of the Euro Zone debt crisis is likely to prompt the Reserve Bank to move sooner rather than later when it comes to rates. In our judgement, and assuming Europe still muddles through in the next few weeks, the next interest rate cut won't occur until May, after the next round of inflation data."

It's a sentiment shared by NAB economist, Rob Henderson. "Confirmation that unemployment remains at historical lows and the apparent gradual tightening in labour market conditions suggest that there is little chance of a rate cut from the RBA in March, barring a financial melt-down in Europe."

Peter Esho on CBA's record profit

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:25:03 +1100

The Commonwealth Bank has posted a record half year profit of $3.6billion.

It comes just days after it, along with Australia’s other major banks delivered out-of-cycle interest rate rises for their mortgage customers.

For more on the result, including the issue of funding pressures, I spoke with equities analyst Peter Esho from City Index.

Casting Aspersions: Ayoade, Armstrong & Corbijn

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:00:43 +1100

Richard Ayoade submerges himself in Dostoyevsky, Gillian Armstrong finds the comedy in Catherine the Great, and Anton Corbijn eyes a John Le Carre spy novel.

There is no shortage of filmmakers who make impressive feature debuts and then forge onwards into an ambitious second film, only to come unstuck when circumstance and material don’t combine so elegantly. Think of Steven Soderbergh, who went from the epochal Sex, Lies, and Videotape to the barely remembered Kafka, or in Australia Geoffrey Wright and the letdown that occurred when the inconsequential follow-up to Romper Stomper, Metal Skin, was released.

The latest contender may be Richard Ayoade (pictured), the English comic who proved to have a sure eye for tone and a feel for the blackly comic potential of his character’s lives in 2010’s Submarine. Ayoade has moved on from the Welsh schoolyard, undertaking a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella The Double: A Petersburg Poem. It’s the story of an Imperial Russian clerk, Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who wonders if he is going mad when he encounters a more confident, assertive version of himself that begins to supplant him.

If Dostoyevsky sounds like a tough sell, calling it (as some already have) a 19th century Fight Club helps, although Ayoade’s trump card is his cast: as Golyadkin he has Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network), who has made unease with the world something of a defining trait, while the female lead will be played by young Australian expatriate Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right). The latter is having another banner year, with performances for Oldboy’s Park Can-wook (Stoker) and The Road’s John Hillcoat (Wettest County) already in post-production.

Czarist Russia is so hot right now: Veteran Australia director Gillian Armstrong (Oscar and Lucinda) will make The Great, an irreverent comedy about the reign of the 18th century Russian ruler Catherine the Great, the Prussian-born aristocrat and widow who ended up turning her late husband’s homeland into a European power. Annette Bening (American Beauty) will play the long serving monarch from a script by Australian playwright Tony McNamara (who himself has never gotten around to directing a second feature after his underrated 2003 debut The Rage in Placid Lake).

Another Australian playwright with a screenplay credit for a major international production is Andrew Bovell, whose previous screen works include Lantana. He’s now adapted John Le Carre’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man, the German-set story of espionage and money laundering in the age of the war on terror, for Dutch rock photographer turned director Anton Corbijn (Control, The American). The first actor announced for the cast is Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), and it’s worth considering just how many fine films have already been made via Le Carre’s texts, from Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in 1965 to last month’s take on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Tomas Alfredson. Add in Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House and Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener and that’s a serious benchmark for Corbijn and Bovell.

Valentine's Day spending to rise as business confidence picks up

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:05:23 +1100

Australians are expected to spend more than $900million today, as Valentine's Day is celebrated around the country.

The predicted expenditure flies in the face of weak consumer sentiment and spending so far this year.

There has, however, been a slight pick-up in business confidence and conditions.

NAB's monthly business survey found confidence rose four points last month as the Reserve Bank cut interest rates and a rebound in the US economy appeared.

Similarly, business conditions lifted by two points.

NAB says while the current level is a touch higher, the economy is running close to trend.

Some components of the survey were disappointing though, as business profitability declined while employment and trading conditions were unchanged.

The survey was also conducted before Australia's big four banks lifted interest rates independently of the Reserve Bank over the past week. The impact of those rises on consumer and business confidence are yet to be felt.

NAB has also adjusted its forecasts for interest rates and now expects one more cut to the official rate in May based on tightening financial conditions as bank financing costs rise and the Australian dollar strengthens.

Still, IBISWorld is expected lovers will splurge 5 per cent more than what they did this time last year on Valentine's Day related gifts.

In a recent report, it singled out Australia's domestic tourism industry will be the biggest winner attracting almost half of total spending.

$422million on romantic getaways is expected to be spent, while restaurant spend is predicted to rise by almost 6 per cent to $31.5million as the popularity of television cooking shows increases the demand for high-end restaurant food.

The second most popular category will be chocolate and confectionary according to IBISWorld, with a rise of 4.6 per cent expected at $292million.

The only segment thought to record a decrease is clothing and intimate apparel. IBISWorld says it simply comes down to difficulty in choosing items that your partner not only likes, but can fit into as well.

Maybe a gift of chocolate and lingerie together isn't the best option after all.

And for the record, I'm still waiting for a gift.

A war on contraception?

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:53:04 +1100

If you think the economy is the biggest issue facing America ahead of November’s election you are wrong.

Right now, it is all about birth control.

President Obama last week announced a compromise on his health legislation that slightly turned around his previous stand that, as employers, religious organisations must pay for contraception for workers through employer-issued health insurance.

One of the more idiosyncratic features of the US healthcare system is that employers are the middlemen in offering health insurance options to employees. Thus, the Catholic Church led opposition to Obama’s directive, claiming exemption under the guise of “religious freedom”.

This effectively meant if you work for a Catholic-owned hospital, school, media organisation, whatever, your employer could deny you access to free contraception.

In response, and sensing a political fight he had to step around, Obama instead mandated insurance companies would be required to pick up the slack directly if an employer defaulted on their role.

It was all a technicality, based on principles, and another example why the US healthcare system is a mess.

The compromise was supported by some sections of the Catholic Church, not so much by others, and triumphantly hoisted as a major point of difference by a political right wing attempting to land points against Obama.

"We consider [birth control] an elective drug,” said Deirdre McQuade, a spokesperson for the Conference of Catholic Bishops during the debate’s early stages.

“Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn't make you sick.”

Republican candidate Rick Santorum, a Catholic, took his views even further: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”.

Mitt Romney called the pre-compromise bill an “assault on religion [that] will end if I'm president of the United States” adding it was “a real blow… to our friends in the Catholic faith.”

On the other side of the bed is the theory that this challenge is part of an on-going Republican “war” on contraception and women, taking an ideological battle beyond abortion rights right up to the nightstand.

If so, the issue highlights the clumsy 2012 Republican lack-of-strategy where ideology and pandering to extreme interest blinds common sense.

Rather than do harm, the divide has actually provided Obama with a clear platform to claim he’s supportive of women and their rights when his rivals may not be while his opponents have confused their understanding of whose rights they’re protecting.

Statistics suggest Obama has the backing of the wider population when ideology and practice meet. Studies reveal 99 percent of Americans have had sex (shock!) and 90 percent of them did so before marriage (double shock!).

In what appears to be late-breaking news for Republican Presidential candidates, this is all normal behaviour. Far more normal than abstinence. I’d also bet almost all of that pre-marital sex was not intended for procreative purposes. And that includes Catholics.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/02/10/obama-birth-control-compromise-defuses-religion-issue.html

Read: A woman's boss is now involved in her sex life

Of course, this is all before we discuss the point that some contraceptives are not always used for “birth control” but often for broader women’s health and that erectile dysfunction medication often is covered by insurance.

Italy takes first stab at soft sex in 3D

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:50:58 +1100

Fausto Brizzi’s saucy romp benefits from its extra dimension, say Italo critics.

Given Italy’s rich tradition in erotic cinema it’s no surprise that the territory has produced one of the world’s first sex comedies in 3D.

Director/co-writer Fausto Brizzi’s Com’è bello far l'amore (translated roughly as How beautiful to make love) is the saucy saga of a long-married couple whose non-existent sex life perks up when two porn stars become their house guests.

Explaining the decision to shoot in 3D, Brizzi told Cineuropa: “Reality is three-dimensional and all films should be shot as such, because the effect is more realistic, you laugh or cry more.”

Medusa launched the romantic comedy budgeted at a reasonable €6.5 million ($A8 million) on 600 prints on February 10. According to Cineuropa, the film was sponsored by a prominent manufacturer of sex aids, which evidently gets its quid pro quo in liberal onscreen displays of condoms, vibrating rings and inflatable dolls.

The working title was Sex in 3D, which, the director reasoned, “would have worked very well internationally, but… would have distanced families." Brizzi added, “The laughter is used to reveal all the hypocrisy of sex around a classic Italian family. We abandon the old ‘si fa ma non si dice e, soppratutto si vede’ (we do it but we don’t talk about it and above all we see it.)”

Italy’s entry to the field of 3D erotica follows Hong Kong director Christopher Sun’s 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, which was erroneously touted as the world’s first 3D sex film when it was released in 2011. In fact, that honour belongs to Korean director Kyung-Jung Ju’s Natalie, the tale of a playboy art professor and his hot-looking student, which came out in 2010.

Com'è bello far l'amore features Fabio De Luigi and Claudia Gerini as the jaded, middle-aged couple, Andrea and Guilia. Their humdrum lives are spiced up when an old friend of Guilia’s, porn star Max (Filippo Timi), turns up with his busty, babelicious colleague Vanessa (Giorgia Wurth).

“The result is a comedy that mixes sex with fine sentiments, irony with trash, nostalgic moments with naked scenes, a range of laughs with various thrills,” opined Cineuropa’s reviewer Vittoria Scarpa.

“The whole thing is peppered with tributes to cinema (the film opens on the Lumière brothers who, tasked with deciding on the subject of their first shoot, decide to film their beautiful naked cousin taking a bath, forget the train in a station) as well as a few pokes at art-house films, especially those of Bellocchio and Lars Von Trier, which are so boring that people only go to see them to smooch.”

Best Movie critic George Viaro declared the idea of a porn actor acting as a teacher to a couple undergoing a mid-life crisis is a perfect starting point for a “collection of gags and extreme situations,” and praised the 3D for adding value and enhancing numerous scenes.

If the movie works, I wonder if it may encourage Australian filmmakers to shoot rom-coms in 3D. Not that we have a great track record in that genre.

Berlinale: Who will be Queen of Berlin?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:20:28 +1100

Nina Hoss heads the best actress pack in a year of strong female-driven films.

From the opening film, Benoît Jacquot’s Farewell, My Queen, to the magnificent tour-de-force performance by Nina Hoss (pictured) in her third film with Christian Petzold, Barbara, this year’s Berlin Film Festival has been a festival of women. Hoss now looks set for second Silver Bear after winning the best actress gong in 2007 for Petzold’s Yella. Barbara, which follows a doctor attempting to flee provincial East Germany for the West in 1980, is flying off the shelf like hotcakes, while an Australian deal for I, Anna, where Charlotte Rampling plays a disturbed mother and grandmother, is in the works as well. The latter film, directed and written by Rampling’s real-life son, Barnaby Southcombe, was surely a poignant experience for the 66-year-old Rampling, who still has what it takes in every department—talent, looks and yes, great legs.

In Berlin, Angelina Jolie was in a less leggy mode than usual as she presented her directing debut, the Bosnian War drama In the Land of Blood and Honey. She clearly hopes her film will fare better in Europe after it failed to attract audiences in America. To the Hollywood star’s credit, she took any criticisms of the film being one-sided from Serbian journalists head-on. Though, as in the US, she allowed her huge cast of largely unknown local actors to babble on at the film’s press conference rather than talk too much about the film herself.

If a little simplistic in a Hollywood kind of way, Jolie’s handsomely shot film (by Australian cinematographer Dean Semler) shows that Jolie possesses an assured hand in putting together a complex action movie/love story. The good-looking leads, Goran Kostic (who resembles Daniel Craig) and Zana Marjanovic, recall the roles played by Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter, even if Marjanovic smiles a little too much.

While not a film to reach far beyond the festival circuit in Australia, Julian Pölsler’s The Wall was worth seeing in Berlin just to witness yet another wonderfully natural performance from Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others, The Baader Meinhof Complex). The setting is alpine Austria where Gedeck is stranded behind a mysterious invisible wall with only her dog (and other animals she eventually befriends) for company. Why did this happen, or more importantly how does she survive? A female Robinson Crusoe tale based on Marlen Haushofer’s bestseller, The Wall provides the kind of role actors dream of. For Australians who rarely get to glimpse such a pristine alpine environment, the cinematography is breathtaking. And that doggie is mighty cute too.

Bored of apathy

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +1100

Tom Boonen is bored. Bored, bored, bored. Omega Pharma-QuickStep's gun sprinter hasn't been this bored since he spent all of Wednesday evening reading the bestselling coffee table book 'The Roundabouts of Qatar'.

"I haven't really paid too much attention to the soap operas surrounding Contador and Armstrong," Boonen said in Qatar. "It’s been going on for a while and nobody actually really cares about it anymore. Every time you open your mouth about these cases you get a great pile of shit over your head. I like Alberto and I hope that everything turns out okay for him, but that's all I have to say about it."

Forgetting the part about what happens when Tom opens his mouth (moving his press conferences away from compost tips would seem an appropriate step), being bored has been a common refrain this week, not just from riders but from commentators, fans and even journalists, some writing not a million miles from this website.

Not that everyone is ignoring this week's monster triple dose of doping judgements. Take retired Professor Unay Talara Robles (please!).

Robles is staging a hunger strike in the Spanish town of Ayamonte, near Huelva. No morsel shall pass the 74-year-old's lips until Alberto Contador's "unjust" backdated two-year ban is overturned. Taking up residence in Ayamonte's Town Hall, Robles vowed not to leave until Contador was free to ride again. When police removed him from the building at closing time, he showed admirable flexibility by vowing to return to the town hall to continue his sit-in during opening hours.

In Pinto, Contador's home town near Madrid, another town hall is lending its support to a campaign titled 'Alberto somos todos' (We are all Alberto*). The campaign comes with a free downloadable Contador mask, complete with the in-no-way-unnerving feature of eyeholes cut into sunglasses. Protesters will ride their bikes from a local park on Sunday morning to the Plaza de la Constitucion, where Contador celebrated his three Tour de France victories.

The reasoning behind this protest is unclear. Perhaps it is an attempt to recreate the famous scene from Spartacus (in which case the protesters would have been better donning their masks to attend the July 2010 doping test). Perhaps the protestors wish to sacrifice themselves alongside Contador, sending the message that if one Alberto is stripped of his results going back to the 2010 Tour de France, this must apply to anyone who looks exactly like Contador, judging only from the neck up and paying no attention to the punchholes in the centre of their sunglasses. Maybe it is simply an excuse to wear a great mask and meet people.

And here's the odd thing. Ill-fated as Professor Hunger Strike's protest is (the Broom Wagon gives it until Tuesday before someone tempts him with a sandwich made from Mexican beef), and epically pointless as the We are Alberto march will certainly prove, their response is healthier for cycling in the long run than Boonen's.

It is proper and right to care about the Contador decision, regardless of whether you feel justice has been served, Contador is a lamb sacrificed to a too-rigid anti-doping policy, or whether you feel the truth lies somewhere in between.

It is good that we care about the week's other big development: the decision by US federal prosecutors to close their investigation of Lance Armstrong. Armstrong's is an exceptionally murky era, as underlined by Jan Ullrich's suspension on Thursday. (Congratulations to grand tour winners Michele Scarponi and Andy Schleck and 2006 Tour de Suisse winner Koldo Gil, while we are here). No reason was given for closing the Armstrong case. Perhaps it was cost v benefit, or perhaps the evidence, which included the eyewitness testimony of former teammates, was not enough for a conviction. Cycling is poorer because we will likely never know.

Ullrich's ban should be welcomed, not because it rights past wrongs or because a ban has any real effect on a retired athlete, but because even six years after the fact it helps send the message that clean sport matters. And ultimately, for all that cycling is a complex and beautiful beast, unless we care about that message and the attempts to enforce it, we are in danger of finding ourselves willing participants in a con.

*A noble sentiment unless you are Mrs Contador.

The week in ...

... priorities

50 per cent of male respondents to Bicycling magazine's reader survey said they would rather give up sex for a month than cycling. The figure was 58 per cent for women.

... Warne

Hitler hears about Victorian premier Ted Ballieu's dismissal of Shane Warne's proposal for compulsory registration for cyclists.

Hitler rants about bicycles and reacts to Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu's recent remarks that the registration of bicycles is not feasible.

... manners

Melbourne, you will recall, is the world's second official 'bike city', after Copenhagen, so we can presume Supersport world champion Andrew Pitt's experience was not the norm.

Pitt was cycling with friends, including Northern Irishman Jonathan Rae and Fabien Foret, from France, who are in Melbourne preparing for the Superbike World Championship on Phillip Island. The group were riding from the Dandenong Ranges into the city when, Pitt said, they were cut off by a public bus, which missed cleaning them up by centimetres.

The bus driver pulled over but closed the bus's doors as the cyclists tried to demand an explanation. At that point, Pitt said, a teenage passenger took a meat cleaver out of his bag and began waving it about.*

Pitt said his friends had been "blown away by the manners of Aussies on the road".

*As tourism campaigns go, the meat cleaver approach leaves a lot to be desired but is still probably better than 'Where the bloody hell are ya?'

Dispatches from the Twitterverse

So the race has moved to a different breakfast hall this morning. Panic attacks ensued. It properly freaked me out. #dontlikechange - @Mark Cavendish

Daq - @CadelOfficial

"Daq" – lil' man's first tweet... (!) - @CadelOfficial

Classic YouTube

Rick 'the Clutch' Roth and Tony 'the Sack' Roth are Arizona-based riders cut from the same cloth as Scotland's Danny MacAskill (and if you still haven't had the pleasure of Danny's around-town stunt work, do yourself a favour and set aside 15 minutes on YouTube). The Roths are not quite up to Danny's standards, but to be fair Danny was not on a road bike.

Schleck deserves his own moment

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +1100

Now that the dust has settled regarding the immediate cycling future of Alberto Contador, perhaps it's time to reflect on where Andy Schleck stands in all of this.

The International Cycling Union (UCI) has, by default, promoted the Luxembourger from runner-up to 2010 Tour de France champion status as a result of El Pistolero's fall from grace.

Schleck has conceded it's not the way he wants to remember a race in which he was beaten by his Spanish rival, who was subsequently rewarded by accepting the yellow jersey high above the cobbled sectors of the Champs Elysees in Paris.

Having your name etched in the history books as a Tour de France winner is one thing but standing on the podium in front of the glare of millions of worldwide viewers is another.

Unfortunately, Andy has never had the chance to savour the experience . . . not yet anyway.

So, if the UCI, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) can change the course of history (as in Bertie's case) why can't the same be done for Andy?

Andy is one of the World Tour's most likeable characters who has all the qualities of an elite racer and is an exceptional human being.

He's never been questioned or come under suspicion for doping and it goes without saying he has thrilled us all with his fighting determination on two wheels.

When finishing second behind Contador in 2010, many suggested then that "his time will come”.

Well, I'm not so sure.

Despite linking up with Johann Bruyneel and the newly-formed Radioshack-Nissan Trek team, I'm yet to be convinced Andy is capable of winning the Tour.

He has been poor in the time-trials and given the 100km of TT laid down for this year's event, I fear he may miss out again.

But that's beside the point.

If Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme cherishes the rich history the his institution has to offer, which he does, then perhaps he can add to it by awarding Andy the yellow jersey for his 2010 victory when the race winds down in Paris this July - win or lose.

How cool would that be?

A back-dated winner of the Tour finally rewarded in a fitting ceremony on one of the world's most famous boulevard.

While we're at it what about Oscar Pereiro, crowned 2006 Tour winner after the shame Floyd Landis brought to the sport back then?

Actions speak louder than words and it’s up to these sporting bodies to make the move.

Chook season

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:58:55 +1100

Chickens. Hanging from the wall. Well, from the fence. Ten chooks, mostly sussex, destined for the pot. I was lucky this time, as Ross was over and took charge of the killing, Sadie the plucking, though I had the job of cleaning up. I’m not sure which job is worse. Though now the freezer is brimming with chicken meat, for only the second time in Puggle Farm’s existence. The chicken meat season has begun; all those eggs that hatched in spring and summer are now close to harvest. By all those eggs, I mean those who hatched eggs more successfully than us. We got our cooking chooks from another grower this time.

Life marches on scarily in summer. We still have long days, though, as I type, it’s still before dawn and just before six. It’s a race to get things done. Water the vegies. Tick. Fill the wallows. Tick. Pick as many blackberries as possible, use the good weather to get lots of outside chores done. Go for a swim. Tick, tick, tick.

Plant the new, large, possibly improved vegie garden with winter crops? No tick yet. Part of it’s a former pig paddock, and one pig is acting a little too free-range for any garden’s good, and won’t leave the area. The ground has to be disked, mulched, sown. Water installed. Beds laid. But this girl refused to follow her 13 companions to their new home, and now watches warily from the hillside. Food, that great motivator, has yet to get her to pass through a gate. Patience runs thin with one difficult porker, but patience is paramount. In an hour I will try again.

The new pig paddocks are dotted with a range of homes, but the latest version of a shelter is one we saw for the first time on the internet, at the wonderful blog of www.milkwoodpermaculture.com.au. It’s made of bent concrete reinforcing wire fashioned to hold hay bales as walls. We have a LOT of hay, so this looked like the design for us. Our method is slightly different, but the idea is to use hay to create an insulated home, one that is too heavy for the pigs to push over, and be able to reuse the wire and discard the hay every few months. A mobile shelter with some indestructible parts.

For us, it’s pig shelter mark five, so we’re hoping it works. Others did, but all have their flaws and benefits. The reality is that it costs a lot to build a rock-solid shelter, and we need them mobile as well as affordable and bomb proof. We also need them bigger than the one I built for my first two porkers, Cassoulet and Prosciutto. The Milkwood idea seems to have worked a treat, though instead of a tarp roof, we’ve put a corrugated iron lid on top, strapping it to the metal using tie wire. With our high rainfall, a tarp would just mean a swampy bed.

I’m not sure how the new design will withstand the hardcore antics of Peter Pan the boar, but, for growing pigs, the shelters seem just the ticket. That’s assuming I can get them all contained in the one paddock again.

UK Supreme Court #guilty of trendsetting

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:44:00 +1100

In a fitting follow-on from last month's Margaret Court blog, a new court has entered the Twitter fray and it's the most serious court of them all.

@UKSupremeCourt has just been launched - and it's so far nailed the tone of the microblogging Mecca.

Tweeting FROM court is no longer new - it's been around since December last year in the UK.

In the US, a Massachusetts court encourages it, and a tweet about bad coffee has already got an inmate off death row.

In Australia, there've been misgivings about reporters' tweets causing mistrials.

However, @UKSupremeCourt is the first official court feed, and a human rights group is anxiously urging the country's other courts to launch their own too.

That sounds progressive and forward-thinking, but speaking as a journalist who has to be super-careful when tweeting even from a personal account, I'm concerned for the sanity of the appointed court tweeter.

Maybe the powers that created the account were apprehensive too, because it remained silent for a couple of days before issuing its first missive - a perfectly lovely 'thanks for the warm welcome', with a link to 'the way we'll be using Twitter'. Big tick!

Then the excitement began, as some users asked the court whether it would be accepting Freedom of Information requests via the microblogging site.

Demonstrating that it has understood the medium brilliantly, @UKSupremeCourt' answered:

So far so good, but there are two points that may cause friction in the future.

For starters, there's the problem of the prolixity, the garrulity, the logorrhea typical of most forms of legal expression. How many lawyer- or magistrate-words even fit into 140 characters? My guess is three or four.

Apart from that, there's the much more serious issue of what kind of things a court might be tweeting, and whom they may prejudice. It's doubtful this court will be taking any risks with that - but how exactly will the line be trodden?

Journalists inhabit a world of expression that's as wild and free as 1950s Havana compared to that of the courts, but we struggle with what can and can't be tweeted for legal, ethical and professional reasons.

When using reports filed by news agency reporters on court proceedings, we often need to make the call on whether we absolutely trust the account of said reporter.

If the court so desired, it could provide UK journos with accounts of proceedings 'from the horse's mouth', sparing them the risk of taking a potentially-mistaken colleague's word for it.

The court made an initial foray into real-time updates with this:

(Yes, my eye substituted a certain singer's name for the Lord in question's too, and it was entertaining).

... But since that tweet it's stuck to straight-out verdicts. I don't think it'll re-visit real-time tweeting during trials, though, due to the ubiquitous and almost-indelible nature of the beast.

If an appeal is launched later about a case that was live-tweeted, those earlier tweets may prejudice it with information that either the defence or the prosecution are seeking to debunk. They may also prejudice sentencing.

Then there's the thorny question of editorialising, and the fine line between an impartial tweet and an interesting one. How might Britain's highest legal institution do that?

I don't think it will. Obviously, official tweets will be bound by the same Contempt of Court rules as online news articles - and who better to adhere to them than the court itself? In the most unlikely case of a breach, could the court find itself in contempt of itself?

That will be especially important in cases spanning multiple jurisdictions like Gabe Watson's. He was found guilty of his wfie's manslaughter while on a scuba dive in Queensland, but then tried for premeditated murder in Alabama.

Perhaps Twitter could play along with that the way YouTube does - by geo-blocking tweets - but in any case it's probably best the court itself retains total control over what ends up where.

Does the advent of a tweeting court signal the beginning of a change in the nature of the beast (or bird)? Is Twitter slowly changing to more accurately reflect all organisms of society - including those who categorically cannot allow themselves a little personal opinion every now and then?

Or will @UKSupremeCourt stay in its own little corner of the Twitterverse, largely marginalised for having not much personality due to all the rules it needs to follow?

In the meantime - hats off to whomever the court tweeter is at the moment. He/she/they're doing a great job of adopting Twitter's unmitigatedly social tone - even entering into actual conversations like the one with the FoI people - with names like 'Pigs on a Wing', no less!

For early online journalists, getting a grip on the sensitivities around tweeting and publishing legal news reminded me of my years spent laboriously studying Spanish - in a university on the other side of the planet.

If every court around the globe eventually gets its tweet on, newbies to the craft of online legal journalism may find themselves learning straight from the pros, benefitting from a sort of (cyber)-immersion in a very different world - a little like moving to Spain.

Not so tranquilo

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +1100

Like many in the cycling world Philip Gomes remains puzzled by the entire Alberto Contador debacle.

Anyone who is found by a tribunal in a matter in which he was found to be a cheat, is a cheat. So goes the statement by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) supremo John Fahey in response to the finding by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) that Alberto Contador did indeed have a banned substance in his system in late July 2010.

But of course the word "cheat", used by Fahey, flies in the face of the actual judgement issued by the CAS, which determined that Contador did not cheat but was the victim of an accidental ingestion of a banned substance.

In the Panel’s opinion, on the basis of the evidence adduced, the presence of Clenbuterol was more likely caused by the ingestion of a contaminated food supplement.

There it is in black and white. True, the panel ruled out Contador's bovine source but it also ruled out a transfusion, an idea much loved by tin foil hat wearing plasticiser conspiracy theorists out there on the internets.

Clearly the WADA boss and former Premier of New South Wales didn't read the judgement.

So digest this for a second (pun intended). The final arbiter, the highest court in sport with all the information available to it, supplied by all sides - the International Cycling Union (UCI), Contador and WADA - found that Contador's positive was an accident.

Yes it is true that Contador had clenbuterol in his system, something not even he denies, but how that eventuated became the important question.

So, like many interested observers out there, I spent the darkened hours of Tuesday morning wading through the documentation supplied by the CAS (all 7.4MB and 98 pages of it) looking for proof Alberto Contador was a cheat. I found none.

I was searching to see if El Pistolero's trademark smoking gun had been turned against him, but what was presented was essentially summed up in the synopsis. This generation's best Grand Tour rider was guilty of nothing except taking an unfortunate bite out of something that ended up giving everyone in the sport 18 months of extreme indigestion.

And no one seemed to be happy with the outcome, not the UCI, not the 2010 Tour de France runner-up Andy Schleck and certainly not Contador.

Yet in fan comments all across the globe (with the exception of Spain) and here on Cycling Central, Alberto Contador was as Fahey described, a cheat.

This is a disconnect I'm trying to pull apart as I sit here writing this. Why? Don't cycling fans read? Or are they only interested in seeing what they want to see?

Like Lance Armstrong before him there is no clear proof that Contador is a cheat (if you indignant readers have any actual proof send it to me, I'll pass it on to the relevant authorities), so why the hate out there for Contador? Why the gloating? Why the "hang him high" rhetoric?

I reckon it goes back to another fateful moment in July 2010, one where the gentle Andy Schleck had his pony taken away from him so cynically by Contador in the infamous "Chaingate" incident during Stage 15 of the Tour de France.

But even there most reasonable observers reckoned Contador did nothing wrong, yet the fans persisted. "He cheated," they howled on Twitter, Facebook, forums and websites across the globe.

That Contador is the best Grand Tour rider of his generation is obvious. Like Armstrong, Contador beats everyone like a drum, smashes them, chews them up and spits them out then points his finger into the camera as he crosses the finish line and goes, "BANG".

So it seems the price someone that good must pay in the post-Armstrong era is that he can only be a cheat if he comes close to replicating what Armstrong did.

I await August and the Vuelta a Espana with interest.

Why the banks may still lift rates

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:53:30 +1100

The Reserve Bank’s decision to keep interest rates on hold might give the impression that the big banks have been let off the hook.

Many of them cried poor as higher wholesale funding costs squeezed their margins.

Just a few months ago ANZ went one step better, explaining the composition of its funding base, detailing how funding costs are rising. It almost seemed like it was preparing us for future out of cycle interest rate moves.

And despite NAB yesterday morning promising to keep its standard variable rate lower than its three major competitors for the rest of this year, experts were warning the banks wouldn’t pass on all of the RBA’s rate cut, if it went that way.

But it didn’t. The Reserve left the official cash rate at 4.25 per cent, so the bank bashing has abated for now.

Or has it?

There seems to be some suggestion that this non-move by the RBA may in fact provoke some of the banks to lift interest rates.

Chris Kimber, Managing Director of Wealth Managements at FatProphets, said that it is possible for the banks to lift interest rates. He says, “If it is true they are not making any profits on recent mortgages they have issued then it has to rise at some stage.”

He adds that the “RBA is playing a game with the banks, not cutting rates as they knew they would not pass it on anyway.”

Stephen Koukoulas, the Managing Director at Market Economics says that its true funding costs have risen and that “there’s an even chance we see one of the banks lifting rates 10bps or so.”

Fitch recently placed Australia’s big four banks on credit watch negative, citing their reliance of overseas funding, and rising funding costs.

Given these costs are rising, despite the official cash rate being steady, simple math would seem to suggest the banks would need to lift their standard variable rates to protect their margins.

But at what cost?

CommSec’s Craig James says that “you can’t rule it out and is a risky thing to do.”

If anyone does move first, it would likely be ANZ. It now announces its interest rate intentions on the second Friday of every month, independent of the RBA.

Shane Oliver, Chief Economist at AMP Capital says there’s only a low risk of the banks lifting interest rates. He told me that risk is “around 15 per cent”. He adds that the RBA still appears to be retaining an easing bias, and that there would be huge negative publicity if they did move, so it would be better to wait and hope the RBA does cut again.

While Peter Esho from City Index thinks it would be very difficult for anybody to move, if one does, “you’d have a lender lifting because they don’t want volume, to reduce risk.”

White Crane Group’s Clifford Bennett reckons the banks will “stay incredibly quiet and don’t think they’ll move at all.”

It’s now up to the banks to see if they make any comments at all about rates.

The Reserve Bank will release more details on Friday with its Statement on Monetary Policy, but even if it doesn’t mention interest rates, we’ll definitely hear from ANZ at the very least, with its new policy to comment on its interest rate direction independent of the central bank.

Kobeba (beef and cracked wheat slice)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:32:07 +1100

I’m mad for Northern African and Middle Eastern flavours at the moment. Well, not really at the moment, for quite a while now. Ever since I was lucky enough to attend a five-day cooking school in Morocco. Well, even before that – I would hardly have travelled all the way to Morocco if I wasn’t pretty sure I liked the food. But that certainly sealed the deal. I loved the communal way of cooking (everybody’s dinner cooked in the basement fire of the local hammam (bath house)) and the delicate spices that became robust dishes and flavours.

So when we featured Egyptian cuisine for our At the Table feature this month, I knew I’d be cooking it for the blog. Call me daggy, but I’m a big fan of mince and always have a kilo or two in the freezer. Just in case. So I was pretty much set for the kobeba – beef and cracked wheat slice. I was intrigued by the fact that this dish is beef, with a beef stuffing – a case of “too much is never enough”?

It’s a simple dish and as I was cooking, I got into the mood by listening to Natacha Atlas – my favourite Arabian-fusion songstress (she was born in Belgium to parents of Moroccan, Egyptian, Palestinian and British background, speaks at least four languages, and has used all of them in the course of her career. Basically, awesome). Her version of Screamin' Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell on You is fabulous and as the kobeba went into the oven, I was shimmying with the best of them.

I served the kobeba with the fattoush and some pita bread for a simple dinner, and it was perfect – the beef-beef combo was delicious and the two layers had slightly different textures and tastes. I think I’ve just added another easy mince dish to my repertoire!

Editor, Feast

The complicated US indignation over Syria

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:47:18 +1100

Ambassador Susan Rice was unhappy when she walked out of the United Nations Security Council meeting on Saturday.

The veto imposed by Russia and China to condemn the Syrian government’s crackdown on protests had irked her.

Ambassador Susan Rice was unhappy when she walked out of the United Nations Security Council meeting on Saturday. The veto imposed by Russia and China to condemn the Syrian government’s crackdown on protests had irked her.

“Let me begin by speaking directly to the Syrian people,” she told media after the vote. “The United States stands with you, the Syrian people, and we will not rest until you and your bravery achieve your basic, universal human rights, to which all human beings are entitled.

“Today, we saw clearly which countries are prepared to support the people of Syria – and, indeed, the people of the entire region – as they struggle to attain a future of peace and democracy. And we saw which countries, for their narrow interests, do not.”

For a diplomat, strong words. So, too, were those from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"What happened yesterday at the United Nations was a travesty," said Clinton on Sunday.

The BBC reported that Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov claimed the resolution was not a sufficient compromise for all parties while China defended its opposition.

Another alternative view came from a China Daily editorial that suggested the UN resolution was presented too quickly and that Russian diplomatic efforts should be allowed time to succeed.

“We've seen what happened in Libya,” read the editorial. “With the armed intervention by some major Western powers, the Libyan regime was overthrown. But instead of the democracy and freedom they were promised, Libyan people cannot even live in peace as the country is in the danger of falling into a sectarian civil war.”

Too late for that in Syria. Almost as soon as the UN resolution was tossed aside, government forces were reported to have unleashed hell on parts of the city of Homs. Unconfirmed reports claimed at least 200 people dead. Syria’s government said the attacks were the work of “terrorists”.

Of course, these things are never simple. Russia has a naval base in Syria and so the Russians aren’t about to upset Assad’s host government over an issue that they feel is driven by, among other things, feigned Western indignation and genuine hypocrisy.

Russia can rightly claim the US has a naval base in Bahrain and there was no rush from the Americans to condemn a government crackdown on protests there last year. Assad’s hand is clearly heavier than that of the Bahrainis but so too is the Assad opposition. It may all be relative but on the other hand, both sides could argue that a point of principle remains a point of principle.

The Middle East has historically long been a game for outside powers one that played a role in determining Syria’s borders. It looks like that game continues into the 21st Century.

Go bush young man

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

There is a way to avoid the incessant news and gossip surrounding federal investigations and high-profile doping cases. Simply go bush, writes Anthony Tan.

While the cycling world waited with bated breath over the decision to acquit or convict Alberto Contador, I realised, rather belatedly, there was a subset of us who simply didn’t care.

The weekend before last, I was immersed in the Apple Isle for the Pure Tasmania Wildside, a four-day mountain bike race held on the island’s rugged though beguilingly beautiful west coast.

Thanks to my now infamous profile (courtesy Mike Tomalaris) and my equally notorious Prussian Blue jacket (courtesy Paul Smith), I get asked a lot of questions. At Wildside it was no different – but with one exception: not a single competitor (and there were 469 of ‘em) asked me about Contador.

Mountain bikers, in general, are quite different from road cyclists.

For a start, they completely embrace nature and its elements, even when, as it did on the final two days of Wildside, the heavens opened and soft-as-pie journalists like me went looking for food and shelter, or, depending on my priorities, shelter and then food.

In fact, as the weather turned for the worse, it brought a smile to most of their faces; this is what they had come here for, so many of them told me.

The elite riders were also dissimilar to a number of elite road cyclists. They did not berate their mechanics about their bikes, scold their soigneurs about their food or bad legs, or squabble with their sport directors about their choice of tactics.

Why? Because more often than not, the cyclists were also their own mechanics, their own soigneurs, their own directeurs-sportifs. This is a world that operates in a largely self-sufficient way.

Self-sufficient, I said, not selfish.

Because therein lies another unique element to elite mountain biking: the riders may ride for different teams, but altruistically, adopt a set of principles where no one is above another, and off the bike, real friendships are established and maintained.

When I asked Paul van der Ploeg, one of MTB’s next big things and a man who finished second overall to Sid Taberlay at Wildside, was he ever enticed by the attractions of the road – fame, fortune, what have you – he replied: “No – it’s more of a lifestyle choice, mountain biking.

“It’s very fun, very enjoyable, and a really good atmosphere to be a part of,” the 21-year-old told me, whose two elder brothers, Daniel and Adrian, also race mountain bikes.

“It’s so supportive… I’m good friends with all the competitors, and we all have a laugh.”

The notion of egalitarianism was fostered at Wildside by having what organisers defined as ‘cruising stages’, in between what was usually two competitive stages per day (save for the last). These were essentially short, untimed, transitional stages that took competitors from the end of one stage to the start of another.

Importantly, it provided an opportunity for riders of all abilities to mingle with each other. Given 66 out of the 489 were of the female persuasion, one could surmise it provided opportunities for other things, too…

This is not some clarion call for you to burn your road bikes, go bush-bashing in the wilderness every weekend and camp underneath the stars while heating up a can of baked beans, singing crickets included, while staring longingly into the eyes of your other half, wondering if she’s thinking what you’re thinking. (Though it doesn’t sound bad, does it?)

I’m more asking you to consider breaking your regimented road routines every now and then, escape the traffic and blaring horns, and lose yourself in nature.

Because maybe then, you, like the people I met recently in Tasmania, won’t give a crap about ‘caso Contador’ either, or continue to lament what’s become of professional road cycling.

For those of you who have already done so, I’d love to hear about your bush experiences, love-making aside, of course.

Twitter: @anthony_tan

Mel’s Get the Gringo could set a trend

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:50:45 +1100

Mel Gibson’s new movie is getting an innovative release in the US, a model that will probably be replicated in Australia. 

A few years ago the notion of a Mel Gibson movie bypassing cinemas in the US, instead premiering on a satellite broadcaster, would have seemed far-fetched, another sign that the superstar’s career had hit rock bottom.

Yet his latest film, Get the Gringo (formerly How I Spent My Summer Vacation) is launching in the US on DirecTV on May 1, potentially reaching nearly 20 million homes.

Rather than being regarded as another setback in the actor’s chequered career, the initiative is being hailed by some commentators as a bold move which could help create a new paradigm for releasing films in the US and, eventually, in markets including Australia.

Produced by Icon Productions, jointly owned by Gibson and his long-time business partner Bruce Davey, the action-comedy directed by Adrian Grunberg stars Mel as a career criminal named Driver.

Pursued by the US Border Patrol, Driver crashes his car carrying a load of cash and a dying accomplice and ends up in a hellish Mexican prison where he finds an unlikely ally: a 10-year-old boy.

“It might be easy to conjecture that Gibson’s recent personal issues were a reason to bypass theatres, especially after The Beaver grossed less than $1 million domestic,” observed Deadline.com’s Mike Fleming.

“I think this is different — a ballsy move by a maverick entrepreneur whose willingness to break rules led him to self-finance the $30 million R-rated The Passion Of The Christ and watch it gross $371 million domestic and $612 million worldwide (still the biggest indie film of all time), and spend $40 million to fund Apocalypto, a film that grossed $51 million domestic and $121 million worldwide.”

In a promotional campaign, Gibson will take part in a question-and-answer session at a screening of the film in Austin, Texas, hosted by Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles, an event that will be beamed to cinemas in about 10 other cities.

That’ll be far cheaper than the $US20 million that distributors typically spend to support a nationwide theatrical release, and Icon will probably pocket about 50 per cent of the $10.99 fee forked out by each DirecTV subscriber.

Focus World, a unit of Universal’s Focus Features, is releasing 12-15 titles direct to consumers via video-on-demand in the US this year, including James Franco's biopic of poet Hart Crane, Broken Tower, Iceland director Gaukur Úlfarsson’s documentary Gnarr and Liza Johnson’s drama Return starring Michael Shannon and John Slattery.

But Get the Gringo is the highest-profile movie to go straight to VOD. Unlike the US, the film will get a significant cinema release in Australia via Gibson’s Icon Films later this year. Icon’s Greg Denning is looking forward to seeing the film in the next week or so and tells SBS Film, “We hear it’s very commercial. If so, I expect it will get a wide release.

“Now that the US release plans are in place we can start looking at release date. We usually go out at the same time or after the US due to piracy concerns.”

If Gibson’s trail-blazing distribution initiative works in the US, it will almost certainly be copied by Australian distributors at some point, probably when the nascent VOD market reaches a critical mass spurred by the roll out of the National Broadband Network.

“I’m sure that a lot of people are watching this to see if it represents a viable alternative in other markets,” said Mike Selwyn, managing director of Paramount Pictures Australia.

However, not everyone is rooting for Mel’s movie, judging by some of the comments posted on Ain’t it Cool.

“Let’s be honest… if the movie was good enough to come out in theatres, it would be. The trailer looks unfunny and dated. It belongs on VOD,” said one cynical non-fan.

“Even in divorce, he’s got a little less money than God and his bank account falls somewhere between Oprah and George Lucas. He never needs to come inside L.A. proper again if he has VOD distribution,” carped another.

Gibson will be hoping a sizable number of people agree with one poster who said, “I forgave Gibson long ago and I think he deserves a chance. I’ll be watching this first day.”

Casting Aspersions: McQueen, Ejiofor & Crowe

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:55:45 +1100

Director Steve McQueen and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor take on the true story of Solomon Northup, and Russell Crowe has his pick of new projects.

There’s something irresistible about a cinematic partnership between a director and their favoured actor. The connection between the person behind the camera and the one in front of it can be electric, and the body of work that eventuates can be evocative and lasting. Think of Robert De Niro as the explicit side of Martin Scorsese’s psyche in the 1970s and 1980s (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy), or Anna Karina bringing new life to the screen as the muse for Jean-Luc Godard in the 1960s (The Little Soldier, A Woman is a Woman, Alphaville); these are exchanges between artists where every close-up is freighted with significance.

[ Watch interview with Anna Karina ]

It’s too soon to attribute the same worth to a current collaboration, that of English filmmaker Steve McQueen and the Irish actor Michael Fassbender, but their two films together – 2008’s Hunger (screening Wed, Feb 8 at 9:35pm on SBS TWO) and this month’s Shame – have both been major works with outstanding performances by the latter, firstly as the I.R.A. hunger striker Bobby Sands and then as a tormented New York sex addict. Now McQueen is preparing to shoot his third feature, and Fassbender will appear as one of the leads.

Adapted from the book of the same title, Twelve Years a Slave is the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American who was born free in the United States’ north but was kidnapped and taken to the southern slave states in 1841. With outside help, and a legal challenge by his wife, Northup was eventually able to win his freedom after 12 years witnessing what he subsequently chronicled in the book as terrible deprivations.

Fassbender won’t be following the comical exploits of Robert Downey Jr’s Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus and donning blackface, with the role of Northup going to Chiwetel Ejiofor (Salt). Fassbender may play Samuel Bass, the Canadian carpenter who helped rescue Northup, or one of his owners or kidnappers. Another starring role will be played by Brad Pitt, who is helping to produce the movie and obviously intends to continue his productive trend of working with leading directors.

WWRCD? That stands for What Would Russell Crowe Do? and it reflects a stark choice of projects the Australian actor (pictured) may have to make. Having already played the patriarch Jor-El in the forthcoming Superman reboot Man of Steel, and with the role of Inspector Javert opposite Hugh Jackman’s Jean Valjean about to shoot in the Les Miserables remake to be helmed by The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper, Crowe is reportedly up for the lead role in a Robocop remake to be overseen by Elite Squad filmmaker, Brazilian Jose Padilha or the part of the Old Testament boat builder in Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic Noah. A cyborg law enforcer or the prophet who parted the Red Sea? If only there was a way to combine the two.

Armstrong reactions

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +1100

While I have an opinion of my own regarding the continuing story of Lance Armstrong it's sometimes best to put that aside and listen to what other media commentators are saying.

But for all that surety, we’ve never really known. And so the debate turned into a long war, with each side convinced of its own superiority but unable to prove it. And as with all things Armstrong, your beliefs about him came to dominate your beliefs about more than just one man and how he became such an incredible bike racer. It was a suspicion that all bike racers dope, or it applied not just to the man but his foundation, which surely was either a paragon of philanthropic rectitude or a slush fund devoted mostly to burnishing the image of Lance Inc. As Bill Gifford discovered recently, the truth is somewhere in between.As with all things Lance there is a mixture of hate and hagiography written into every piece as we assess his legacy within the sport. Among fans there are those who look past any alleged transgressions and to his work on the cancer front. Then there are those who see a separation of the two as impossible. Within the mainstream media, bound by a certain set of standards, the story largely rests on a single concept, proof.

Anyway, here is some of the best commentary from around the cycling world. Enjoy, or not.

Charles Pelkey: Red Kite Prayer

Sources close to the investigation say that the decision came as a surprise to many of them, too. The case was being handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Doug Miller and Mark Williams, with the help of FDA Criminal Division investigator Jeff Novitzky. The U.S. Attorney’s office did not indicate who decided to end the investigation, whether it was based on a lack of evidence, whether there were strategic problems with pursuing an indictment or whether pressure came to bear from outside the Central District. Indeed, the Assistant U.S. Attorneys, Novitzky and other investigators were informed of the decision only about 30 minutes before the press release was issued. Somehow, I think we’re going to hear a bit more about what went into this decision. I remain curious.

Neil Browne: Browne Eye Media

I also find it interesting that Armstrong has been deafeningly silent about the conclusion of the case on Twitter – his social media platform of choice when he wants to gloat about something. Did his team of lawyers get a hold of him and confiscate his iPhone to prevent him from saying something damaging?

A.J. Perez: Fox Sports USA

Still, Armstrong might want to send a thank-you card to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens after the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles announced Friday it had dropped its investigation of the seven-time Tour de France winner — ending a nearly two-year effort to determine if Armstrong and his teammates participated in doping. For all the millions spent investigating Bonds and Clemens, all the Feds have to show for it is a one-month house arrest sentence against Bonds for obstruction, a mistrial for Clemens and a nation that has become blasé on the topic of drugs in sports.

Anthony Tan: VeloNews

Note the reasons for their decision to shelve the investigation – read the statement: “The United States Attorney determined that a public announcement concerning the closing of the investigation was warranted by numerous reports about the investigation in media outlets around the world.” In other words, the federal probe was ostensibly closed, not because there was no evidence, or too much taxpayers’ money had been wasted, or Novitzky, as Armstrong’s defense team repeatedly claimed, had an axe to grind, but due to the number of leaks to the press.

Bonnie D. Ford: ESPN

Critics of all three investigations focused on the government's financial outlay in tough economic times and questioned law enforcement priorities. There is little doubt that if Armstrong had been indicted and gone to trial, federal authorities would have faced a years-long, extremely costly battle against a stacked legal team and a defendant who retains a devoted constituency despite years of persistent questions about his character. Is it possible that this prospect affected Birotte's decision, or was it made for purely evidentiary reasons? There is also sure to be widespread speculation about whether political pressure came to bear, either because of the dynamics of an election year or Armstrong's many acquaintances on both sides of the aisle.

Wade Wallace: Cycling Tips

I suppose for me it’s a bit like when I was a kid and the slow realisation that Santa Claus wasn’t true. My parents didn’t need to pull me aside and tell me. Over the years I put 2+2 together, figured it out something wasn’t right, kept my mouth shut to my younger sister, and know that the truth doesn’t hurt anyone. If you’ve been a cyclist and a fan for a long time you’ll be able to put 2+2 together as well. I have a lot to thank Lance Armstrong for. He inspired my obsession in road racing which has given me a tremendous amount of joy. He helped bring road racing to the level of popularity we enjoy to this day. He has done a lot for cancer, even though it’s debatable if the money is put to good use. I don’t lose any sleep over what I think the truth is. It is what it is, and we’re not going to turn back time if anything is revealed.

Panache for him and her

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Panache is one of those elusive things in cycling. A bit like calves the size of footballs and the ability to Dance On The Pedals™ or dip into one's Suitcase of Courage™ (both ©Phil 'n Paul) you either have it or you don't.

Matthew Lloyd clearly has it, as do his Lampre teammates Alessandro Petacchi and Michele Scarponi. Davide Vigano has an umbrella, because panache is okay but it is good to be prepared.

In the GreenEDGE-AIS women's team, panache is everywhere. Judith Arndt, Alex Rhodes and Loes Gunnewijk all featured in the decisive break in the opening stage of the Tour of Qatar (the first hour, according to Twitter's Bridie O'Donnell, was raced at an average speed of 53kph). Teammate Tiffany Cromwell packed panache for her trip to the desert, along with sunscreen. Many, many varieties of sunscreen.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Broom Wagon is beginning to suspect, is an organisation flushed with panache.

At 11.49am on Monday a tweet fluttered into the Broom Wagon's account from Cyclingnews.com: "Contador verdict expected today: CAS ruling announcement imminent".

As if watching and waiting, CAS published a statement, and 11 minutes later, before many observers even had the chance to brew the Tea Kettle of Justice, a second tweet arrived from CN editor Daniel Benson: "CAS announce another delay #notjoking."

Whereas last time around CAS blamed rumour mongers for the latest postponement, this time the court stylishly gave no reason for the delay, merely winking and twirling its silver-topped cane as it pushed back the announcement by another week.

"(CAS) intends to publish its decision in the arbitration procedure involving the International Cycling Union, the World Anti-Doping Agency, Alberto Contador and the Spanish Cycling Federation on Monday 6 February 2012," the court said in a statement.

The Broom Wagon's advice here – and doubtless the advice of Davide Vigano – is to pay close attention to the word 'intends'. Panache is fine, but it is good to be prepared.

The week in ...

... beachgoing

Niels Albert, not to be confused with King Albert II of Belgium, who was also in Koksijde* last weekend, has won the men's cyclocross world championships. He has had a sand dune named after him. Albert (the cross racer, not the king) credited the win to his determination to master the ins, outs and unpredictable sideways swooshes of sand riding. He trained for the event in Spain, and his sessions included weaving in and out of plastic chairs set up on local beaches, possibly in conjunction with the campaign mentioned last week to attract European holidaymakers to Kyrgyzstan. Sporza has a video of Albert (the man, not the sand dune) striking fear into Spanish sunlovers here.

*The venue for this year's cyclocross world championship is in no way childishly amusing. Please stop sniggering at the back.

... Warne

The cyclist who says Shane Warne rammed him with his Mercedes and who Warne claims whacked his bonnet wants Warne to pay for damages. Mathew Hollingsworth, 28, threatens civil action unless Warne pays $1500 to cover the cost of repairs to Hollingsworth's bike. No, no police charge has been laid. Yes, Warnie continues to make a tit of himself on Twitter. In further related news, here's a rare example of a politician providing the voice of reason. Victorian premier Ted Baillieu on whether cyclists should have to pay registration: "I would have thought if people showed respect and common courtesy it would not be necessary."

... heroes

Israel's Yad Vashem holocaust centre could bestow another honour on one of the sport's greats, Gino Bartali. Bartali, who won the Giro d'Italia three times alongside two Tours de France, also helped save the lives of up to 800 Jews during World War Two, according to new research. After a forced stint in the traffic police under Italy's fascist regime, Bartali went underground and began smuggling identity photos to a convent producing counterfeit papers. Soldiers guarding the roads between Florence and San Quirico assumed the champ was merely on a 380km training run, as you do. In fact, he was carrying valuable documents hidden in his saddle and frame. Bartali rarely spoke of his acts, saying: "Good is something you do, not something you talk about. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket."

... contract extensions

Ivan Basso and wife Micaela have renewed their marriage vows. Said Basso: "Eleven years ago in the registry office, today in the church. The same emotions, the same love. A circle closes, two hands holding even tighter. And three kids who live with us now." He did not add: "And a mortgage." Here's a lovely pic.

Dispatches from the Twitterverse

Drunk people should NOT be allowed to enter an aircraft - @janibrajkovic

Why people put [white] sock's on when they [wear] black sandals...modern trend....!!?? - @f_cancellara

Classic YouTube

Having exhausted all that New York has to offer, the people at Red Peak Branding chained a fully-equipped bike (lights, basket, the works) to a post in a busy Soho street. Then they photographed it every day for a year to see what would happen. If you think it's something surprising, you may wish to re-evaluate your faith in human nature. (Spoiler: days 270 onwards are not the video's most exciting).

Optus win looks good from the cheap seats

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:58:42 +1100

Modern sport means big business.

Long gone are the days when a few cents got you in the stadium to cheer on your team of part-time amateurs, who did it for love, in their spare time. Well, I'm not sure when it only cost a few cents. But just take a look at England's bloated Premier League to see where money gets you.

Here in Australia, our sports are not as affected by the big bucks. For starters, noone else is really that interested in our multiple codes of football; even we can't seem to agree on one.

But selling the rights to NRL and AFL matches is certainly big money in local terms. And for the last few decades, it's been all about TV rights.

With the latest landmark case, however, mobile technologies are the new battleground.

Telstra's deal with the AFL is worth $153 million. Well, strictly speaking it cost them $153m; what it's worth is another matter entirely.

Nonetheless, the fact that Optus customers are able to watch the big matches just a few minutes behind their screening on terrestrial TV is obviously a concern for Telstra, and thus came the court case.

And it was Optus that won this landmark proceeding against the AFL, NRL and Telstra in relation to its TV Now service. The app enables Optus user to watch TV shows just a few minutes after they've gone to air (whether it should be called 'TV just after' is up for debate), and obviously, there's value in this for sports fans.

But value is what drives sports broadcasting rights. Why pay big money for mobile rights to a game if it's not exclusive?

The judge in the case said it was not Optus making the 'recording', it was the individual who was 'shifting' their viewing, so 2006 amendments to the 1968 copyright act held.

"Even though Optus provided all the significant technology for making, keeping and playing the recording, I considered that in substance this was no different to a person using equipment or technology in his or her own home or elsewhere to copy or record a broadcast", he said.

So, even though the recording was done in the cloud, it's the same as using your VCR to tape your favourite show; no copyright breaching here.

Naturally, there are big implications for sports. How can sports bodies establish a value for internet rights with rulings like this?

The football codes say they are likely to appeal, but, of course, victory is not guaranteed.

"If it ultimately is held, what will the major sporting codes do in response given sales of mobile rights is becoming an important revenue stream?" asked Ian Robertson, a Managing Partner at Holding Redlich lawyers.

"Running these sports is an expensive operation."

And he's right. You only have to look at the AFL's recruitment of former NRL star Israel Folau. $4.3m was coughed up for a three-year deal. The average AFL player is set to earn over $300,000 a year by 2016, according to The Herald Sun.

Sport is becoming more, and more of a business. They'll always be looking for new revenue streams.

It's a vicious circle. A more entertaining match requires more money to fund it. But ultimately, that money comes from sports fans, with higher ground fees and ever bigger broadcasting deals, via whatever medium. Tack on to that more charges to watch and more Burger King advertising in your life ('the Whopper has also celebrated being the Official Burger of the AFL '). Fantastic. Give me the leagues of 50 years ago.

In the strange universe of English football, television revenue has gone hand in hand with the fortunes of Russian oligarchs and Gulf Sheikhs to transform the league beyond recognition, catapulting average teams to the top of the league. Manchester City? Are you joking? A generation of millionaires created while working fans cough up small fortunes to watch games in the stadium or at home.

Money has brought the world's stars together to create beautiful football - but how much more beautiful, and bloated - can it get?

While we're not there yet in Australia, for Ian Robertson, should the AFL and NRL not be victorious against Telstra in protecting their new cashflow portal - your mobile handset - there's likely to be a knock at the government's door.

"Sponsorship and sales is a very important part of their revenue stream...the question is what are they going to do about it? I'd say they're likely to lobby the government", he told SBS.

In the unlikely event that this new revenue stream is not protected for the money machine that is professional sport, revenue will be hit.

But you know what? I'm pretty sure those players aren't going to go hungry any time soon.

They're up to their necks in official burgers, for starters.

Follow @billcode

Roger Coleman on Rinehart’s Fairfax raid

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:24:19 +1100

Gina Rinehart’s raid on the Fairfax share registry has raised many eyebrows.

The mining magnate is paying a premium at an attempt to become the company’s biggest shareholder.

Roger Coleman, a media analyst at CCZ Equities told me that it’s a political play.

Why the Fitch bank ratings review means no mortgage rate cut

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:50:42 +1100

Australia’s major banks have been given a helping hand in their case to distance their interest rate decision from that of the Reserve Bank.

Fitch placed the credit ratings of Australia’s big 4 banks on watch negative yesterday, noting their reliance of wholesale funds, a point Australia’s banks have been trying to make for some time.

While it’s nothing new, it reinforces their stance at a time when interest rates are bounced as a political football.

To explain, I spoke with banking analyst, Brian Johnson from CLSA.

Hungarian poster for Shame causes stir

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:31:19 +1100

The US distributor of Steve McQueen’s sexual drama have shot down the Hungarian poster.

It’s the rejected film poster that everyone is suddenly seeing: recently a censored one sheet (see below) for the Hungarian release of Steve McQueen’s uncompromising sexual addiction drama, Shame, has been bouncing around the internet. Reportedly prepared for the Hungarian distributor, Fox Searchlight, the poster starkly features the film’s title written on bare female skin with what is meant to resemble semen. It is, depending on your viewpoint, either powerful or pornographic, with the only thing for certain being the potential for puns.

With Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender (pictured) and Carey Mulligan, opening in Australia on Thursday 9 February, we asked Andrew Mackie, joint managing director of the movie’s Australian distributor, Transmission Films, about the process of local distributors creating their own promotional materials such as posters.

“As an indie distributor you can come up with any poster you want,” he explains. “Normal procedure is that you get it approved by the producers before you print it, and most contracts insist on that and we’d do it as a matter of course.”

While Transmission have not been able to trailer Shame in Australian cinemas – R-rated pictures can only have their trailers attached to other R-rated releases, and there’s none in the market currently – they could feasibly issue a similar one sheet here as posters are not subject to official classification. That said, Mackie adds, there would not only be resistance from cinemas, “it’s also a question of whether it’s in good taste and fits the campaign we’re building.”

Mackie says that Australian distributors, especially those handling independent releases or titles that have not yet released in the United States or United Kingdom, often generate their own posters and trailers. Images that work in Europe, for example, often aren’t that effective in Australia.

“It’s a shame we don’t have a specific award for move posters in Australia, because the independents here generate some amazing campaigns,” he says. “Our Sleeping Beauty poster and trailer went worldwide.”

The distribution executive – who is a confirmed fan of the remarkable Polish film posters from the 1980s that are now also collected online – has commissioned local poster designs for everything from Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries to John Michael McDonagh’s recent black crime comedy, The Guard, but the only outcome that’s certain is that not everyone will agree.

“We did a distinctive poster for Antichrist in this market, from Jeremy Saunders, and I heard that [star] Willem Dafoe hated our poster, but [director] Lars von Trier loved it,” Mackie recalls. “You really can’t please everyone all the time.”

In the land of the free, money talks

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:18:56 +1100

The United States likes to proudly boast it is the land of the free. This is an honourable claim except that, when it comes to a presidential campaign, it is far from free and all about money.

If the US economy is in decline maybe the 2012 candidates should run for office every year. The money flowing through their campaigns could rejuvenate the economies of many states and create thousands of jobs across America. The big winners? Media companies rolling in advertising money during 2012 as candidates spend, spend, and spend again to denounce their rivals.

Some analysts expect television stations will take in as much as $US5 billion from campaign advertising this year – up almost 80 per cent from the $2.8 billion spent in 2008. A lot of this money is the result of a highly contentious 2010 Supreme Court decision sparked by a right wing group called Citizens United that demanded the right to broadcast a film critical of Hilary Clinton. The result, a victory for Citizens United, effectively granted a corporation the same political donor rights as an individual.

The tight ruling (voted 5-4 by the nine judges) was applauded by many (but not all) on the right and denounced by President Obama and others. In simple terms, the ruling eased restrictions on corporate campaign spending and contributor identities, effectively opening up a great big grey area for how a campaign can be managed and funded. In brief, a corporation can donate as much as it wants to a campaign, for whatever reason, and do so anonymously. The result is billions for politicians and lobbyists. Oh, and TV companies.

A great example and irony in this, however, can be seen in the recent experience of Newt Gingrich. The former Speaker was a strong supporter of the Supreme Court decision and a regular partner with Citizens United, with which he has “produced” a number of political “films”. But so it was that Gingrich felt the full press down weight of attack ads from Mitt Romney funded by organisations in turn funded by corporate powers just as soon as he started to exercise some kind of success.

The law states that these so-called Super PACs (“PAC” as in Political Action Committee) cannot coordinate campaigns with a candidate. But as Timothy Egan has pointed out in the New York Times, a Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney by the name of “Restore Our Future” is run by former associates of Romney’s at Bain Capital, business friends of his in Utah and some of the same donors who Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.

“If we coordinated in any way whatsoever we’d go to the big house,” defended Romney.

But don’t expect the jailer to come calling any time soon.

Of course, it’s not solely money that will see a candidate get over the line. In Iowa, Rick Santorum effectively spent 74 cents per vote against Rick Perry’s $358. Santorum is still in the race. Just. Perry, though, is distant history back in Texas.

Aside of money, of course, there’s also the issues that are the key to victory. Issues that included, according to a televised debate on CNN last week, establishing a colony on the moon, squeezing the life out of Cuba, and arguing over whether Gingrich said Spanish was “the language of the ghetto in 2008”. Oh, and don’t forget the candidates unabashed love of Israel.

No mention of the economy, though.

Sundance: Hello, I Must Be Going

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:48:30 +1100

Despite projections, female-driven films didn’t end up dominating festival discussion after all.

I have come to think of the 10 days of Sundance as a kind of controlled haemorrhage: The festival begins at maximum capacity as everyone rushes into Park City at the same time, and then as each day passes film news and film people leak out at a roughly proportional rate. My favourite part of this process comes around day six, when all the opening weekend warriors have left, there is time to catch up on the things you’ve missed, and room to turn around in the press tent without swatting someone with your badge.

By the time the awards ceremony takes place, Park City has been mostly emptied of its industry invaders and the important decisions have been made. Still, news continues to trickle out of Sundance, and although it doesn’t look like this year is going to come close to topping last year in sales, a few buyers seemed to find what they were looking for—most notably Magnolia and Fox Searchlight. The former picked up The Queen of Versailles, a reality TV-styled doc about a couple who were in the midst of building the biggest home in the United States when the economic crisis hit, Compliance, Craig Zobel’s feature based on the true case of a prank phone call to a fast food outlet that ended very, very badly, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s winsome culture clash sequel to 2 Days in Paris, V/H/S, a compilation of short horror films of the “found footage” variety, and Nobody Walks, a drama directed by Ry Russo Young and co-written by Lena Dunham.

Fox Searchlight landed the festival’s two unlikely big fish: The Surrogate and Beasts of the Southern Wild. The former won the Sundance audience award for best U.S. feature, and the latter took the Grand Jury Prize for best feature. Both are by first-time directors, and both tell stories of characters on what I guess you could call the fringe—a man confined to an iron lung by polio and a little girl who imagines her Louisiana town is perched on the edge of the world. Though films with marquee names attached like The Words (Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper), Arbitrage (Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon), and Lay the Favorite (Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall) are quietly signing deals for VOD and/or theatrical distribution, it seems safe to declare Sundance 2012 The Year of the Ringer.

One of the trend stories that seemed poised to happen but didn’t quite get there involved the preponderance of young women in writing and directing roles. Along with Young and Dunham’s Nobody Walks there was Bachelorette (pictured), which director Leslye Headland adapted from her play, Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister (picked up locally by Hopscotch), For a Good Time Call…, a sex comedy by writers, co-directors, and three name sharers Lauren Anne Miller and Katie Anne Naylon, Black Rock, a thriller directed by Katie Aselton and starring Kate Bosworth, and For Ellen, a character study of a young father in the midst of a custody battle starring Paul Dano and directed by So Yong Kim. The strident bad girl raunch of Bachelorette seemed to eat up most of the available oxygen for the subject of women at Sundance, which is both good and bad. On the plus side, the sooner that Bridesmaids dress train-riding tactic plays out the better, but in the meantime it’s a shame that Bachelorette’s relative fizzle dominated the discussion when the diversity across these films should have been the real story.

But then it’s easy to talk about what the real story should have been on day 10. It’s probably also a little imprudent. The exciting thing about Sundance is watching how the films that debut here develop a life and personality throughout the year to come. Last year I couldn’t wait for the rest of the world to see The Interrupters, the Steve James documentary about how cycles of violence form in a Chicago community. This year it’s Detropia, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s numinous look at a city in ruins, The Invisible War, a vital recovery of stories of rape in the military, and The Surrogate, which contains some of the most awkward and life-affirming sex scenes I’ve ever watched on screen. At the heart of it Sundance is all about making people care, after all—about your film, about your favorite. And though caring is not always enough, it’s a nice place to start.

Casting Aspersions: Murphy, Roberts & Inarritu

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:26:20 +1100

Ryan Murphy looks back at the AIDS epidemic, Julia Roberts plays around with Meryl Streep, and Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu plots some revenge.

Two of the most important and resonant responses to the spread of HIV and the subsequent rise of deaths in the gay community from AIDS have never made it to the movies. Randy Shilts’ damning non-fiction study of the disease’s early spread amid official apathy, And the Band Played On, was made into a HBO mini-series in 1993, while Larry Kramer’s incendiary 1985 play, The Normal Heart, has stayed on the stage. The latter was prominently revived on Broadway last year, and that appears to have secured the work a screen adaptation.

Ryan Murphy, the television impresario (Glee, American Horror Story) whose filmmaking efforts have been somewhat patchy (Running With Scissors, Eat Pray Love), will direct a script written by Kramer. For the central role of Ned, a New York City writer and gay activist whose anger grows in the absence of organised research and health warnings, Murphy has cast Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right), while there are parts for Alec Baldwin (Ned’s homophobic brother), Matt Bomer (Ned’s boyfriend) and Julie Roberts (as the wheelchair-bound doctor who’s one of the first to understand the looming crisis).

It will be the latter’s second collaboration with Murphy, and Roberts continues to run an eclectic schedule. She plays a comically camp Evil Queen in Mirror Mirror, one of the forthcoming Snow White films, is still due to co-star with Meryl Streep in the adaptation of another key American play, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, and will also produce and star in Second Act, a comedy about a woman who is forced to take a job after a lifetime of not working. She appears to be leaving the romantic comedies that made her the most commercially popular actress in Hollywood to the younger hopefuls hoping to succeed her.

Mexican filmmaker Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu has a short but compelling list of movies to his name: Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful. His fifth film is now underway, with Inarritu directing a Mark L. Smith adaptation of Michael Punke’s novel, The Revenent, an 1820s American frontier drama about a man on a hunting expedition mauled by a bear and then robbed and left for dead by the two men detailed to look after him. When the injured man survives revenge becomes his obsession. Inarritu, who draws outstanding performances from his actors, is talking to Leonardo DiCaprio for the part of the central protagonist, with Sean Penn, who featured in 21 Grams, as one of the pair that abandon him.

And, finally, more from The Casting Director’s Best Friend (a.k.a. Steven Soderbergh): the prolific, possibly soon to retire, filmmaker is now populating the pharmaceutical thriller Side Effects. Blake Lively (The Town) plays the young wife who develops a prescription addiction on the eve of her husband, Channing Tatum (Stop-Loss), being released from jail and begins an affair with a lawyer to be portrayed by Jude Law (Contagion). The latest addition, as a doctor, is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who got some of her best reviews working for Soderbergh a decade ago as a drug baron’s wife in Traffic.

Joke posters plaster Oscar nominees

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:50:10 +1100

Mock posters put a clever new spin on the hype for Academy Awards candidates.

Amid all the earnest commentary, debate and prognostications over the Academy Awards, it’s refreshing to see someone taking the Mickey out of the nominees.

The UK website TheShiznit.co.uk cheekily has poked fun at the best film contenders by redesigning the movie posters “so they're a little more honest about their content.”

[Related: See the full list of 2012 Oscar nominees]
[Oscar watch 2012: SBS Coverage]

The Shiznit creative team’s wicked sense of humour is often politically incorrect but some of the new titles and taglines are very funny.

Hence The Iron Lady is rechristened Total Bitch with a strap that proclaims, “Crippled our Nation. Stole our Milk.”

The Help is dubbed White People Save Racism with the slogan, “You’re welcome, black people.”

Hugo’s 11 nominations haven’t spared the film from being mocked for its mediocre box office performance, affixed with the new title Marketing Nightmare and the slogan, “Martin Scorsese’s Loving Homage to the Early Era of Cinema and Filmmaking…for Children.”

Stephen Daldry’s 9/11 drama Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is pilloried as Extremely Lame & Incredible Cloying.

David Fincher’s lurid remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is retitled All the Rape, No Subtitles with the strap, “The movie you already saw…Now in English.”

The Descendants is given a clumsy new moniker which makes fun of its star:
Look! George Clooney is Good at Acting!

Perhaps the most devastating critique is the poster for Terrence Malick’s apparently pretentious, abstruse The Tree of Life: a montage of stills with one word in the middle: “WUH?”

Among the least clever or inventive is the re-tweaking of Oscar frontrunner The Artist, which becomes Pure Art…Guaranteed Winner.

Christopher Plummer’s nod for best supporting actor in Beginners inspired the site to re-name the film Old gay man wins Oscar, which is misleading because Plummer isn’t gay.

The satirists at TheShiznit also took aim at several films that were overlooked in the nominations, including J. Edgar, whose poster shows Leonardo DiCaprio pleading, “Please nominate me. I’ll take anything. Even if it’s, just, like Best Make-Up.”

And Lynne Ramsay’s confronting We Need To Talk About Kevin is re-billed as Hardcore Sequel to Problem Child.

The Shiznit’s piss-take does seem to have touched a nerve with many people who aren’t enthused with the current crop of Oscar nominees.

“From a pure spectator perspective this looked like a very boring year for movies. I don’t really hit the theater anymore unless something really compels me, and only Drive was able to do that this year,” said one comment posted on Collider.com.

“The Artist hasn’t even won an Oscar, yet it feels like it already has. This sux,” moaned another.

Speaking of The Artist, an amusing tape of blooper outtakes from the silent movie has surfaced on the Internet. Enjoy.

Water for novices

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:22:54 +1100

Water. Take a look around every paddock, every time you’re in the country, and you might not even see the water. But each paddock, each field, usually has a source of water, if not for livestock, then for crops. Under the earth and along fence lines are countless kilometres of pipe, feeding into baths and troughs, some gravity fed, some using a siphon, some connected to pumps and most work on a float valve, the kind of thing that sits in your cistern above your dunny and allows the water to run and stop before overflowing.

Our new place, 70 acres of valley floor near Cygnet (the neighbours call it "the gully"), has plenty of water compared to many farms. Seven dams. At least three seem to be spring fed, and there’s also a winter creek. But allowing livestock down to the creek or dam isn’t the most efficient use of a resource, so we have to hook up clean, fresh sources of water in every paddock. A simple task, until you realise that pipes cost a bucket, the fat ones are a nightmare to unroll, and to bury one you need a tractor or a backhoe or some other machinery. Add in time, the expense of float valves; hole saws to drill through baths salvaged from the tip; the fact that water, by definition, is to be found at the bottom of the valley, but we need to get it out of the creek bed and dams and up to the cows, the sheep, the pigs. Without power. Without risk of it failing. And in a way that we can rotational graze our livestock to get the most from the grass, the land, the animals.

(Rotational grazing involves moving the herd quite regularly to new grass, a process that mimics the migration of grazing animals, and is believed to help improve soil depth and structure.)

Add in rotational grazing, which means you ideally want water in the middle of a paddock, not one corner, and you end up with a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and me with neither the skills nor the knowledge to put it all together. Water, like fencing, is one of the things non-farmers take for granted when we look at the landscape. We don’t see the time, money and effort that’s gone into creating a place where plants or animals can thrive. The lattice-like system of pipes that wrap around each property like the structure of a lung. Water, that giver of life, isn’t something to be taken lightly.

I’ve set up two siphons already. But the big picture of the farm needs big water storage and a more fail-safe system. Water pumped up to large tanks so it can be dripped onto the new orchard. Or gravity fed into a trough. Or soaked into a wallow for the pigs in summer. There are about 35 of them at the moment, and supplying clean water is a constant issue for an animal that soils its own drinking water with its muddy snout.

In the meantime, I look at my back-of-the-envelope calculations and begin to wonder how much else I don’t know about farming. What other unknowns are waiting out there for the novice. And rejoice in all the challenges of this life that we never thought we’d lead.

Men's final, strap yourselves in

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:05:58 +1100

Tonight’s Australian Open men’s final is a clash of the titans – and one from which I expect Rafael Nadal to emerge victorious. Just.

Nadal will go into the final an underdog, something he’s not had to worry about for most of his career, even though he’s shared 26 Grand Slam titles with Roger Federer, probably the greatest player of all time.

But Djokovic has just enjoyed the most dominant single year of tennis in decades, which culminated in three Grand Slam wins and an extraordinary 41 straight wins until the French Open semi-finals.

The Serb is also the reigning champion, having thrashed Andy Murray on this stage 12 months ago.

He’s got form against Nadal as well, having defeated him in the finals of the US Open and Wimbledon in 2011.

In all, he’s won the last six encounters.

But he’s also not quite at 100 per cent, and that’s why I’m going with Nadal tonight.

Djokovic seemed to strain a hamstring in the win over David Ferrer in the quarter-finals, and looked like he had trouble breathing at times in his win over Andy Murray in the semis.

Djokovic says he’s fine, but if there’s anyone who can exploit any physical weakness in the Joker’s game, it’s Nadal.

“There is no secret it is going to be physical again,” Djokovic says.

“I will do my best to recover. I have a day and a half. I will try to get as much sleep and get my recovery program underway and hope for the best. I think that's going to be crucial for me to recover and to be able to perform my best, because Rafa is fit. He's been playing well. He had an extra day.”

Even Nadal though isn’t buying into the theory of Djokovic being under par.

"It's funny, no? I saw the match on TV, and in the fifth set he was moving fantastically well, and they show images from two hours fifty before and seems like he was destroyed. Two hours fifty later he was in perfect condition. So is difficult to imagine that he has these problems. I don't know."

I think it’ll be a factor.

Nadal has only dropped two sets in the entire tournament so far, and with that crucial extra day’s break, he’s ready to go the distance on Rod Laver Arena.

"I am trying to play a little bit more aggressive and hit more winners.

The improvements that I want to make are not complete. But I am happy how I am doing, no? I don't know if it’s going to be enough for him."

I’m tipping Nadal in five, but either way, strap yourselves in for a classic.

Shrieks of nature

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 16:14:28 +1100

Already everyone’s billing the Australian Open women’s final as the "shrieker vs the screamer", as Maria Sharapova prepares to take on Victoria Azarenka.

The issue of grunting, screeching, or otherwise making a rather offensive sound during a rally isn’t a new one – remember the stick Monica Seles used to cop in the 1990s?

But it seems to have reached a new high – or low – this week, with the antics of both Sharapova and Azarenka. Jim Courier is on record as saying it’s unfair, as players rely on the sound of the ball hitting the racquet to determine how fast the ball’s coming over the net.

Several players mustered the courage to speak up about the distraction, including Agnieszka Radwanska, who lost to Azarenka in a quarter-final on Tuesday.

Ridiculously, Channel Seven had a decibel meter on centre court to measure Sharapova’s shrieks, as if it’s a competition.

Add that to the undercurrent of sexual objectification of women on the WTA Tour – still! - the Australian Open website even had a poll about which woman was the most ‘glamourous’ - and the tennis itself seems to be a sideshow.

However, screaming on court is not a matter confined to the women’s game. Those who watched Rafael Nadal’s superb victory over Roger Federer last night will have noticed the Spaniard grunting throughout, but no-one seems to mind. Why?

Whether it’s a matter of bad sportsmanship or simply that it’s annoying, why aren’t the men subject to the same criticism and ridicule?

The WTA issued a statement last night, saying it would like to clamp down on grunting in women’s tennis – but would the ATP, the men’s tour governing body, ever do the same?

Not likely.

Click here to have your say.

On court I’m backing Maria Sharapova to win her second Australian Open to add to her 2008 title. The Russian has been there, done that, and I fancy her experience and composure to get her over the line in three sets.

Azarenka is a great story – ranked number ten 12 months ago, if she wins tomorrow night she’ll be the new world number one. But she’s never even played in a Grand Slam final, let alone won one.

And I suspect she played her final one game too early, in knocking out the reigning champion Kim Clijsters.

Afterwards, she said it was such a relief she wanted to cry. I believe it’ll be Sharapova with the tears of joy tomorrow night.

Down and out in Paris and Aigle

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1100

You may wish to sit down for this, but this year's Paris-Roubaix could be marginally less cobbly.

Organisers have warned that the race's most famous stretch, the Forest of Arenberg, is under threat after utterly unforeseeable weather left bits of the road covered in soil.

"Nature has reasserted itself, and mud is covering the ground," sighed Jean-Francois Pescheux, a representative of the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO), as if Arenberg was a sandbank in the path of the Amazon and not a forest in France.

The ASO runs Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France, so it may come as a surprise that the organisation is wringing its hands about the failure by French authorities to maintain a road that is used precisely once per year, rather than offering to, say, chip in for a couple of spades to initiate the clean-up.

But perhaps like elsewhere in cycling, money is a problem. This week the ASO knocked back the chance to toss wadded-up banknotes into a pot the International Cycling Union dug out of its shed and labelled 'Global Cycling Promotion'.

The UCI, having squirreled away just 114,000 Swiss Francs (US$124,000) in 2010, are approaching "people of means" (although presumably not this guy) to invest in their new entity, which they hope will boost coffers by tapping new markets.

As the UCI is non-profit, president Pat McQuaid has promised that any doubloons which Global Cycling Promotion funnels back to Aigle will be invested into the sport.

Interestingly, he specified this money would be distributed among teams* – something that may or may not relate to the recent proposal for a breakaway series which promised teams 64 per cent ownership.

*Possibly not women's teams, admittedly.

The week in ...

... biking pure

French teenager Alexandre Dougnier is not someone who does things by halves. Dougnier, 19, has been banned for three years by the French Cycling Federation after testing positive for 12 separate performance-enhancing substances. He was riding with local club AC Boulogne-Billancourt when dope testers caught up with him at a Kermesse race in May last year – perhaps having been tipped off after noticing his urine burning holes in the pavement. The complete Dougnier cocktail is as follows: 3'HydroxyStanozolol, 16B-HydroxyStanozolol, 4B-HydroxyStanozolol, 4-Meyhylhexaneamine, Prednisone, Prednisolone, Oxandrolone, Epioxandrolone, Tuaminoheptane, Triamcinolone Acetonide, 6B-HydroxyMethandienone and 17-Epimethandienone.

... letdowns

The Tour Down Under was not everything it was cracked up to be for Vacansoleil's Dutch sprinter Kenny van Hummel. "I still haven't seen a kangaroo in the wild yet," van Hummel told Yahoo Sports. "We've ridden past kangaroo signs but seen nothing so far. Yesterday we saw a wild koala in a tree when we were on a training run, but that's it."

... global cycling promotion

Kyrgyzstan, besides being a nightmarish Scrabble hand, is best known for being a landlocked Central Asian country not closely connected with Borat or Alexandre Vinokourov. But if one man has his way cyclists will soon be flocking to the mountainous nation like snow leopards to a wounded goat. Almaz Aiylchiev wants to build a 300-mile bike path around local beauty spot Lake Issyk-Kul.

"Cycling is very popular in Europe, the United States, Russia and China and this project will be good for tourists," Aiylchiev hurrahed, placing a bulk order for bar tape and chamois cream. Kyrgyzstan's recent achievements include two revolutions and violent ethnic clashes, so it's possible that a bike path may not be enough on its own to kick-start a tourist boom.

Luckily Aiylchiev has other tricks up his sleeve, including the project’s name, Bai Issyk-Kul – chosen with foreigners in mind.
"In the Kyrgyz language it means 'rich Issyk-Kul' but in English it sounds like bicycle," Aiylchiev said. Tourism officials in Koksijde, home of this weekend's cyclocross world championships, were unavailable for comment.

Dispatches from the Twitterverse
Air Europa the worst flight company ever. To anybody out there never ever book a flight with aireuropa - @schleckfrank

I decree there shall be more grunting in women's cycling. More frocks, names on our shoes & matching sweatbands. I have kit envy #sharapova - @Bridie_OD

Anybody else perplexed by the fact that every 2nd AD on TV is selling funeral insurance? Surely it can't be that popular to invest in death? - @badencooke

Classic YouTube

The hit series 'Shit girls (skiers/yoga teachers) say' has finally inspired a spin-off covering cyclists. Man, shaved legs DO make such a difference.

Tent Embassy Protest: What People Are Saying

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1100

Cadet journalist Hannah Hollis takes a look at media coverage of the Tent Embassy protest.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda said he was “appalled” at the level of disrespect and aggression shown towards the two leaders: “Aggressive, divisive and frightening”.

He also said the actions yesterday went “too far” and questioned the timing of the protests “when we’re so close to moving towards cementing respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution”.

Similarly, former ALP President Warren Mundine said the protesters overreacted to Tony Abbott’s comments: “The words were pretty timid”.

Comedian & broadcaster Meshel Laurie took to popular blog Mamamia, urging people not to let the dramatic images harden hearts against the Indigenous community.

Meanwhile controversial Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt said the movement yesterday was “shameful” and “the reconciliation movement move must end”, stirring heated debate on the Herald Sun website.

Protester and tent embassy co-founder Michael Anderson said “police overreacted” but also told 3AW’s Neil Mitchell the protesters “misinterpreted Mr Abbott's comments” .

ABC Radio’s Michael Edwards took a different angle, saying the incident raises questions about how effective the PM’s security is.

Amy McGuire reports in Crikey that media reports of an ‘angry mob’ or protesters were inaccurate - echoing commentary in online magazine New Matilda: ‘The Mob Violence That Wasn’t’.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott has refused to retract his comments, maintaining they were “pretty timid” remarks. He condemned the protests and labelled the actions of protesters “un-Australian”.

Protester Pat Eatock told The Australian PM Julia Gillard had one week to collect the shoe she lost in the protest: “If she doesn’t meet with us I will be putting it on eBay”.

Comments made on Living Black’s Facebook page remained divided, with many in support of the protest action. Others questioned the protesters’ tactics, while some expressed distrust of media accounts on the event.

Where is the buzz?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +1100

Still on a high from the success of the national road titles and phenomenal Tour Down Under Mike Tomalaris wonders where the buzz is for the Cycling Australia Track National Championships.

Cycling Australia's track national championships begin this week.

Trust me they do!

But sadly if you live, or have been staying anywhere in the vicinity of Adelaide (as I have since the end of the Santos Tour Down Under), you'd be excused for thinking the titles are being held in another land far, far away.

Just four days after one of the most gripping editions of the TDU, watched by an estimated crowd in excess of 750,000 across seven days, you'd expect cycling's national governing body would seize the opportunity to remind South Australians there's another huge event being held in their city.

But after scanning the local newspapers and surfing the various commercial TV networks, I can genuinely report this is not the case.

Since Simon Gerrans and GreenEDGE crossed the finish line triumphant last Sunday, the stream of visitors to the TDU immediately returned home to all points around the country.

The network of roads that grace this wonderful cycling haven between the city's nearby hills and coastline have also been returned to Adelaide's rightful owners. Cyclists here may be fewer in numbers now but they just as passionate about pushing pedals.

Yet, having spoken to many cycling supporters and recreational riders in the days since the final stage of the TDU few, if any, outside of the sport's local fraternity realised that a four-day track carnival featuring a host of stars is being held in their own back yard.

I can't understand why, this is a market yearning for more after experiencing all that the TDU had to offer.

Whether it be on the road, in the velodrome or on the MTB and BMX dirt, Australia is curently blessed with world championship cycling talent and the track nationals is no exception.

Look at the names - Kaarle McCulloch, Anna Meares, Shane Perkins, Jack Bobridge, Michael Freiberg, Michael Hepburn, Luke Durbridge and Rohan Dennis.

Each have each been awarded UCI rainbow jerseys at one-time-or-another during their respective careers and all will grace the boards at the world-acclaimed Adelaide Superdrome this week.

Multiple world and Olympic champion Meares is a national treasure, while the likes of Perkins, Bobridge, Durbridge and Hepburn are likely gold medal contendors at the UCI Track World Championships and the London Olympic Games.

Look at Rohan Dennis. Here is a youngster who not only cleaned up in the under 23 time trial and road events at Ballarat, but also rode with distinction at the TDU.

If anyone is going to "make it" it's this wonderful prodigy from the suburbs of Adelaide.

Cycling Australia rightly scored many bouquets for its handling of the recent road national championships in Ballarat.

The viewing ratings for SBS''s breakthrough live coverage exceeded expectations and the names that graced our TV screens on that occasion reminded us how fortunate Australia is on the professional road circuit.

Why can't the same marketing and promotion be prioritised for the track nationals?

Do national authorities constantly need to be reminded that Australia's track heritage is filled with rich history dating back some 100 years? I shouldn't think so.

Ticket sales for the UCI Track World Championships in Melbourne over Easter already suggest a sell-out, vocal crowds will attend.

Adelaide will host the Australian Swimming Championships which double for Olympic qualification and although they are still six weeks there's already an air of anticipation.

Come on Cycling Australia lift the profile of your event and your sport!

Raise the awareness of the talent you have at your disposal, it's in the interest of Australia's sporting public and the cyclists who do the hard yards.

Shout it out loud, tell the mainstream media and make aware to the casual cycling fan what you have on offer.

There would be nothing more cringe-worthy than turning up to a half-empty Superdrome at a time when our track athletes deserve much, much more.

Cycling Central will have LIVE coverage of the final two nights of the Cycling Australia Track National Championships on 28 and 29 January from 7:30pm, SBS TWO and online.

Casting Aspersions: Cumberbatch, Joon-ho & Jones

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:30:51 +1100

Benedict Cumberbatch shows class, Bong Joon-ho trains up, and Tommy Lee Jones goes to war.

“Being a posh actor in England, you can’t escape class-typing, from whatever side you look at it. I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals,” the actor Benedict Cumberbatch recently remarked to the Radio Times. “I was brought up in a world of privilege. It can ostracise you from normal codes of conduct in society.” If that’s the case, the 35-year-old isn’t faring that badly. Cumberbatch is currently on cinema screens in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, providing a nuanced, vulnerable foil to Gary Oldman in the latter, and he stars as a modern day Sherlock Holmes on the successful BBC television series Sherlock.

And his forthcoming roles suggest that his aristocratic demeanour is being put to unexpected use by some filmmakers. In Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, Cumberbatch will not only provide the voice of Smaug the dragon, but with motion capture technology he’ll also lay the foundations of the nefarious beast’s performance. He’s also been cast in another blockbuster, 2013’s 3D Star Trek reboot sequel. The role returning director JJ Abrams has earmarked Cumberbatch for isn’t confirmed, although there are obsessives who swear that the timelines match perfectly for Cumberbatch to play a younger version of Star Trek’s most revered villain, Ricardo Montalban’s Khan from 1982’s The Wrath of Khan.

Should Cumberbatch worry? Unless he has his heart set on getting a call from Mike Leigh, probably not. As he knows, for every role the British class divide denies to him, there’s an actor who can’t get a look in for the parts Cumberbatch does get. You don’t hear Eddie Marsan or Ray Winstone complaining, and the only real risk for Cumberbatch is in allowing his background to become a kind of cinematic shorthand that pigeonholes him. That’s called doing a Hugh Grant.

South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, who has enjoyed considerable attention outside his homeland thanks to 2006’s The Host and 2009’s Mother, appears to be assembling an international cast for his next project. Based on a French comic book, Snow Piercer is set on a train in a post-apocalyptic ice age, with those on board forcefully separated by class and privilege. The actors Bong is looking to cast include Chris Evans (Captain America: The First Avenger), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Jamie Bell (The Adventures of Tintin).

And, finally, should actors worry about a character they’re portraying having previously fared badly? In The Emperor Tommy Lee Jones (No Country for Old Men) will play General Douglas McArthur, the controversial American soldier who was head of the occupying forces in Japan after World War II ended and had to decide whether the nation’s deified Emperor Hirohito would be tried as a war criminal. McArthur already has an infamous place in movie history, with Sir Laurence Olivier portraying the character in the disastrously bad 1982 Korean War epic Inchon. The film was an expensive bomb, with the ageing Olivier telling reporters he took the part for the $US1 million fee. “I’m almost used up now and I can feel the end coming,” he told reporters. “That’s why I’m taking money now.” Hopefully Tommy Lee Jones has somewhat better intentions.

From Ricardo, to Richard, to Ricardo

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:40:31 +1100

SBS presenter Ricardo Goncalves grew up in Wollongong speaking Portuguese. When he hit primary school the nuns made him 'Richard', but at SBS he became Ricardo again.

Thirty-one years ago today I was born to a wonderful Portuguese immigrant family in a hospital in Wollongong on the South Coast of New South Wales, with a full birth name of Ricardo Jorge Goncalves (Jorge, pronounced George, not Hor-hay).

But, despite the very, very Portuguese name, I’m as Aussie as they come.

As we approach Australia Day, it got me wondering what being Australian really means. What is the Australian culture? What does a typical Australian look like these days? Is Australia truly multicultural?

Last night, in his Australia Day address, neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo spoke of the racism he endured and, more recently, his daughter, despite their obvious Australian accents. They have Asian backgrounds.

Growing up in Wollongong I spent the first five years of my life speaking Portuguese as my first language. It wasn’t really until I hit primary school when English was really introduced, and it was in my first year, when the nuns anointed me “Richard”.

Neither I nor my family really questioned it or made a big deal about it. It kind of just happened. Instead of being called Ricardo at school, I was Richard. The bizarre thing was that I probably went to one of the most ethnically diverse Catholic primary schools in Wollongong, so surely it wasn’t because of my cultural background or an attempt to anglicise me.

So, throughout my schooling life I was Richard Goncalves (Gone-karlves). I excelled at school, even topping my English classes culminating in 3 unit English at high school (I never want to hear about Utopias and Anti-Utopias again) and was the College Captain at my high school, Edmund Rice College. At the same time I worked hard to earn a bit of cash, respected my family and contributed to the local Portuguese community dancing at my local folk group and Wollongong community at large through various endeavours.

I was your typical Aussie kid growing up, I just happened to have a Portuguese family who worked tremendously hard and ate lots of espetada and on the odd occasion, milho. Look them up.

Did I ever feel a sense of racism directly aimed at me? Not really, but in my early adulthood, I was told by a nightclub bouncer in Wollongong that I was refused entry into a club because my hair was too dark. It was a common excuse.

Richard stuck with me for 24 years, even as I started work on air as a journalist. Again, I didn’t question it and I didn’t think much about it to be honest. My birth certificate and official documents said Ricardo, everything else, Richard. Even my parents were calling me Richard.

But when given the chance to work at SBS, it was suggested that maybe I’d like to return to my birth name. What a great opportunity to return to really help define what it is to be Australian.

So I have a woggy name. It’s actually not that woggy. But hey, that’s who I am, and that’s what it is to be Australian. (And a chance to get some publicity and attention for myself for the name change, I do have a marketing degree after all).

Australia is a melting pot of different nationalities, respecting each other to help live the Australian way. What is the Australian way? Ignore the stereotypes, it’s not about throwing a shrimp on the BBQ or slapping Vegemite on some burnt toast.

Nor, to the other extent is it about cultural exclusion.

It’s about people that live in Australia who come from different backgrounds simply respect each other, to help each other strive to be the best they can be and the best this young country can be.

It’s as simple as that.

I’m Ricardo Goncalves, I’m Australian, I just happen to have a Portuguese background. It doesn’t define me. What does is the way I treat and respect my fellow Aussies.

Phong Nguyen has told Michael Kenny he believes the government should have pushed ahead with its original plans.

Oh, and it’s my birthday today, two days before Australia Day. That’s pretty Aussie hey?

Sundance: The Discomfort Zone

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:24:45 +1100

Re-invention is emerging as the true theme of this year's Sundance Film Festival.

In his opening day press conference, Robert Redford told a less-than-full house (blizzardy weather delayed many on their way in to Park City) that Sundance is the only “purely independent” film festival that also runs a filmmaking lab all year round. The first part of that description seemed designed to get the crowd wagging: For almost a decade now, debates over Sundance’s indie credibility have nagged at the festival, which has become a hotspot for marketers—“leveragers” in Redford’s words—and big studios hoping to manufacture a low-budget hit. In recent years the discussion about the year’s program has been framed by a kind of accusation: Is Sundance really independent? This year, a new question is taking shape: What does independent even mean anymore?

In that same opening press conference Sundance Institute director John Cooper deflected a question about the overall theme of this year’s program. “Independent film is the theme,” he said. In fact, there is a slogan for the 26th annual gathering in Park City: “Look Again.” It’s written everywhere, most prominently in the animated bumpers that precede each film. Because I am professionally programmed to look for unifying themes, I would say that after a few days here in Park City, “Look Again” could have doubled as a mantra for many of this year’s films. A large number of them involve artists stepping out of their comfort zones and into new capacities, with the hope that audiences will accept the shift. Filmmakers and distributors are also taking some risks, thinking more independently and encouraging audiences to do the same. It’s like Park City is a snow-cloaked, Shakespearean forest, and all who enter hope to emerge transformed.

It’s fitting that Stephen Soderbergh’s new film, Haywire, was released over Sundance’s opening weekend. The film, one of indie lodestar Soderbergh’s romps into glossy genre territory, features mixed martial arts superstar Gina Carano in her first acting role. Many of the festival’s high profile films have at least one foot in the discomfort zone, including Wish You Were Here, which was written by actors Felicity Price and Kieran Darcy-Smith and directed by Darcy-Smith. Actress Rashida Jones co-wrote the script for the acrid relationship comedy Celeste and Jesse Forever, comedian Mike Birbiglia tried his hand at feature filmmaking with Sleepwalk with Me, and actor Mark Webber has written and directed The End of Love, a film about single fatherhood that stars his real-life toddler.

Some directors are switching it up as well: Nicholas Jarecki, of the Jarecki documentary dynasty (his brother Eugene’s film The House I Live In, is playing in the doc competition), is receiving very warm reviews for his first feature film, Arbitrage (pictured), a finance thriller starring Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere. James Marsh, who won an Academy Award for the documentary Man on Wire in 2009 and directed Project Nim this past year, is also entering the feature arena with Shadow Dancer, an IRA-era thriller set in Belfast that stars Clive Owen and W.E. star Andrea Riseborough. Both are hoping the Sundance seal will calm skittish viewers about the switch.

Mumblecore lynchpin Joe Swanberg brought his Uncle Kent to last year’s Sundance; this year he is not an official part of the program, but admits he timed the online release of his new film to coincide with the festival. Marriage Material is available for free for the week that Sundance is taking place. Swanberg’s move is in keeping with a festival drawn more and more toward digital platforms and filmmaker-driven channels of distribution. Just as directors (like Detropia contenders Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady) now routinely seek funding on sites like Kickstarter and Goodfilm.org, this year I have noticed it is the filmmakers themselves who stop to chat you up, not the publicists, and buyers talk as heatedly about VOD rights as they used to about splashy numbers for theatrical exhibition. After resisting this move for the better part of a decade, the movie industry finally feels ready to think about new ways to get eyes onto the films. Just before the festival began the Sundance Institute’s “Artist Services” program announced a partnership with online distribution agency New Video. As of this year all Sundance films, past and present, are eligible to sign a deal for digital distribution—a godsend especially for older films that fell through the cracks.

This year Sundance has also teamed up with YouTube to provide a showcase for their short film selections, nine of which are available for viewing online. One of those, called Henley, directed by Craig MacNeill, is a snippet of a young boy’s lonely world living at his father’s roadside motel. Its biggest asset may be the beguiling face of young actor Hale Lytle, but Henley is well shot and sharply edited—a tonal exercise with a startlingly dark ending. Sundance shorts often function as calling cards, or teasers for feature versions of the same story. This year, by virtue of being instantly available around the world, the selections also provide a glimpse of the future of independent film.

Attack ads of the Republican bloodbath

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 09:50:11 +1100

The most interesting thing about the array of Republican attack ads is that in the end, these guys are supposed to be on the same team.

For those readers who enjoy blood sports, Newt Gingrich’s emphatic victory in the South Carolina Republican Primary should be welcomed.

Gingrich not only won the support of Republicans in South Carolina, he won with over 40 per cent of the vote. Huge. Mitt Romney, the supposed sure thing, limped across the line humiliated in collecting only 27 per cent of the vote.

This shows South Carolina’s Republicans don’t care for several things. They don’t care about Gingrich’s infidelities, they don’t care about ethics violations that saw him flung from the Senate, they don’t care about his connections to lobby groups and profiteering from companies that played a role in the economic collapse.

They also don’t care much about Romney.

News last week that Rick Santorum had actually won Iowa – and not Romney – was also a major blow to Romney’s ambition. The supposed favourite is now not universally liked – even by Republicans.

The race is now genuinely wide open and will provoke brutal blood letting before the party decides which candidate it considers – in its wisdom – the best to beat President Obama.

Remember him?

So what are the candidates to do? Certainly not discuss their plans for a potential Presidency or flag solutions to fix the economy. Beside general rhetoric about small government, low taxes, and moral values, the candidates have taken a similar path – beat the other guys over the head. Viciously and angrily.

Here’s Mitt Romney’s latest attack ad on Newt Gingrich. Theme: “After being sanctioned for ethics violations and resigning in disgrace, Newt Gingrich cashed in as a D.C. insider.”

Here’s an attack on Newt Gingrich from Ron Paul supporters. Theme: Gingrich is dangerous and must not win Florida.

Here’s Newt Gingrich attacking Romney for apparently being pro-abortion. Theme: Romney can’t be trusted.

Romney gets it from Rick Santorum too. Theme: If you vote for Mitt, you’re a sheep endorsing what the “establishment” wants. Oh, and by the way, did you know Romney’s for abortion (he’s not)?

Here’s another ad attacking Newt Gingrich funded by Mitt Romney supporters, a so-called “Political Action Group” called Restore Our Future.

It’s important to note that these guys are all supposed to be on the same team. The battle against President Obama has yet to begin. If any candidate is still alive by then.

The black, white and grey of racism

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:56:37 +1100

While we should never forget that racism exists in Australian society, we should also put our country's experience into its proper context.

It seems everyone has an opinion on racism.

Dr Charlie Teo's Australia Day speech claiming that it still exists in our society, got enough coverage and sparked enough reaction to attest to that.

People seem to fall into the following four camps: either you agree, disagree, think the debate is exaggerated, or believe reverse discrimination is just as prevalent.

I think all are valid. Which is why this is such a messy debate.

As a fourth generation Australian (who has inherited more of my father's Malay-Indonesian genes than my mother's Irish-Australian) I've copped my fair share of racist comments over the years.

But taking offence depends on who's saying it.

I have plenty of ethnic friends who happily banter among themselves and with white Australians - usually at the expense of a stereotype.

They'll argue that it's the 'Australian way' to be self depreciating, cheeky, and to push the boundaries through humour.

They're among friends and know the intent is good.

But if it comes from the mouth of a stranger, it's labelled a racist remark.

A contradiction, you say?

This debate is full of them.

I remember my girlfriend (who is half Asian), advertising her car in the paper.

"I'm going to put lots of 8s in the price to attract the Chinese; it’s perfect for them," she told our friends.

Exactly why was it perfect?

"It's small, safe and pretty much drives itself," she declared.

Some might find her connotation of Asians and their standard of driving to be crude.

Others may find it amusing.

But this is the whole point about the racism debate.

Some migrants have looked me in the eye and vowed there’s no racism in Australia.

On the other end of the scale, ethnics themselves can be racist.

Racism isn't just confined to our shores. It's happening all around the world and in more serious circumstances.

Let there be no doubt that some on this planet are paying a heavy price for being a minority.

You only have to turn on World News Australia at night to witness some of the atrocities in other countries, where racism leads to displacement, violence and death.

For Australia, the race debate is always going to be a part of us.

Ever since the First Fleet, then decades of the White Australia policy, followed by Hansonism and now the struggles with new arrivals - undertones of racism have been here long before any of us were born.

The country's dark chapters can be perfectly summarized on four programs recently aired on SBS: The First Australians, Immigration Nation, Go Back to Where You Came From, and Once Upon A Time In Cabramatta.

It's clear we have much to be ashamed of.

But at the same time, we shouldn't use our past as the only basis to debate the future of our wonderful country.

I used to feel a little squeamish talking about racism in the same way some people talk about multiculturalism.

Often, these two topics attract great big sweeping motherhood statements about how our country should be.

But with one in four of us now born overseas, surely we can do better than this?

We mustn't forget the countless success stories of ethnic migration, or the fact that our country is incredibly peaceful given the number of flags we have living under the Australian one.

As the topic of racism rears its head again this Australia day week, let's remind ourselves that somehow, we are doing a better job than most countries around the world.

That's something to be proud of.

Japanese filmmakers tackle the 3/11 tragedy

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:31:02 +1100

Three films focusing on Japan’s nuclear plant meltdown and the aftermath will be unveiled next month. 

“If one was to be poisoned by radiation, if he or she did so out of their own will and conviction I believe it to be perfectly fine. But you can’t force that onto the children. The children, you must distance them from the poisoned areas.”

So says Koide Hiroaki, Associate Professor at Kyoto University’s Nuclear Test Facility and a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner, in the documentary Friends After 3.11, which will have its international premiere at next month’s Berlin International Film Festival.

Also being unveiled at the festival are two other Japanese films dealing with the March 11, 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station and ensuing tsunami.

Funahashi Atsushi’s Nuclear Nation: The Fukushima Refugees Story, will have its world premiere in Berlin. Produced by Documentary Japan, it’s described as a portrait of a mayor without a town who tries desperately to keep together a community scattered across various emergency shelters in the Tokyo suburbs. In the process, he questions old certainties.

The New York-based Atsushi’s last movie was 2009’s Deep in the Valley, which combined a contemporary romance set in the old section of downtown Tokyo with a period drama based on Five-Story Pagoda, a classic literary work by Rohan Koda.

Atsushi has said, “My films aspire to present a universal ‘visual’ language of human emotions, which essentially highlights not the differences in people but the commonalities in them.”

Toshifumi Fujiwara’s No Man’s Zone (Mujin chitai, pictured) delves into the contaminated zone around the nuclear reactors and is said to evoke “images of an invisible apocalypse.”

The film premiered at Tokyo FILMeX in November. In a laudatory review, JFilmPowWow’s Nicholas Vroman observed that Fujiawara’s journey “takes him within the 50 kilometer no man’s zone surrounding the crippled and leaking Fukushima Nuclear plant. The journey is not merely the usual disaster sightseeing trip, but a serious questioning of how it was and is being mediated, along with a healthy dose of asides and commentary, interviews with a handful of holdouts living with the zone and scenes of destruction countered with things like blooming cherry trees and flowers. For a film about one of the major disasters that ever hit Japan, it’s surprisingly beautiful.”

Directed by Iwai Shunji, Friends After 3.11 screened on Japanese broadcasters Sky Perfect TV and Asahi News Star in November. “After 3.11, I noticed I’d made new friends. After this East Japan Earthquake, we all bore a deep wound,” said Shunji.

“Countless lives, treasures were taken from us. And the nuclear accident at Fukushima Plant became a catastrophe worse than Chernobyl. From now on, both Japan and the world will have to live with this burden. Speaking with many people, I made new friends. The realities of the disaster as told by these ‘friends,’ the days following, and then today. I want to portray the present and future of Japan, with all of its problems and obstacles.”

During the filming of an earlier doco on the subject, Tatsuya Mori’s 311, some survivors reacted angrily when they were approached by the film crew. People expressed horror and fury when they saw the cameras, the China Post reported when the film premiered in October at the Busan festival.

“We felt we had a duty to record what had happened and there is certainly a degree of egoism to filmmaking,” said Mori. “But we were constantly asking ourselves 'how do we approach this, what do we do to help those who survived and those who are dead?' In the end I think that became the theme of the whole film — how do we react to such a thing?”