Tricky Business - a review of the ad, not the show.

Dear Channel 9,

Wow! This show looks amazingly shit. You have really outdone yourselves!

Muster up all your imaginative powers and think of a modern, successful show. Just for example, I'll go with Breaking Bad. The catch is a cancer ridden high school teacher starts cooking meth to pay his hospital bills. Awesome right?

What exactly is the catch of this 'Tricky Business' series? A 'disfunctional' family? Shit.
A couple that break up a lot? A daughter that wants attention? This is 2012 you fuckheads, these 'catches' are not even close to being interesting. How old are you writers, ninety?

ALSO the ambiguous name 'Tricky Business' isn't fooling anyone (well its probably fooling most people but fuck you anyway). You come up with these shitty non-specific names, because you know you have made a terrible show and by using a non specific name (as opposed to the name of a character, or family, or something that would make the show look retarded-even for Australian standards- if they changed it completely - like The Simpsons not having the Simpsons in it anymore) you can kill off all your terrible characters and themes when the audience starts telling you how shit you are or an aboriginal gets offended.

 Like all great essays (hah) I shall finish in a quote, from the late and great Bill Hicks.

Yes replace marketing/advertising dicks with 'creators of 'Tricky Business'' and you get the message. Because when it comes down to it, you are just marketing scumbags, not writers/directors/artists/mimes. You have made another polluting, lowest common denominator product that you will chop and change and huck to the dumbest bidder. Eat a massive dick.

FOUR KINGS/paranoid racist rant?

Something funny happened the other day. I went to the dentist. If you remember I don't like dentists, especially ethnic ones. However, I waltzed into my new dentist, shook his hand, and noticed he was Egyptian or Turkish or something. The funny thing was I didn't mind him poking his hands around my molars. I blame my new-found lack of ignorant racism towards Middle-Eastern (I think) people on Four Kings. It was pretty damn good.

But goddamn reviewing good movies is hard. I can't just rage and let you slugs feed off my hateful energy like the... slugs you are. Four Kings follows the lovable-fuckup-underdog comedy structure, cleverly woven onto a tale of four Islamic terrorists planning an attack in London. It successfully and refreshingly pokes fun at Muslims,a religion/people/culture/whatever that is usually sickeningly immune to such fun-pokery. When that type of fun-pokery, like a cartoon drawing of Mohammed, usually results in riots and death threats and decapitations. I think where Four Kings succeeds is in its fun poking at not only the religious extremists, but the society that surrounds and spawns such whacky individuals.

All shits and giggles aside, Four Kings is dealing with a serious thing, the fact a lot of  world wants to blow you up because you are a lazy cracker that doesn't bow to the east eight  times a day. All logic aside, Four Kings manages to make us like these guys. Is it because they are idiots and we sympathise with them? Nope, the British police are also dickheads and we don't like them. We like them because they are the underdogs. We watch them tumble and fumble on their rocky-road to success (blowing up people that don't share their humble religious views). How easily manipulated WE BE.

Which brings to my point at long last. The unsettling thing about Four Kings is how easily  manipulated an audience is. An hour and a half long series of images and sounds has us  hollering and cheering for people that no ifs-ands-or-buts want to murder you me and everyone in between.

At the risk of sounding paranoid, if a feature length movie can manipulate so well, what about the non fucking stop streams of advertising molesting our eyeballs at any given second?! I'm  just counting my lucky stars I live in a cave on the moon and am transmitting this bullshit one-way  through the new fillings in my teeth. PEACE OUT EARTHLINGS

Red State

Red State made sweet sweet non-consensual love to my expectations. With my popcorn and coke I bounded into the cinema  sat in front of my laptop with a big bag of peanuts hum-drumly expecting something similar to Kevin Smith's previous jaunts, Mallrats, Clerks, Dogma, etc, but apparently papa's got a brand new bag. I liked his past movies and all, but Smitty has milked the charmingly-nerdy comedy cow bone dry and he knows it. Now he's bopped that cow on the head and ground it up into the delicious burrito that is Red State. Good for him.

Red State state is choc-full of what Smith's other movies are noticeably absent of, GRRRRRRIT! Grit is totally underrated and underused. Grit brings the terrifying randomness and unpredictability of real life to the light, sound and motion in front of you. It sucks you into the psychological experience a movie should be. MOST other Kevin Smith movies were great and all, but they were more clever, nerdy mixed up discussions about pop culture and some whimsical grown-up scenarios, rather than 'psychological experiences'.

Red State begins as a horror movie, and draws you in like one. But then BAM, the real horror doesn't come from the gore or the tension (not that there isn't plenty of both), but the horror comes from the VERY real characters, who you wouldn't be surprised to see on CNN or Fox or some stupid U.S news show. The usual Kevin Smith social commentary is plentiful, but this time the commentary is manifested much more effectively, through convincing, edge-of-your-bean-bag situations as opposed to half hour lectures on alternative pop culture from Ben Affleck. Because we are watching a movie after all, not a... lecture. Genre-wise, Red State becomes more of a serious action/thriller, but the grittiness keeps the core of the film much scarier than any Hostel 7 or Saw 15 torture-porn. Word of the day being GRIT.

YET for some reason my main praise is for the tame budget. At four million, there's no pointless extras or helicopter scenes, the fat has been left out of  this burrito (still prodding that metaphor) which is refreshing, when you could use the budget of most hollywood pieces of shit to buy all the burritos in burrito world. The bag of peanuts didn't cut it as dinner, can you tell???  

BUT what is the message/question/beefy core of Red State? Religion is awful? The FBI are awful? Humans are awful? Naw. Its just a nice solid diss to the Red States of Americuh, with too many guns and too few brain cells. BURRITOS.

Donnie Darko

http://whatculture.com/film/50-reasons-why-donnie-darko-might-just-be-the-greatest-film-of-all-time.php

AT HOME WITH JULIA

A political satire about the day-to-day life of Victorian prime minister blah blah blah fuck fuck shit. According to google, starring Amanda Bishop and some other Australian actors people. 

Well obviously, it blows.

Australian television. We have potential, right? Kath and Kim, was good I guess, Wilfred, and there’s probably more... However, on the very rare occasion that we spawn something watchable, producers just make the same thing over and over and over and over trying to recreate the same thing for the same effect and get confused when it don’t not work. It’s like a comedian who tells you a joke, then tells you the same joke again with a funny hat on. He then wonders why nobodies laffing. Instead of revising his material, he tells the joke AGAIN, but in a funny accent and with a bigger hat. But alas, it’s still the same punchline.

*

 *relevant

Enough shitty metaphors. To put it very politely, Amanda Bishop's (playing Gillard) voice acting leaves a lot to be desired. Her accent sounds like a mix between Kath and/or Kim, and the guy that plays John Howard on Full Frontal. It was hilarious on Full Frontal because it was a silly, over-the-top skit show. And this is political satire, right? It needs to have some kind of veil of seriousness to work, but Bishop's stupid voice reminds me of when you make fun of someone by impersonating someone in a voice they don't-even-have, which works when your teasing your boss or wife or parole officer, but not for an entire show. 

    

And the premise. Boy oh boy. The premise of this particular episode says a lot about Australian audiences, or what show's creators think of Australian audiences. The premise, is Julia Gillard is having some important industry heads over for dinner, but OH MY IT ALL GOES PEAR SHAPED but then turns out okay. WHAT A ROLLER COASTER.

Really? Fucking REALLY? I know I watch about six-thousand times more television than the average Australian (scratch, human), but I'm pretty sure this was the plot to the first episode of I Love Lucy. This premise has been satired to death, it was satired in the ‘Behind the Laughter’ episode of the Simpsons, as the fake first episode of the Simpsons where Homer is having his boss to dinner but HEYO it all goes pear shaped. I remember it being satired in Ren and Stimpy also, more than once. I didn’t even Google those references, that is sad.  

Things don't even go THAT pear shaped, the industry heads want some Australian food but HEYO that’s hard to get in Canberra “LOL you can’t get Australian food in Australia?! How Whacky!” YOU GET THE PICTURE.

It might be appealing to those interested in Australian politics *gun to head pull trigger hand movements* but those kinds of people are interested in things like, well Australian politics. Ask them which is better out of the Age and the Herald Sun and they'll be entertained for hours. For those interested in funny television shows however, this does not cut it. 

Black Swan

Torture son, straight torture. AND I don’t mean torture like getting your wisdom teeth pulled or watching Enter the Void. The good kind of torture, that you WANT to watch (don’t deny it) because its fun, and you live in a comfy Western country where the closest thing we will get to torture is like-I-said, Vietnamese dentists, and being in a hurry and accidently opening itunes.

Black Swan ties you to a chair, burns you with cigarettes, bites of your nipples, cuts out unnecessary organs, gives you a blood transfusion to keep you alive, then makes you choose which of your children it rapes first before it douses you in gasoline and lights you up. And oh it feels soooo good. The pacing, the music, the visuals, the colour schemes all maintain this twisted cinematic rhythm that is excruciatingly brilliant. The type of movie that makes you shield your eyes at points, but not to stop watching (fuck you that makes sense).

Natalie Portman kicks raw-fuckin’-ass as the mental, skeletally thin lead ballerina. She tears herself in two to become the Black Swan, and we see it and feel it right along with her. The psycho-sexual dominance of her trainer will be seen by a lot of viewers as mere sleaze from his part, but he is doing everything he needs to do to make her become her evil doppelganger. Black Swan is about real art, and is real art, like it is Black Swan, about Black Swan. Follow me? Real art comes from real sacrifice. To make an audience experience an emotion, the artist needs to have experienced it. Plus you get to see Mila Kunis go down on Natalie Portman KA-CHING.

It’s refreshing to see an amazingly structured movie about a classic art form, in this day and age of twitters and Justin Beibers and super-AIDS. It is easy to forget the effort put into art and entertainment once upon a time, art or entertainment now being boiled down to Kanye West tweeting about his new fucking fish tank. Go get Black Swan. It’s brutal.

Enter the Void

Shit, I think. I unwittingly downloaded a version with Swedish subtitles. Oh well. Then suddenly, FUCK. The opening credits are a strobing, neon, typographical pack-rape on my corneas. Along with a very brutal electro track by UK artist LFO, synced perfectly with the epilepsy-inducing electric circus-circus visuals. The credits are absolutely what credits should be. After they rip-cord through my skull I am cross legged and one-hundred-percent ready to ENTER THE FUCKING VOID.

And then the rest of the move happens. The choppy story follows Oscar, an amateur psychonaut on a journey through drugs, death, Tokyo and incest. He is shot by the trigger happy Tokyo 5-0, then we follow his consciousness floating around, mainly stalking his silly chums and watching his little sister get fucked by everything. The scenes leading up to Oscar's death set the tone of the film. They involve acid, DMT, a discussion on the Tibetan Book of Death, the 'tone' being pretentious-as-fuck, a tone familiar to anyone who's ever eavesdropped at a coffee shop in the North of Melbourne.

One the plus side, Gaspar Noe lives up to his filthy cheese-eating reputation. His camera buzzes around like a ghost, achieving  mind-fuckingly impossible angles, exploring his world of aggression and degeneracy in a unique way. I've seen donkey-snuff shows easier to stomach than a lot of the stuff Noe wants to show you. However, just because the angles are unique doesn't make them good. Kudos for the trying something new angle, but for-fucks-sake, why is it such an unfathomable concept for the majority of movie makers to grasp that it is completely possible to entertain and experiment at the same time??? Just ask a broke hooker.  

As you should have guessed, viewers expecting plot development, likeable characters and an ending will be sorely disappointed. It is misleading to label Enter the Void as anything but an experimental film, other labels are just slapped on to sell tickets, or downloads, or however you people access these things. Experimental film, as in experimenting and exploring just what in fact film is-all-the-fuck-about. This is good. Enter the Void could not be Enter the Void in any other format. For example most films could communicate their ‘essence’ in other, cheaper formats like novels, plays, cave drawings or twitter updates. But not Enter the Void. Bring it on. Additionally, according to Noe, his prior film Irreversible, was solely made to get the cash to make Enter the Void, describing it as a ‘bank robbery’. You gotta respect that.  

I recommend playing Enter the Void in the background of your next mushroom-tea party. The visuals will blow your tiny minds (read lots of neon lights), yet the lack of plot will stop you from getting overly involved, so you can keep those conversations about how the static on the TV is redefining your world view going healthily.  

On the plus side, you get to see sex from the point of view of a womb. God bless the technology modern film-makers have at their disposal.