Full Marx to China

This story is irresistible. Reports are in that an all-singing, all-dancing stage version of Das Kapital will be staged in Shanghai. The aim is to show how Marxism, Karl not Groucho, is as relevant in today’s economic crisis as when Das Kapital appeared, without high-kicks and sidekicks, in 1867.

Zhang Jun, Fudan University economics professor and advisor on the show believes that in post communist China, “the entertainment and theatrical elements will help ordinary people better understand why the financial crisis is happening. The director, He Nian, will incorporate modern elements in the show to make it easily connect to people’s lives and feelings.” Marxism will be shown in an accurate, trendy and entertaining musical show as Fascism was in “Springtime for Hitler”.

May capitalism be overthrown and the proletariat released through musicals. A sequel, “Engels Ueber Berlin” is no doubt already in preparation.

Talk and Die

We all know the teacher’s evil eye. It fixes the over-verbal malefactor or miscreant with a cruel sternness that says ‘talk and die’.

This week google has gone mad with people fascinated by the cause of Natasha Richardson’s death. In traumatology, it is “a clinical presentation in acceleration-deceleration brain injury, which may cause massive cerebral edema, that may have a latency period–eg, 48-72 hrs, until death. Cf subarachnoid hemorrhage” (medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com).

People suffering from “Talk and Die Syndrome” may appear fine at first, talking and acting normally as Richardson was, only to slip slowly into unconsciousness, coma and even death as blood floods the brain.

As we know from the many reports, Natasha Richardson was reported to be “fine at first” after she hit her head in a skiing accident, but the 45-year-old actress’ health began to deteriorate within an hour. The press reported her dead before she actually was, spread a fascination with talk and die syndrome, and have now elevated the actress to Heather Ledgerian ‘too young to die’ posthumous immortality. The media covered her accident, not death, death, tributes, funeral, organ donation – the full grief process of her family – in full view despite the family’s and Neeson’s desire for ‘privacy’. There is a new term for this: ‘grief porn’ (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10564063). Natasha Richardson (Redgrave Neeson) died on March 18, 2009.

She was lovely, intelligent, a Tony-award winner (“Cabaret”, 1998), a Redgrave and so a Royal, Liam Neeson’s beloved partner and, like Princess Diana, a mother of two fine boys. She was wonderful in The Handmaiden’s Tale (1990) and The White Countess (2005), a Li-lo and a J-Lo costar and now she is elevated beyond what she achieved in her career. All tragic, and now we all know what talk and die is.

It is not the wish that occurs in your brain when someone talks and talks ad infinitum without letting another person get a word in edgewise.

Mars Attacks in Christchurch

The film ends with Tom Jones surrounded by surviving woodland creatures singing ‘It’s not unusual’. This is one of the best ways on record to evacuate a movie session to make time for the popcorn-pickers-up to vacuum the aisles prior to the next session. Mars Attacks is a film very conscious of the great powers of music. Not only does the Danny Elfman soundtrack emulate the ’50s cheesy, bubbly-gummy sci-fi classics, but so too are characters revealed through the type of music they like (hillbilly caravan trash, Las Vegas Copacabana-style trash, new age dovey trash, etc). The movie is director Tim Burton’s homage to the movies he loved as a child as well as a warped critique of America pretending to be a parody of Independence Day.

While it’s fun to see Glenn Close get wiped out by a chandelier and Sarah Jessica Parker end up with her own chihuahua’s body, the funniest part is the climax, with 30s star Sylvia Sidney as the grandma, Florence, outcast in a Twilight Home by her family for being too senile. It is her gramophone, playing the Indian Love Call, a famous Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy number covered by Slim Whitman in the 50s, that provides the instrument that kills the martians. “When I’m calling you” – and the last syllable is an endless yodel. Their bubble heads pop viscerally at the sound of the yodel-like C&W muzac.

The same strategy is used in marketing. It works in shops at Christmastime. The minute I hear ‘I saw Mammy Kissing Santa Claus’ or those other offensive Coca-Cola Christmas songs, that shop loses my business, period or I lose my nut.

This strategy – appalling music – has great potential in social control and policing. It worked in Rockdale, New South Wales and now works also in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Christchurch’s Central City Business Association are piping music into areas such as hoon-hit Stewart Plaza. They say this muzac provides a calming effect and may also be offensive to the young troublemakers’ ears, such as classical pieces and classic cheesy Barry Manilow hits like Copacabana and Mandy. “The kids hate [Manilow's songs] and they don’t hang around,” said Rockdale City Council spokesman Vince Carrabs. The Kiwis emulated the Aussie idea, but I think they should take a leaf out of Mars Attacks! and go one step further.

Unsurprisingly, one of the hoons interviewed Jesse Sharland, 17, said his friends would “pump out some Slayer [thrash metal] … and will drown out Manilow and blast him back to the 80s”. There’s an Arnie Governator movie I recall where Arnie blows away such a punk and his ghetto blaster, grunting one of his one-liners.

Taking this strategy to his Kiwi heart, West Auckland Mayor Bob Harvey, ever the everyman and the patriot, prefers to pipe local content: Kiri Te Kanawa’s shrill operatic tones are “so bloody hideous” to the teens that he hopes they won’t congregate in and graffiti-ise public spaces. Mr Harvey describes the effect of Hooked-on-Kiri on the teens as “like us being locked in a room with hip-hop. It would be enough to drive you crazy.”

Still, Harvey, not far enough. When the graffiti spray cans come out, remember that in Indonesian temples there are gongs which reach notes so subsonic that they can rupture human organs.

For the real story of New Zealand’s war on hoons see:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10559860http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10559860

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10560080

Whatever Happened to Michael Jackson?

The revelation that Michael Jackson, in his new spiritually elevated state with his embracing of Islam, expunged of his worldly belongings from Never Never Land in the recent auctions of his bejewelled gloves and various payhouses, is to make a comeback fills me with apprehension. (See http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/music/jacko-plans-comeback/2009/03/04/1235842453106.html). The concerts would be Jackson’s first since he was acquitted on child molestation charges three years ago.

Apparently they will also be his last. Is that a promise?

What I wonder more is not that he might sound now like Cat Stevens, but that he might look like, well, not a cat, but your mind ought to be boggling.

I have found a really, really mean website (http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Jackson.html) that might put speculation to rest. Here are two highlights showing Michael at 41 and 42, and the icon he was, perhaps, aspiring to.

I want Ice Cream!

In New Zealand, Weta Digital, Peter Jackson’s production company, is preparing the first of the TinTin movies, The Secret of the Unicorn, due in ’11 and now Spielberg seems back on board for directing duties according to imdb. Jamie Bell will don the plus-fours and the impossibly peaked hair as Tin Tin, Simon Pegg will beef out the blue sweater and Captain Haddock and Daniel Craig will be suitably piratical as Red Rackham. It’s all as exciting as The Lord of the Rings was, and there are daily announcements about it on: http://tintinmovie.org/category/tintin-movie-cast-crew/

Equally fascinating are the discussion boards where ‘TinTinologists’ debate about racism and animal cruelty in TinTin in the Congo (a black boy is named Snowball; animals for Africa are slain for laughs, including a herd of antelopes and an elephant) on the website http://www.tintinologist.org/.

One current debate (well, current when I wrote this) concerned whether in The Land of the Black Gold, Abdullah should have been disciplined for repeatedly demanding ice cream and bawling like a bored child in a supermarket queue surrounded by chocolate. “I want ice dream”/ “Pow”. Some argue that this would be cruelty to children, just as Tin Tin was cruel to Snowy after disciplining him when he drank Haddock’s spilled whiskey.

In my book, children who repeatedly demand ice cream without saying please or without deserving any ice cream deserve reprimanding, no matter what Sue Bradford (Kiwi pinko no-spanking icon) might say.

"I want ice cream!"

In New Zealand, children who want ice cream go down to the local dairy with a gun and hold up the always-Indian shopkeepers and demand “I want ice cream”.

If you do not believe me, read this story: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10559329 and file it under ‘Only in New Zealand’.

The title is ‘Boys steal ice cream at gunpoint’.

Nature’s Rampage

Floods! Fires! Mad-as-a-meataxe chimps tearing people’s faces off! Cows on the loose in suburbia! Tigers savaging people who are only trying to be friendly! Crock attacks! Bondi Beach shark attacks! Yes, media, nature is on the rampage.

The situation just developed another symptom in New Zealand with the news that the bees are on the ‘attack’.

Near Tauranga, a 20-year-old man spent a night in rugged bush with a broken finger and other injuries, dressed in just a singlet and shorts, the Kiwi national costume, after being attacked by a swarm of bees and falling 35m down a cliff.

Extra! Extra! Read about the attack! http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10559211

Nightmare on Elm Row!

I come from Dunedin and have long remarked that it contains more than its fair share of the creepy and the iconic. It could be due to its notoriously C-grade water, its dour sou’wester Scottish Presbyterian heritage or merely its murkily drizzly subclimate, but it does produce a lot of strange grizzled blokes in straggly beards who wear bare feet with and without sandals in the middle of winter. You can regularly see bobbing buskers, bin burglars and locals dressed as yetis in main street.

The city and its surrounds have their fair share of tragic males such as David Malcolm Gray of Aramoana. And possibly others, who I won’t name. It was here where Janet Frame was nearly lobotomised. It comes as no surprise that the media’s creep of the week comes from here too.

We all know that creepy blokes like to hide behind handsome avatars on the internet. They like to create glamourised second selves and to lure unsuspecting females into their lairs. Creepy hairy yetis can pretend to be Jasons and Kyles. But what happens when their quarry actually comes from far across the seas and visit them?

Peter Robb is now a notorious unemployed 54-year-old man. But he is also the guy who lured an intelligent, attractive German woman, Maja Gille, 36, with his poetry, photoshopped past pictures and imitation of a Keatsian, willowy PhD student. He was allowed his harmless fantasy – but not to overstep the line … Myspace and its like contain a wealth of creeps, as we’ve already seen this week.

This story illustrates the moral that everyone already suspected. People are not what they seem in Cyberland. Fantasies merge with dreams and delusions. Suddenly you are on a plane to a perfect stranger, expecting a dreamboat but end up with a shipwreck. Gille escaped from the hell house after having to spend a night in horror, texting a man she met on the plane to come and get her. “He had such a creepy aura. I was in shock. His home was really a horror house, I would say. Little roosters, cats and chickens lived in the house. There was an ugly smell, a dead animal smell, and an ugly smell [of] old clothes.” (See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10558013).

I hope she sells the movie rights and gets Diane Kruger to play her, and Freddy Krueger to play Peter Robb.

Does this look like a photorealistic person to you?

Oscared and Aus-cared!

I enjoy the annual self-congratulatory, catwalking indulgence of the Oscarfest, I admit. Guilty pleasure as allowed, as is mocking the starlet who did not get it quite right. And if the show weren’t so shamefully broken up by banal, loud advertising, I might actually watch the broadcast, especially since it hasn’t been exclusively taken by Sky TV this year.

Here in Aussie the Hugh Jackman factor might even turn it into a national event. The whole nation awaits Heath Ledger’s family’s acceptance, and the outpouring of national grief from today’s Day of Mourning will receive another apex. Will they play Waltzing Matilda?

We expect fully a reference to the Aussie disaster – not the movie Australia, intermittent though its rewards were courtesy of Bazza and Nic, but the ongoing Victorian bushfires. These are now marked in history as an event the nation united to bounce back from. A defining moment, Aussie’s Wahine. As I write new fires burn in the Warburton Valley and Yarra Valley and could threaten numerous towns. This is only kilometres from where I go every day to work. This is close to home, and no Julia Roberts movie.

At the Aussified Oscars I expect to see Slumdog’s unslummed children, a well Milked Sean Penn, a clothed Kate Winslet and probably Penelope Cruz (not my choice this year – Volver was better – but seemingly the world’s since she possesses the Mighty Aphrodite Babe factor) stroll across the podium in their Armani or Gucci with downbeat and austere recessional accessories and an absence of bliiingy baubles. A tear or more should be shed in catharsis. I prefer the historical reinvention of Milk to the actorly reinvention of The Wrestler by far, and feel strongly that film titles with a reference to titular main character are fast in fashion (stand up Benjamin Button, which I so far ignored, despite the Cate factor).

Having seen Kate in The Reader, I can earnestly say that this adaptation deserves everyone’s time and attention though it is not the uplifting experience that Slumdog is. A meditation on human responsibility, it is thought-provoking, beautifully structured, literate, moving and worthy. It has something to say about humanity’s need for catharsis too. It bears scrutiny as a cerebral text, and is endlessly worthy of analysis. Its three act structure continually surprises us as it jumps from uncomfortable love story to holocaust judgment to meditation on responsibility, ‘doing’ and inaction. It definitely deserves its kudos, although it’s this year’s Atonement: the symbolic British fifth-place taker.

Seeing Stars

I love to collect autographed photographs of classic, and sometimes not so classic, stars of yore. Here are a couple of excellent ink-signed ones, plus one I met.

Australia (italics, please)

The movie divided the nation and the world. My verdict seems to be that of many. The indigenous people and landscape scenes were fascinating and mesmerising, if a little tourism Australia-inspired. The early scenes were uneven and the cinematography inappropriate: luckily it evened up as the movie became a more traditional mustering-and-wartime yarn. Anything with Nicole Kidman was material for the barf bag. The Aussies have really embraced this film as the best depiction of themselves and their forebears on screen. It certainly taught the world well and truly that the Aboriginals do not speak of the dead, a message delivered with a sledgehammer. They love it far more than your average international reviewer. Some cruel reviewers said that Nicole, past-botox, herself looked like a bat-face with skin taped back. Maybe she was unconsciously trying to mimic another Aussie icon, the flying fox. Maybe she’s much better at motherhood these days. Meanwhile Hugh Jackman, minus his own creature features, gets to put Australia on the map at the Oscars. I thought Cate Blanchett had already done that, being a default nominee, except for this year. Although there’s no god if Sean and Kate and Penny don’t stroll across the podium, it will be interesting to see who accepts for Heath and how people, very much set in post-Diana, media-legend-making mentality will react, and who the camera will show off-guard with tears in their eyes. It’s “Leakation, Leakation, Leakation”.