For you, dear Voxfrockers, we braved two cinemas bristling with Coke-slurping, popcorn-gnashing coughers, sniffers, chatterers and lolly-bag rattlers to compose learned reviews of Noah and Tracks. Then we joined guffawing hoards for the first, traditionally iffy nights of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Why (we hear you ask) did we set such taxing challenges for this April Fool’s edition of Voxbullets? Because we love you. Natch.
(Longform post: Allow 6 minutes read time. Scroll down for Noah, Tracks, Denise Scott, Frank Woodley).
NOAH
Let’s start with a few spoilers. Noah (Russell Crowe) is a touchy-feely-flower-child-God-fearing-zealot with wife, two sons and murderous tendancies. The Ark is huge, natch, to accomodate all God‘s creatures two by two, so Noah enlists help from a battalion of kind-hearted house-sized rock/spirit monsters. As you do. Noah’s dream sequences throw-back to that apple/snake business in the Garden of Eden, played out by a pea-green goggle-eyed slitherer and an Adam and Eve who glow like those aliens in the film Cocoon. Getting the picture? Daft doesn’t cover it, particularly during the film’s first half when puzzlement assumes the ascendant, ie: why was this dopey/fantastical/barelybiblical romp actually banned in some countries? And, why would Mr. Crowe invite the pope, of all people, to partake of this biblical root-story’s transmogrification into a Saturday Arvo Monster Special? And, why do cinema’s sell Maltesers et. al. in the noisiest crinkle-cracking packaging known to bogans? Arggghhh!
In conclusion, we did enjoy Noah, despite the bollocks. There are some smashing Icelandic landscapes that encapsulate biblical notions of scorched earth and pestilence, and some gob-smacker scenes of the Ark lumbering in heaving seas. There’s a spirit-lifting forest that springs from barren rock and spreads on and on for lush mile after lush green mile. And, Emma Watson is heart-wrenching, Russell Crowe is not half as irritating as usual, and the special effects in this adventure flick are genuinely mesmerising, With an innocent, less-than-enquiring mind, it’s possible to sink deep into this epic and emerge blinking, sated by the fantasy, about two hours after you first go: “w….t…..f……”
Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky, on general release now.
TRACKS
Voxfrock is enamoured of Mia Wasikowska‘s fragile beauty and splendid acting talent, but not of tortuously slow filmic experiences. Consequently, it took us two weeks after the release of Tracks and the Herald Sun‘s discouraging review, to screw up enough want and need to see it. We are piously glad we did. Miss Wasikowska replicates the look and demeanor of young Aussie loner/drifter Robyn Davidson. In a mind-blowingly self-indulgent light-bulb moment in 1975, the real Miss Davidson decided her wish was to be alone, bar a few camels, on a desert trek from Alice Springs to the West Australian coastline. As you do. She set off.
Step one: first, catch your camels. She did. Step two: enlist funding. She did that too, but via National Geographic magazine which contracted a photographer, played in the film by Adam Driver, to dog her steps. “Alone”, particularly as global media caught on to her fantastic journey, became a fractious, agonisingly relative term. As Miss Davidson’s epic unrolls poetically across hot, scabby desert and as her skin burns and crusts with sand and dirt and her hair bleaches, she begins to resemble her surroundings. Yes, the film is ponderous, but in the manner of, say, Sophia Coppola (eg. The Virgin Suicides, Somewhere) who strings out the minutae of daily life in a way that is almost as intriguing as – in this film – the hyper-events of charging camel bulls and story-seeking journalists. Voxfrock left the cinema reflective, with the crackle of Malteser wrappers ringing in our ears.
Tracks, directed by John Curran. On limited release now.
DENISE SCOTT – MELBOURNE COMEDY FESTIVAL
Bless Scotty. From her pendulous breasts to her bicornuate uterus, she plumbs enough comedic material to enthrall us all for 90 flashby minutes. Mother Bare is the veteren comic’s show-twist on pro-creation from guess who’s laborious, rollicking, self-deprecating, hilarious-from-the-get-go point of view. Her sell-out audience on the night we settled into the Fairfax Theatre‘s comfy-if-squeezy seats, was a jolly blend of blokes and women; mostly middle-aged and familiar, we suspected, with the “exquisite pain” (I plucked that from Germaine Greer’s body of work, not Ms Scott’s) of parenthood.
The only teenager and possibly the only gay in the audience, were swiftly identified (by teendar and gaydar?) and amiably Scotteased till curtain down for, respectively, their detestable youth and unlikely comprehension of vaginal jokes. Ho ho ho indeed. Voxfrock recommends Mother Bare equally for boys and girls as men and women. Even if you haven’t popped one out, and slogged through the Himilayan graph of their first 30 years of life, you might learn a thing or two: the caesar-birth crawl, for instance, or the orgasmic power of knitting.
Mother Bare, Arts Centre, Fairfax Theatrre, 100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, until Sunday, April 20, April: Tue to Sat 7 pm, Sun 6 pm, tickets $44.50/$39.50/$35.50/$32.50. Book www.comedyfestival.com.au or 1300 660 013 More Ms. Scott: click here
FRANK WOODLEY – MELBOURNE COMEDY FESTIVAL
“I give off a sort of pathetic vibe,” says Frank Woodley near the start of his Fools Gold show. And so he does: endearingly pathetic in the manner of a more verbal, less narcissistic Mr. Bean. Mr. Woodley is crazy-funny for half an hour; we’re in stitches down here in our cramped elbows-to-ribs lines of office chairs in Melbourne’s Lower Town Hall. So silly! He’s been described as “professionally ridiculous” and he’s that too, delivering the dopiest jokes (the one about the Dickensian council worker and the acrobatic snail) with full body slap-stick and a hail of goofy, stammering, half-finished sentences. But, inexplicably, the laughs lapse in the middle: he’s picked up a guitar and singing about…Facebook?
Why do comedians do that, just when it’s all going so well? (Tripod, Tim Minchin, others we, not surprisingly, can’t recall.) Silly songs are for grunting or pffff-ing at, not laughing. Things do pick up again when he puts the guitar down with an; “Enough of that..” (he’s intuitive!), then dissolve into forced ha-ha’s again when he hauls a couple of likely lads out of the audience for a skit about -you guessed it – testicles and having it off with a squire’s sister. Pffff. Grunt. Not that funny. Or, maybe that was just girly Voxfrock. Our boy-guest was still laughing like a drain. As you do.
Fools Gold, Melbourne Town Hall, Lower Town Hall, Cnr Swanston & Collins Sts, Melbourne, until Sunday April 20: Tues to Sat. 8.20pm, Sun 7.20 pm. Tickets $39.50/$35.50. Book www.comedyfestival.com.au or 1300 660 013. More Mr. Woodley, click here and here. (At the time of posting, the Herald Sun scored Fool’s Gold 5/5 stars.)
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au with Terry Carruthers, info@voxfrock.com.au
