Author: Alex Doenau

Last week I saw Tenacious D at the Hordern Pavilion. They had a really good “He is Real” shirt for the tour, but the ATM at the venue (one ATM at a venue that holds thousands? Good idea!) was broken. The night got off to a sour start as a result. The support act, a pair called TnT … I have no idea how good they were, because they tended to sing about the sort of stuff that appeals to “all young men in Australia except for me” … which indicates they were probably too generic for the rest of the audience, because do you really want to hear songs about going out and drinking with your friends?

The concert itself was fun, although it was strange to see JB and KG stringing a story onto the stage. The songs that I knew went down a treat but, because the danged movie hasn't been released out here yet, I didn't know a lot of the rest.
This would not have been a problem had the D not gone electric (me! Judas!). The acoustics were not really calibrated for electricity and vocals, so I had no idea of a great deal of what Jack Black was singing. The band … consisting of the Anti-Christ on electric guitar, Charlie Chaplin on bass and Colonel Sanders on drums … was good, but it all became as so much noise to me.

It was a fun night, but not as much fun as I would have liked. I prefer the D when they treat a concert as a concert rather than a performance … and when using the Saxaboom makes sense!

For this reason, I present to you my write up of December 30th, 2004: the Day of the D.

Contains frequent profanity!

Not from me, no, these are the 2006 Kaedrin Movie Awards! Mark’s awards are particularly notable in that they embrace arbitrariness without being as thoroughly useless as my own criteria, and that he is actually able to focus on the good of Mission: Impossible III without his brain trying to eat itself from reminding the sheer stupidity of Ethan Hunt finding a tennis ball launcher in Hong Kong in the middle of the night in less than half an hour.

Better yet, it looks to be a daily occurrence! That’ll keep you occupied while I spend my time watching movies about Mexico.

Nobody knows the people of England better than she.

It did not take me long to realise that Stephen Frear’s The Queen is a delicate story of Upstairs and Downstairs relations. Here, however, the Upstairs is directly accountable to the Downstairs; Downstairs being as they are, what they want does not always seem the classy option. The Stairs themselves are therefore precariously balanced with reconciling those above and below them, all the while trying to balance their own interests.

What was once a simple and elegant metaphor for English society grew laboured in my telling, but Upstairs is the British Monarchy, Downstairs the increasingly cultureless citizens of England, and the Stairs Tony Blair’s government.

Being as this is a movie about class, it’s no surprise that it’s a classy movie. It sympathises with Queen Elizabeth II, who seems more personable than any of the limited times I’ve seen her (although she seemed quite nice when Rolf Harris painted her). The situations presented are almost entirely based on conjecture about the events of a few weeks in 1997. While they may not be strictly true, they feel genuine; these real world people have become fully realised characters for the sake of a film.
While there are some who will be offended by the idea of an author writing a situation that may have happened (and was pretty well researched), anyone else with a vague interest in the Royal Family and the death of Diana will be well served to see The Queen.

“‘Let them eat cake’? As if I’d say that!”

I’m in a million different minds about Marie Antoinette. I love the French Revolution, but this is not a movie about the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette exists in a by turns oppressive and decadent dream state, devoid of a story or scenes. Time progresses, new characters arrive and old characters disappear, and then it’s over. The events that lead to its conclusion are barely touched upon, and in this way Sofia Coppola has created an intimate portrait of a woman in such a manner that the audience can’t tell if the film or the queen is the superficial one.

Commie Liberal Propaganda for Kids!

I had misgivings about Happy Feet the first time I saw a trailer for it some eighteen months ago. The teaser trailer really said nothing, but I had to wonder how a film about penguins could be visually interesting. Yesterday I swallowed those misgivings and … they turned out to be correct. Happy Feet was not visually interesting. Nor, at one hour and 48 minutes, was its story tight or involved enough.

Happy Feet has some moments of high enjoyment and quite a few good laughs, but to say that makes it a good movie is like saying that a zombie movie is good because it has a couple of zombies in it: meeting the most basic of expectations a scarce few times is nothing impressive. It’s not a terrible film, but I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it.

That said, I’m looking forward to reports of children nagging their parents to buy them penguins, then proceeding to flush said penguins down the toilet to freedom.

With the realisation that the two posts I had written to kick off 2007 were generally negative, I decided that I had better start the year on a positive note. Thus, I shall present the highlights of the next two months in Australian cinema!

December 2006: More than a Feeling (More than a Feeling!)