Curmudgeon Asks: Where The Bloody Hell Are You, Then?

Forgive me internets, for I have sinned; it has been more than a week since I have updated this portfolio of cranky. The three spam-bots, two people and functionally literate chimpanzee who read regularly will, I am sure, grow and move on.



Canberra has been in the midst of what can fondly be termed IndieFest2011 (also known as the You Are Here festival) for just over a week now, with festivities winding up this weekend. I know it's fashionably post-hipster to sneer ironically at hipsters (and am clearly guilty of it myself at times), but I'm going to concede that this was actually a pretty cool idea. Any publicly funded arts event will inevitably raise some hackles about what the money could have been better spent on, but my best guess would be that this was run on a relative shoe-string, with the highest costs being printing the (admittedly very hipster) program and probably public liability insurance, with quite a bit of support being kicked in by local businesses like the alternative bookstore, all of whom will ultimately benefit if this grows big enough to rival Newcastle's This Is Not Art (TINA) Festival.

As with any festival of arts, attendees probably need to suspend their snark reflex, seek out the events they're most likely to enjoy, and try not to be whiny jerks about the free entertainment in some vain attempt to appear more interesting/complex/sophisticated/coolly aloof than everyone else. Fun and irony in equal measures abound if you're willing to kick in and explore, but if your idea of a great evening is pontificating about your general superiority from the couch then you'll probably have a terrible time.

Given the crapload of money the Territory will be spending on supporting a loud and sparkly firework background to bogan debauchery this weekend (Skyfire), recognition of Canberra's thriving and largely unpaid arts community goes some way to acknowledging the diversity of the Canberra community: we have, at the very least, bogans, hipsters, and the public service to consider. Plus, Friday night's Zombie prom was all kinds of amusement. Cheers to the organisers - you might be incorrigible hipster kids for all I know- but you manage some excellent festival.

CisforCurmudgeon: Why Sophie Mirabella is not Gaddafi; On Getting Along

Like all misanthropes, I cherish living alone as a sort of Valhalla-type paradise of win. Hells yeah, every day is pants-free day and I don't have to hide the gin! Unfortunately, the economics of being neither congenitally wealthy nor a high-priced hooker means that securing a one bedroom home within two hours drive of university or work is about as attainable as the Prime Ministership - should everyone else who wants to live in Canberra fall off the face of the planet in some freak accident that rewrites our understanding of gravity I might be in with a shot- otherwise it's housesharing, that quaint university town practice where people you don't necessarily know very well become your nearest neighbours and gen Y select-a-family. At some point, as well, you're probably going to have to leave your room and get to know these strangers you live with.

My current select-a-family is pretty decent. They're both literate, relatively clean, definitively not racist, and most of the time they pay the rent. We've reached a point of self-referential familial comfort whereby we now stage enormous twitter house civil wars over people's opinion of Black Swan (if you're new, you can find my thoughts on the matter here). Housemate B recently saw this film and decided that he liked it. Since Housemate B is in all other respects a gentleman of discerning tastes, I have to conclude that he is either trolling me (a unique experience when there is the continuous and ominous threat that either one of us might shave off the other's eyebrows in their sleep) or that some hipster zombie stole his brain once the film had lulled him into the semi-consciousness such faux-artistic travesty inevitably promotes.

The point is, like parliamentarians (and except for in relation to Black Swan, you hipster nerd) we've probably got more in common than not. All parties are able to recognise that leaving someone else's cheese on the bench to go sweaty is a crime against all that is right and good in the world. Likewise, all parties are aware that picking a fight over cheese is the action of a petty tyrant, and life mostly goes on and everyone gets to keep their eyebrows. Win! I think the important thing is that no one ever gets compared to Gaddafi over who takes the rubbish out, and I think that makes our house of largely itinerant student-types a cut above Coalition MPs like Sophie Mirabella, at least in terms of basic human decency and perspective.

If we want to split hairs on this issue, what Sophie actually said this week was that if PM Gillard believed people were actually willing to pay more for things to offset the risk of cataclysmic climate change, then she was clearly "as deluded as Colonel 'My people love me' Gaddafi". Which is not entirely the same as calling someone a mad dictator, but given the wide range of possible similes to draw other than unstable and violent dictators turning the army onto protesters, it is clear that Sophie was showing the restraint, civility and quality judgment of Charlie Sheen on a drug binge. Also, Tony Abbott gets shouty a lot, and so did Hitler. Not that I'm saying, of course, that the two have anything else in common...


Is it trite to compare what happens in the national parliament to what housemates do when someone won't take out the rubbish, or leaves the cheese to go sweaty on the bench? Yes. It absolutely is. We work on the assumption that our representatives are presumably supposed to be better than this, above petty disputes and the kinds of minor human failings that characterise the interactions of the mere plebeian class. If I have to put on pants and learn people skills in order to go downstairs and use the toaster, by all that is right I expect our politicians - practitioners of the 'art of the city-state', to go at least one better than that. Accordingly, however, when the Libyan people are dying on the streets for the sorts of basic rights we take for granted in this country, it is fair to say that is cheap and shallow, by any standard, to use the name of their oppressive dictator to describe a political opponent who wants to institute a carbon tax.

In other news, South Australians are represented by someone who is incapable of making a rhetorical point without an extended hokey-pokey dance session, so maybe we should just all hope our global leaders have long since lost access to the nuke launch codes, settle them down for a post-afternoon-milk nap, and teach them about sharing, toilet-training and human decency once they wake up. Think back to the most thuggish kid you knew in kindergarten - the one that threw sandpit trucks at other kids and who perpetually had one finger up his nose as though attempting to dig through to his scalp. That kid probably votes now, and there's a reasonable chance he might get elected to the Australian parliament to represent your interests at home and abroad.

Maybe we should just all climb back into the trees and wait for armaggedon, really.

[P.S - The Asshattery Award would go to Sophie Mirabella this week, except the fact that she exists and gets to wander around being a representative of the human race, much less a parliamentarian, makes me so despair of the human race that I want to go curl into the foetal position under my bed and wait for society to make some sense. Also, I think if we're handing out awards for worst human being this week Gaddafi probably ought to make the short list, and I don't want to fall into a Mirabellan rhetorical trap].

CisforCurmudgeon: Untangling the Assange Debate

Julian Assange's legal team are currently contesting the extradition order made in Belmarsh last week which would see Assange returned to Sweden to face charges of sexual assault. Look kids, it's easy. No reference to conspiracy theories, Wikileaks, traitors, trumped up charges or the national misandry of Sweden, just a sentence containing a single fact.

This issue appears to have become a signpost issue for ideological positioning, with various hysterical oversimplifications of the facts highlighting from whence on the political spectrum a person hails from.

Variously, the extreme left holds that the charges themselves are a conspiracy by the US Government to silence Wikileaks, that the women were a honeytrap, that Assange can be more easily extradited from Sweden to the Guantanamo Bay and that Assange is a political prisoner. From somewhere in the deep undergrowth of the centrist left comes support for Wikileaks coupled with suspicion of Assange as an anarchist who wants to overthrow all governments using the weapon of truth, and the claim that anyone who dares suggest anything dodgy about the sexual assault charges is secretly a misogynist and apologist for sexual assault. The vocal far-right variously appears to hold that Assange is a traitor to America, a kind of criminal terrorist mastermind who deserves to be locked up, tortured or executed, and they don't really care by what process this occurs.

Thus simplified, this entire debate seems reminiscent of climate change, with various groups who don't understand the science at all deciding that whether or not climate change is happening is a left-right issue and positioning themselves accordingly. Whether climate change is happening, however, is not a space for ideological argument in the same way that gravity is not. Whether or not the global mean temperature is rising, and why, is part of a series of discoverable facts about the universe, and politics really should only be coming into it as a matter of public policy - determining what action needs to be taken, given the best possible understanding of the facts.

The problem with positional adoptions of factual situations is that, even in our cutesy post-modernist intellectual world, science, the law, and David Duchovny's character in the X-files all want to hold that there is a truth out there, somewhere. The bulk of commentators, coming largely from non-specialist media, appear to be content, once they realise the extent to which they must wade through the arcane system of law or complexities of science, to settle somewhere near the bottom and draw conclusions according to the most convenient selection of facts.

Julian Assange's extradition was heard by a Magistrate at Belmarsh. Under the 2003 Extradition Act, which brought British law in line with EU extradition agreements, the Court needed to ascertain that Assange was wanted for a prosecution of an extraditable offence, and also that none of a specified list of exceptions which would make extradition unjust, applied. The court ruled that, although Assange was not arraigned for the alleged charges, certain oddities of the Swedish judicial system meant that we could understand that Assange was in fact wanted not merely for questioning, but for answering the charges before a Swedish Court. The threshold here is low, and the British court would have had to impugn the Swedish process for handling sexual assault charges and indeed the Swedish legal system as being susceptible to coercion, were the judgement made that Assange's extradition to face these charges was improper. In shiny new EU happy family land, that was always going to be extraordinarily unlikely.

That being said, Assange's legal team is correct to appeal this decision to a higher court. The central evidence in favour of Assange's extradition was provided in affidavit (written) form, and the prosecutor did not make herself available for cross-examination, meaning that evidence was never tested. The alleged events took place between 13 and 19 August 2010. On 20 August 2010 the Swedish prosecution (improperly) made a media announcement that Assange was the subject of a rape investigation. At some point over the next month, the charges are dropped by the Swedish prosecution and Assange is advised he will not be held to answer them. Enter the new prosecutor, Ms. Ny, who decides to prosecute after all.

This raises some questions about why the prosecution was revived. In the case of sexual assault, it is manifestly unlikely that new evidence arose, as the nature of the offence is such that evidence is eroded over time. It is also unlikely that, over time, a witness' statement becomes more credible. This makes the decision to re-open the prosecution appear to be a politically motivated one.

I do not wish to comment on the likelihood or otherwise that Assange has committed the offences that are alleged. I know that some commentators have, but to my mind as someone who was not present at the time, my opinion is entirely invalid and would be based on speculation. I do note that the process by which Swedish courts handle sexual assault charges is considerably more private than in our common law tradition. The media in Australian trials is allowed to be present but restricted in what they can report. In Sweden, they are not entitled to be present. A single judge and panel of three political appointees hear evidence and interrogate the accused and witnesses. A judgement issues at the end, but to my mind, if I were hoping to tar and feather someone without giving them an opportunity to publicly defend what have been extraordinarily public accusations, there could be no better venue selection. This is especially the case given the media play the prosecution case has already had in Sweden, with there being little left in terms of protecting the identities of the victims to necessitate a private trial.

Honey trap or no, Assange's extradition is beginning to look very likely, and there are real concerns about impropriety in the way in which the prosecution has handled the investigation. Focus on the idea that it's easier to extradite Assange from Sweden to the US misses a critical point, however, which is that it is not tremendously difficult to extradite from the UK to the US, provided that Assange has a case to answer under US law. Unfortunately for the US, no one can yet point to a US law which he has breached. As is made clear in the judgement issued last week, further extradition from Sweden would likely require the consent of the UK Secretary of State.

I don't think this is a PR move, either, because there is almost no way in which the extraditon of Assange from Sweden to the US doesn't generate a media shit-storm approximately a hundred times bigger than Charlie Sheen's narcissistic meltdown. If the US were prepared to do that, and accordingly undermine the sovereignty of both the UK and Sweden by pressuring their judicial system for a particular outcome, then there's almost no sense in which the US is restrained at all by the restrictions of diplomacy, in which case it would probably have been easier to simply arrange for Assange to be killed and face the possible diplomatic ramifications later.

The real loser in all this is Bradley Manning, the American defence employee who allegedly leaked the cables to Wikileaks in the first place. He's suffering torture, solitary confinement, and the real chance of execution. As a US citizen and someone who leaked confidential information, there are few legal remedies to his current plight. The law, weakened and sullied in a post-911 world to bring us Guantanamo Bay, military trials, and the absence of common law protections for those merely accused of terror offences, in fact protects those who wish to confine, torture and execute Manning. Whether you consider his actions to be a serious crime or not, it remains to be said that his treatment post-arrest has been far beyond what we would hope for from a civilised nation led by the rule of law.

If a tiny bit of the attention on Assange reminds people about Manning, then it can only be a good thing. Underpinning Wikileaks is the notion that exercises of power which occur silently and in the darkest corners where the powerful play, confidentially sequestered from the public gaze, should be feared. Manning's actions, from which we can assume a belief in transparency, shining a light into dark places, has plunged him into the sort of nightmare that makes 1984 look tame, and it is not the time to turn our faces and attention from that dark little military cell in favour of the glittery show-trial of Julian Assange.



Seriously, how can that childlike face not prompt some sympathy, even at the very least 'aw, maybe let's not attach electrodes to its testicles'?

Senior Libs Apologise for Timing of Apology

Desperate to keep the issue of asylum seekers on the agenda, senior Liberals have held yet another press conference to clarify the Coalition's position vis-a-vis funerals for refugees.

"Obviously we are well aware that some sectors of our electorates are suffering the depths of human misery when they are forced to think about tax-payer funding being spent on refugees attending the funerals of family members tragically killed in the Christmas Island boat wreck" said Opposition Immigration Spokesperson (and all-round sensitive guy) Scott Morrison.

"It was insensitive and badly timed for senior figures of the Coalition to suggest that it was insensitive and badly timed to attempt to politicise government facilitation of attendance of refugees at funerals. We simply didn't think about the human cost to the multiculturally-challenged citizens of Mossman and Toorak."

"After extensive tax-payer funds have gone into the detention of these asylum seekers, and then the further cost to the tax-payer of retrieving the bodies of the dead -well, we really think it is our job as the fiscally responsible Opposition to ensure that the government is forced to justify expenditure of every single Aussie taxpayer dollar that could otherwise be going to keep Senator Joyce in off-road vehicles."

Coming so soon after a particularly disquieting episode of Border Security, Opposition leader Tony Abbott joined Morrison in offering their sincerest apologies to any white people who had been further emotionally traumatised, distressed or mildly inconvenienced by their remarks.

As many as 50 people died when the asylum seeker vessel known as SIEV 221 crashed on rocks and broke apart off Christmas Island's Rocky Point in December last year.

The grieving refugees, grown fat on the tax-payer funded teat of luxurious mandatory detention, declined to return CisForCurmudgeon's call prior to publication.

The Surly Valentine

When did this become a thing, this wide-eyed tacky embrace of all things coupledom for St. Valentines' day in Australia? Like Easter and Christmas, it seems to come on earlier and stronger every year. Even my beloved Aldi, the cheap eurotrashy supermarket that keeps me in mushrooms, broccoli and gluhwein while letting me keep my labour in the lower paid community sector, is, two weeks out from the supposed big day, offering chocolate roses. It begins to look as though a total boycott of the festival of mush is entirely impossible. Is there nowhere outside the curmudgeonly cave that is safe from kitsch heartshapes, pinks and reds and cliched sentiment?

It is beyond unlikely that I will be spending February 14th entwined with some other soul, making mushy faces in some overcrowded restaurant, gushing over something Hallmark finds a romantic sentiment, and pretending that every cliched motif of romanticism is somehow a sweet and unique expression of something genuine, as opposed to a crassly commercial, over-packaged and manufactured emotion. Of course, your Curmudgeon would say that. My history around these situations is somewhat fraught.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, Valentines Day was a concept as foreign as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Halloween. There were always going to be a couple of people who embraced the concept, but we never exchanged cards at school or really focussed on the day as a calendar event. When I was fourteen, I contemplated organising a Valentines' day gift in a fit of tacky adolescence, but decided instead to dispense chocolate frogs to other girls at my single sex school who did not have single stems of roses to carry from class to class all day (P.S girls who did have roses, please note they *will* fit into a locker, stop with the conspicuous smuggery). That became a fun tradition as, adolescents being adolescents, there was always someone in need of chocolate and cheering up on this day designed to remind us all that, OMG, the perfect state of being is to be permanently attached to someone else.

As we got older, it became the Anti-Valentines outdoor cinema night, or the Lonely Hearts (fuck you, Valentines Day) bar crawl. It was a paean and ode to our youth, our freedom, and the city we found ourselves in. Healthy sense of irony engaged - no one was particularly bitter about being single, but nor were we in a hurry to hide at home from the smug couple hordes. We believed this night should belong to us as well.

I haven't always been as single on Valentines day as I will be this year. I too have had the gushy Valentines Day experience of the cringeworthily cutesy young love variety. I forget what we did, but I recall he wrote me a poem and we had what could somewhat unoriginally be described as a magical evening. Melbourne in February puts on decent weather, and it felt like we had all the time in the world. It was coffee, sunshine, our own little world - but then, when you're a little bit in love with someone every day is like that. The crowds and the conspicuous coupledom of the holiday of lurve neither adds nor detracts, because that would involve peeking outside the adolescent-hormone bubble of each other and noticing that the rest of the world continues to turn.

The relationship was pretty seriously on the rocks when we shared a Valentines Day which involved a teddy bear holding a heart, a single rose, and some chocolate, the scatterbomb approach to human engagement if I've ever seen it. I was never sure if he covered all of the traditional bases because we had just gotten back together after a break-up, if everything was half-price (since we'd missed the actual day out of a combination of busyness and apathy), or if he genuinely didn't realise that the poem he'd written me a year before, the notes he used to leave scattered around my room, actually meant something, whereas a bear saying "I wuv you" means someone's suffered a frontal lobotomy. We had stopped putting anything of ourselves into what we were doing, and we were ready to settle for tokenistic and expected.

The curmudgeon comes out here - these things were somewhat meaningless because they had nothing to do with who either of us were as people. They involved a transaction in which no thought was required, to purchase a message that was made trite and somewhat meaningless by mass-production. This is not an aesthetic or consumeristic point - I would not have liked the idea of these gifts any more if they were expensive, quite the contrary - the only reason I had any time for them at all was because, despite everything, I cared for the person proffering them. It was the fact that thoughtfulness ceased to become a part of the situation. A plush heart to say "I love you" is about as meaningful as a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy from a cereal packet.

Since then I've largely avoided VD in all its forms. If I like someone, I don't need the excuse to show my affection. I do hereby pledge, however, that I will never buy someone a plush animal wielding a heart in cold blood. Maybe this year I'll distribute chocolate frogs to my friends or leave a thoughtful note somewhere to be found, or I'll go back to my favourite haunts and let my city be my Valentine for one more year. Being a complete and solitary human being on Valentines Day, despite the social pressures of monogamy etcetera, is something of a relief. This year I'm curling up with a volume of Charlie Brooker's articles, listening to Van Halen and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. I recommend it.

Fundies Ineffectual in Aid Relief: Send Help, Not Prayer, says QLD.

This was originally written at the height of the Queensland flood coverage back in January 2010 for release on www.threesixfive.org, a site devoted to the satirisation of current affairs from an Australian perspective. As TSF appears to have had a life-cycle shorter than the average double-glazing start-up company, I've reproduced the article here for your general amusement.



Fundies Ineffectual in Aid Relief: Send Help, Not Prayer, says QLD.
The wrath of God is upon Queensland in the form of a shit-tonne of water because Kevin Rudd "not only called on Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but said it should open all its nuclear facilities to UN inspectors", according to Catch the Fire Ministries’ Pastor Nalliah.

Authorities have not responded to what Nalliah refers to as "floods of biblical proportions" by constructing a large wooden boat and plotting the slow death of every species on the planet through the sorts of genetic diversity failures that happen when an entire species is descended from just two samples. Evacuation and relief funding are, controversially, being considered more responsible state responses than constructing an Ark.

Authorities also urge concerned Queenslanders not to go rounding up two of every animal just yet, (especially since locating the dinosaurs will be pesky), citing implausibility that God came out of aeons of retirement purely to dampen some bogans. Nalliah, who frequently blames and praises God for various atmospheric and physical conditions causing natural disaster in Australia, denies that his God is not that petty, saying He absolutely would.

However, despite these massive, Mel Gibson reminiscent, fits of pique utilising the full force of natural disaster, God was apparently powerless to stop satanic rituals/teenagers drinking goon on a mountain near parliament from promoting parliamentary discussion of equality for homosexuals. In early 2010, these events prompted an evangelistic roadtrip from Nalliah’s congregation, who hoped daubing olive oil and babbling in tongues on said mountain would solve the whole ‘evil female Prime Minister’ problem for God.

To be fair, He has probably just been too busy reading the minute details of every press-release our Foreign Minister has ever put out in relation to Israel. It's not like being an omnipresent dude means you can be everywhere at once. Hang on a second...

Nalliah also takes credit for the "saving of Rockhampton", claiming that this was the result of “answered prayers”, exulting “We have a God who answers prayer!”. The nature of such a "miraculous" escape for the citizens of Rockhampton is questionable, given the context in which it occurs, with a rising damage bill and more than eight people confirmed dead across the state - but hey, Rockhampton's okay! Thanks, God!

Except... well, Rockhampton's really not okay, is it? It was submerged under six feet of floodwater, and remaining survivors are having to deal with venomous snakes driven into populated areas by rising floodwater.

If we assume the correlation implies causation logic which works so well for CTF Ministries' press releases, then the real culprits become apparent - adherents to the faith are simply not praying hard enough. Certainly things appeared to go backwards for Rockhampton after Pr. Nalliah’s announcement.

And if their prayers are being heard and answered, then what precisely does CTF have against the rest of Queensland, that it refuses to use this apparently magical line to divine emergency assistance to help Brisbane, Theodore, Dalby and Bundaberg?

Not to be too picky, but if one has a direct personal relationship with an interventionist metaphysical being capable of exercising supernatural power that can't be explained by mere climate physics or meteorological science, why be so half-arsed about it as to ask that it be slightly less of a bad situation than in other disaster zones? Why not ask, while you're at it, that the floodwater be turned into something useful?

There's biblical precedent for this with the whole 'water into wine' miracle. In this reporter's experience of Queenslanders (ed: schoolies), they are a people uniquely placed for the challenge of drinking away the flood, provided the floodwater was turned into mediocre beer (wine being something more of a challenge to the palate to the average Toowoomban, if I recall correctly - these are a people who will drink Mebourne Bitter even when there are other beers available).

Kevin Rudd has had a pretty crappy year, Pr. Nalliah, and it seems a bit of a stretch to argue that the mere suggestion by Rudd that Israel should be compliant with the sorts of international standards we apply to any nuclear state would cause God to wash away half of Queensland. I mean, sure, the Labor Party blames him for things which are also only slightly correlational, like hung parliaments, but at least if you squint there’s a causative link.

On the other hand, Pr. Nalliah want us to believe God answers his prayers sufficient to ‘only smite Rockhampton a little bit’, on his instructions, which suggests that Catch the Fire Ministries presumably also in some way instructed God to flood the rest of the sunshine state.

If someone has access to supernatural forces which can wash away entire towns, cause untold damage to the economy and potentially kill hundreds of people, and that person is prepared to use that influence to influence political outcomes (such as letting Israel construct an unregulated nuclear force in order to hasten the Armageddon that CTF believes will bring on the return of Jesus and the rapture), that person is at least one of three things. They are either dangerously deluded, someone who ought to be detained under anti-terror laws by using the threat of violence for political ends, or they are cynical and manipulative assholes seeking to gain through the misery of others.

Clearly, the only way to avoid any of the above charges is to harness the glorious power of prayer to turn the snake-infested rivers into rum, or to deliver a heavenly bounty of enough Sham-wows to soak up the equivalent of two Sydney Harbours.

In the alternative, perhaps Pastor Nalliah and his rabid flock may be persuaded to leave the floods analysis to the experts and stop seeking credit for things they can in no way meaningfully influence through telepathic conversations with their apparently petty and vindictive imaginary friend.


--> Addendum: Since posting, there has been some more crazy, nicely summarised and snarked by PZ Meyers over at Pharyngula.
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P.S Since there’s unlikely to be a divinely alcoholic intervention anytime soon, I heartily endorse supporting the Flood Relief Appeal, here. It's getting a lot less coverage than it was at the height of the floods, but the clean up continues and funds are still desperately needed.

Curmudgeon Reviews: Black Swan

IMDB describes: "A ballet dancer wins the lead in "Swan Lake" and is perfect for the role of the delicate White Swan - Princess Odette - but slowly loses her mind as she becomes more and more like Odile the Black Swan, daughter of an evil magician." That's probably a fair synopsis, although it does entirely manage to avoid discussion of Natalie Portman's crotch. Given the gratuitous number of times the film returned to focus on that region, I would almost have expected it to get a billing all its own.

I am somewhat at a loss to understand the critical acclaim which has followed this film, particularly when compared with the masterful character work in The King's Speech. It manages to bewilder and disturb audiences with what appears to be a spectacular attempt to be artsier-than-thou. This film was alienating and mawkish at worst, and simply pretty and awkward at best. It's that hipster kid at the party who wants to argue with you about how he was a hipster before anyone else even knew what it was.

It's not trendy to diss this film, as emaciated Natalie Portman (it's amazing how malnourishment can age a person) goes somewhat brilliantly mad, as illustrated by visceral and downright gory special effects that are actually painful to watch, and perhaps the most cringeworthy and entirely gratuitous female masturbation portrayed on screen in any cinema where the seats aren't hosed down after a screening.

It is a film that wants very badly to be an artistic, interesting masterpiece, but it ends up being awkwardly overplayed, painful to watch, and unrewarding as a cinema experience. At times, Portman's portrayal shines, but almost as often we are left with the wooden character familiar to those who followed her Star Wars prequel days. There is a sense that with the loss of a quarter of her body weight and presumably intense dance training that the recognition of her acting in this film is more a reflection on the hard work that went into the role, much like Nicole Kidman's having to wear a false ugly nose to play Virginia Woolf, rather than any sine qua brilliant performance.

Try as it might, it lacks the depth and substance a film so wholly unentertaining requires. The symbolism is obvious and overplayed, while the narrative within a narrative (the Swan Lake motif) provides no interesting twist. Broken music box ballet dancers. The breaking in of ballet shoes. The children's toys and single bed. The red lipstick. The perfect bun which becomes disarrayed as the character begins to fall apart. This film stabs you in the eyes with the sorts of screamingly obvious film techniques studied to death in high schools across the country, without once engaging on a deeper level.

The gore was realistic and visceral - blood, tearing skin, broken bones, scar-tissue - enough to be uncomfortable viewing. This too was overdone, gratuitous, and seemed to lack a deeper narrative point beyond shock value and the illustration of Portman's character's fading grasp of reality.

Add to this, the characters are often shrill and not especially likeable. There is a tendency toward downward spirals of mental stability rather than any sort of development. With one possible exception, they are so superficial that despite the fairly unpleasantly violent events which occur to them, they evoke little sympathy. For example, the girl next to me audibly cheered when one of them was stabbed in the face with a nail file, which was a sentiment I could sympathise with. The audience members find themselves putting not insubstantial amounts of effort into the film in the form of suspension of disbelief, for minimal reward. I won't spoil the ending any more than the producer did, suffice to say 'trite and cliched' would be a generous description. Frustrating.


High points
~The highest point of the film, for me, was the mild ironic value of Winona Ryder's character having some crap stolen from her. That's right, petty larceny for the no longer especially topical inadvertent LOL. The film so failed to transport me that by this stage the recollection of Ryder's shoplifting charges was something my brain did to amuse itself while this film failed to engage it with anything of substance.

~The drug trip that lasted the entire rest of the film. One can only assume that they shared the good stuff with some of the reviewers/awards panels floating about. Honestly, honey, when your reality shifts that quickly and remains that warped for so long, you need to eat a sandwich or something and try not to puke up every piece of sustenance that crosses your lips. Which reminds me...

~Bravo to the ballet film for the vague social policy win in the example that eating disorders aren't fun, and they aren't clever. This was probably entirely inadvertent, but it is nevertheless a positive thing. Oh yes, thinspired fourteen year olds, do you really want to look fifty and mummified when you're supposed to be playing a character in their early twenties? Purging's not so fun now, is it?

~The film was, I must concede, visually spectacular at times, with costuming and make-up especially well done, but these were features which occasionally arrested my attention, long enough to make it vividly apparent that the rest of the film was quite disappointing.

~The biggest highlight? The end credits. This was a film which made you appreciate life and never want to waste one hundred and eight minutes of it in such frustratingly aimless pursuit ever again.