It took me two and a half hours to get to Burwood this morning, starting with a half-hour walk to Jacana station, then a long wait there, then a ride to Flagstaff the woeful station of the underground, then a delayed (but express) train to Camberwell, then an all-stops-to-Box-Hill, then a bus. Luckily I had essays to mark, a book about (the films of) Peter Weir to read, and a laptop computer to mess around with.
The Peter Weir book made me realise how much I don't like the bollocks of auteurism. Why pretend he operates in a bubble? To be honest, pretending he operates in a bubble makes him fantastically more boring than he would otherwise be. He seems to be just making the same film over and over again, and the author just wants to draw out the similarities between Picnic at Hanging Rock and Dead Poets Society. I always thought I loved the former and couldn't stand the latter, but obviously I am wrong, as they are basically the same fumes from the still of Weir's genius. The guy who wrote the book doesn't appear to have too much understanding of Australia, either, as his description of the opening scene of The Cars that Ate Paris makes painfully clear.
ryan 'pipeline' (part 1)
I'm going to come back to this ep of Ryan because it has an amazing North Melbourne car chase, but first I want to honour Margaret Cruic...
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As a child, naturally enough, I watched a lot of television and it being the early 1970s when I was a child, I watched a lot of what is no...
