article - Italian Film Festival 2006.

When in Rome

(cover story: Metro, Sydney Morning Herald 20/10/06)

Benito di Fonzo
October 20, 2006

The Italian Film Festival's opening flick, My Best Enemy, is a comedy about a man who loses everything after having an affair with his boss's wife. Is the occurrence of infidelity in Italian films a true reflection of the country's men?

"L'uomo italiano molto infedele, si, yes," says the film's actor, writer and director, Carlo Verdone, "and the Italian woman is becoming quite unfaithful, as well. Marriage is sacred, but being unfaithful gives spice to life, and being Catholic means you know you can repent and be redeemed."

Festival manager Elysia Zeccola disagrees.

"I don't feel that Italians cheat on their lovers any more than Australians do; perhaps they just make more movies about it."

Other films to deal with infidelity in the festival include The Land, in which Massimo Venturiello plays a violent womaniser, and The Days of Abandonment, where Margherita Buy's world falls apart after her husband leaves her for a younger woman.

The most controversially sexual themes arise in Melissa P. and The Beast in the Heart. Based on an Italian bestseller, Melissa P. details the adventures of a 16-year-old Sicilian (Maria Valverde) who uses daring sex to combat loneliness. Oscar nominee The Beast in the Heart confronts childhood incest.

Verdone's protagonist in My Best Enemy loses his wife, job and, most importantly, the respect of his daughter, which he spends the rest of the film attempting to regain.

"This is a critique on worldwide society, not just Italy," says Verdone, who starred in last year's festival opener, The Manual of Love. "It seems as if the adults are having great difficulty maturing, and very often the children are the mature ones. They are the ones that can teach something to their parents. This is because of medical advancements - plastic surgery, Viagra - which give the illusion that one can remain young. The motor is old even though the carriage is young, and very often it becomes pathetic."

Verdone is famous in Italy for his melancholy brand of comedy, or "melancomedies".

"A well-presented comedy can have a better result than an intellectual presentation because it reaches a greater public," he says.

Can comedy save the world?

"Comedy is saving the world. We can't stand any more these ridiculous films where a man can stop a comet or a nuclear attack at the last minute; September 11 has demonstrated how ridiculous those films were. The world is made up mostly of people with great weakness and great fragility. The main characters of a lot of Italian films are pathetic characters. They're just ordinary people."

It's this embracing of the absurdity of everyday life that inspires Verdone.

"I laugh when I see the reality of everyday life and I laugh at people who don't realise how comical they are. My ability is to pick up on these defects and transpose them on to the screen."

One rich source of absurdity has always been Italian politics, a vein Verdone will mine in his next film, but he denies his politician will be based on former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Other filmmakers have been more open in their critiques of the former right-wing PM, who owned half of Italy's TV stations and was accused of Mafia links and bribery. The Italian Film Festival has several such critiques, including Sabina Guzzanti's examination of censorship under the regime, Viva Zapatero!

Guzzanti was sacked from the government television station after airing a Berlusconi satire on her show. Berlusconi is also caricatured by several actors in Nanni Moretti's The Caiman.

"I think his era is widely regarded as being the downfall of Italian television," Zeccola says.

A cross between Eddie McGuire, Rupert Murdoch and John Howard, perhaps?

"You're scaring me," Zeccola says.

Another festival highlight is Quo Vadis, Baby? This piece of Italian feminist film noir, about a hash-smoking detective, includes a sex scene set to Ultravox's Vienna.

Running alongside the best in contemporary Italian cinema will be a retrospective of Michelangelo Antonioni films. Zeccola has tracked down prints of all 14 Antonioni features, including his English-language classics Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, starring a young Jack Nicholson, and Blow-Up, a film that so captures '60s London it has a chase scene through a Yardbirds concert in which Jeff Beck smashes a guitar, much to Jimmy Page's dismay. There are also docos on Antonioni and charismatic film star Marcello Mastroianni.

Perhaps the most interesting film is All the Invisible Children, a multilingual series of vignettes on childhood from directors including Spike Lee, Ridley Scott and Stefano Veneruso. It's produced by Il Postino star Maria Grazia Cucinotta, who many will recognise as the Napolese mafiosa from The Sopranos. Cucinotta produced the film to raise money for UNICEF and feels a strong connection to the tales of childhood poverty.

"I grew up in a difficult neighbourhood [in Messina, Sicily] and have reality still on my skin. I grew up in the middle of all invisible children.

"I was lucky because I had the chance to go away to improve myself, but I didn't forget about my origin. You see children forced to work at five years old because they don't have anything to eat. I was lucky because my father worked every day. I was the princess in that neighbourhood compared to the other ones who maybe had their father in jail, maybe didn't have their mother. They are heroes.

"We are lucky because we can see through movies that there is a difference, and we can hope there is a chance to make our life different. Sometimes people think the only reality is the one they have, so it's difficult for them to dream. When you stop dreaming you are dead. I'm a dreamer, a rebel. If you have the power, and if you really believe in something, you can make it. My life is like Cinderella."

Who are the ugly sisters, then?

"They're the people who spend their lives envying and destroying other people. It's something you can't escape at a certain level. You're surrounded by sharks, but it's part of the game. It gives me the energy to go ahead, to say, 'You want the competition? Let's go!' "

Somehow I don't think anyone will be infedele to Cucinotta any time soon.

Italian Film Festival
Thursday to November 13, Palace Norton Street, Leichhardt and Palace Academy and the Chauvel, Paddington, 1300 306 776, single tickets $16/$13.50.
It opens with My Best Enemy on Thursday at 7.45pm at Palace Norton Street, $45. Go to www.italianfilmfestival.com.au

Article - Pam Ayres Interview

By Benito Di Fonzo (Metro, Sydney Morning Herald 13/10/06)

“Do you have Portaloos in Australia?” asks Pam Ayres whilst telling me about her new show.

“There is a piece, which I always say is a hip-hop piece, called ‘The Battle of Portaloo.’ It’s about a builder coming and sticking a Portaloo in the back garden.”

Look out Ice T!

Despite still being hip enough to embrace hop Ayres seems less than enamoured by my offer to get her a ‘wildcard’ spot in a Poetry Slam whilst in Sydney.

“It sounds very gladiatorial. I might not last the three minutes.”

Ayres’ tour coincides with the launch of her book “Surgically Enhanced” which includes poems, stories and sketches from her BBC radio comedy series “Ayres On The Air.”

“It’s the first time I’ve been able to write for other voices. There’s one [sketch] were I’m applying for a job as a pole dancer. I’ve just had a hip replacement so I think I’ll be able to manage the job.”

Do you get the job?

“No he doesn’t want to know, the rotten swine.”

Ayres began writing poetry at 12, but it was only after being convinced to read at Oxfordshire Folk clubs in the mid 70s that her career took off with invitations to read on radio and TV.

“I never set out to be any sort of a funny poet, I just liked writing, and then this caught peoples attention and that’s what they wanted much more of so I provided it.”

All seemed to be going well with Ayres becoming such a stalwart of British television that she was offered her own show, which proved not such a wise career move.

“I did the crummy television series. That was quite damaging, it took me a long time get over that because I spent a lot of time on television saying things that other people had written, it was a ghastly experience and the show got panned as you’ve reminded me. Then I had very much reduced audiences, so I started playing small audiences and building back up again. I’ve been very lucky I’ve had one or two things that really caught people’s imagination.”

The highs and lows of her career are demonstrated in the fact that while her show was voted 64 in Channel 4’s “100 Greatest Moments from TV Hell,” her poem “I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth” was voted into the top 10 of a BBC poll of the nations favourite poems.

“I’ve been listed among the best selling poets and found myself alongside Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath which is very flattering in one way but it’s nonsense in the end because our goals are completely different.”

What are her goals?

“I don’t think I would call my work serious literature, it’s written for performance, for my style, my sense of humour. They’re [about] very ordinary things Benito, I don’t try to enter the political arena, I don’t think that’s my strength, my strength is in looking at normal, everyday things and writing about them in a way that strikes a chord with people. If you write something hilariously funny about politics it has a very short life, whereas if I write about missing your children because you’re an ‘empty nester’ that will have a much longer life.”

She’s had surprising success in a medium that generally strikes fear into audiences’ hearts at it’s very mention: poetry.

“The joy of my job, particularly in the early days when nobody knew me, was to be introduced on some modest stage as Miss Ayres who was going to read her poetry and you’d see everybody’s face drop with, uhm…”

Horror?

“Yes horror, and irritation, and then I’d go out and do a few poems and you’d see them start to laugh, it was very satisfying.”

Now on the verge of her 60^th birthday and performing 50 shows a year worldwide, with a live DVD “In Her Own Words” recently released, she has no plans to put her feet up.

“I don’t think I’ll stop doing it as long as people are interested. Anyway, I think I’d go on doing it even if people weren’t interested because it’s part of me.”

Hopefully she won’t have to test that theory any time soon.

Pam Ayres

17^th October, Parramatta Riverside Theatre $69 - $49 bookings 8839 3399

20^th October, Sydney Opera House Concert Hall $75 - $49 bookings 9250 7777

Benito Di Fonzo's Bitter & Twisted Book Reviews.

"Benito Di Fonzo's [hopefully not too] Bitter & Twisted Book Reviews"

now on 2SER 107.3FM last Thursday of each month

during ‘Overdrive’ with Angela Stretch. (4-6pm)

"On the last Thursday afternoon of each month Sydney's finest Irish-Italian failed poet, playwright, performer and journalist [except for all the other ones] Benito Di Fonzo BA will review the latest in fiction and non-fiction despite that fact that he is no more qualified than anyone else to do so and will desperately be attempting to prevent himself unconsciously harbouring deep feelings and fears about his failed career and personal life that he will hopefully not suppress into a tight ball of bitter resentment that can be aimed at those authors who have the temerity to get published more than he does, all in the best possible taste mind you, and followed by some nice cannolis and a Spaghetti Western [bourbon & chinnotto] over ice. Okay?"

see www.2ser.com

article: Russian Resurrection, 2006 Russian Film Festival

Crikey-ski

Benito Di Fonzo
Metro, Sydney Morning Herald. 22/9/06

"For me," says Russian actor Vladimir Mashkov down the line from Moscow, "a real disaster was the man who died a couple of weeks ago: Crocodile Hunter."

Steve Irwin?

"Yes, he's my favourite-in-the-world man, I have all the DVDs."

Perhaps he could play the Russian Crocodile Hunter.

"He's the only one in history for me. Please write, I want to play that part."

I'll start working on the script, then?

"I'm waiting, I'm prepared," he says with a hearty deep laugh. "I'll just go into the zoo to buy a big snake to do rehearsal with."

Until our Russian Crocodile Hunter gets off the ground, you'll have to settle for seeing Mashkov in three diverse roles at the Russian Resurrection film festival. They include a plump revolutionary in The Captain's Daughter, a terrorist in opening film Counsellor of the State and an action hero in the smash-hit Piranha.

Later this year Australians can see Mashkov opposite Robert De Niro in De Niro's Cold War flick, The Good Shepherd. De Niro will probably play De Niro playing De Niro, but you can never be sure what to expect from Mashkov.

"For me, first of all I must change myself, physically and mentally," he says. "I can't do two movies together, I can't go with the same face. For [The Captain's Daughter] I put on 20 kilos.

"I am from Stanislavsky school. My teacher Oleg Tabakov, most famous actor, director and teacher in Russia, he give me same advice Robert De Niro gave me: follow your instinct. All my life I lived in Siberia in Novosibirsk. That's very tough city, I saw a lot of different people with very strong character."

The late Irwin and Mashkov's other Australian friend, boxer Kostya Tszyu, epitomise the type of character he has made a career portraying in the former Soviet states.

"They are real men, because they have passion, they have destination," Mashkov says, deferring to the Russian word tsol or goal.

Mashkov's English is self-taught:

"I never learn English. I'm like man in the middle of river, somebody just put me in the water and I just swim."

Russian Resurrection organiser Nicholas Maksymow helps translate during the interview. Maksymow, born in Parramatta to a Russian escapee of a Nazi POW camp, says the Russian film industry "was certainly healthy in the old Soviet days". It took a few years to get back on its feet after the fall of communism, "[however] there were certain topics that were no-go zones".

One taboo was Afghanistan, where Soviet troops were fighting the

US-backed mujahideen. The topic was powerfully covered in Ninth Company, last year's Russian box-office hit and part of the festival program.

"I think it rams home what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq today,'' Maksymow says.

Other highlights are First On the Moon, a mockumentary about Russia winning the space race, and top heartstring-puller The Italian. There will be a retrospective of Andrei Tarkovsky's work, whose Solaris influenced filmmakers everywhere.

"What I think is strikingly different about Russian as opposed to Hollywood films is that they have a sense of realism," Maksymow says. "Most of the time they have sad endings."

Mashkov explains why: "Because Russians in real life don't trust happy endings. We think, 'After this happy ending something horrible!' Our country changes every three, four years."

Mashkov admits the Rambo-esque Piranha is Russia's attempt at Hollywood fluff: "You put your head in a freezer, grab a box of popcorn, sit and enjoy yourself."

Mashkov says that films such as The Captain's Daughter, based on the classic Alexander Pushkin novel, give us "the spirit of Russia". Which is?

He laughs heartily.

"When a person would give his last shirt on his back. The most important thing is that a Russian person never betrays anyone. That's what the spirit of Russia is, and that's the scariest thing in life: to know you've been betrayed."

I better get to work on that Irwin script, then.

Russian Resurrection
Tuesday to October 1, Chauvel Cinema, Paddington,
www.russianresurrection.com

article: Push 3 & 4, Wharf2 Loud, STC.

(Metro, SMH, Sept. 2006)

If Lally Katz’s aunt hadn’t been dragged her to a New York transsexual karaoke bar she may never had written “Waikiki Palace.”

“When I was in New York I decided to get a ticket to Waikiki, but I lost my passport in a bar when I was drunk. My aunt took me to this transsexual karaoke bar, it was during the Republican Convention, there were armed guards everywhere, so I thought I’d have my passport with me. Then I got stuck [in Waikiki] because of my passport and ended up at a youth hostel where I met the people that are the inspiration for the play.”

Does that mean there’s a transsexual identity-thief travelling the world as Lally Katz?

“I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t.”

It wouldn’t be the first time the 27 year old playwright had juggled with gender: her last play in Australia contained two characters called Lally Katz, one of which was a male detective and neither of whom were played by the author.

“This is the first [play] that I haven’t been in for a while, I suppose I’m self obsessed.”

Along with Adam Grossetti’s “3606/202,” a sequel of sorts to his award winning study of 1930s Queensland Italian mafia “Mano Nera,” “Waikiki Palace” is the next in Sydney Theatre Company’s ‘Push’ series which gives writers and directors eight days to rehearse and stage a play that conforms to the ten-point ‘Manifesto’ of Wharf 2Loud directors Brendan Cowell and Chris Mead.

‘Waikiki Palace,’ directed by Chris Kohn, is the story of 30-something divorcee Prairie, and her affair with 22 year old backpacker Jack.

“They’ve had an affair but it’s coming to an end and she wants to have this night of connection and love but all these things happen to spoil it. I think it says something about women in our time, that it’s not cool to be affected by casual sex, that you should be like a man.”

Detached?

“Yeah.”

Katz had no problem fitting into the Manifesto.

“I really like rules, especially obscure rules, because it means I’ve got something to bounce off.”

Others haven’t been so accepting of Cowell and Mead’s maxims.

Mead: “We almost had a fight at the launch between a couple of directors over whether it was a good idea or not.”

“There were lots of arguments,” says Cowell, “some quite heated, that was the whole idea. The theatrical event is only half finished when the play’s over, people have a few Amstels and suddenly everyone’s shouting at each other. That’s why we have the bar.”

And the bands, which will feature beforehand on Fridays, and Saturday DJs after, during which Cowell may be having a quiet word with Adam Grossetti who seemed a little unsure of his ability to fit in with the Manifesto.

“I find it quite hard to fit in anywhere,” he says from the corner of an Erskineville hotel.

Okay, Rule 1: No junk.

“What, heroin?”

No, milk crates or hip flasks.

“That’s going to be hard, I carry 17 hip flasks on me at any given moment. Perhaps there should be a manifesto about the manifesto?”

Grossetti’s ‘3606/202’, directed by Chris Kohn, examines fear-mongering and the resultant deterioration of human rights.

“It was inspired by the process my great uncle went through when he was interned during WWII. He’d been naturalised for 26 years.”

He was also president of an Italian-Australian social club, which brought him under suspicion as Mussolini marched into Abyssinia. However “3606/202” expands into the present to show the commonality of Grossotti’s experience.

“It’s the same guy or girl in Belfast, Auschwitz or a porn set in Hollywood, the significance is we’ve been doing this for a long time and haven’t learnt anything. I was struck with the idea of if you start at this point where do we go in terms of what we do to each other, the process of stripping people of their rights. It seems to me that it’s a quick and slippery slide down to the acts of depravity we’ve seen in Abu Ghraib.”

Grossetti utilised transcripts of interrogations from The National Archives.

“It was the beginning of ASIO. You know what? I bet they had a manifesto.”

Push 3: “3606/202” by Adam Grossetti. Directed by David Field. 7,8,9 September. 8:15pm

(Friday “Sarah Aubrey & The Audio Visual Club” 6:30pm, Saturday DJ Mostyn after.)

Push 4: “Waikiki Palace” by Lally Katz. Directed by Chris Kohn. 14,15,16 September. 8:15pm

(Friday “H*t Yeah” 6:30pm, Saturday DJ Mostyn after show)

Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company

book review - "Bacchanalia"

Benito Di Fonzo reviews B. R. Dionysius

(in www.cordite.org.au Jan. 2oo6.)

Bacchanalia by B. R. Dionysius
Interactive Press, 2002.

The title poem of Bacchanalia by B. R. Dionysius is a muscular, vivacious and absorbing piece of prose poetry that starts like a fifteen year old’s diary entry but morphs darkly into something more akin to a police statement. It is original and exciting. Unfortunately, however, many other poems in this collection do not share these qualities.

When the verse in this collection does work, as in the title piece and poems such as ‘Il Duce’ and ‘Browning Street’, the images are vivid and lively as they seamlessly push along a fast flowing narrative. In ‘Bacchanalia,’ for example, one unpunctuated image runs into another taking us into an unstable brain’s mechanics while never judging the unfolding action even at its bloody climax:

that night shazza and i got shitfaced on a bottle of rum a bottle of vodka anything we could find in my mother’s bar we made cocktails mixed shit together sharon chucked all over the toilet floor the piss coursed through our bodies like molten lead…

Or in the potent and rhythmic imagery of ‘Browning Street’:

Sometime,
in the early hours
of the morning,
an albino cockroach
anointed his bare feet.

The world
didn’t miss
a beat.

I felt that too many of the other poems, however, got tangled up in self-conscious pop cultural references – be they Apocalypse Now or Pepi le Phew – that often distract from and do not at all enhance the narrative and momentum of the pieces. In ‘Stars In My Eyes My Country’, for example, the reference to the seminal surrealist film seems unnecessary and superficial:

Sometimes I want to drag
a cutthroat razor across
my eyes like in that film
Un Chien Andalou.

Or the naming of the famous Vietnam War film in ‘Observations From The Herb Garden’, which seems uninspired and unoriginal:

Tiny grasshoppers (an air-cav unit
sic Apocalypse Now) snip Rorschach
shapes out of the chocolate mint.

I found the pop culture and poetry train-spotting annoying after a time, particularly in a piece like ‘An American Trilogy’ which manages to reference everything from Malcolm in the Middle, to Blue Velvet, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, and even an entire quote from (again) Apocalypse Now, all in a poem that mimics the voice of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘America’ too closely for my liking:

… Amerika, they still call you Trinity, don’t they?
Besides the Emperor would’ve been freaked
out with just a demonstration & surrendered
anyway, but as Capt. Willard says,
‘I needed a mission & for my sins
they gave me one.'

‘An American Trilogy’ is not the only place where Dionysius evokes the voice of another poet. There is, for example, what appears to be a Queensland spin on classics such as Ted Hughes’s ‘Crow’ in ‘Crow the Birdbrain’, or on Ginsberg’s ‘A Supermarket in California’ in ‘Lorca in Highgate Hill’:

I saw you Mr Lorca
steal a Milky Way bar
& give it to a boy
who stood on the footpath
dismembering a camellia
for no surrealist purpose.

In some of the Queensland poems he successfully evokes a sticky pungency that reminds me of everything I hate about places of heat and humidity. Here it seems the poet is exploring a different kind of Bacchanalia from the one you might have initially imagined on the basis of the collection’s title, or the poet’s surname for that matter: a submersion in hot nature, and a death through which humidity evokes the natural qualities of decay. In ‘Ragnarok’, for example:

If chrysanthemums
fed on our flesh,

If cocos palms collected
the souls of the dead…

… Moreton Bay figs
old derelicts

asleep in coffins
by the Brisbane River.

Overall, Bacchanalia is an uneven collection. While the title piece struck me as a powerful narrative prose poem with imagery both unsettling and engrossing, most others seemed to lack this clear sense of ‘story’ or vision to propel them forward, and hence came across as self-conscious and insecure, often ending up being poems about poetry itself. Poems about poetry are often as bad as rock songs about rock and roll, but everybody writes them occasionally. It is, however, possible that this eclecticism could work for some readers. One man’s Malcolm in the Middle is another man’s Ginsberg after all.

Jason Reitman (Thank You For Not Smoking) interview

Where there's smoke

by Benito Di Fonzo

August 18, 2006 (Metro, Sydney Morning Herald)

Jason Reitman was captivated by Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel Thank You for Smoking but the film rights already belonged to Mel Gibson.

"The original idea was to make a $US60 million [$78 million] comedy, a smoking version of What Women Want," says Reitman, the son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman. "By the time I got involved [Gibson] had gone on to things he was more 'passionate' about."

In light of recent events, perhaps Reitman is grateful?

"There's only so many times you can hear, 'Die, Jew,' while trying to give an actor directions."

Reitman's Thank You for Smoking made for a tenth of Gibson's proposed budget, follows smooth-talking tobacco-industry spin doctor Nick Naylor, played by Aaron Eckhart.

To stop sales dropping, Naylor tries to cut a deal with Rob Lowe's eccentric Hollywood agent to get cigarettes back in films. Naylor's brief also includes stopping Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy) from putting a skull and crossbones on cigarette packets.

Finistirre's logo seems subtle when compared with the blackened organs adorning Australian packets.

"We tried to make it look really nasty, but you're right - next to what's on the Canadian and Australian packs, we can't compare," Reitman says. "[That] often happens in satire: you try to do an elevated reality, then you realise the truth is worse."

Comedy is a good approach to making a film about Big Tobacco.

"You couldn't do a drama with a hero that works for Big Tobacco," Reitman says, clearly forgetting Russell Crowe's turn in The Insider. "I'm taking a mature look at the subject of vices: that we have to be adult about this, that it's not as simple as heroes and villains. Had I made a drama, people would string me up. But by making something we can laugh at, we can talk about these ideas. That's the importance of satire."

Thank You for Smoking is Reitman's first feature, but the 29-year-old has been making films since he was 10. At 15 he made an award-winning commercial about AIDS, and at 19 he was one of the youngest directors to show at the Sundance Film Festival.

Does he feel he had a career advantage in that his father is a successful filmmaker?

"Oh, that! Honestly? Once people know you're the son of a famous director, they really do think your film's going to suck. Back when I was making short films I could see it in people's eyes. They would say, 'Hey, your film was good.' It was like, 'It didn't turn out as retarded as I thought it would.' "

However, being Ivan Reitman's son had its advantages.

"[When] I was seven years old, every kid was a Ghostbuster for Halloween, but I was the only kid who actually had a real Ghostbusters gun!"

Reitman has directed award-winning commercials for fast-food chain Burger King and Heineken lager. Would he direct a cigarette ad?

"I wouldn't do cigarettes and I wouldn't do military," he says. "American military commercials really bother me. Not that I'm against war, I just don't think people should be conned into fighting. The air-force commercials show kids snowboarding."

Isn't the hero of Thank You for Smoking a con man?

"Nick speaks on behalf of the freedom to smoke. He says people should be allowed to smoke, shouldn't be vilified for smoking. We understand the dangers, we know it's deadly - if you still want to smoke, smoke! If you want to put a gun in your mouth and shoot, shoot. He's a believer in freedom."

Reitman was adamant his adaptation of Thank You for Smoking would be his first feature, believing it would affect the type of scripts he was offered afterwards. The policy paid off. He has since being offered "cool stuff, Iraq War satires".

Perhaps he could interest Gibson? The Aussie expat may need the work.

"Poor Mel," Reitman says.

"I heard he put himself into rehab.

I'm not sure if it's rehab for alcohol or anti-Semitism."

Thank You for Smoking
Director Jason Reitman
Stars Aaron Eckhart, William H. Macy, Rob Lowe, Maria Bello, Robert Duvall
Rated M.
Opens August 24.

Article - Nicholas Hope.

Don't you want me Bubby?

July 21, 2006 (Metro, Sydney Morning Herald)

Nicholas Hope is over Bad Boy Bubby. Too bad his fans aren't. Benito Di Fonzo reports.

Nicholas Hope is often cast as an anxious eccentric, be it Bad Boy Bubby, a priest in Hal Hartley's Henry Fool or his latest role as a strange Australian sailor in Norway. However, it's a surprisingly calm and erudite Englishman who enters the kitsch Randwick cafe, albeit with a large bandage on his finger and a cut on his lip from rehearsals.

"There's a section in the show where I become a snowflake, and the chair collapsed," he says.

The Colour of Panic is his one-man exploration of a dichotomous existence between Australia and Norway.

His script won an award in Norway.

"I thought I'd write a show to give myself some work," Hope says. "[It's about] that feeling of being alone, just not having a place that was mine and feeling panicked. I didn't know what the heck was happening because I was moving between countries all the time.

"It was an interesting feeling, just like having moved [to Whyalla, South Australia] when I was six, that little petulant child came out and I just wanted to blame everybody for how I felt."

Hope explored his angry inner child in his memoir, Brushing the Tip of Fame.

"[That] was more about being on the edge of celebrity and the effect that has on someone who is basically a petulant child. My genetic code is English - it's a little gauche to be overly proud - but the petulance came from expectations and the realisation Hollywood wasn't knocking on my door."

Hope won an AFI for his lead role in Bad Boy Bubby, but received little work immediately afterward, even missing out on a role in Se7en to Kevin Spacey. He did however get flown to many film festivals, the juxtaposition of poverty and the jetset life emphasised when he arrived at Centrelink in a limousine.

"I said [to Village Roadshow], 'I'm sorry, I've got to put in my dole form otherwise I won't have any money,' and they said, 'That's OK, we'll pick you up, take you to the dole office and then zoom you to the interviews.'

"It was a limousine they picked me up in, it had champagne and I had a glass. I ran past everybody in the queue saying, 'I'm really sorry, I've got to get to an interview,' and everybody turns around and the chauffeur waves."

Did he enjoy that? "Yes, I loved it."

At a festival in Norway he fell in love, eventually moving to the "social democratic paradise" of Oslo. The resulting culture shock informs The Colour of Panic. What colour is panic?

"Grey with flashes of red. The grey comes from that first winter in Norway. The sun comes up about 10 and goes down about three, everything is grey and claustrophobic. The red's the Australian desert."

Hopes says the dislocation between Norway and former home Whyalla was something he was able to use theatrically: "It's the ultimate panic attack."

However, Hope keeps his cool when encountering weird Bubby fans, such as the Norwegian who'd seen it 13 times.

"A band was playing, and I said, 'Look that's really lovely, that's great, but I'd just like to listen to the band if that's OK.' He grabbed me and threw me up against the wall and started screaming, 'F--- you, God! F--- you, God!' Then the bouncers came.

"Here, having a quiet drink with my brother in a pub, someone comes over and starts jabbering about Bubby. Then he decides he's insulting me so he says 'sorry', grabs a pepper shaker and pours the entire contents in his mouth, then splutters and coughs all over our table and into our beers saying, 'Sorry, sorry'.

"He believed he'd insulted me because he didn't know my name. He started shouting, 'Everybody, this is Bad Boy Bubby, do you know his name?' It's not like being an A-list star where people say 'you're Mel Gibson' or 'you're Al Pacino' - they say, 'You're Bad Boy Bubby'."

If panic is grey, what does it smell like?

"It smells like burnt dust, and reverse-cycle airconditioning."

Like Centrelink?

"Yeah."

Suddenly I feel like some champers.

THE COLOUR OF PANIC

Wednesday to July 30, Opera House.

"Sydney Plantagenet's Psychedelic Quest. Episode 1: Attack of the Robotic Russell Crowes."

If you missed my radio play "Sydney Plantagenet's Psychedelic Quest. Episode One: Attack Of The Robotic Russell Crowes," live from The Sydney Opera House Studio and broadcast on FBI-94.5FM on June 25 then you can hear it by clicking on the headline of this entry.

I don't know how long FBI are going to leave it there so, click on soon, and don't be afraid to tell me what you think... I know it ain't exactly Hamlet, but...

http://www.fbi.org.au/content.php/703.html

Article - "Meow Meow"

Hello kitty

Benito di Fonzo

Metro, Sydney Morning Herald. June 30, 2006

Sultry cabaret artist Meow Meow was in London on Monday, New York Tuesday, Los Angeles Wednesday and, on a wet Friday afternoon, she's lying atop a bar in Darlinghurst's Victoria Room sipping Chandon. No wonder she called last week's show in Germany Sequins & Spectacular Jetlag.

When it opens at the Opera House it will be retitled Beyond Glamour: The Absinthe Tour.

"That's a reference to my mental state, clearly, but it conjures up a fabulous image of Toulouse-Lautrec and early French cabaret," purrs Meow in an accent you can't pin down. "My first language was obviously unintelligible, [but] it made sense to me, then off we went into French and German, then English and a little Mandarin."

For her Sydney debut, Meow will team up with pianist Iain Grandage, who she met in Shanghai while working with controversial Chinese transsexual Jin Xing.

"[Xing's] a really interesting woman. She was the best male dancer in China, a kind of superstar, and she was a colonel in the army, as well.

Then she had a sex change."

Meow's show received rave reviews in Melbourne, where The Age's Helen Razer described her as "Diamanda Galas drowned in cherry liqueur".

"This show takes a lot of songs that I absolutely adore," she says. "Really beautiful cabaret songs from the French and German cabaret tradition mixed in with show tunes, horribly deconstructed, I'm afraid, and I mix it with some John Cage and contemporary opera.

"I love that you can use noise and you can reference 15 songs in one song just by passing through the notes, and people have this primeval memory of 1925, 1865 or a primal scream from the slime that means something."

Meow is also working on performance art fellowships in Berlin and New York.

"I'm seen as sequins in the performance art world and [as] razor blades in the cabaret world," she says.

"There's this saying that what turns me on is erotic and what turns you on is pornographic, so for some people the show will be deeply erotic, and for others it will be deeply grotesque, and that's what I like to play with. It's a lot about how [the audience] wants to perceive you; as a superstar or a washed-up diva, a goddess or a has-been."

Meow, also a lawyer, says she may be "wilfully blind" when it comes to any rules the Opera House imposes on her: "I popped my bosom in a glass of red wine [at one show] because there's so many rules about nudity, alcohol and cigarettes and I just think it's so ridiculous. I think it's important to rock people and also to soothe them. You don't want too much of either, otherwise you've got bland, anaesthetised non-thinking. Shatter and soothe, I think, is a good thing."

Punters be warned: there'll be audience participation.

"I think fear is good in the theatre; it's good when you think anything could happen - we're not in a cinema, after all. So it is unpredictable: I could walk offstage, I could fall in love with you, you could fall in love with me. How are you feeling, by the way? In love, clearly."

Her biography says she has no fixed address. Does that mean she'll need somewhere to crash after the show?

"Yes, is that OK? I'm very cuddly.

I leave a trail of sequins and eyelashes, but nothing scary."

Meow Meow: Beyond Glamour
June 30, July 1, 7 & 8, Opera House Studio

Article - Bukowski On Film: Rough Guide (Metro, SMH)

Bukowski blues

June 16, 2006

Metro, Sydney Morning Herald

Translating a drunk who does little to the screen is tough.

Bent Hamer's adaptation of Bukowski's 1975 novel Factotum, starring Matt Dillon as the author's alter-ego Henry "Hank" Chinaski, with Lili Taylor (I Shot Andy Warhol) and Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny) as his alcoholic muses, is one of the better attempts at putting the drunken bard on screen.

Tales Of Ordinary Madness in 1981 was the first and, for many, the best, with Ben Gazzara as a slow, cool, yet still ugly and a little unlikeable anti-hero.

It was followed in 1987 by Barfly, the best known and the one screenplay Bukowski wrote. It featured a mumblingly over-acting Mickey Rourke opposite Faye Dunaway. Bukowski wrote Hollywood about the underwhelming result.

That same year, the one Bukowski film the writer liked was released. The Belgian production Crazy Love, based on his books The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California, and Ham on Rye, concentrated more on his socially awkward and acne-ridden adolescence.

Last year the critically acclaimed documentary Born into This was released here. It used rare and revealing footage of the famous wino, as well as interviews with Tom Waits, Bono, Sean Penn and some people without yachts. Another Bukowski adaptation, Bring Me Your Love, has recently finished filming.

Factotum sticks to the Bukowski formula: "Went to the bar at the track and got loaded, met this ugly, drunken piece of ass, after we f---ed I felt sick, so I went to the bar at the track ... [etc]"

However, as with Born Into This, Factotum has voice-overs of Bukowski's poems that give some insight into his life as a search for a kind of purity. And that is what appeals to Bukowski's fans.

In common with Gazzara, Dillon is a more believable, blackly comic Hank. Rourke was more caricature yob. Factotum captures the way Bukowski used art to laugh at the absurd meaningless of life, like a drunken lama, without over-idealising or pulling punches.

FACTOTUM

Director Bent Hamer. Stars Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor. Rated M. Screening now.

Article - Mark Lee (Metro, SMH)

The Frail Man

Benito di Fonzo
June 16, 2006

Gallipoli's Mark Lee resurfaces in a new play about "what makes us so insular".

Mark Lee shot to fame as the fresh-faced hero of 1981's Gallipoli. On the eve of a lead role in a new play and his feature directorial debut, I asked where he's been.

"I've had a great 25 years! I've worked in music, theatre, film, and I began to develop as an actor, which I wasn't, to be quite honest with you. I got through Gallipoli on a reasonable looking mug, a lot of enthusiasm and some great people around me, not technique, not any great talent. Because Peter [Weir] and Mel [Gibson] hit the stratosphere after that they always say, 'What happened to you?' With Mel, realistically it was Mad Max 2; with Peter it was probably Witness.

"It was one of those things that turns in your favour, so over the time I've gone back to school. I love doing this, I've found a play I really enjoy."

That play is the Sydney premiere of Anthony Crowley's thriller The Frail Man, in which Lee plays the CEO of Australia's largest IT company, who is pursued by a detective (Jeanette Cronin) in the investigation of the murder of a young Muslim woman.

This story is interwoven with the tale of two runaway convicts.

"The play looks at our roots, our beginnings, what makes us so insular," Lee says. "We came here in pain and degradation and tried to make the landscape anything but what it was; that defines many of the problems we face today, an island nation of Europeans in Asia, and it looks at that using the corporate structure, by looking at the echelons of power and at its zenith how it's manipulated."

Another work that tackles corporate machismo is Lee's feature directorial debut The Bet, which opens at the Sydney Film Festival. In it, Matthew Newtown plays a young stockbroker who makes an ego-filled bet with a wealthy friend (Aden Young) over who can make the most money in 90 days. It then follows the effects of this obsession on his personal life.

"While The Frail Man is a big metaphor for Australia, The Bet is a moral tale set in the corporate world," Lee says. "I had to learn about the stockbroking world, sit with stockbrokers, watch them work. We had to work out a way to keep the veracity but make it visually exciting."

Among the ways Lee and editor Jason Ballantine ( Wolf Creek) achieved that was by ditching the fluoro-blue tones of corporate tales for a warmer look.

Lee moved to directing when he realised there are only so many spots on All Saints you can do. "As you get older if you haven't hit a certain niche your choices are fairly minimal, you find yourself sitting in the same casting agents looking at the same people for a 50-worder going 'this is insane, I've been doing this since 1967.' So I took an overdraft and funded my first short. I found there were certain things I had a knack for."

What made him want to direct The Bet? "I'm now in my late 40s and started directing fairly late and found I loved it. Had I been offered Zombie Nymphomaniacs In Chains 2, would I have taken that? That's the question you ask yourself. As it turned out, this had a wonderfully strong structure."

It's quite a change from the post- Gallipoli years when Lee worked as a labourer. "I did that on and off for nearly nine years. It's nothing special, and it was good; it got me fit, got my head straight. I started doing different roles rather than wallowing. I [also] played in pub bands: the Idle Poor, One Way Ticket, Waterfront. I don't know how good we were but we had a ball."

Lee's joy in projects such as The Frail Man and The Bet has taken care of any regrets. "I went through a phase. I stupidly once said to a friend that sometimes I feel [ Gallipoli is] an albatross I'd shot and hung round my neck, I was so disgusted with talking about it. He chastised me by saying, 'We should all have such as albatross,' and I went, 'Yeah, fair enough.' "

Romeo and Juliet (Metro, SMH)

Benito Di Fonzo

June 9, 2006 Arts - Entertainment - smh.com.au

What it is about Romeo that stops Juliet ringing Neighbourhood Watch?

Romeo is not the only Italian to stand under a girl's balcony reciting verse, but with lines such as "But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?" you know he's the most infamous. What it is about Romeo that stops her ringing Neighbourhood Watch?

"Obviously, if Juliet was not a virgin and had had a series of abusive relationships behind her I don't think she'd be as responsive to Romeo, [but] there's this beautiful vulnerability and ethereal quality that she sees in him, like he's from another planet," says 23-year-old Chloe Armstrong, who plays the "not yet 14" Juliet in Bell Shakespeare's latest production.
"It's to do with his imagination, sensitivity and impressionability, and as young as she is she sees that straightaway and falls for him."

Romeo is played by Julian Garner, best known as Alex Dimitriadis's gay lover in 1998's Head On. Even armed with poetry, the love between Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet is doomed from the start due to their families' feud, a conflict for which director John Bell saw comparisons in recent events.

"He was thinking we don't really have this sort of fighting in our society," Armstrong says, "and then the Cronulla riots happened. That was the starting point for him. The set has quite a stark urban feel, and the divisions are very clear between the Capulets and Montagues in costume."

Armstrong, who also plays the witch Graymalkin in Romper Stomper director Geoffrey Wright's upcoming film version of Macbeth, saw echoes of her own adolescence in the love-struck Juliet.

"I had moments where something mattered to me so much that I lost all sense of rationale and was arguing along a course that was completely unfathomable, but I was so adamant in my heart that this was right that I couldn't see past it.

"To an outsider's eye it would have seemed that I was being a hysterical rebellious adolescent, but I was just desperate. It's the same for Juliet, she's a girl living with a family who are completely thwarting her whole objective, which is to be with Romeo."

Hence we witness Juliet's journey towards independence as the conflict between her forbidden romance and her family forces her to make some very adult, if ultimately ill-fated, decisions.

"It's quite unusual for a 'not yet 14'-year-old to be quite so free-thinking," she says. "She becomes her own agent. A big part of Juliet for me is her autonomy, which she discovers, and asserts. It's really cool that it was written so long ago by a man who gives this young girl this incredible initiative."

She is aided by Friar Lawrence (Philip Dodd), who secretly marries the couple before Romeo's enforced exile for the murder of Juliet's cousin. Later, after learning of Juliet's decision to commit suicide to avoid an arranged marriage, the Friar gives her a drug that will help her fake her own death. What would the Department of Community Services say?
"In retrospect you can go 'Oh Jesus, that was a bit rash, perhaps I should have called Lifeline'," Armstrong says. "He's impulsive, but he means well."
Ultimately, love brings an end to the ancient feud, if a little late for our lovers. Juliet might have been better off calling the cops when some boy from the wrong part of town turned up. Yet love, like poetry, is at it's best when blind.

Armstrong says: "To think that adults need two young people to kill themselves to see how stupid their feud is. As she says, 'my only love sprung from my only hate', which is imposed on her, like any sense of racism."

Only in fair Verona, or Cronulla.

(originally appeared in Sydney Morning Herald, Metro, 9/6/06)

Article - Request Programme (Metro, SMH)

"What's My Line Again?"

IT'S NOT HARD TO FLUFF YOUR LINES WHEN THERE AREN'T ANY.

BENITO DI FONZO REPORTS ON A WACKY STC PRODUCTION.

In January Sydney Theatre Company's "Wharf2LOUD" attempted to live up to it’s manifesto of creating interesting cutting edge theatre by staging a play without punctuation (Dissident, Goes Without Saying), now they take it one step further with "Request Programme," a play without any dialogue whatsoever.

Metro asked Wharf2LOUD Director Brendan Cowell if there's something wrong with his grammar-check.

"We're trying to guarantee our audience a new theatrical experience every time they come here, and we can guarantee that nobody has ever seen anything like this before; it goes for one hour, it's got one woman in it, and she doesn't say a thing, and it's absolutely compelling."

Brendan discovered the play, written in the 70s by Bavaria's leading playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, while in Berlin in 2003.

"I saw a production of it and immediately began to build one in my head because I thought this was one of the most chilling evenings I'd ever had in the theatre, I was really shaken up after it. But I also thought they got it a little bit wrong. Then I started thinking about it in context of Sydney."

Hence Kroetz's Bavarian heroine has become Ms Emma Swift, and the stage now an Edgecliff flat. She never says anything, but she does everything a women living alone might do, including go to the toilet, use 'feminine deodorant,' and, most importantly, listen to her favourite radio request programme.

"There's three characters in the play; her, her flat, and the radio programme,” Cowell says. “They feed off each other. I don't think [the play's] ever been so pertinent - we're getting so brilliant at being on our own, we all live in these one bedroom apartments right next to each other with our own little lives, "

Emma is portrayed by Suzi Dougherty in her first one woman show.

"In Germany every leading female actor wants to play this role, that's why it's performed so much,” Dougherty says. “It's the kind of play you could see a few times and get different things out of."

Dougherty’s challenge is to flesh out the character solely through her actions.

"It's about the ordinary,” she says. “The sum of the ordinary actions equals the extraordinary event that happens."

Extraordinary, says Cowell, because on this day something is different.

"Tonight she's holding herself up against a few things, which is a potentially dangerous thing to do."

Kroetz intended the audience discover something of themselves through Emma's un-self-conscious actions.

"When you're on your own you behave in a more primitive fashion,” Cowell says. “We're like animals when we're on our own - we feed ourselves, we shit, we listen. You start projecting your own emotions, fragilities and neuroses onto [Emma], that's the genius of the play: it's about us."

Kroetz's extreme-realist plays have caused controversy before. In 1970 when a Munich theatre was put under police protection after violent audience reactions to Stubborn and Working At Home which featured masturbation, attempted abortion and a child murder on stage. Three years later he was Germany's most produced living playwright.

The radio request programme of the title is based upon "Your Request," a Bavarian "Love Song Dedications" of the 70s, currently being updated and localised by Cowell and Sound Designer Basil Hogios.

Hogios: "We had discussions about the whole series of songs mapping the story, having highs and lows."

"They're all love songs," explains Cowell as a Leonard Cohen number floats across the rehearsal studio.

No Slayer then?

"I did suggest some Iron Maiden," says Hogios.

Perhaps a Leonard Cohen cover of Maiden?

"We do have an interesting cover," says Cowell.

Hogios: "We can't mention it yet, but it's a cover of a famous Australian song by a female and turned into a love ballad."

Finally, Mariah Carey's Khe Sahn - only to be played when nobody's watching.

#

(originally appeared in Sydney Morning Herald, May 26 2006.)

Gypsy Journalism - TINA 2001

Here's an ancient piece of mine that I rediscovered recently... most unprofessional and all... (i.e. I'm in the article, but it always tickled my fancy...)

It was originally published in 2001 in the now defunct Sydney street magazine "Revolver" (which had morphed out of "Beat" and later became "The Brag")

"The Write Stuff"

This Is Not Art and The National Young Writers' Festival make for a unique Newcastle adventure.

By Benito Di Fonzo

The ‘National Young Writers’ Festival’ (NYWF) has given the former steel town of Newcastle a fine local tradition. That of writers from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Ballarat, Brisbane and all points in between swilling beer, bourbon and hash cookies as fast as they can scam them, whilst their ‘compoetriates’ rant black rivers of cynicism or blow Utopian hope-bubbles from the stage and street. It’s a great feeling for a two-bit wordsmith like myself, trying to cash in on everything from ethnic stereotyping to performance poetry, to find that all over Australia there are like minded merry pranksters.

At times it feels as if, for one week a year, Newcastle becomes Newtown by the sea, with a healthy dose of Fitzroy and St Kilda thrown in. Electro-ferals and day-glow turntablists share the town with bad-shirted poets, hip-hopping revolutionaries, confused short film makers, pissed street press, and the just plain ‘lost.’ This is because NYWF falls under the umbrella of the ‘This Is Not Art’ Festival, which also includes ‘The National Student Media Conference, ‘’ Sound Summit,’ and ‘Electrofringe.’

Aside from the odd interview for 2SER’s ‘Poetic Off-Licence’ (6pm Tues), I had earned my free bed by volunteering to MC the Saturday Night Cabaret Spectacular. Or something like that. As far as I knew the rest of the weekend could be devoted to ‘finding myself’ as it were. However, NYWF is a strange animal. A kind of drug fucked octopus in a vat of Kent Old. Hence, no sooner had I found Newcastle, found my Hotel, found my old muso buddy Philasophigas, found the Hunter Hotel, and found a likely seminar to attend, than that strange beast’s tentacles sprung maliciously out in the form of Australia’s most violent poet - Melbourne’s Phil Doyle.

Phil Doyle earned his reputation when he pulled a Bowie knife at the first NYWF. At the time it made the papers and got the event some free publicity. Phil Doyle handed me an article he had published in ‘Overland’ criticising NYWF, with particular venom pointed at “the Sydney poets” who were accused of committing what is considered a grave crime in Melbourne. We had made poetry entertaining. I was to defend the charge. Luckily, Philasophigas had bought half a bottle of bourbon off a guy in the street whilst asking directions to the nearest chemist. He left me with the bottle as he was off to see something ‘electrofringy.’ I poured myself a little poets’ courage, studied the article, and vehemently defended the charges. Sydney poets entertaining? Ludicrous!

There were a lot of other laid back yet informative events to attend between drinks. Highlights included Linda Jaivan talking about how to write sexy text, AJ Rochester on comedy writing, and of course the afore mentioned Cabaret night. For the sake of the Melburnians I tried not to be overly entertaining. In the end, failure is it’s own reward.

Of course, come Sunday the brutal reality of being in Newcastle on Grand Final night hit us like a bad simile. The afternoon went eerily quiet as several poets followed local boy and organiser Marcus Westbury’s advice and donned blue and red clothing. There was a sigh of relief when the local team won their little football game.

As a writer, I probably learnt more about humanity on that night than at any seminar, as I wandered through a cross between a kind of footy-yob Reclaim The Streets, and the Star Hotel riots.

“This is what football’s about” said one delirious Novocastrian as he passed me a beer in the street before climbing a traffic light so as to jump into a mosh pit of locals from the roof of the Great Northern Hotel. Now that, I thought, is art.

(originally published in ‘Revolver’ 8^th Oct. 2oo1.)