"Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue"

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald. August 24, 2007

Would you bribe a dictator to sell grain? Our biggest corporate scandal comes to the stage.

David Williams and Jane Vaile in Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue.

Genre

Theatre

Location

CarriageWorks

Address

245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh

Date

24 August 2007 to 8 September 2007

Tickets

$20-$30

Phone Bookings

1300 438 849

Online Bookings

www.carriageworks.com.au

Preview

"It's a happy story about Australian successes," says Stephen Klinder from Version 1.0.

He's talking about the performance group's adaptation of the Royal Commission into the Australian Wheat Board's (AWB) rorting of the oil-for-food program. The Cole Inquiry found that AWB kicked back about $290 million into Iraqi coffers via a Jordanian trucking company while it made Australia the biggest seller of wheat to Saddam's regime. Bad politics, yes, but surely good business?

"Iraq was their most profitable market," says another Version 1.0 member, David Williams. "They were able to charge whatever they wanted."

Deeply Offensive & Utterly Untrue follows earlier Version 1.0 works in a genre called documentary theatre. CMI: A Certain Maritime Incident used transcripts from the "children overboard" inquiry, while The Wages Of Spin used Senate proceedings about the Iraq war.

Turning the 8500-page transcript from arguably the most boring of political scandals into something entertaining seems a mammoth challenge. Isn't it just a room full of lawyers talking about wheat contracts?

"It's a fair question," says Version 1.0's Kym Vercoe, "but we were about to go to war against Iraq and, meanwhile, one of our biggest corporations had given them $290 million, a company monitored by the Government gave our archenemy money. That's not boring, that's shocking!"

Surely it's all in legalese, a language designed for somnolent obfuscation rather than entertainment?

"Sometimes it's like a farcical courtroom drama," Klinder says. "We have interviews with Alexander Downer and he's really a parody of himself. I think there's a lot of comedy in Alexander Downer."

The play's title comes from Downer's response to accusations that Australia went to war to protect its wheat market.

"He'll be a great loss to the artistic world," Williams says of the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Taylor says: "The only parallel I can think of is extreme sports. This is extreme theatrical sports - how do you [make it entertaining]?"

Members of Version 1.0 find using real transcripts lends rhythmic veracity to the dialogue.

"You've got people like [David] Mamet and [Harold] Pinter, who struggled their guts out to make [dialogue] sound like the stuff people say and in the way they say it," Klinder says.

Cognisant that they couldn't just have people sitting in courtroom chairs for 90 minutes, Version 1.0's members use sound, video - even live mice - and physical theatre to bring the concepts to life, such as a "living diagram" of just how the kickbacks worked.

Taylor says: "When we go onto the floor we have to physicalise it, that's why I called it an extreme sport."

So it won't be like watching question time?

Vercoe says: "We've done this because we trust that most sane people wouldn't want to read the entire Cole Inquiry. We think, as much as we forced ourselves to read it, we have particular skills - whether they fail spectacularly or not - of making that information digestible, entertaining and something that people can take away and think about."

With so many witnesses apparently suffering memory loss during the inquiry, there shouldn't be a problem if they forget their lines.

"You do get the feeling that they've had a big meeting and said, 'Let's see how far we can push this, how far we can pretend we just don't remember,' " Vercoe says. "If I forget my lines, sooner or later someone in the company's going to say, 'Get your lines down, we open tomorrow night.' That's pretty small in comparison to giving Saddam Hussein $290 million. It doesn't work when you get a parking fine - you can't say, 'I didn't have time to read the sign.' "

Another performer, Christopher Ryan, says: "We're human beings, we all f--- up. With the AWB, you've got somebody who's incredibly belligerent at one end going, 'I did nothing wrong, get off my case,' and you've someone at the other end having a mental breakdown. It's a huge classical thematic of human greed. It's fantastically meaty, ballsy stuff."
The timing is certainly fortuitous.

Williams says: "I don't know that political scandal will die if the present government isn't re-elected, [though] I'd hope there'd be fewer of them."

Preview - Survival Tactics

Survival Tactics

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2007

Is hip-hop theatre more valid for today's generation than Shakespeare?

Wire MC in Survival mode.
Photo: Bryan O'Brien

Preview

Back in the mid-'80s, talented young actor Morgan Lewis was performing mime at the Opera House and playing Romeo for the Australian Theatre For Young People. Meanwhile, streetwise B-boy Morganics was beatboxing and breakdancing to Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa outside Hoyts and at Circular Quay.

Lewis and Morganics were the same person and, through the emerging genre of "hip-hop theatre", they've come together - not that the paradox was ever more than geographical to Morganics.

"I moved from Circular Quay doing mime and popping and breakdancing routines to, at the age of 14, doing a 45-minute white mime show in the Opera House, so it just moved up the road a little bit," he says.

The 36-year-old has performed in shows such as Crouching B-boy Hidden Dreadlocks and Stereotype. He was in arguably Australia's first hip-hop theatre show, The Bridge, as part of the Metabass N'Breath ensemble in 1996. Reviewers in the US, where hip-hop theatre has become large enough for an annual week-long festival to be held in New York, have noted that the genre in which people speak in tight rhymes is reminiscent of Shakespeare's poetic Elizabethan language.

Morganics agrees with this observation.

"Iambic pentameter, yeah," he says. "I came up doing Shakespeare since I was 12, you're doing your bars and your counts. As artists today we have a new vocabulary and this vocabulary is now being put in a theatrical context.

"I think it's as valid, if not more valid, for us than Shakespeare. For us this is the stuff that we listen to, live, breathe, eat, sleep ... this is what's going on in our lives and we're trying to put it on the stage so people can feel it."

Despite starring in stage productions opposite Toni Collette, Morganics originally moved away from acting out of creative frustration.

"I found that actors didn't have any ideas of their own, which is not entirely true, but I found that if you had your own ideas you'd become a performer, and you'd start making your own work."

Morganics is currently performing in, directing and co-producing Survival Tactics with the Opera House Studio through his company, Invisible Forces. The cast is filled with some of Australia's finest B-boys, rappers, DJs, dancers and singers, including Sista Native (Bounty 75), B-boy Jay (Wicked Force), Wire MC, Nick Power (Gravity Warriors) and Triple J Hip Hop Show and Channel [V] host Maya Jupiter.

"Everyone [in the cast] generates their own work and has their own ideas," Morganics says.

The cast also represents the multicultural heritage of inner-city Sydney. Marrickville-raised Tongan soul singer Seini Taumoepeau, also known as Sista Native, says: "We've got myself, some Anglo-Australians from various backgrounds, an Aboriginal man, a Turkish-Latino woman, and a Maori-Romanian who's also part Polynesian."

Sista Native sees hip-hop theatre as a welcome move away from the materialism of much of the hip-hop scene.

"Hip-hop theatre is an area where we can just tell the story, where it's not about your CD or DVD," she says.

"It's a bit more simple in terms of, 'It's theatre, it's the story, and here's our story in this format,' and I think that people really dig it. And it's good getting off the mic, it's a bit more like hip-hop on the street in that sense."

Each performer has created his or her own character, whose story intertwines with the story of other performers. The result is a narrative about life in inner-city Sydney that culminates in a moment of violence.

"Some characters are very close to the performer and some are very different," Morganics says. "I'm not an ice junkie but in the show I am, because that's what I wanted to look at. Once you scratch the surface of that you become aware of more people who are doing that shit everywhere in this country."

Rapper and guitarist Will Jarrett, also known as Wire MC, plays Swerve, an angry young Aboriginal man who has to learn to give and accept trust.

"He's based on where I was at a young age, not letting go of anger and bitterness and letting that consume my life," he says, adding that reading helped him to escape that phase.

"I read a lot and I met a lot of people and I realised you can't blame people, you have to blame actions. That's what [Swerve] learns."

In conversation with some Chaser cats.

(unedited version of article for Sydney Morning Herald)

“The Chaser’s War on Shakespeare” by Benito Di Fonzo.

While awaiting Dead Caesar composer Andrew Hansen’s emergence from an ABC editing suite I watch the play’s author Chris Taylor and Chaser cohort Craig Reucassel rehearse links for that evenings show. Reucassel is confused by Taylor’s joke concerning the Dalai Lama’s MySpace site and it’s ubiquitous creator Tom.

Taylor tells Reucassel not to worry, “the kids will find it funny.”

His approach to writing his debut play was not a million miles away.

“I went to a whole lot of plays in a row that were just hard work,” says Taylor, “It struck me that there was a hole in the market for a good crowd-pleaser, so I wanted to put on something that was very undemanding of it’s audience, and just a bit of silly feel-good nonsense. Even I was surprised at how Revue-like and unsophisticated it is. It’s the most undergraduate thing I’ve written since Uni. I grew up loving Life of Brian and the Python stuff and I’ve never been able to write that type of humour for the Chaser because [it’s] set in the real world, it just wouldn’t work, whereas I could do it on stage.”

Rumour has it the idea was first mooted by Wharf2Loud Artistic Director Brendan Cowell in the early hours of a bender.

“The way he recalls it is I was begging him to give me a slot, as I actually recall it was somewhere between the two. We were definitely in The Abercrombie Hotel, that has been verified by at least four barmen and a cleaner. [Cowell] and I write very different shows but we have a mutual interest in getting young people to the theatre and convincing them that it needn’t be a hard night out, it can be enjoyable and engaging.”

Taylor chose to satirise Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a way of commenting on both politics and theatre itself.

“I’d always had the idea, even back in Year 9, that it was a great story, but Shakespeare made the fundamental mistake of making it a tragedy. Even back then I could see the potential for quite a satirical political fable in there, these guys running around stabbing each other wearing togas. I play up the whole analogy between Caesar as toppled dictator and Saddam Hussein. The Roman plotters are like the Coalition of The Willing, particularly Bush and Rumsfeld, the way they thought they were doing a good thing by getting rid of a dictator but actually plummeted a country into civil war. I was keen to make that analogy without laying it on too thick.”

Taylor discovered writing for the stage a very different process to TV and radio.

“No one ever really analyses the lines I write in a Chaser script, whereas it was fascinating to see these NIDA trained actors torturing themselves in analysing what essentially amounted to a knob joke. I thought I could just break their habits and convince them to work my way but what happened was the reverse and eventually I saw method in the way they’d been trained and it made me a lot more disciplined with the rewrites. You still get to the knob joke but you’ve got to be a bit smarter about how you get there.”

Andrew Hansen, who along with a kazooist is the live orchestra for the show, admits he was worried when he first heard Taylor was writing a play.

“In the Chaser group I tend to play the more low-brow stupid stuff,” says Hansen. “Chris is good at writing dry, satirical, clever stuff and I was terribly worried that Dead Caesar was going to be dry and clever, it was an enormous relief when I discovered that it was this drunken bawdy farce.”

Hansen also had his fear of his fellow actors to confront.

“There was a moment with the dress rehearsal where Ben Borgia [who plays Brutus] said to me ‘I’ve brought 20 friends, all NIDA graduates,’ and when I heard this my bowels loosened. I thought god they’re going to go ‘what is this upstart comedian doing in the theatre? Get out!’”

Does he appreciate the political allegory?

“I’m told there are some allegorical moments, audience members have told me, I haven’t spotted them myself. It’s just a huge amount of fun and incredibly entertaining, to me that’s meaning in itself.”

#

“Dead Caesar”

By Chris Taylor.

Composer Andrew Hansen.

Directed by Tamara Cook.

With Ben Borgia, Alan Dukes, Andrew Hansen, John Leary, Ewen Leslie, Toby Moore, Monica Sayers.

Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company.

4 July – 21 July.

$15 - $34

Bookings (02) 9250 1777 www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Finishing a manuscript is a deeply emotional moment. Printing it out and sending it off into the world even more so. It's like sending a child off to school.

You weigh it in your hands.

You look at what was until now only pixels on a screen. A damn lot of pixels but pixels nonetheless. Now it's three hundred and eight pages of hard copy.

You flick through them.

You just know the judges of the competition you're sending it off to won't love it like you do, won't understand this strange little retarded infant you spawned, but you always will. Or will they? Who knows.

Here are some photos I took before I sent my child out into the big bad world. For three years I carried it in me in various forms, and I carried in that strange incubator known as my laptop. In fact it outlived two laptops, two Toshibas, and I carried it unharmed into a third, a Dell, only a month ago.

This morning it was spat out, all three hundred and seven pages of it.

I was unsure my printer would cope with it, whether the sides would split and it would bleed black blood, but it didn't. Sure it had a minor panic halfway through the labour but a restart soon fixed that.

When it was all out I dried it in a towel, looked over it to make sure it was all there, and naturally as one does with a newborn after a long labour, photographed it with my laptop camera.

Then I casually printed out the placenta-like Synopsis.

My hands were shaking as I filled out the entry form for the ABC Fiction Award 2008 and a stray tear of black blood left my laptop I'm sure.

Then it was off to the post office.

I felt like I was putting it out for adoption, betraying it almost, but no - I was sending it out into the world, hopefully to be judged less harshly than me, who knows.

So here it is, hopefully you'll hear more of it. Either way they say it's the journey that matters anyway. Not that a journey to a book deal isn't always better than a journey to the Dole office, but...

I call it Molochio Leather.

I Was Attacked By A Bush Poet!

Here's an old poem that I've just put this here for Wednesday Kennedy in response to an on her blog at http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=149802788&blogID=280206981&MyToken=5b9b6d02-01a8-4216-8dc2-71f48d589800

It's a true story incidentally.

I Was Attacked By A Bush Poet.

I was attacked by a Bush Poet it's true; he looked like a rabid Orson Welles

as his porky fist popped buttons off my collar & his face grew pink as a dingo’s bits on heat.

Yeah, I was attacked by a Bush Poet at the peak of a Spring Writer's Festival

after consuming the sponsor's fluids in the stale starchy air of the poetry marquee.

The gaggle of poets had gathered around to do what they did best; compete,

for a minuscule monetary prize,

and a rare shot in the bloated blue veins of their egos of the finest uncut kudos.

And then I was attacked by a Bush Poet,

sure, some would say I was asking for it

with my smart-ass dago mouth and threads and my 'Stop Jabiluka' badge.

I'd actually quite liked his verse;

a mild departure from the Lawson like rants about

horses and hills and sunburnt bullock trains,

and hard blokie homo-erotic fantasies about raping the land for a Queen -

all as alien to my existence as that sad Union Jack in our flag.

So I congratulated him, sincerely if not soberly,

as he pulled back his Akubra scalp

and continued to guzzle at the barrel of Guiness which explained his stout physique.

As his bloated face came down all that he seemed to notice

was the bold black and gold of that Jabiluka badge pinned to the rim of my ethnic leather

and so he began a tirade supporting uranium and sprouting mad Menzies wisdom.

Naturally, I didn't agree.

In fact, I'd just come from the ERA embassy,

and heard of the ferals risking their lives against the dumb ugly evil of Darwin police.

What I actually said to him is beyond me,

but I'm sure it was delivered with the silk like bite of a polite chardonnay

and an accenting flick of the wrist.

Then it happened; his porky fist flying towards my collar like a logger on acid,

then pulling it towards his plump matronly features as he began to bellow;

"You macchiato sipping inner city smart asses,

you dole bludging, drug addled, commie, hippie, poofter, scum.

Pauline’s right; you should all be gassed, you Greenie Wog Asian Jew Blacks."

All around me writers turned, poets even halted tugging dumbly at their drinks

and sat silently in the amphetamine air of violence awaiting my baited reaction.

Now, I'm a runner not a fighter

and while I'm not averse to thrusting the blade of a sarcastic word

into the Achilles heel of an enemy's sole,

I've never been in a fight in my life and I plan to keep it that way.

Like Ghandi said, You can't fight fire with fire, only water.

So responding in kind to his primate violence was never in the equation.

Besides, I'm a card carrying coward, and for all I knew, this yob wrestled crocs

and I couldn't fight my way out of a yeeros bag.

So in the end all I could to do was wave my hands in the air

and place my fingers in victory as I began to recite John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance".

Before long the pacifistic logic of the lyrics

caused the old bush bard to have a cerebral haemorrhage

and begin to fall t'wards the floor like a hard wood

only to be caught by his ‘mates’ and dragged quivering to the tune of "God Save The Queen"

into the annals of history

(where, some would say, he belonged.)

©Benito Di Fonzo. Oct, 1998.

Beyond The Valley of The Summer of The 17th Doll

After the beautiful failure of my combining the literary styles of Raymond Chandler and Lewis Carroll (see www.jabbernoir.blogspot.com) my latest idea for a cultural mash is a blend of the cinematic style of Russ Meyer (Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, Vixen, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Beneath The Valley of The Ultra Vixens) with the seminal Australian theatrical work Ray Lawler’s Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll. Just think of it – 60s psychedelic soft-core porn blended with the rough elegance of the Australian outback. I could bring out all the sexual undertones of the outback and blend Strine with 60s hipster speak. I’m going to call it Beyond The Valley of The Summer of The 17^th Doll. Discuss.

BDF

The Loneliest of Cities?

I just read a reviewer refer to London as “that loneliest of cities,” but I wonder, is it really? Surely the loneliest of cities would have to be an Australian town, even Sydney – those sparse, empty spaces, be it the landscape or the never-ending suburbia. Sydney does not even have that sense or artistic community of, say, Melbourne.

Sydney is an empty town where empty people leave their single flats to sit on vast, hot, salty beaches and not talk to one another, the loneliest of cities easily no? Discuss.

In conversation with Marton Csokas (Romulus, My Father)

Romanians of the day

Latest related coverage

• Director's video diary: Romulus, My Father
• Trailer: Romulus, My Father

Other related coverage

• Proud father

Benito Di Fonzo, Sydney Morning Herald.
May 25, 2007

In Romulus, My Father, Marton Csokas (Lord of the Rings, xXx) takes a break from playing elves and villains to assume a role closer to his heart. The son of a Hungarian immigrant plays Hora, the Hungarian voice of hope and sanity opposite Eric Bana's troubled Romanian in Richard Roxburgh's directorial debut.

It's based on philosopher Raimond Gaita's memoirs of the country Victorian shack where his father raised him with the help of Hora. Meanwhile, his German mother (Franka Potente, Run Lola Run) disappears to the city with her lover (Russell Dykstra), who is also Hora's brother. Romulus, My Father encapsulates the seldom-told struggle of the Eastern Europeans who came to Australia after suffering both Nazi and Soviet occupation.

"There are certainly similarities to the stories that my father and friends of the family told me," Csokas says.

"They shared the shock of the new, coming from an old established culture and what it was to arrive in a very foreign land. My father was the only person left in his family, and off he went from 12 years old. The story of Romulus is not dissimilar to that. The boy at the centre of the story, Raimond, has the wisdom of the old world in a burgeoning new land, and that's what struck me as the most wonderful thing about this story."

The film explores how young Gaita (Kodi Smit-McPhee) deals with the tragedy that unfolds in his life as his extended family try to survive and stay sane in rural post-war Australia. This bleakness is balanced by the optimistic Hora, who introduces the future philosopher to the works of Bertrand Russell as they watch the sun set.

"He's the light in the darkness, which is why I loved playing Hora," Csokas says. "He's full of sun and life. I could do with a lot more of Hora in my life."

Romulus, My Father
Directed by Richard Roxburgh
Stars Eric Bana, Marton Csokas, Franka Potente
Rated M. Opens Thursday.
There is a Q&A and screening of the fi lm with Bana at the Cremorne Opheum on Tuesday at 6.30pm.

In conversation with director Denis Dercourt (The Page Turner)

Reprise of revenge

• Trailer: The Page Turner

Benito Di Fonzo
May 18, 2007. Sydney Morning Herald.

Hell hath no fury like a child prodigy scorned, or so it would seem in writer and director Denis Dercourt's intelligent psycho-thriller The Page Turner.

Most of us struggle with one career, but 43-year-old Dercourt has excelled in two: writing and directing films while teaching and playing viola in the French Symphony Orchestra.

His latest film, The Page Turner, was selected for Cannes and was the most successful French film in 2006. It tells the story of Melanie, first seen as a talented, precocious child pianist attempting to enter the Conservatorium. When her ego is shattered by examiner and famed pianist Ariane (Catherine Frot) signing an autograph during her audition, she gives up music forever, carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of the Arc de Triomphe.

Fast forward 10 years and fate finds the adult Melanie, played by Deborah Francois and reminiscent of a young Catherine Deneuve, working as a nanny for Ariane, who now suffers performance anxiety due to a hit-and-run accident. Deciding revenge is a dish best served cold, Melanie endears herself to the ageing pianist and becomes her page turner, confidante and indispensable companion.

The subtle build-up to Melanie's revenge, foregoing the obvious avenues, marks The Page Turner as a tour de force in filmmaking, moving with a musical dynamism to its crescendo.

"The main mechanism in classical music is that of the cadenza," Dercourt says, "a tense chord resolving in another chord; tension, resolve, tension, resolve, and often the release of tension is [creating] another tension. It's the same in a film, especially genre film, and I liked writing this film because I hadn't done that before. That was a real discovery for me."

Dercourt's musical background gave him a unique insight into musicians' minds.

"It's a very tiny village, the world of musicians. We are very few, especially at a certain level. Playing music is really difficult, hard work."

Are musicians particularly prone to becoming psychopaths, then?

"Like actors, like painters, like all artists they are more aware of their feelings. Also they must be like sports people - they must be always perfect. You cannot fail when you have a concert, you must be aware of your state of mind."

Who is more dangerous, the child prodigy or the failed musician?

"That's a good question," Dercourt says. "When they both are one single person you have to be very afraid."

The Page Turner
Director Denis Dercourt
Stars Catherine Frot, Deborah Francois
Rated PG. Out now.

In conversation with Adam Hills

Adam Hills: Joymonger

Benito Di Fonzo
May 17, 2007. Sydney Morning Herald.

The Spicks and Specks host is having a car roof moment.

Adam Hill's deliriously positive dial has beamed at us from ABC's Spicks and Specks and stages from Enmore to Edinburgh. His new show, Joymonger, promises more uplifting humour. Someone once said "never trust a man that doesn't drink or is always smiling", so I decided to find Hills's dark side. What makes him angry?

"What makes me really angry is myself," says Hills, "my own shortcomings."

That's just too nice.

"No, I get really shitty at myself - if I forget somebody's birthday I really take it to heart."

Move over, Satan!

"All this 'nice guy of comedy' malarky is never really something I've cultivated," Hills says.

I remind him that his show is called Joymonger.

"Well, there's that," he says. "I was trying to think of something like 'militant joy' or 'joy warrior,' this idea of living in a cynical, jaded and very frustrating world and therefore trying to dance on the roof of my car."

The analogy, Hills says, comes from a friend in Egypt.

"He told me that whenever there was a traffic jam it was so frustrating - 45 degrees, no one could move - people would get out and dance on the roofs of their cars. I liked the fact that purely out of frustration people would dance on their cars, not because everything is great but because everything has turned so bad that the only way to deal with it is to dance on your car."

Is he sure they were dancing, not jumping? "Pretty sure. I believe in putting positive vibes out into the world and when you're frustrated and angry that's when you most need to put positive vibes out."

Joymonger is partly "improvised joy," such as in Edinburgh where Hills conducted a gay wedding, held an impromptu job interview and became godfather to a three-month-old in the front row.

"I like to create something special that audiences are going to remember," Hills says. "It's not about me showing off, it's about making sure they're enjoying themselves and often that entails 20 minutes of chatting with them because I want to get to know them."

Hills will be bringing his sign-language interpreter for Joymonger.

"I did a show in Adelaide a few years ago for a disability art conference and they provided a signer and two things happened. First, deaf people in the audience were connecting with my material, and second, I was getting laughs out of the sign-interpreter because the hearing people were fascinated. Now I have hearing people who will only book [for signer shows.]"

Hills was raised in Sydney's Sutherland Shire, where he had a "pretty happy suburban life, pool in the backyard, cricket on the road ... I was so happy when I was 10, 12 years old, and the rest of my life is trying to recapture that."

Happy despite the fact that he was born without a right foot, something that makes him feel almost lucky as it pushed him to achieve his goal. Hills has been determined to pursue a career as a stand-up comedian since he first heard Victor Borge on a plane at the ripe age of eight.

"That one person was making a room full of people laugh - I liked that idea. [Also] our family used to listen to comedy on holidays; Bill Cosby, Billy Connolly, Peter Sellers. Comedy was something that bonded our family. I like stand-up because it bonds people; again maybe it's me trying to recapture the happy days of being a 10-year-old."

Hills admits he has been driven to anger, such as when he abused a punter in an Adelaide beer garden who attempted to tell him a racist joke.

"I don't deal well with negative energy," he says, "If something bad is going on around me I wither and freeze up or yell at people inside my own head. One of the points of [ Joymonger] is to find a way of dealing with that."

Also, the man who wrote on disability website Ouch! that he feared becoming a "one-legged Anthony Robbins" does worry he takes life too seriously.

"I think a lot of stand-ups take life incredibly seriously; that's why they do stand-up. [So] I wouldn't say I have a dark side, but I certainly take life ridiculously seriously and I need to lighten up."

"The Italian" preview.

No place like home

Benito Di Fonzo, Sydney Morning Herald.
April 10, 2007

Inspired by the orphans that Russian director Andrei Kravchuk saw scamming on the local streets in the '90s, The Italian is a dark and moving journey about a heroic little boy.

Along a dirty and remote snow-ridden road, a childless Italian couple arrive at a rundown Russian orphanage to adopt Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov). Vanya's peers, envious of his escape from the rule of the orphanage's drunken, melancholic headmaster (Yuri Itskov) and their own harsh hierarchy, christen him the Italian.

"When I was a student I shot a little documentary about [a] children's house and I thought about this problem," says Kravchuk, whose film has won several international awards. "[When scriptwriter Andrei Romanov] told me about the little article in newspaper, about [a] six-year-old boy who decides to find his mother, I realise it is a very good story for [a] movie."

Many of the cast members are actual orphans, injecting the film with a level of realism that Kravchuk set out to achieve. "I want that the people see it like a real story," he says.

Learning of the suicide of another adopted child's mother, Vanya escapes his comfortable life in Italy to search for his own mother. The Italian then becomes a neo-realist chase film as Vanya is pursued by orphan traders (Mariya Kuznetsova and Rudolf Kuld).

Learning important life skills along the way, such as how to glass a man with a broken beer bottle in a street fight, Vanya is hindered by as many people as he is helped.

Kravchuk sees Vanya's struggle as a parable of hope for his homeland.

"We have [a] heroic little boy who lives like a real man, yes? He lives like he feels in his heart and I think that when you have that kind of hero in our time in Russia, yes, we have a future."

The Italian
Directed by Andrei Kravchuck.
Starring Kolya Spiridonov, Yuri Itskov, Mariya Kuznetsova.
Opens April 25.

The Host, an interview with Mr Bong.

(unedited version, written for Sydney Morning Herald)

“A Hit From The Bong” by Benito Di Fonzo.

When some of us think of a monster we imagine an amalgam of HR Giger’s Aliens, Godzilla and Bronwyn Bishop on GBH. Bong Joon-Ho, or Mr Bong as his publicist calls him, decided on a clumsy four-legged mutant fish from Soul’s Han River about the size of a Kombi and with a face reminiscent of Steve Buscemi.

“I didn’t want to copy typical Hollywood monster where they are really scary and they’re perfect and they never make mistakes. I’d like to give you an analogy and I’ll use Hollywood actors. You know actors like Al Pacino, Gary Oldman they play real bad [guys], really through and through they’re baddies. I didn’t want to create a monster that way, I wanted it to be more like Jack Black or Steve Buscemi. [So] me and our creature designer (Hee-chul Jang) have a photo of Steve Buscemi when we are designing the creature [so] we always think about Steve Buscemi.”

The monster isn’t the only thing that separates The Host from the usual Hollywood fare. After his young daughter Hyun-seo (A-sung Ko) is kidnapped before his eyes by a monster created after US scientists pour formaldehyde into the Han River, squid-salesman Gang-du (Kang-ho Song) and his elderly father, former student-activist brother, and archery-champion sister form a dysfunctional posse to track down and destroy the killer fish.

“In Hollywood monster movies you will see army officers or scientists or biologists or police officers but I want to see ordinary people; powerless, weak, ordinary Korean people in my movie. I had to choose a weak, powerless family and make them fight against this monster without much support from the government or the society as a whole and that’s why it had to be somebody really powerless, for contrast.”

In fact Gang-du, with his bleached hair-do, comes across as the last of the 90s ‘slackers.’

“That’s to emphasis that he’s really like simpleton, a slightly retarded sort of loser, he doesn’t even know that [bleached hair] is not in fashion anymore.”

The monster was realised through a collaboration between John Cox’s Creature Workshop in Queensland (Babe), NZ’s Weta Workshop (Lord of the Rings, King Kong) and San Fransisco’s The Orphanage (Sin City, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.)

However, while the sight of a Buscemi-faced mutant fish swallowing and regurgitating the hapless Koreans who keep stumbling into it’s path provide much of the excitement and black humour, the real story is that of the family’s search for Hyun-seo through Seoul’s sewers while being pursued by the South Korean and US governments, desperate to rescue their kin before US scientists drop ‘Agent Yellow’ on the city to kill a non-existent virus.

Mr Bong, a member of the leftist Democratic Labour Party who confesses to having thrown the odd Molotov Cocktail in his student days, admits you may pick up a slight anti-American feel to the story.

“Of course this movie has many satire of the American, also many political comment, but I don’t like straight propaganda movies. The opening sequence, the formaldehyde sequence, it really happened six years ago in Korea. The Agent Yellow means the Agent Orange in Vietnam’s War, also the long misinformation about the virus is also the satire of [WMDs in] the Iraqi War.”

“When I was in Cannes Festival one journalist, from Al Jazeera, asked me again and again, ‘in your movie the monster is America?’ I don’t want to bring it down to very simple level of monster symbolises this, monster symbolises that. It’s rather what the family has to experience after the monster turns up and does all this damage. Nobody helps, not the government not the society. So that in itself, the situation they’re put in, it’s a monstrous situation.”

While Universal Studios purchased the remake and sequel rights the moment it broke Korean box-office records Mr Bong may not be involved.

“As a director I think the most important thing is to 100% control my movies, but in Hollywood it’s very hard because every right of final cutting, final editing and final script is by producers, so I hesitate to go there.”

So see it now before some Hollywood hack sucks it dry of it’s humour and originality.

“The Host”

Written and Directed by Bong Joon-ho. 

Starring Song Kang-ho, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko A-sung, Byeon Hie-bong.

Opens March 8^th.

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article - Death of a President.

Bush whacked

Latest related coverage

• Trailer: Death of a President

Benito Di Fonzo
Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, 2007

"Fortunately when you apply for a White House press pass they don't ask you if you're making a film about killing President Bush," says English filmmaker Gabriel Range.

His new faux-documentary, Death of a President, has been called a "snuff movie" and "a new low in Bush hatred" by some critics. Others have chastised him for painting too nice a picture of George Dubya.

"I think it was very important that you got a sense of George Bush as a human being," Range says.

"It's a film that is absolutely critical of the Bush Administration's handling of the war on terror. It's critical of the very cynical way it sought to exploit the climate of fear following 9/11 and the very cynical way it sought to lead the country to war and connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11, but it is not a Bush-hating movie."

You could argue Death of a President is the best insurance policy Bush has had.

"I think if you ever needed a better deterrent than the prospect of President Cheney then I can't think what it might be," Range says.

The neo-con vice-president, who Range considers the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq, takes over the presidency after Bush is assassinated outside a Chicago hotel. Cheney immediately pushes Patriot Act III through Congress, further curtailing civil liberties.

Meanwhile, FBI agents go through names of employees in the building from which the bullets were fired. Focusing on people with Arab-sounding names, they find Zahra Abi Zikri (Hend Ayoub) unaccounted for. Within a year Zikri is convicted despite doubts from FBI forensic examiner James Pearn (James Urbaniak) and agent Robert Maguire (Michael Reilly Burke), both of whom resign in protest.

Much of the movie is made up of archival footage, including presidential appearances and anti-war protests, supplemented by footage Range's crew filmed in Chicago. Some of it is digitally manipulated, such as when Bush's face is pasted onto an actor's or when President Cheney's Reagan eulogy becomes one for Bush. As such, the film is as much a comment on media manipulation of images as it is on erosion of civil liberties.

"It is in some senses a very extreme version of the kind of media manipulation that happens on a daily basis," Range says. "A lot of it is simple editing and I think that you forget the power that has."

Zikri's trial also examines jurors' television-inspired faith in forensics.

"There's a sense among lawyers in the States of what they call the 'CSI Effect' in which juries expect forensic evidence to be incontrovertible," Range says.

Range and the director of the Toronto Film Festival were sent death threats before the film's launch. Cinema chains across the US have refused to screen it. The White House has wisely refused to comment, but presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has said that "anyone would even attempt to profit on such a horrible scenario makes me sick".

Range brushes off the death threats as "just a few poorly spelt emails from suspiciously Southern-looking addresses. [However] every time I go through US immigration I have this suspicion that I'm going to be detained for a few extra hours."

He is fascinated by political assassinations and their accompanying conspiracy theories. He saw his scenario as a chance to make an entertaining film that also commented on an administration "riding roughshod" over the constitution.

"Presidential assassinations are very much part of popular culture in the States. They're fascinating in the way they play out. The film plays with the hunger for conspiracy theories. I hope it makes us think about the way those conspiracy theories emerge out of any major event.

"It's a murder-mystery which I hope is intriguing. You don't have to be American to feel the effects of the war on terror or what the Bush administration is doing."

With luck, then, it will still be playing when Hicks gets home.

interview - Danny Bhoy

Danny Bhoy

Benito Di Fonzo

Sydney Morning Herald, March 1, 2007

The Scottish comedian riles everyone from christians to Eddie Mcguire.

Danny Bhoy invented a new swearword, just for Eddie McGuire.

"I called him a dick splash," says the dark, handsome young Scotsman.

Which means?

"I don't really know. It sounds quite offensive, probably doesn't mean anything. I've used it a few times since and people find that it's a good one."

Unfortunately for Bhoy's chances of a career at Channel Nine, he said it over the Collingwood AFL club's PA at its Hall of Fame event. Did Bhoy know what he was saying to the Collingwood president-cum-Channel Nine chief?

"I didn't know who he was, that's basically what the problem was. I was backstage and he came in and said, 'Hi, I'm Eddie McGuire, I'll be introducing you.' I just thought he was the MC.

I said, 'Great, whatever, keep it tight, don't f--- me up, just bring me on and enjoy the show.'

"I did a joke which involved the C-word. Nobody had told me not to swear. I didn't really know the importance of the evening. [McGuire] walks on after me and says, 'Well, my grandfather was Scottish and he didn't need to swear to be funny.'

"I thought, 'What's he saying that for? This guy's just the MC.' So I'm still mic'd up and I turned around and said, 'Yeah, f--- you, dick splash.'"

Has he heard from McGuire since?

"I've not had his heavies round but I'm sure he's planning a revenge. I've offered myself as a contestant for Who Wants to be a Millionaire."

So far, he says, there has been no response, but Bhoy's humour has a way of provoking people. Back in Britain after that run-in, he received a death threat in Bournemouth.

The threat came from balancing jokes about Muslim reaction to Danish cartoons with jokes on Christianity.

"I got not one complaint from the Muslim community and a huge amount of emails from Christians saying, 'It's disgusting what you said.' So I carried on doing it, as you do."

The would-be assassin got close to Danny by appealing to his vanity.

"He threw me a curveball by saying, 'Oh, great show, Danny, can I get an autograph?' I went towards him and he grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall and said, 'If you ever do jokes about Jesus again I'll stab you in the neck.'

"It was quite a weird threat because it was quite specific. It made me think that guy's obviously thought long and hard about how he would kill me."

Did Bhoy point out the Fifth Commandment?

"I'd already done that onstage. He clearly hadn't taken that as written."

Bhoy's mouth has gotten him into trouble since his childhood as the only Indian-Scot in small-town Moffat.

"When the teacher introduced me to the rest of the class she goes, 'This is Danny, he's all the way from India,' as if I was commuting every day. I got in a lot of trouble at school. Like the Christian thing, not everyone's going to find you funny. In school, that was the teachers. In later life, it's Eddie McGuire."

Or the Queen, who Bhoy first met as a Scottish Young Achiever.

"Most people there were teenagers that'd climbed Mount Everest with half a head or something genuinely amazing and I'd just won a comedy competition."

Perhaps she thought he'd been commuting from India?

"Prince Phillip did. [He later] said, 'I saw your act, you're very funny, but you're weird, though: you speak Scottish but you look like a bloody Indian.' And I went, 'You know what? You've not disappointed me. You're everything I thought you were going to be.'"

Bhoy's Sydney show will combine his recent Edinburgh festival act, which was a look at the inevitability of failure through history, with material he hopes to discover on his regional tour.

"I'm being more political this year than I've ever been. With the current predicament, it just feels like something you should be talking about if you can make it funny and interesting at the same time. Then again, I'll probably end up doing dick jokes like everyone else."

article - Cracker Comedy Festival young bloods.

Throwing jokes from the fringe

Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2007

Sydney is about to see new comedians at a new venue, writes Benito Di Fonzo.

WHILE big names such as Weird Al Yankovic, Danny Bhoy, Ross Noble and the show Puppetry of The Penis will be packing crowds in at the Enmore Theatre, the spiritual home of the Cracker Comedy Festival, there are hopes that the festival's new venue, the Factory Theatre, at the bottom of Enmore Road, will nurture the next generation of stand-up superstars.

Cracker hopes to give these fresh faces a crack through initiatives such as its MySpace site (www.myspace.com/crackercomedy) where wannabes can upload a set in the hope of being given a showcase on April Fool's Day. The festival is also offering a series of cheap ($17) one-hour shows by rising stars such as Sam Bowring, Dave Jory and Daniel Townes, similar to the Sydney Festival's successful About An Hour series.

“There's obviously fringe arts,” says Bowring, 27, “but in terms of comedy there hasn't been a festival to provide an umbrella for a lot of fringe acts.”

Bowring hopes the exposure of burgeoning talent during the festival will mean more Sydneysiders take a chance on the lesser-known names that grace regular open-mic sessions such as the one he and Kent Valentine, who is also appearing at the Factory, run at the Friend In Hand Hotel in Glebe.

"That's part of the festival experience, really: not to just go and see the same people you could see on TV," says Bowring, whose show Small Animals I Have Known examines the nature of mercy in terms of the swarms of small insects that seem attracted to him.

"I woke up and there were 50 live bees in my room that weren't there the night before, and another time baby huntsman spiders, then caterpillars, centipedes. I think God is sending his plagues against me."

Townes, who has just returned from a stint in Britain and is a winner of FHM magazine's "Search For Australia's Funniest Man", is tight-lipped about the show he will share with Raw Comedy-winner Nick Sun.

"You got to come and see the show. I went to see a counsellor about something, and she judged me, so it's something I've never talked to anyone about, and an audience is going to get it all," says Townes, 26.

Jory, the elder of the group at 33, is a Triple-J regular who came to stand-up after his book I Know Everything was favourably reviewed by Hustler magazine but otherwise unread.

"It was a precursor to doing stand-up because it came out and no one bought it so I needed a new outlet," says Jory.

For Cracker he will be focusing on that comic staple, the battle of the sexes. "I've decided that there is no battle of the sexes, that it was won long ago. Women won it and men are just hanging in there hoping it's still going," he says.

All three agree Sydney is a great training ground for comedians.

"In Sydney you've got to be really quick," says Townes.

Bowring says: "It's gladiator school. Melbourne audiences are quite forgiving, [but] the more forgiving an audience is, the less you learn."

Jory adds: "You see it when Melbourne comics come up here. They freak out because they see that the old tricks aren't going to work, they have to think on their feet a lot quicker."

The three believe Sydneysiders will take a punt on this fresh generation.

"All the acts that are playing at the Enmore, they all started where we did," says Bowring.

Townes adds: "The difference between them and us is 10 years."

Bowring says that if people take a chance, they will enjoy themselves. "Just because they don't know who we are it doesn't mean it's not a good show."

Jory adds: "Being the first one to find something is always more exciting than jumping on a boat that people already are on." And Townes reckons older acts will be taking note.

"Profile people take jokes all the time," Townes says. "They go shopping at open-mic nights. In the industry we call it 'side-writing'. People watch what works and then take that idea and run with it."

Jory says: "If you hear a pen scratching away you've got to home in on that."

"The trick is to get them in first," says Townes.

The Cracker Comedy Festival runs from March 7 to April 1. Details at www.crackercomedy.com.

Sam Bowring's Small Animals I Have Known is on March 30 and 31, Dave Jory Is Polished is on March 14-17 and Nick Sun and Daniel Townes are on March 28 and 29, at the Factory Theatre, Enmore.

article - Flyboys/ Martin Henderson interview

And they go down

• Trailer: Flyboys

Sydney Morning Herald. February 9, 2007

Benito di Fonzo shoots down some not-so-magnificent men and their flying machines.

Since such classics as Wings (1927), Hell's Angels (1930) and The Blue Max (1966), few films have attempted to put on screen the complex and dangerous manoeuvring of the flimsy World War I biplanes that battled above the trenches.

Producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day) attempts to remedy that with the epic Flyboys, much of which consists of close-up dogfights made possible by live footage and computer imagery.

Directed by pilot and war-plane enthusiast Tony Bill, the film stars New Zealand actor Martin Henderson, currently on screen in Smokin' Aces, as bitter flying ace Reed Cassidy. Along with Captain Thenault (Jean Reno), Cassidy preaches the realities of war to the adventure-seeking young American pilots led by Blaine Rawlings (Spider-Man's James Franco) that made up the Lafayette Escadrille in the years before the US officially entered the war.

The script has been criticised as an amalgam of war-movie cliches and stereotypes, but filming it was a dream come true for Henderson.

"My grandfather was in the [Royal Air Force] in World War II so I grew up listening to his stories of flying Lancaster bombers. He and I spent many an afternoon on the couch watching The Battle of Britain and The Dam Busters."

Henderson was perhaps a little overenthusiastic on set.

"Every time I went up [in a biplane] I loved it so much I kept smiling. My character's supposed to be this seasoned cynical veteran who's been in the war for years, so I had to go up and reshoot stuff because I was having too much fun."

Was Henderson concerned about romanticising war?

"That did cross my mind, given that America [is] at war. I don't know if it glorifies war. There's nothing attractive about burning to death in a little cockpit whilst plummeting towards the ground and being shot in the face by machine guns."

Flyboys
Director Tony Bills
Stars James Franco, Jean Reno, Martin Henderson
Rated M. Opens Thursday.