I was going to do a proper post but I can't be arsed, I have things to do, besides I've just found what is possibly the most interesting blog of 2008, a blog dedicated to Nicole Kidman's Forehead.
I'm torn, also, between posting on the idiot parents of Adolf Hitler in the US which I've just seen on the Age website.
Some points re Germaine though. I am a self-admitted Greer fan-girl, and while reading her article in todays' Age about the movie Australia, I found myself agreeing with her on some points, but I also realised I was annoyed by her review. It's not a film review, as such. It's more a litany of flaws as she sees them.
The problem is that maybe she is too cerebral to be able to enjoy entertainment and a bit of froth and frippery. I wonder if she has an imaginative bone in her body. I think she's one of those hyper-smart people who takes everything far too seriously, and while she can crack ironic and witty-quips with the best of them, it's always still terribly clever, and I think she find it's difficult to remove her scholar hat and the feeling that the world is waiting for her words, and to just re-fucking-lax.
Greer also used her article to have a bitchy go at Marcia Langton (some hangover revenge from just before Germaine came out to do the publicity for her essay on Rage, perchance?).
Rather than go through the article, picking out points, what reading it made me think about was this fundamental question:
Do filmmakers have a responsibility to be historically accurate with their fictionalised accounts that they bring to the screen?
Germaine obviously thinks they do. While Baz was sloppy with research (as pointed out by Germaine), I wonder whether the mechanisms of fiction mean that you can pick this and that, borrow and transform. It's a creative process. Where does inaccuracy then start to undermine credibility?
To Nicole's Forehead now.
1 comment:
I read that review, and, to my taste, it fell somewhere between inchoate and incoherent. I think it needed a bit of a line edit, frankly.
I think that a movie that is set in the real world, dealing with real world events, has to pay attention to the facts, even when it's fictionalised.
I haven't seen "australia" (the movie), but i think that Baz would have had to have "Moulin Rouged" it, to make it appear to be set in a totally fictionalised alternate universe only loosely based upon the real one, to be able to get away with his historical liberties.
In "Moulin Rouge", he showed that ppl prepare absinthe by setting it on fire. Which is not historically correct. Now, however, ppl prepare absinthe by setting it on fire. Why? Because they saw it in his film. And that's the danger.
PS I especially like her comment about how the movie was supported "by the Australian Tourism Export Council, in the sanguine expectation that the film would do for Australian tourism what Schindler’s List did for Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Krakow."
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