Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for November, 2008
Tina Arena. A Pop Star Comes Home.
20 November 2008
We’ve had some pretty big pop stars here on the Breakfast Club over the years. Olivia Newton-John, Donny Osmond, Paul Stanley from Kiss, Spearhead’s Michael Franti, Westlife, Bonnie Tyler.
But one that is close to our hearts is Tina Arena, the Australian child star who went to England and became a superstar, scoring millions of sales and performing with people like Andrea Bocelli. In this country that produced AC/DC and Kylie Minogue, Tina Arena managed to out-sell them both in 1996 and 2000, being the biggest-selling Australian artist across the world in those years.
She’s also close to my heart because I knew her back when she was a teenager, when she was appearing in a musical here in Melbourne with my wife. Back them she was a happy, unaffected teen who kept the spirits of the cast bright (it was a show called Nine, which had 21 women and one man. Yes, 21 women on one stage. Spirits in this kind of situation do need to be kept up).
Now 40 and a mother of a young child, Tina has found peace in her life, and looks it.
It’s lovely to know that you can be a star, sell heaps of records, and still be the same happy person you were before the whole career juggernaut began. A lot of it has to do with her parents, Italian immigrants who brought her up in the western Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds. Despite their daughter’s wealth, they have stayed in the same family house where she cried over her first lost loves and skinned knees. Their grounding really has flowed to their daughter.
Good to see you again Tina.
– Phil
Guantanamo Bay’s Terrorist Who Wasn’t
19 November 2008
Like in all cultures, in western society there are lines that keep people in safety and happiness.
In the west, there is the concept of habeas corpus, which literally means, have the body. The system means that a person suspected of criminal activity is taken into custody, and then must be presented to court to answer charges. If the arresting authorities cannot lay a charge, or do not have enough evidence, then the person, who is always presumed innocent until proven guilty, must be released.
In the immediate years after the September 11, 2001, this rule of law was dispensed with by the US for people suspected of terrorist-related activities. The Bush administration decided that people arrested for suspected terrorist activity will be dealt with my military tribunals and not the conventional courts of law. This contentious decision was divisive in the White House itself with the Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice reportedly furious at the decision.
Yesterday we spoke with Mamdouh Habib, an Australian man who happened to be travelling in Pakistan just as the US forces were looking for the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Habib is of Egyptian descent, so he looks middle-eastern. He was taken by security forces and kept for the next four years in detention centres. He says he was tortured in Pakistan and Egypt, before being taken to the US base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He says he was tortured there too, beaten, given electric shocks, had menstrual blood thrown in his face, drugged and deprived of sleep. There was far worse, he said, but would not say what.
After the four years, he was released. He was never charged. He faced no jury. It was not a case that a jury found him not guilty. It was a case that he was never tried in court. For four years he was kept in a cell, a year of which was in solitary confinement, and in the end there was no evidence put against him.
Mamdoub Habib is a broken man. Three times during our interview, he broke down in tears. For a muslim man, this was an extraordinary thing, to get so emotional so publicly.
Habib says that he was taken to see an Australian diplomat soon after his arrest but was denied assistance. The Australian government denies this.
Being released without charge apparently doesn’t mean very much here in Australia, because since his release, Habin says he has been harrassed in the street and by the media. There is obviously an attitude in this country that where’s there’s smoke there’s fire.
This for a man who was never charged.
It seems that line between a just society and a an unfair one can be very thin indeed.
– Phil
James Bond is Back. A Quantum of Solace Review
18 November 2008
One of the respondents to yesterday’s blog about the new Bond film said that they thought the title for Quantum of Solace was rather weird.
I like it actually. It’s a title that comes from one of Ian Fleming’s short stories. They’ve used up all the titles from the full length Fleming novels, and then there was The Living Daylights, the title of a short story. Since then they’ve made up some strange titles, Like Die Another Day or Tomorrow Never Dies. There’s a lot of dying in Bond titles.
Quantum of Solace is not only Flemingesque, it’s also pretty relevant to the movie. Bond is out to avenge the organisation that was responsible for the death of the love of his life, Vesper Lynd, who drowned at the end of the previous Bond flick, Casino Royale.
Revenge, a licence to kill, a Walther PPK and an Aston Martin all come together in a pretty wild opening for the new film. Many Bond movies have had hairy car chases, but nothing like this one. Done on deliberately low light grainy film, you feel you are in the driver’s seat. The director Marc Forster gets plenty of use from his steadycam. Sit too close to the screen and you could feel both immersed and sea-sick.
At the end of Casino Royale I thought that the Bond producers had made a tough task for themselves, having to follow one of the great cinema surprises of this century.
Let me tell you, they pulled it off. They pulled it off with plenty of action that never felt gratuitous which in hindsight was very gratuitous. Judi Dench played a heavier role in this film, although the writers seem to be stuck in a plot rut with Dench. Again and again she chastises Bond for exceeding commands, yet again and again she lets this apparent loose cannon kill more and more people. In the real world he would’ve been put ourt of action before the opening credits have finished rolling.
But James Bond is not supposed to be about reality.
Or is it?
At this time when Hillary Clinton is in all the media as being a serious contender as the next Secretary of State, this film has a heavy critique of US foreign relations, and the interference of Uncle Sam in the politics of neighbouring countries. Consider here that the man who originated the story was American Michael G. Wilson (stepson of Bond film pioneer Cubby Broccoli), and the inferences are surprising. This part of the film feels too real for comfort, especially the part about the CIA playing games with national leaders and criminals (who are sometimes the same people). Bond will win. The baddies will die, but anyone who knows international politics will know that the baddies don’t die like this. The smell of the seedy international incursions stays well after the film’s last shot is fired.
Daniel Craig is, again, superb. He has humour and intensity that was lacking in a few of his predecessors. Yes, the Bond character is cartoonish, but that’s no reason to destroy tension for the moviegoers, who have paid their ten bucks to get a bit of a thrill. Craig thrills. You just keep looking in his eyes. When his face is on the screen, nothing else matters. That’s the mark of a great actor.
The story is open-ended too. We just learn a little about the international organsation that is wreaking such havoc with drugs, business and government. Like with SPECTRE, the extortion group that was Sean Connery and George Lazenby’s Moriaty in the first seven Bond films, this group is being slowly unveiled. With each Craig film we claw our way further up the organisation, which we are told in this film is called Quantum.
In all, they pulled it off. This is a fine action, drama, spy thriller. It takes Jason Bourne by the throat and whacks him over the head.
My only question is, like last time, how will they top it for the next one.
– Phil
James Bond’s Quantum of Solace. Lifus Interrruptus.
17 November 2008
I really don’t get it.
I’m a Bondophile which goes back to George Lazenby’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. To an impressionable (very young) child like me, Lazenby had it all. He was good looking, tough, physical and funny. And Australian. He was also in a ripper movie. If you haven’t seen it, get it out. It’s a spy drama with a genuine love story. My older eyes have since seen the shortcomings in Lazenby’s performance, but in truth he wasn’t half bad, and his Bond is probably closer to Ian Fleming’s laconic Etonian drop-out than any of the other actors who have donned his tux.
So I suppose I was ruined young. I crave the bullets flying across the screen at the beginning of each episode. I hang out for the title song and for the impossible stunts and the gadgets that are always inventive. But most of all I love the anticipation of the next movie.
For the last flick, Casino Royale, I went to a special media screening where we were searched to make sure we didn’t have mobile recording devices. This only built the tension.
The film, of course, was a ripper. Part of the gush that followed this film was partially due to the fact that it was not expected to be much of a Bond movie. Poor Daniel Craig got a lot of bad press from unkind people. “James Bland” “James Blond” and the like.
These people did Craig a favour. When the film was released, it was a whack on the head like no other Bond film since the early 1960s. This was a film that Timothy Dalton would’ve loved to have done. His attempts to turn the Bond into an acting piece were brave and solid, but they were still very 1980s movies in that excessive sort of way. Casino Royale stands as the benchmark, and that benchmark was set by Daniel Craig. He, by his performance, demanded that every other actor in the piece rise to his level. And they did.
The one worry I had after leaving that media screening, was that the producers would have a hard time making a follow-up film. The audience now know what to expect. The essence of Bond films is that there must be surprises. Until now, the Bond producers have simply made each one bigger and bigger, and sometimes this gets a little silly, like trying to outdo The Spy Who Loved Me, by taking Bond into outer space in Moonraker. It was clearly ridiculous. Even Roger Moore admitted as much in his recently released autobiography (we’ll ask him about it when we chat next Tuesday on the Breakfast Club. Wow. Roger Moore live in the studio!). The film came back to earth in the very fine For Your Eyes Only, but excess surfaced again in Octopussy, the next movie in the franchise. Pierce Brosnan has made no secret opf how he wanted to act in the Bond films, so what did they give him? John Cleese, shapshifting baddies and invisible cars. No wonder he got a little ropey about it all.
So to tonight. I’ll be seeing the media preview of Quantum of Solace, and will review it for you tomorrow.
But that a simple film can be a red letter day in my life says something about the power of the Bond mystique, eh?
– Phil
Charlie and the Chocolate Stockmarket Factory
14 November 2008
I saw my stockbroker neighbour Charlie last night. He’d had a hell of a day. The stocks around Asia had fallen to incredible lows. Australia had not been so low for four years. This is not just a stat for the record books. This is much more important than that, because it effectively means that all the gains of the last four yerars have been wiped out in the financial turmoil that started with two companies named Fannie and Freddie.
Overnight the US markets jumped up with a bounce worthy of Superman. The main US indices were up by more than six percent. This is a significant turnaround. Also significant was the overnight jump on the Frankfurt Dax, which was up more than half a percent. This is extraordinary because this happened after new statistics showed that Germany was officially in recession. Cars have been the bane of economies over the last few months, especially in the US and Japan, but not so in Germany. It was a great performance from the German auto sector that proved the Dax’s saviour overnight, recession or no recession.
But let’s not forget the ‘sentiment’ factor. The markets move because people feel good or bad about the future. It’s not an exact science, or even a science.
Last night, when things were looking a lot more dismal, Charlie bemoaned how this sentiment always led to extreme behaviour. People bought too much, people sold too much. It was like chocolate. When it got a little warm it melted and was virtually useless. Chocolate has a way of being messy at the slightest temperature change. Stockmarkets seem to have the same inability to withstand external factors. Profit takers and panickers make the drops more than they should be, and then when there’s good news, the market goes higher than it should.
Then the market corrects for these erratic changes. The stocks in the US are bound to drop again soon. Six percent jumps are great, but no-one but a fool would believe that this takes, in one swoop, the market to where it belongs right now. Confidence needs to return. It’s the incremental changes that will get the market to where it needs to be, not huge single jumps.
And we’re not there yet.
– Phil
