Laurel Nakadate's second film, The Wolf Knife, is the examination of two teenage girls and their sexuality, caught between that of an adult, and that of a child.

A video artist and photographer, Nakadate's The Wolf Knife is a film that falls under mumblecore. Shot cheaply on video camera, and featuring to unknown actresses, it has that cheap, DIY ethic that a lot of mumblecore does, and it is both the success and failure of the film. Success because the two actresses, Chrissy (Christina Kolozsvary) and June (Julie Potratz) embody the awakening and confused sexuality that is the centre of the film, and failure because the editing, camera work, and just general style of the film leave a lot to be desired. To be honest, the kindest thing that you could say about it was that it was amateuristic. It's a shame, especially when given that a look around Nakadate's work outside film are interesting and often quite beautiful, in a dirty, voyeuristic fashion.



As a film, however, it's simply too long, going at least twenty minutes longer than it needs. I do understand why it was done, to provide a sense of closure to Chrissy and June's relationship, but it wasn't necessary in my mind--the film worked on its naturalism, and to provide such a sense of closure, of tying up loose ends, went against the piece to me. The acting, outside the two young girls, is uniformly awful, and the dialogue was just as bad. Silence, such an important thing in the film, was even moreso because it allowed you to escape the weakness of the script, or the improvisation--but unfortunately, for the most part, the silence of the film did not convey much.

I was, at the end of the film, a bit give and take about it. The sexuality of the girls was excellent, but it didn't make a film, and in the end, I had to fall on the side that the film itself wasn't very good. The truth is, it's just poorly made, for all the DIY, cheap auteurism. My opinion of that, after flipping around on Nakadate's site, was reinforced, given how much I liked of the still images she had, and the sexuality that she explored there. It was just a real shame that her skills in film--skills relating to craft--were still in development.

In the comments of yesterday's post, I was asked about the director's cut of Aliens. I don't really think it gives all that much more to the original, but it got me thinking about director's cuts, in general.

Once, there was a time when I was young and thought director's cuts were cool and fantastic and new, but now I'm mostly cured of that. Sure, a director's cut can be that, but how many DVDs promise it just for a marketing tool on a shit film to begin with? I mean, there's a director's cut of the Chronicles of Riddick. For a film like that, there has to be a moment where you step back and say, "I apologise for making the film, I'm sorry, here's twenty bucks back for the original movie ticket." And it seems to me that there's a lot of director's cuts out there now, a lot of them lurking under the 'uncut' and 'unrated' tag to try and convince you to buy a version of a film that ought not have been made to begin with.

But, that said, there are still a lot of films that suffered from studio involvement that I'd like to watch a director's cut of. There's a lot of Orson Welles films that were sadly butchered, though the chances of seeing them returned are pretty slim. Tony Kaye, the director of American History X, was infamous in his insistence to get his name taken off the film after his original version was cut and put out--and you know, I liked that version, but I'd really like to see Kaye's original cut of the film. There are a number of other examples, as well, with studio interference being a long and terrible influence on film over the years.

And then there are the versions that didn't need a director's cut, but got one anyhow--I liked, for example, Apocalypse Now Redux, which I believe adds a nice new layer to a film that, to be honest, I was always happy with before.

But mostly, it's true, a director's cut doesn't do much for me anymore.

Though it is hated by many, I love Alien: Resurrection.

It's not a perfect film, I know that. Whoever agreed to hire Jean-Pierre Jeunet to direct it must have ate a whole bag of coke before coming up with that idea. But I love it because he did, because it shows you what happens when a truly creative person is let into a franchise.

A franchise has a set of rules, unwritten or written, and the success of the franchise film or book depends on how well that the artist or artists involved can play to those rules. The Alien franchise, a science fiction horror film, works best when the aliens themselves are the threat, when they are dark and fast and terrifying. As much as I have disliked other James Cameron films, he understood that perfectly and Aliens presented an opening act that served to introduce a cast who would be dramatically and violently cut down in the centre of the film to cement the aliens as an apex threat. That lesson was laid out by Ridley Scott in Alien with the violent birth of the creature from John Hurt's chest, but Cameron really did bring that moment out in what I consider a superb way. David Fincher's Alien 3 didn't deliver on that--an alien birthed in a dog was never going to cut it, and the film is a low note, right until the end when Ripley falls into the furnace, clutching the baby alien mother.

But in Alien: Resurrection, Jeunet doesn't really give a shit about the aliens. The Joss Whedon script offers the moment wherein the mercenary crew bring in the sleeping bodies that they have stolen, but before that, in the opening scenes of the film, Jeunet has established that he is more concerned with Sigourney Weaver's recreated Ripley, a hybrid of alien and human clone work, the monster birthed out of the military's Frankensteins. In every scene, Weaver is in control, sure and violent, and wonderful to watch, but she's all the alien that Jeunet needs, and ignoring the rules of the franchise, he follows that, letting his quite considerable skill out on it. Whedon's script, which is pure franchise work, is broken--though it was always going to be, since the film never got the budget for a lot of the scenes--and it is worth taking a moment to compare the mercenary crew that appears there as a prototype for what would later become Firefly. Darker, ironic, both more ruthless and more self serving, the crew has none of the heroism that is baked into Firefly, but oh, in a different world, Michael Wincott and Dominique Pinon and Ron Perlman and Gary Dourdan and, in a role that no doubt led to River, Sigourney Weaver...

Perhaps it'll just be me who thinks that.

There is a moment in Alien Resurrection when it just goes straight into weird, where the alien mother is revealed to have a reproductive system, where the Newborn and Ripley are in tender moments, where a macabre sense of humour settles into the final deaths of the doctor, where the rules of the Alien franchise are lost, broken. You're not meant to laugh. You're not meant to find it strange, to marvel at the oddness of it--that's not how an Alien film works, that's not how the rules of the franchise, brought back in Aliens Vs Predator, are meant to exist.

But yet, I love it so.

I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40% of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin.

--Pauline Hanson.

Last night, I happened across a piece on channel Seven's flimsy excuse for a current affairs program, Today Tonight, wherein Pauline Hanson ran around in Thailand, accusing everyone and anyone who was Asian, of identity theft.

I have been long disturbed by Hanson's return to mainstream Australia, especially on Seven. If you aren't familiar with Pauline Hanson from the mid-nineties, she is Australia's most prominent white supremacist politician, a woman who stands against multiculturalism, who believes Asians are going to swamp us, Africans are all infected with AIDS, and that Aboriginal people get it too easy in this country, considering that they were once a cannibalistic society who ate their babies (and hey, may still do so, right?). She often says that she knows her views will get her accused of racism and this is good, because she is racist, pure and simple. We don't use the term often, but her racism is akin to that of white supremacy groups, and if Hanson herself was not removed from these groups that she starts, one could accuse her of heading an organisation. Because she cannot be linked to large organisations, we must refer to her only in the singular, but it is important to remember that she is representative of a minority of people in the country.

One might question, then, why a white supremacist is being promoted and supported on a mainstream network, a fact that has been consistently occuring since 2004, when she appeared on Dancing with the Stars. There has, from this point, been a slow and systematic reconstruction of Hanson's image. Apart from regular gigs on Today Tonight, Hanson has also appeared on Celebrity Apprentice for channel Nine, and fuck knows where else, all the while rebuilding what remains of her shattered career as a politician that deals in race.

You would be wrong in thinking that she has given that up, as well.

Last night's piece--I cannot call it news reportage, or an article--was all about giving credibility to Hanson's racist points of view. Set in Thailand, the white crew of Today Tonight, led not by Hanson, but by some sock puppet for the program who did all the questioning and leading, wandered around the streets of Bangkok, pointing out how Australian identities are stolen by these street vendors and then sold to anyone from organised crime who would want a new identity. Nothing, and I repeat, nothing, in the episode even related to identity theft. The interview with a man who had had his driver's license stolen didn't even relate to Thailand--and the idea that someone here, in Australia, stole his card and then shipped it over to a dirty street vendor in Bangkok so they could sell it for fifty dollars to someone on the street not only strained reality, but burst apart the more that you thought about it.

My girlfriend, a fine and upstanding American, said that it was worthy of Fox News.

But credit to Today Tonight, they didn't let evidence stop them. They toured the small vendors selling fake IDs and presented them as a part of a huge network of men and women working to defraud the Australian public out of six million dollars...

...And at the end, Pauline Hanson said, "What we need is an Australian Card."

The Australian Card is not new, and if you are not from Australia, you will know it under a different name, no doubt. Regardless, it is a card that allows authorities to stop you on the street if you aren't white and ask you to present your identity card, to see if you are legally allowed to stay in the country. Calling it the Australian Card is really the wrong title, honest: we should refer to it as what it is, the White Supremacist Safety Card. WSSC for short. See, it's a card that makes supremacists like Hanson feel safe, because they can look at the Chinese woman across the street and call the cops, or hey, even demand to see it themselves. For why not? They are the white people, the right people, the people who have the god honest right to demand who enters and who stays in their country. If only the Aboriginal people had got together and organised that over two hundred years ago, really.

Today Tonight's article is, without a doubt, a piece that works to present and support the racist ideologies of Pauline Hanson. It is nothing short than racism, a horrible act of manipulation, and one that seeks to validate a politician and her extreme, minority driven views.

The piece is here, if you want to watch it.

You do.

Because racism cannot be allowed to exist unchallenged.

Luna Park is one of two amusement parks in the world that is protected by government legislation. I don't know what the second is but, located on the edge of Sydney Harbour, I know that several of the park's buildings are heritage listed.

In 1979, six children and an adult were killed in a fire in the ghost train ride, a fire caused by age and neglect, and the park has suffered in stutters and moments of life since. It has spent years closed and years open. It has been the subject of legal battles from those who live in the area and don't want the noise from the rides, nor the noise from construction. It is now, operational, but with limited hours, and when you pass, it's mostly quiet, but lit up. Around you it's bright, bright, but the darkness from the mouth stretches back, into the rides, into the steel barriers, a stillness that lingers.

Link.

It is not a new statement to say that we, as a society, worship youth. We all want to be on the cover of the magazine, beautiful and ageless and full of potential.

Yet, it isn't just the appearance of youth the is given such space in our public domain, but the thoughts of that time, as well. The hesitation of new sexuality, the awakening of new ideas, the first experiences with the world, the search for identity--these concepts that characterize much of growing up are a dominant force in the world, and emerge in film, music and literature with such regularity that you could think that your entire life was spent in the pursuit of these ideas. The new, the freshness--it is as much a part of what we love about youth as the beauty and openness of such an early age is.

It's not surprising, then, that young adult fiction has become such a dominant force in literature, but its success with adult readers is not an entirely healthy one. This is especially the case when you consider young adult fiction in relation to the genre of speculative fiction, where so much of what is written anyway is YA or of a quality that will appear to a young audience (in the latter here, I am thinking of a particular kind of horror that, with its excessive violence and sexuality, is aimed at a young male audience). Speculative fiction has a long history of being a genre that appeals to the young and a lot of the old writers, such as Asimov and Bradbury and Heinlein--the modern fathers, one could argue--demonstrate that throughout their bodies of work. And truthfully, it is not such a problem: there should be work for kids out there, things that are bright and shiny and awesome, and which draw them to it. That is, after all, how I was drawn to the genre. Just as those authors and more are for teenagers, so are the tie-in novels, films like Star Wars, TV shows like Star Trek and so much more. The success of books and films like the Hunger Games and Harry Potter owe much to those who came before in the genre.

However, as I said, the success and popularity of young adult fiction is not an entirely healthy one. There must be a balance: the sense of childish wonder that is so core to the genre must also be balanced by the intelligent, subversive, keen eye of the adult. The young, simple protagonists must be counter balanced by the older, difficult protagonists, similar to the way that Robert E. Howard's violent, but simple Conan is balanced by Fritz Leiber's violent, sexually characterized and ironic Mouser and Fafhrd. The simple binary comparison I am making here doesn't at all suggest the complex and interesting ways that a genre can be fractured, but it's enough to begin making my point (or not, if you happen to disagree). It's enough for me to lead on to the point that, without this balance, and with young adult becoming more and more dominant, the more interesting writing, in terms of prose and theme and concept, are being lost. Lost because there is no place for that in young adult fiction.

I know, a lot of people don't like to hear that. A lot of people will say that young adult fiction can (and indeed, is) well written and intelligent, and that's true. However, it is intelligent in relation to the things that matter to its audience, and it is well written with the understanding that its audience is not an experienced reader--meaning that it is not, to someone who has a decent understanding of literature, that interesting, or that well written. The argument that there is absolutely no difference between young adult and adult fiction is one that is one that is flawed, which actively seeks to ignore the fact that adults and young adults have differences, and while that difference may vary accordingly to the individuals who are in place (I know teenagers who are more intelligent and articulate than some adults I know) it does not seek to acknowledge that as an adult I can and I do demand more from my fiction than that of someone who is twenty years younger than me.

It is a balancing act, wherein we must ensure that there is work for the young, but that there is also work for those who are not--and that that work receives the proper attention and love that it deserves. The world is not about youth and, just as the covers of magazines are troubling in relation to those who do not fit what they gaze at, so does young adult fiction begin to mirror that.

One of the hardest things with a long project is that, if you're forced to take a break from it, finding your stride later can be difficult.

I've spent the last three weeks chasing down various things that I have needed to get done for a while, the result being that I pushed the novel I'm writing to the side. Now that is finished, though, I get to return to being around fifty thousand words deep on heavy rewrites. The motivation is, to be honest, a little hard to come by, and I've engaged in the regular form of time wasting with a document file open. It'll pass. I've been doing this long enough in enough different ways that I know that it's just my mind changing gear, letting old thoughts shift around to become new ones again, and to push onwards.

Maybe it's strange to talk about a book that might not get published and it certainly feels that way, occasionally. There is very much the thought in my head that it's right to talk about what you work on when you know that it will be published, when you know there is a venue for it, but I've not that here. Some authors, now, they don't want to talk about a work while they are busy on it--you can talk a work out of yourself if you talk enough, but I talk myself into a work to a degree. A lot of how I write is very strongly tied to structures and thematics and the thoughts that often emerge aloud is what breaths life into the rest of it. But when you talk aloud about whatever you talk about, you are essentially saying, "Okay, here it is, what I plan to write and sell and if it doesn't happen...

...you'll all know."

Publishing can, at times, feel like that Japanese husband who, to save face, pulls on a suit and tie every day and pretends to go to work. I imagine that all art feels like that, occasionally.

It's unnecessary, of course, especially since publishing in general would benefit a lot from having the secrecy drawn away, but in a perfect world, no doubt we would not need publishers and agents and friends and enemies. It is far from a perfect world, however, and we would all like to look amazingly successful and on top of things.

Either way, I have to find my stride for this book, but I don't foresee it as much of a difficulty. It's coming together nicely, I think, and I like the structure I decided to use, and if I can have it all said and done within six months, that will suit me just fine. Then, of course, there will be the shuffle for a new agent, a new publisher, and while that itself fills me with about as much joy as once can expect, it'll have to be done.

According to Wikipedia, Nancy Sinatra, now 71, hosts a weekly radio show called Siriusly Sinatra.

According to family and friends, the legendary director, Akira Kurosawa, later said, "At least it wasn't Sergio Leone."

Link.