Art Smitten

Thierry, Andrew and Ayden interview Clare Watson about Malthouse Theatre's 2016 production, Gonzo. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christian interviews curator of the NGV's Vincent Van Gogh exhibition , Ted Gott. It will be opening in 2017, on April 28th, and running until July 9th.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you’re fan of that strange nostalgia that comes from witnessing old Hollywood glamour, Café Society might just be for you. Complete with a backdrop of wonderfully detailed fashions, an upbeat jazzy soundtrack and in the company of presumably rich, carefree socialites, Woody Allen’s latest venture is a rabbit hole into that bygone era of Hollywood romanticism. Set in the late...

Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon would have been, I imagine, quite an easy film to pitch, but a very hard one to describe. Since seeing it I've been explaining it to people as "the Black Swan of modelling,” which might sound very reductive, but given how much it invites comparison with Darren Aronofsky's film, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Refn had originally conceived it. Both...

La Mama Theatre’s The Masque of Beauty seems to have taken its name from Ben Johnson’s courtly masque composed in 1608. However, in Peter Green’s ‘Renaissance Cabaret’ we certainly feel far away from the England court, even if he uses a few Shakespeare passages on one of his literary medleys. Green’s writing, and indeed Faye Bendrups’ directing, both take...

Hell or High Water is a 2016 film written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by David McKenzie. Set in blistering rural Texas, it focusses on two brothers, played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who rob banks, and a cop on the verge of retirement who is chasing them, played by Jeff Bridges. There’s action, there’s tension, there’s laughs. Tonally, the film carries itself with a partic...

Thierry, Ayden and Andrew are joined in the studio by writer and performer, Ryan Good, about his production Cosmonaut  in the Melbourne Fringe.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Sharp, smart and hysterically funny!”… “A cult hit….gleaming with comic polish.”… “A frothy, sill, saucy and spectacular affair.” These are just some of things critics have said about 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, a play written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, currently being performed for Melbourne audiences as part of the Fringe Festival...

Francofonia is the latest film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is perhaps best known for his 2002 documentary Russian Ark , an ambitious and awe-inspiring one-take trip through St Peterburg’s Hermitage museum during the Russian Revolution. In Francofonia , Sokurov once more returns to the themes of art and war and museums, this time focussing on the Louvre during the Nazi occupati...

Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk. Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beac...

Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Patrick Durnan Silva on his production, Cull in the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thursday, 1 st September marked the seventh year for the Korean Film Festival In Australian (KOFFIA). ACMI hosted Melbourne’s festival and invited guests to share canapés of kimchi, cocktails and listen to traditional music on the Gayageum. This festival boasts twenty newly released and critically acclaimed Korean films, however it was the film titled 4 th Place, written and directed...

On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize Shortlist was announced. For those of you not in the know, the Man Booker is a prize given for what the judging panel deems to be the best novel written in English and published in the UK each year. For many including myself, the Booker is the Prize to watch, the AFL Grand Final for nerds. This year's shortlist consists of: Paul Beatty's The Sellout Deborah Levy's...

Rupert Burns is Kelvin Campervan. Or is Kelvin Campervan Rupert Burns? They seem to get along pretty well in the one body, but can never quite decide who is the artist and who the creation. The one man show explores the nature of a person's relationship with themselves and their history. It is set from the vantage point of mid life, but even at my age of 21 I was inspired to be existential about m...

Ebony interviews Georgia Symons, creator of Fringe 2016 show You Must Come Alone to Read the Last Book on Earth.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Beth and Thierry interview Assistant Director of the UHT production of Macbeth + Macdeath: a coda, Rachel Shrives.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Christian and Adalya interview Matthew Lutton about the Malthouse Theatre's 2017 Program . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christian speaks to writer/broadcaster Made Stuchbery, chatting about her ten part radio series Born to Die.  It's available on soundcloud . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Christian and Jim sit down with artists Alexia Brehas and Chanelle Nillson to discuss their upcoming joint exhibition ' Rave in Paradise ', Off the Kerb Gallery and Studio. Showing from September 9 at 6pm. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phil Rouse decides to introduce his production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with a very peculiar sight: some slides of Elizabethan text hover above our very skilled ensemble as they are all club dancing to ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s one of those audacious mixes of the highbrow classical and the lowbrow modern that the theatre world can never get enough of. Arturo Ui (playe...

On Thursday night I showed up at La Mama ready to see The Ribcage Collective’s new work of experimental theatre. The Ribcage collective are a collaborative group of young theatre makers from varied theatrical backgrounds. For a second year running they have written, devised and performed works of immersive, sight-specific theatre at La Mama in Carlton. Their previous show was described by Ar...

Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers is one of the most bafflingly entertaining films of the year. A part-time cheesy teen movie, part-time goofy horror flick and full-time American satire of Canada, Nazis, Canadian Nazis, ‘kids today,’ and of course yoga, it never really asks to be taken seriously, just to be enjoyed. It's a follow-up to Smith's previous film, Tusk, with Johnny Depp reprising hi...

Heavily stylised and endearingly quirky, Girl Asleep could be very easily described as “Wes Anderson does Napoleon Dynamite”, but in reality it’s much, much more than that. Sure it’s full of dorky humour and a kitsch yet meticulous 70s aesthetic, but it’s got a unique and very sweet take on the coming-of-age story. The girl of the film’s title is 14-year-old Gre...

Cattle, contemporaries and canapés, Eddie Perfect’s play; The Beast , promises to touch you inappropriately in all the right places. By challenging a lifestyle that conceals itself behind a facade of authenticity, the show wastes no time in establishing a humorous destabilisation of friendships; stripping characters down to their inauthentic cores. With sensitive subjects used as punc...

A film that opens with a lens-flared shot of a forest is only ever going to be a particular kind of film, I thought. A twee, wilderness-worshipping kind of film with smug self-contentedness. But Captain Fantastic, written and directed by Matt Ross, is not really that kind of film. Or rather, not entirely that kind of film. Yes, it’s full of obsession over nature and that brand of anti-consum...