Roger Lowenstein is one of the most consistently insightful yet energetic chroniclers of the financial world; I loved When Genius Failed (2002) and Origins of the Crash(2004) and he has also written about Warren Buffet. That he generally tackles financial disasters and is a savage critic of basic tenets of the modern financial priesthood must be [...]
My sons lapped up Terry Pratchett’s comedic, bursting-with-ideas, oddball fantasy novels the moment they were published, so over the years I have read a fair few of his forty-five books. Unseen Academicals is the first Pratchett I’ve read in years, and at first my impatience almost bested me. Every page is packed with witty authorial asides, [...]
The star of South Solitary, an Australian film by director Shirley Barrett that zapped across our cinema screens for scant weeks, is its setting, a lighthouse on a bleak, remote island. Cinematographer Anna Howard captures the austere scenery and interior of the evocative lighthouse with great aplomb; it helped that I’d recently seen one of the [...]
Oh to live in New York and see movies like Away We Go, directed by young Sam Mendesand powered by a Dave Eggers/Vendela Vida script, as they are released, in the glory of a cinema! Away We Go came out in 2009 but never made it into Australian multiplexes; only now, a year later, was [...]
My 2008 ‘return to roots’ trip to Estonia and Siberia haunts me still, so I was naturally drawn to Maria Tumarkin’s Otherland. Tumarkin is an adventurous, cerebral researcher/writer who couples an exuberant style with a personal frankness that seems to me very brave. I loved her first book Traumascapes, bold and opinionated, and found Courage [...]
The thriller genre used to feed off the Cold War. More recently, the ‘bad guys’ have tended to come from terrorists, Islamists, etc., and in most cases I’ve found such books to be excruciatingly shallow. The Good Son, seventh novel from thriller writer Michael Gruber, provides a welcome whiff of intelligence in the genre, for [...]
Ricky Gervais is a hero to me, his brand of savage, ironic humour a lifeline to someone who rarely finds funny what others do. So I watched The Invention of Lying (Gervais co-wrote, co-directed and starred) as soon as it came to Australia on DVD (its cinema season was an eyeblink). Alas, this is a [...]
As a sucker for novels set in the milieu of rock music, I was blown away by Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire, partly because it is completely different to all the others I’ve read. Rather than embedding the reader in a character who is a singer or guitarist in a band, the hero of Evening’s Empire, [...]
I didn’t borrow Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus because of its now universal tagline, ‘Heath Ledger’s last film,’ but because of some intriguing reviews read in retrospect. And I was in the mood for something visually arresting. Imaginarium proved to be wonderful eye candy, a lovely fable plot, and some fine ensemble acting. I [...]
My current hunger for sci-fi, in all its forms, led me to last year’s Surrogates. Casting Bruce Willis as lead automatically indicates a film that is less sci-fi and more mindless thriller, but, to his credit, in Surrogates he plays a restrained role. The plotline is pure Philip K. Dick (the second time I’ve written [...]