Actors

Been trying to get an interview with Mel. Gibson. No luck so far. Frankly, I’m not even sure Mel knows I’m alive. I suspect his Los Angeles press agent, Mr Alan Nierob, has not been passing on my emails.

It started in April last year with a long and possibly overly involved interview request that, in hindsight, might have been the wrong approach. The basic synopsis was that, yes, Mel’s a prick.

But who isn’t? I also intimated that Mel’s anti-Semitism and wife-raging might be a form of PTSD.

Continue reading "Waiting for Mel…" »

Once upon a time there was an endearing little sitcom called Bewitched. It was predictable and more than a little cheesy, but it was good fun.

A few decades later, there was another sitcom called Two and a Half Men. It was predictable and more than a little cheesy, and it mightily sucked.

Two and a Half Men resumed overnight, after a six month absence caused by Charlie Sheen’s quest to simultaneously screw every woman in the world along with his own dignity. He succeeded in both.

Continue reading "Bewitched swapped Dicks, why can’t Men swap Charlies" »

Imagine if the construction workers union, the CFMEU, issued a statement calling for Maoris and Islanders to be banned from working in the building industry. Or if the white-collar Australian Services Union demanded an end to all those pesky Indians stealing our jobs in IT.

They would be howled down as racist protectionists, accused of taking the nation back to the dark days of the White Australia Policy, offending the principles of inclusion and diversity by denying people from other countries a chance to settle and work here.

It might be 2011 but the actors and journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has this week launched a campaign which is the artistic equivalent of legislating to keep the kanaks off the canefields in the early 20th century.

Continue reading "Aussie actors unite - we grew here you flew here" »

We were due to start shooting at 8:00am. Legendary actor Bill Hunter, Billy to his mates, looked at me with one eye open, the other squinting and with a wry smile made it clear he wouldn’t be moving until I relaxed, sat with him and had a beer or two. He hadn’t said a word. His was a face that told a story.

Four other well known Aussie actors were there too. We were shooting a self-funded pilot for a TV series (that was rejected by the networks). For once I didn’t babble. I watched and listened and learned. I can’t say I knew Bill Hunter, but I was pleased to my core as we sat back and opened a second beer before shooting, that I shared a few golden moments with a man who knew how to tell a story.

Bill Hunter had a knack of picking the right Aussie films to be in. He knew what a good story was. So many Australian feature films are a flop nowadays because we lack the ability to tell a good story on-screen. For all the modern gadgets, the hand-held video cameras, the hard-drives; the instant play-back generation simply doesn’t know how to tell a story on-screen anymore.

Continue reading "Airheads with gadgets have hijacked real storytelling" »

The relationship between actors and the parts they play is an odd one.

Directors in the pursuit of authenticity in their production often cast characters pulled from the same streets, and sometimes with associations to the same criminal societies from which they draw their artistic inspiration. When these actors start getting into trouble for much the same things as their characters did, it poses an interesting question: which came first, the actor or the gangster?

Here’s a few notable examples of actors turned gangster, or is it the other way around?

The Wire’s Felicia “Snoop” Pearson

Continue reading "Bad things happen when gangsters play actors" »

Follow The Punch’s updates of triumphs and faux pas from the Oscars red carpet with our stellar fashion correspondent Nedahl Stelio throughout the afternoon.

MOST UN-BLACK SWAN LIKE: MILA KUNIS

It’s more than that, it’s positively pretty. All lacey and lilac-y and girly and flowy, Mila, who not only managed to hold her own with Natalie Portman in the film, proves that she ain’t bad in the style stakes either.

For her very first Oscars, this is stellar choice. It says, “I’ve made it, kind of, but I’m not going to be flashy about it. I’m keepin’ it real.”

Continue reading "Oscars 2011: The good, bad and extremely good looking" »

Australia’s creative industry has again shown its canny ability to frame a debate.

The recent dispute over lifting restrictions on parallel book importation has been cast as a classic good versus evil battle. On the one side, we apparently have the noble educated patriots, boldly standing on the last line of defence for Australian culture, and on the other we have a mounting tide of sub-standard (foreign made) literature and a cabal of neo-liberal charlatans hell-bent on unleashing it on the young impressionable minds of Australian readers.

Author Tim Winton says the Productivity Commission is “hostile to Australian rights.” Louise Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Press, launched a shrill attack on the Productivity Commission as “neo-liberals and economic fundamentalists.” 

Continue reading "Spare me the artists’ pain, change book import laws" »