Search Results: comedy
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 18 December 2014
8 Comments
It's December, and film writers everywhere are putting together their lists of the best films of 2014. But best-of lists are so subjective, so here's our take: ten films from 2014 that are guaranteed to get you thinking, and talking!
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 11 December 2014
During an end-of-season trip to Bangkok, impressionable country footy dork Ray is badgered by one of his teammates into turning drug mule. He is picked up in Melbourne, where a couple of nasty cops detain him under supervision for seven days, waiting for him to pass the heroin-filled balloons he ingested. Ray is beset on all sides by systemic corruption, which makes his refusal to poo — fuelled not by greed but by a kind of everyman nobility — seem truly heroic.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 20 November 2014
2 Comments
The three recently reunited sisters are immersed in whispered conversation, during the second day of mourning at the house. In the next room, older men in ceremonial garb chant a mourning ritual. Suddenly, the sisters get the giggles, only to be angrily shushed by one of the men in the next room. But grief can't be stage managed, and it seems only natural that the process should be guided by normal human interaction.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Barry Gittins and Jen Vuk
- 24 October 2014
9 Comments
Satirist David Hunt's best-selling Girt The Unauthorised History of Australia prompted Joe Hockey to offer him a job as speech writer. There’s plenty of dirt. Australia was the place to be, writes Hunt, 'unless you were black. Or a woman. Or gay. Or suspected of being Irish. Or even worse, all of the above'.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 02 October 2014
2 Comments
It is almost impossible to sympathise with Aidan and his flailing ‘dream’. He decides to take the kids’ education into his own hands. He calls this ‘home schooling’, but it pretty much consists of taking them for trips into the desert or conning the salesman at a luxury car dealership into letting them take a car for a spin, while spouting trite platitudes about life, death and the getting of wisdom.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Anthony Morris
- 25 September 2014
Perhaps the trickiest relationship to show on-screen is the one between siblings, and it’s not just about finding actors who look alike. What The Skeleton Twins tries to tell audiences about damaged people is solid but uninspired: don’t deny your heart, you have to deal with your past rather than bury it… But it’s the chemistry between the two that makes this something special.
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AUSTRALIA
- Frank Brennan
- 22 September 2014
5 Comments
Considering my indebtedness to the two Aborigines who met [my family's ship arriving in Hervey Bay from Ireland] 151 years ago, I owe it to all my fellow Australians to agitate these issues of law, morality and politics here in Ireland so that back in Australia, the homeland which, in my religious tradition, was known as the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.
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MEDIA
- Megan Graham
- 28 August 2014
3 Comments
While we are all afraid of the unknown, complete certainty and predictability do not make for a vibrant life. Magic in the Moonlight is a film about the lens through which one chooses to see the world. Cynicism or wonder? Mayhem or magic? It poses the question: Which way brings more joy?
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MEDIA
- Megan Graham
- 14 August 2014
16 Comments
As human beings we do all kinds of things to avoid suffering. Drink, drugs, hobbies, television, retail therapy. The list is endless. It is our job to survive and avoid suffering: to huddle around our loved ones, to live and thrive and not let the shit of life get us down. For Robin Williams, it seems avoiding suffering was a very hard task.
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EDUCATION
- Ellena Savage
- 08 August 2014
13 Comments
There's a view that most Australians, including the Prime Minister, still have poor speech skills, and that there ought to be some kind of standardised verbal communication skill-level as a prerequisite for politicians, educators and advocates. Personally I'm quite content with an Australia that is accepting of vocal particularities, the flexibility of meanings, and often humorous miscommunications.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Tim Kroenert
- 19 June 2014
Mental illness is no laughing matter. Except when it is. Frank is a musical genius, who spends his life with his face concealed inside a comically oversized head. His bandmates are in awe of him, especially starry-eyed keyboard player Jon, who in his naivety envies Frank's illness and the strange creativity that it entails. Things turn ugly when one member of the ensemble commits suicide during the recording of the band's debut album.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Philip Harvey
- 10 June 2014
8 Comments
Rumours of his death are greatly exaggerated, but Clive James has since 2010 made a public art of dying. It is in this intense moment of re-evaluation of life that we read his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Possibly no great poem is so immersed in the connections between our life here and now with life after death. It's striking that an avowed atheist produces the best poetry in Paradiso.
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