The stunt cast

Why? Why would they? There's no surer sign that a TV show is about to hurl its ass Fonzie-style across shark-infested waters than the stunt-cast. It's never good. It never works. The pop cultural graveyard is littered with the corpses of TV hacks who in their last gasps were heard to utter, "You know what Ugly Betty's been missing all these years? Post Spice!" Whether it's Nancy Reagan warning Arnold and Willis to say no to drugs or Brad Pitt's wooden banter and woeful in-jokes on Friends (hahaha he hates Rachel ...) or Color Me Bad and Jeremy Jordan thrashing out early-90s white boy R&B in the Peach Pit, stunt casting is just awkward and embarrassing for all concerned. Suddenly the characters in this neat little self-contained universe are turning to the cameras and giving us the big wink and nudge and asking us to revel in the hilarity of oh look, it's Mrs. Cunningham on Drew Carey! It's not clever, meta, postmodern, self-reflexive or any other dumb things you spouted in cinema studies tutes. It's just dumb. It's lame. And Jessica Alba and Jack Black belong nowhere near Dunder Mifflin. That is all.

Linkalicious

• Sean Penn, palling around with the anti-gays. Also doesn't much like journalists. Who knew?


• Milk snubbed for Best Picture at the Golden Globes. San Francisco critics are mad for it.


• Tom O'Neill, the Helen Thomas of film journalism, bravely goes where no hack has gone before, asking Marisa Tomei about that Oscar rumour. Tomei grits teeth and overlaughs.


• Ha ha ha Tom Cruise mocks self by delivering woefully unfunny Letterman Top Ten.


• Germaine Greer dislikes Australia. Australian media collectively loses its shit.


• Oprah signs an HBO deal, which means we'll soon see Tony Soprano doodling in his gratitude journal and Ari Gold delivering free cars to South African fat farms or something.

Hugh Jackman to host Oscars

You've come a long way from Corelli, baby.

Got milk?

Here at Freeway 9 we're shining our shoes, picking out our best Bob Massey headwear and rustling up our Oscars bingo cards ("honor just to be nominated," "girl from a trailer park," "Harvey Weinstein," BINGO!) because IT'S AWARD SEASON, Y'ALL!

POSSIBLY ILL-ADVISED EARLY PREDICTION #1: Milk will win Best Picture.

While everyone else has been putting their money on Slumdog Millionaire, Daily Rushes has had 30 maths nerds working day and night, each paid with thirty peanuts, a Troop Beverly Hills DVD and the promise of Oscarblog glory, who've poured through the research data and all of Three 6 Mafia's back catalogue to arrive at this foolproof algorithm:

M = B-C/b+p(2)+J(z)k/W

Where:

M = Milk wins

B = Number of Best Picture trophies Milk has taken out (One: New York Film Critics)

C = Number of Best Picture trophies Slumdog has taken out (Two: National Board of Review, British Independent Film Awards)

b = Prop 8 topicality and liberal Hollywood guilt arising from Brokeback snub, (hereafter known as The Incident,) with said snub attributable to homophobic octogenarian Oscar voters who have since moved on to the great Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in the sky.

p = Stellar cast with establishment heavies (Penn), rising middleweights (Brolin), indie darlings (Luna, Hirsch), and one surprise heartthrob breakout (Franco).

J = Producers Guild of America's Stanley Kramer Award (which honors pictures for taking on 'provocative social issues'; see "b",) with Producers Guild a reliable indicator of Oscar glory, notwithstanding the Little Miss Sunshine misfire of 2004.

z = Desire to reward Gus Van Sant for returning to semi-commercial Hollywood fare with conventional plot, character and continuity (cf Good Will Hunting) with nary a big-thumbed cowgirl or snow-walkin' Gerry to be seen.

k = Homeground advantage for Real American Van Sant vs British interloper Danny Boyle.

W = Ten bonus Billy Crystal points for biopic.

Liveblogging Australia

00:05 Nicole Kidman appears. Her name is Laura Ashley, or something.

00:07: Woah boy, does she hate that Drover.

11:00 Already one kangaroo, one Crikey and one Bill Hunter.

13:00 Laura Ashley is British and so uptight and repressed. She says things like "quite" when she means "yes".

20:30 The narrator child Nullah's mother dies, and he's upset for about five minutes.

25:30 But then he falls in love with a new mother. Hurrah!

33:00 Hey, it's Diver Dan!

38:15 Diver Dan's the bad guy. ie He has a pencil-thin moustache.

39:30 Also, when he needs to say something mean he walks up and says it right into Laura Ashley's ear even though there's no one else in the room.

48:00 Laura Ashley sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Something beneath that bodice there's a heart of gold and a fiery lust for some brawny Aussie beefcake.

1:10:30 The Drover hangs out with two Aboriginal people. They don't say much except to occasionally speak wise truths to him about his commitment issues.

1:17:00 Also, the Drover is friends with a Chinese man. We don't know his name. He cooks food and plays a ukelele. He says something about Beijing.

1:17:30 Hey look, it's Ben Mendelsohn! He has a plummy accent but we all know he's gonna end up back on the junk.

1:30:00 A stampede of cattle and a roaring orchestra. It's the live action Lion King.

1:35:00 The Drover pours water over his rock hard, glistening abs.

1:39:00 Also, he cracks whips. HE IS ALL MAN.

1:46:00 Everyone calls the drover Drover. That's cos he's embarrassed by his real name. Hector.

1:54:00 "Listen lady, I mix with dingoes, not Duchesses." AWESOME.

2:10:00 Now there's a ball and it's just like college with sweaty boys wearing tuxes and drinking straight out of longnecks.

2:17:00 Hahaha the Drover has come to the ball to show up all those stuffy suits.

2:20:00 Then it rains and he and Laura Ashley kiss in an embarrassing, old-couple kind of way.

2:25:00 Aaaargh they're bombing Darwin. Plot twist!

2:27:00 The Japanese land on the beaches of Darwin. Followed by Gwen Stefani.

2:37:00 OMG The Drover is saving the whole stolen generation. This is such a history lesson.

2:45:00 The Drover and Laura Ashley live happily ever after. Australia goes on to earn ten billion at the box office and Baz gets 43 Oscars, plus Australian of the Year, plus first president of the new republic, plus Ricky May Day gets renamed Baz Lurhmann Day.

On Nicole

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who dislike Nicole Kidman, and those who loathe her. Something about this woman – with her frozen forehead and her white-rooted hair and her penchant for freaky men – just pisses people off, and they’ve all have been having a merry time as the festive season of Kidman-bashing gets underway. If you haven't been following, here's the latest:

• She sucks on Letterman.
• She sucks on Facebook.
• She sucks as a mother.
• She sucks at opening a movie.
• She sucks in Australia.
• She sucks in The Reader, which she wasn’t in, but if she had been, she would have sucked.

So what is it about Kidman that provokes this kind of ball-tearing? Maybe it’s just that she always seems to be trying too hard. She’s trying too hard to be breezy on Letterman; she’s trying too hard to emote on Oprah; she’s trying too hard to paint herself as a serious art actress, blockbuster queen, comic foil, indie darling, fashion muse and global humanitarian; and on screen, where she’s painfully self-conscious, she’s trying too hard to act.

Maybe it’s also that sense she gives off that as a frizz-haired, freckled adolescent living at the bottom of the world she set her sights on global stardom and then mustered every last drop of ambition to achieve it. If that meant a lightning-speed marriage to a top-billed nut, a radical regime of peeling and dyeing and straightening and slimming, a much-hyped breakdown and press tour and subsequent sympathy Oscar, and a string of all-too-carefully chosen movie vehicles and well-timed charity appearances, then so be it. Maybe it's a Faustian pact that she wrestles with every time that turbo-charged needle inches towards her embattled brow.

Synecdoche, New York

Sure, I had high expectations. This was the director who crawled inside the mind of Malkovich, who created the first fictional Oscar nominee, and who was the brains behind the great Clementine Kruczynski.

And the reviews! Ebert called it a “film with the richness of great fiction” whose “surface will daunt you and depths will enfold you.” The Washington Post called it one of the best films of the year, the decade even. The Times' critic said that to call it one of the best films of the year was "such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now."

So hey, I was a little disappointed to find that watching Synecdoche, New York, was like getting stuck at a party with a guy who bangs on about his philosophy thesis and Nietzsche and how we’re-all-just-extras-in-someone-else's-dream even as you stifle yawns and nod politely and inch closer to the cheese table.

It’s not that I hated it. The best of Kauffman is all there: the quirky humour, the grandiose ambition, and the refusal to be cowed by conventional notions of narrative, character or the whole, you know, time/space continuum. Hoffman and Keener are, as always, brilliant. He's all pug-faced and mournful and she's all wan and withering and it's a beautiful thing to see them on screen together again.

But it’s way too long and it needs stronger direction and it gets to a point where you’re shifting in your seat and furtively checking your watch and tiring of the audience members snickering at the four-hundredth reference to what small, self-absorbed creatures we all are.

And the burning house was just dumb. Sorry.

Lopping the Poppies

No nation has perfected the art of the backlash quite like Australia. Sure, Russia had the gulags, France the guillotine and Britain the stocks, but falling out of public favour in Australia lands you the antipodean equivalent: the merciless floggings on talkback radio, the forced labour of tabloid appearances and the gruelling interrogations by glossy mags where you beg absolution for your illicit text messages/turkey-slapping/Best Western fling with David Oldfield. Then, once your spirit is broken and your mind reduced to mush and you’ve apologised for all four series of ‘Tonight Live’, you’ll be exiled to the E-list reality TV circuit of celebrity fat camp and karaoke specials.



John So seems to be the latest victim of the ever-turning worm of public opinion. Turns out he’s not our ‘bro’ but more the disgraced cousin who hocks Grandma’s antique wedding ring to pay off Fat Tony. The Age paints So as an out-of-control meglomaniac whose profligate spending is sending Melbourne broke. But what of the rapping, smiling, clapping, not-at-all-patronising image of the ‘diminutive China man’ the media’s been so mad on? And if So goes, what becomes of a thousand subeditors’ dreams of coming up with all the more creative ways to pun on his surname?



A Jet backlash? Please. The Jet backlash has been on ever since those boys set their pointy cowboy boots inside a recording studio. Their paint-by-numbers rock riffs and carefully-coiffed facial hair made them a target for scorn on sticky carpets the country over. Wearing thongs to the Arias? ‘Tex did it years ago,’ someone jeered. So what will become of Jet, once the supermodels leave and the coke dries up and the lights rise for the last time? Future, thy name is Roxus.

The Number 112

Hey there, big fella. Come, have a seat. My clenched forehead, tightly folded arms and determined stare out the tram window shouldn’t be taken as signs I want to be left alone. They’re in fact an open invitation to collapse next to me and let out a low groan in my ear. No, I don’t need much space, do take more. Speak, please. Roar at the top of your gravelly voice. I want nothing more than to hear about your latest ailment/run-in/conspiracy theory. Your hot, gin-soaked breath on my neck is a delight to me; your encrusted body odour a treat to the nasal passages. I love the way your spittle lands on my cheek as you lean ever closer. I love the way you throw your head back, slap your knees and launch into a tune - evidently self-composed and with such an unusual approach to pitch. Hey, I’ve as much middle-class guilt as the next frightened commuter. Now go on, scratch your balls and pass out on my shoulder.

Greed: like, so over

They’re making another Wall Street: the film that defined its era with pin-stripe-suits and cigars and lunch being for wimps and Darryl Hannah looking slightly confused throughout, like she wandered off the set of Splash and swapped her fin for Armani.

And yeah, it was all 'zeitgeist' and epoch-making and whatever but really, Wall Street was just one of a bunch of 80s films of the “dude gets filthy rich but it ain’t all that” variety. Except usually they were screwball comedies with a bawdy Bette Midler and a souped-up Richard Pryor and maybe a Tom Cruise flash of teeth. Course there were variations on the same theme. There was the “poor dude becomes rich dude” (Risky Business, Big, Brewster’s Millions); “poor dude moves in with rich dude” (The Toy, Outrageous Fortune, Down and Out in Beverly Hills) and my favourite, the always salutary “poor dude and rich dude swap lives” (Trading Places, Big Business).

And if the 80s were saturated with “dude gets corrupted by the system” films, so too has Hollywood always bent and swayed to the neuroses of each era. So the 70s had your “dude tries to beat the system” (The Graduate, Bonny and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, All the President’s Men) and the 90s your “dude says fuck the system” (Slacker, Suburbia, Reservoir Dogs) and lately, as war rages and the world warms, we’ve had a whole slay of totally-right-on “system, what system?” flicks, where snaggy Clooney-types stroke their beards and furrow their brows and curse at the inhumanity of it all (Syriana, Babel, etc).

So if Wall Street II has Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko getting out of jail twenty years later, his jowls mysteriously tighter and his eyelids pinned to his brows, having been deprived of life and liberty but not, evidently, the services of an expensive Beverly Hills surgeon, maybe we’ll see him forsake the corporate thievery of years gone by and ask not whether greed is good but whether it’s ecologically sustainable, non-GM and carbon-neutral.