The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 14

14 THE AGE, Friday 14 December 1984 edited by Rebecca Batties Little to confront or Loacl Gf old garbage, with recycled cliches challenge the listener FILMS MUSIC Neil Jillett Kenneth Hince 1 if': a structural model is quite clear even without the program note, but its purpose is never made clear. Careful and neat in form, the music remains a bit desiccated not at all generous with its feeling, a little bland, and in the long run repetitious. But it was a rich and expensive feast on Wednesday when put in front of composer Donald Mar-tino's 'Seven Pious Pieces'. These make an absolutely sumptuous choral sound, most of which was realised in this performance, but they are as dry and meaningless as an empty matchbox. The Astra Choir, judging by this concert, is not in peak form.

Its singing under Robert Small-wood was competent, sometimes vibrant and stimulating, but it needs a few more men. It has a notably feminine timbre. SOME films begin badly and immediately indicate that they are going to get much worse. 'Sixteen Candles' (Russell), emetically directed by John Hughes, is a particularly nasty example. It purports to be about a girl whose family forget her 16th birthday because big sister is about to be married.

Its Middle American cast of plastic females and self-regarding males look and behave like delegates to a Republican convention. The slight plot is strung out on a series of gross jokes. For example, the bride menstruates on her wedding day, and grandpa's bowel movements make the bathroom uninhabitable. MUCH-MUSCLED Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose jutting jaw and natty codpiece seem to have been made as a matched set has the title role in 'Conan the Destroyer" (Russell), the second film in what threatens to be an endless sword-and-sorcery series. The plot succeeds in being incomprehensible as well as simple.

Among the main ingredients are a journey through a landscape that is vaguely Biblical and even more vaguely Arthurian, a sacrificial virgin and a reborn monster. Most of the cast are dressed in a way that suggests they are off to an and ball, but otherwise the film is sexually timid. The violence, mainly decapitations, is executed in a thoroughly jolly way. Richard Fleischer's directing is as limp as the film's relentless attempts at comedy. THE program for the Astra Choir's concert this week, at the Union Memorial Church in North Melbourne, looked quite formidable on paper.

But the problems were mostly illusory. The new music on the program had very little in it to confront or challenge the listener. It was another case of old friends, best friends. The most enjoyable music came with the short motet 'Lobet den Herrn' of Bach, with the unaccompanied Tomkins setting 'When David Heard', and with Christian Wojtowicz's excellent and finely articulated playing of the third Bach suite for solo cello. Wojtowicz returned after interval to play Don Banks's 'Sequence' for solo cello, a substantial and well organised piece of music which has never struck me as being one of his finer works.

It is not less inventive than the best of his music, but its surface is scratched with a few tricks and mannerisms that were very mo-dich in the late 1960s and did not really agree with his own positive and candid way of getting on with the argument The two new choral works were staid and unexciting. Jennifer Fowler's 'When David Heard', using in part the same text as the Tomkins, was commissioned last year by the Australia Council. The use of Aboriginal chants as lypse Now, which Milius helped to write. The right of people to abuse their freedom by making and showing a film as cynically provocative as 'Red Dawn' is part of the price the rest of us must pay for living in a democracy. It is unlikely that the Soviet Government would permit the making of a film that had American, Turkish and Norwegian paratroopers landing on the soccer field of West Orechovo Zujevo High School.

WATCHING "The Last Star-fighter1 (Russell) is like trying to play Space Invaders without using the controls. Eighteen-year-old Alex, who lives somewhere in America, becomes world champion of a video game that, like so much of this film, looks like a low-energy recycling of the "Star Wars' series. His prowess leads to his being kidnapped to outer space, where he is supposed to lead the fight against armadas of intergalactic baddies. Director Nick Castle seems unsure whether he is aiming for an adolescent or prepubescent audience. His film is genial, but ponderous.

It has a love story that does not fit comfortably with the amusement arcade standard of Alex's whiz-bang adventure. BRIEFLY THE opening of 'Red Dawn' (Hoyts) signals the outbreak of World War III with the arrival of gun-blazing Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan paratroopers at a Colorado high school where a black teacher is giving a white class a lesson on Genghis Khan. Some of the boys flee this disrupted paradise of inter-racial harmony and hole up in the Rocky Mountains, from where they harass the invaders with guerilla tactics. This ugly mess of a film is directed and co-written by John Milius, who once described himself as a Zen fascist His main purpose in 'Red Dawn' seems to be to cash in on America's mood of Rea-ganistic nationalism. Yet, while it is a fantasy whose script harps on the inevitability of a non-nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, it contains little direct ideological propaganda about freedom vs the commie menace.

In this respect, it is much different from 'Uncommon Valor (produced by Milius and seen here earlier this year), which glorified an American private army's invasion of post-war Vietnam. 'Red Dawn' has a strange, and perhaps unintentional, ambivalence, exemplified by its references to Cuba. The film holds up, as a hero for every red-blooded American boy, Teddy Roosevelt, whose military adventures in the 1890s helped to put newly "independent" Cuba under America's thumb. Yet one of the film's few attemps at subtlety has a Cuban colonel, presumably a Fidelist hero and therefore a supreme demon, showing practical sympathy for the adolescent guerillas. But 'Red Dawn' hardly deserves the courtesy of a search for Deep Significance in its details.

It is basically garbage that adds nothing new to a recycling of cliches from westerns and World War II films about valiant resistance fighters. But in its central situation of a group of youths camping in the wilderness, it has an undercurrent of homoeroti-cism, reminiscent of the 19th century adventure story 'The Coral Island'. There is no chivalrous nonsense about rescuing girls, and when two do join the boys in the band, they are characterised as virtually asexual. The guerilla chief wears an improvised burnous and shows other affinities with Lawrence of Arabia. As bang-bang action, 'Red Dawn' has its moments, though it fails to convey the seductive glamor of THE secret is out Jon English, Marina Prior, Simon Gallaher and conductor Andrew Green from 'The Pirates of Penzance' are the surprise guests at the Victorian State Opera Foundation Christmas Get-Together on 17 December.

A SCENE from 'Red Dawn': Lawrence of Arabia on a coral island in the Rockies. Irksome miscegenation iftililiiiiii PHOTOGRAPHY Beatrice Faust 6TPHE MIRROR' uses photogra-JL phy for introspection and self-definition. Sue Purdy hand-colors details from pictures of herself to find an affinity between color and emotion, allowing her "to share images of myself from inside my body looking The foundation prints are as soft and grey-grainy as a pencilled imitation of a black and white photograph. The colors are added from fluorescent and felt pens, color pencils, enamel, crayon, pressed flower petals, bark and snakeskin. Sometimes these are used to fill in an outline, sometimes to provide a background of dots, checks, streaks and KlimMike whorls.

The results are ambiguous. The photographic detail can be seen only from fairly close up but at that distance, most of the colors are pallid and scratchy. From farther away, the colors form coherent masses but the photographic images disappear. The viewer may choose to see black and white or to see color. I find the miscegenation irksome.

Christine McKenzie's catalogue note tells us that she sensed a "deep connection" between Tuscany, Venice and Sissinghurst "To me it's as if the images of these places I loved had always floated around as one Multiple exposure or multiple printing seem to offer a reasonable chance of expressing this confluence, but the finished pictures (printed by Peter Flavelle) do not communicate a feeling of oneness. Sue Purdy: 'The Mirror', Visibility, 642 Station Street, North Carlton, 3877432. Weekends until 23 December. war shown so brilliantly in 'Apoca- FOR BETTER OR WORSE by Lynn Johnston luiHRT- I You hpwemYgot 3 I WHAT POt HAVE TD DO 1 1 DUMB QUESTTOM. I y3UR unMPS 8 L-2U? r-r NOT Tl FINISHED A It 1 DRIED ycxjR rtRIK-YOU HPNENT tfVi DONE by Brant Prkr and Johnny Hort THE WIZARD OF ID mrOH IN rf a 'oar -mrtxTn i casks' JONCS-LOWI V.ON VlS OF HOT SO wepOMe rod ducks.

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