The Scrivener's Fancy

'Face' the Music and Dance

I have to admit that I just watched 1996 Barbra Streisand opus The Mirror Has Two Faces for the second time. Yes, and the first time I saw it, my curiosity had led me to take the trouble to go to see it at the cinema, if you can imagine such a thing. Still, having found the film to be a memorable piece of work, I’d always wanted to see it again and truly realised how much when I recently saw it in a bargain bin as part of a series called ‘Girls’ Night In’. This is a collection of titles packaged in pink plastic, which, if it truly is what ‘girls’ want to stay in and watch, is a compelling argument against female suffrage.

You can tell straight away that The Mirror Has Two Faces is intended to be a ‘woman’s film’ by the fact that in Streisand’s first appearance, she is eating a Twinkie even as she wears a facemask. The plot concerns the marriage of convenience…

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Title Goes Here

People living in Melbourne are used to seeing the name Shane Chartres-Abbott in the paper. And whenever the Herald Sun runs another chapter of the saga that I hope will one day be dramatised Underbelly-style under the title Mullett/Nixon, you can be sure that there’ll be a picture of the man now routinely referred to as a ‘self-confessed vampire’. I can remember very little of the Chartres-Abbott case, and so am unable to verify the extent or authenticity of the man’s vampirism – years before it became fashionable, incidentally – but at some point in the last decade it has gone from being a crazy allegation to an actual job description. Newsreaders, journalists and policemen refer, seemingly without irony, to ‘self-confessed vampire Shane Chartres-Abbott’ and we all assume that while we haven’t been paying attention, Fright Night has been reclassified as a documentary.

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Remaker

I was doing my best to avoid all things electionary when I found myself watching The Mean Machine. Not the Burt Reynolds classic (called The Longest Yard in the US) with Private Dobbs from F Troop as his offsider, Caretaker, and ‘Oliver, darling’ from Green Acres as one scary prison warden, but the farcical remake with Adam Sandler. The remake of a classic movie often says more about the period of time when the movie was remade than the quality of the movie. Take a look at the 2003 The Italian Job remake and its lingering, lascivious shots of gold bars (not of Charlize Theron!), or the update of Miracle On 34th Street as the camera shoots Santa getting into his costume like Rambo in First Blood, and you’ll see that we live in vacuous times, where style is everything over content.

My recent favourite was the 2000 remake of ‘Gone in…

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‘Today Tonight’ Tonight

I could tell from Ashlea’s urgent ‘hello’ that we had had a breakthrough. The publicity campaign for Making News had been running for nearly a month and, beneath the din of the election campaign, we’d struggled to make much news ourselves. Nevertheless, we’d baited plenty of hooks, and this time she clearly had a nibble.

‘Can you go on Today Tonight today?’

‘Today?’

‘Well — for tonight, but they’d film today.’

I paused long enough to spare a compassionate thought for the promo writers at Seven, who have trod the ‘Today Tonight tonight’ and Today Tonight tomorrow’ minefields for over a decade.

‘Do they want me to talk about the book?’ I asked hopefully, knowing that a…

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