Wyatt Moss-Wellington: Blog

At the end of 2009 I wrote an article on the easy retreat many film critics make into assessing visual stimulation as a film’s worth. I’d like to point out that this is not the case with everyone, and it certainly isn’t the case with Armond White, one of the few critics writing today who see film reviewing as a springboard to wider cultural debate, much like Pauline Kael used to (though, arguably, with less aplomb and less success – White’s weakness for the inflammatory above the expository often sees him sending himself up).

White is a a social agitator. I don't always agree with his reviews, but I think they are important. I get frustrated by the consensus reality of criticism, instilled by powerful marketing. Many films take on a holy status before they are even seen, and apparently it is too much for critics to question the marketing and assess films independently. If a film scores 100% on rottentomatoes.com, we should probably be very suspicious.

White casts himself as contrarian often to a fault, but he is close to the only film critic I can think of who is doing it.

However, anyone who reads his writings online for New York Press would have witnessed the barrage of offensive, expletive-laden comments tailing his articles, many imploring White's editors to give him the sack, or complaining of his reviews having a political axe to grind (so?). There is now an online petition set up to remove him from rottentomatoes.com.

This could be dismissed as the work of a handful of fanboy nutters who have found access to internet traffic via the democratic offering of message boards. However, even those leaving comments across the web come to represent a reality which appears woefully interactive.

World-famous reviewer Roger Ebert recently defended Armond White's review of the film "District 9". White was once again under attack for spoiling a perfect rottentomatoes.com score - and this before the film was released or had been seen by any of the irate devotees so enchanted by the experience of being courted by marketers. (It is a curiosity of the human experience that the colossally wealthy have been so good at enlisting the hoi polloi to protect their interests for them.)

However, Ebert received such a negative response for his defense of White that he changed opinion on his blog in a new entry entitled: Not in Defense of Armond White. In the entry, he agrees that White is a "troll", reducing White’s opinion to the product of attention-seeking novelty rather than serious social questioning.

Many bloggers across the spectrum of social debate amend their posts due to negative feedback from trigger-happy armchair commentators. Some even give up for good when the feedback gets too nasty; Twitter is notorious for bringing celebrities to their knees with the reactionary unkindness it has uncovered.

All of this begs the question: should our utopian dream of free speech on the internet be called into question? At the very least, perhaps the “less clicks the better” assumption should be reassessed. What was once a principle for online sales maximisation – the less clicking one has to do, the more opportunity for doubt-impaired impulse buying – has become a principle for all internet traffic, as internet traffic means revenue. But perhaps with the advent of such proliferated online communication – including email – there is a place for demanding extra click-throughs. Maybe when we hit the “send” or “post comment” button, there should be a popup or two, requesting: “have you really thought about what you are about to send; have you considered the psychological impact of what you are about to say?”

But this isn’t likely to happen, so we should consider other, even more serious dilemmas: if utopian free speech just gives voice to less considered opinion, including antisocial, bigoted and offensive slander, should we consider mooting a more selective approach to public comment on the internet? This suggestion is a massive no-no in our current democratic climate, where the right of majority rule is unquestioned. Fair enough – this model of democracy is the best we have come up with so far; if our voices are moderated, who should do the moderating? It hands away too much power.

But it is worth asking: as we see the power of debate transferred to the internet, simultaneously seeing it slip away from a filter which, at the very least, aimed to ensure knowledgeable voices were more prevalent, is there a way to return to a place where an informed (i.e. researched, considered) opinion is given more weight than the reactionary majority? Because I’m pretty sure that not listening to the learned among us, and presenting all consumers as a higher power, will be a recipe for disaster.

My friend's neighbour is from Haiti. She has only recently been able to contact her family by phone; they are unharmed.

Channel Nine News, in their understandable desire to locate all Haiti diaspora now living in Sydney, recently requested to interview her in her home. She agreed, whereupon, she alleges, she was told by the reporter what they wanted her to say: that she has only been able to contact her family by email and Twitter.

No, it didn't matter that it wasn't true.

She declined to do the interview.

Hollywood has been obsessed with condescending its audience with karmic moralism for Lordy knows how long. They have insisted time and again, perhaps to justify their own excesses, that the good will get what they deserve and the bad will suffer as they must - this is the way of the world.

The Coen Brothers, despite a high-handed superiority they flex over all of the parochially self-unaware characters they create, offer a very important antidote to the rest of the Hollywood mainstream. They take apart any notion we may have had of absolutist natural justice beyond the justice that we, often misguidedly, attempt to plaster over our chaotic circumstances.

In "A Serious Man", Joel and Ethan Coen have made their point more accurately than they have been able to before. By encouraging us to laugh at our own flimsy answers to the continuously confounding absurdity of being (their speciality), they acknowledge that good fortune and destructive happenstance blow around randomly. What makes this film different is their vision of a man struggling to be good, finding himself in impossible situations and ultimately bending to the unfairness we prop up by convincing ourselves that the world is naturally fair. And we still care about him, heartbreakingly - and funnily - enough. This is an empathy unparalleled in other Coen Brothers films: empathy with those caught in the unjustness of our attempts at creating a just world.

Unfortunately their existential realities usually court a uselessly abortive dismissal of benevolent aspirations, still trendy for its excusing of our intellectualised inaction. "A Serious Man" does not escape this Coen trope, however it is mitigated by their understanding of the dilemma posed by trying to be good in a world where the only meaning that can be found is whatever equally absurd meaning we apply to our time here.

One more satisfying tidbit: for the first 20 minutes or so you won't know where the film is heading. This being a rare occurrence in the cinema, I will refrain from spoiling it for you.

So it's the end of 2009 and Copenhagen has shown us that people will generally wait until an immediate threat to their mortality emerges before engaging in any foresight or sacrifice.

As upset as I am, it does seem a difficult ask to get the international community to agree to such monumental global transition when the evidence is hypothetical to most. Those who have really felt the effects of a warming globe are a minority. My guess is that we'll have to see China or the United States suffer real fatalities before the domino effect kicks in and we start to change. Which most of us know is very sad.

If the United States can spend trillions bailing out institutionalised greed, surely the country has the wealth and clout to bail out a much more valuable asset: our only habitat? Keep at it Obama et al.

Meanwhile, "Avatar" is the most expensive load of tosh yet endured on the silver screen. It extends the environmentalist cause to a justification for war (who knew this was such a good idea?) and transforms our understanding of environmental politics into condescending Hollywood mysticism. This is not useful. Moreover, it hypocritically ignores the technology and investment which made the film possible.

I'm unconvinced; James Cameron's half-baked Westernised spiritual philosophy does not represent any indigenous culture or environmentalism. Masquerading as anti-development, anti-greed enlightenment (which we could use in some parts of the world), it instead represents a colonial, essentialist view of our biological makeup; the uneducated Everyman (Sam Worthington) is revealed as inherently good by "the spirits", because he has a "strong heart", which seems to mean he is able to be adventurously self-destructive without thinking. The majority of the rest of the human population are just essentially bad, to the extent where we are asked to desire their righteous demise in the sickeningly misguided climax. Folks, hit the 'ignore' button, this is just more goodies and baddies, the worst kind of Hollywood cliche sandwich. Even the pretty tropical palette and creature design aren't worth the price of admission.

Cameron got it right with "The Abyss", so I thought there was a chance of something worthwhile here. I recommend watching "Abyss" instead.

And has anyone else commented that the giant smurfs, apparently ideal blue versions of the ideal amalgam indigenous human, look anorexic? So many offensive ideas, it's hard to know where to start. It's this year's "Slumdog".

On a lighter note, I will leave you, dear reader, over the seasonal break with a review of the Ass Cup Swing:

I ask you to recall the particular humility of childhood known upon arriving at a local park, expecting the freedom of flying joyous through the air and receiving instead the Ass Cup Swing.

You know the kind - the chain-clad black nappy suspended from a pole, staining your playground with the dark aura of generations of babies' valuable playtime misspent in swing purgatory. This is not a piece of play equipment; it is an abomination, a Frankenstein's swing constructed from the broken dreams of swingless adults who obviously planned a targeted negative punishment assault on the emotional development of hapless minors.

Ass Cup Swing does nothing for the pride of a tot.

Observe the baby's face as it is placed in the oubliette: initially surprised, it will look uncomprehendingly down at its captor contraption before glancing around at happier, older children on nearby swings. It tries to jiggle its way to a similar freedom. No response from the Ass Cup. Defeated, the baby will hold its arms aloft, expecting the nearest caregiver to pluck it from the dark rubber clutches of disappointment. If no one arrives in good time, the misery sets in - will I be stuck here, motherless and fatherless, forever? Then the tears come.

So think twice next time you attend the playground with your beloved progeny. Ass Cup Swing gets one out of five stars from this reviewer.

I'll be back in the new year with a new blog. Seasons greetings sundry!

It may be already so distant from my life that it's hard to believe, but a couple of years ago I completed a Master of Arts in Screenwriting in my hometown, Sydney.

My strongest recollections of what I was taught there are enshrined in the mantra: "The more white on the page, the better." There was a strong bias against storytelling through dialogue, at the expense of the kind of interrogation and exposition verbal communication is good at. We watched reel after reel of examples of non-verbal storytelling; we had it drummed into us that this was, indeed, a superior form of communication.

Who began this anti-dialogue campaign? It seems to be working, I'm hearing it all over now, from audiences and critics alike.

Recognition of visual storytelling techniques makes us feel clever. There is something about non-verbal communication that, when recognised, seems to affirm us as perceptive individuals. Unfortunately, although visual storytelling is often necessary, especially in drama seeking to be demonstrative, comparatively it cannot have the depth and nuance of meaning provided by conversation. It's why we created language - to communicate complex ideas. This is what words are good at.

In academe, there are libraries worth of tomes dedicated to the study of movie-going, and the psychological state of being in a cinema. This is fair enough; although there have been countless heralded threats to cinema's survival - TV, video, the internet - our need to consume cinema in public remains healthy, and box office records continue to be broken year after year as cinema-consuming populations grow worldwide.

The consensus seems to be that sitting in the dark, having our senses stimulated without need for action, usually with some manner of junk food satisfying our oral fixation, very much resembles regression to symbiosis. Cinema is like returning to the womb.

While this is an extreme position, I understand the point that we like to feel comfortable in the cinema. Visual stimulation, and its potential to usurp more analytical thought, plays an important part here.

Many critics, for example, will switch off at the first sign that a film isn't going to indulge their need for regular eyeball diversion. As an example, take one of the most progressive and rousing statements on the decade just past: Lions for Lambs.

I can't name many pictures that have the proverbial testicles to stand up to generation y's political inertia. The film industry, recognising business opportunity before cultural fibre, prefers to pander to their fraught disinterest. But Robert Redford's clearly-intoned statement on the times got buried in a poor critical response. Browse the comments on rottentomatoes.com. The majority were annoyed that the dialogue-heavy film didn't contain enough action to keep them satisfied. The word that gets used often is "preachy." Yet most demonstrated that they entirely missed most of the deeper questioning the script attempted (certainly more discussion than diatribe). Perhaps the threat of something too direct reminded them of their own political inertia and scared them off.

What service are critics providing these days? Cinematic analysis or gatekeepers to our need for cultural self-questioning, nannying away the possibilities for deeper thought?

On the other hand, observe a film such as the recent Michael Caine vigilante pic Harry Brown.

The argument that we are all able to recognise fantasy in cinema breaks down when we look at Michael Caine's statements to the press after shooting the film - that we need to do something about the degraded, drug-addled youths of London who are turning to firearms and crime.

Really? Is there an epidemic of gun-related juvenile crime anywhere in Britain?

Although I haven't seen the film, I'm very familiar with the press surrounding the film, and it is the all-too-real political discussion I take issue with.

Once again, fantasy exists because there is something in there we long to believe as real, and in this case we are being encouraged to take a hardline approach to a hypothetical population of rabid hoodies who we have no contact with.

Most critics were able to see through to what the Independent's reviewer, Anthony Quinn, calls "a nasty Daily Mail-ish subtext to this brand of OAP vigilantism, a suggestion that Harry is only doing what everyone secretly would like to, ie blasting the scum from the streets."

The dismaying thing is that, although most recognised this absurdity of subject matter, they promptly dismissed it in favour of their entertainment at seeing these youths blown away by a vengeful Caine. Once again, browse rottentomatoes.com, and here is an example.

This would be fine if their fantasy didn't reach parliament or the minds of the voting populace. But this anti-human fantasy has real effects. Critics are part of this process.

Our value of visual storytelling over expository dialogue is a thinly disguised value of our entertainment over critical thought.

Same goes for news content: its value has been sold to us as entertainment. Is a culture that asks to be entertained before it commits to any interest in reality shooting itself in the foot? Or am I overreacting, as many have warned me? Surely these are questions worth asking.

To many post baby boomer generations, hearing yet more tales of how different and special the swinging 60s were incites yawns laced with envy. It’s a romance we’re locked out of and it’s boring – even if we do reap the rewards of relative equality and artistic freedom. And at least they could let go of their empires, just a little, right? Trust us with the world, before they retire?

Unfortunately for us, there is some truth to the romanticism of their youth – the world came ahead leaps and bounds in the 1960s. Youth action was revolutionary, and we haven’t seen its like since. “We achieved a great deal before the authorities figured out how to capitalize on our self-destructiveness,” is how ‘White Bicycles’ author Joe Boyd puts it. “Right-wing commentators still spit with anger when they contemplate how fundamentally the sixties altered society.”

Although much has been written about the era, the last chapter of Joe Boyd’s book provides a more insightful and succinct, personally mournful yet universally aware catalogue of the achievements and losses of the period than any I’ve read. For those who would prefer, it is possible to read just this chapter and get a lot from it, but you will miss the power of Boyd's nearly imperceptibly cumulative amassing of requiem throughout ‘White Bicycles’. From the losses of Jimi Hendrix to Nick Drake and all the ideology in between, he points out that, "We fuelled ourselves with inspiration from our cultural heritage, and in so doing helped turn it into smoke … The destructiveness that comes with innovation is a process as old as history."

The book can be seen as a springboard to exploring possibilities for our future, as in this final chapter he asks what made the era so different. Like many others, he points to the unprecedented economic prosperity.

Then he points out that, allegedly, we have more money now than we ever did then. But less time.

“People are supposedly wealthier now, yet most feel they haven’t enough money and time is at an even greater premium … In the sixties, we had surpluses of both money and time.” Could this be a key to the revolutionlessness of the last four decades?

What happened? Did the baby boomers’ idealism really pave the way to lasting exploitation? Somewhere along the line we became convinced that we no longer had time or money. We bought what was advertised at us – the fear that if we don’t acquire a very large buffer between us and ever-present, lurking poverty, we will invariably find ourselves miserable and destitute.

“There was a feeling that nothing was nailed down,” writes Boyd, “that an assumption held was one worth challenging.” Would that this were still true!

Now we’re stuck in an unusual situation. If climate change is as bad as most of the global scientific community seems to believe it is, then we are going to need a force much more potent than our current reliance on the mock-democracy of self-defeating, passionless political compromise, favoured because it looks after itself by not actually achieving anything. To deal with this scale of problem, we need a revolution. But we all think we’re too busy to be involved in any such thing. The Western world has a love affair with the process of two-party political compromise because it makes no change; it endeavours to keep the status quo, seemingly so we can keep overworking and generating so-very-necessary wealth.

Same goes for music, the subject of ‘White Bicycles’. Wouldn’t a revolution be nice so we didn’t have to keep hearing slight variations of the same music over and over again?

How did the fear tactics work so well?

I wish we knew that we actually have the time and money to honour our history, and explore the possibilities for our future.

When you're steeped in cultural critique, ethical inquiry and a good dollop of lobbying, you can find yourself spending most of your time in complaint. As a human it's hard to communicate that there are still goings-on in the world worth being cheerful about; as a blogger it's hard to avoid relying on rants.

Moreover, as most activism these days takes place on keyboards rather than on the streets (the impact of gathering in public places and hollering demands has been unfortunately mitigated), it's a lonely thing, complaining. It's probably also why so many remain nostalgic for the political activism of the late 60s, and why we haven't managed the same level of progressive upheaval since: to most, it's just not that attractive making change by yourself on a computer, without the social gratification, comradery, or human results unfolding in front of you. We rely on mavericks to change the world now. Too bad for us.

A friend wrote in the comments section of this website, "I also look forward to you liking something ... ie. I hope this doesn't turn into a rant blog."

True. And it has.

I know how difficult and disheartening it can get when you spend any amount of time monitoring the things that are going wrong with the world. My girlfriend deals with this by writing ten good things about the day when she goes to bed at night. So here are my ten good things about Movember:

1. Spike Jonze et al's feature adaptation of "Where The Wild Things Are"; I finally saw it on Thursday. WTWTA manages to approach painful parts of youth I had forgotten about, with an honesty and an ingenuity to make it unlike any other rite of passage film. Also nice to see a cinematic fantasy with naturalist production values.

2. Revisiting Anne Tyler's best novel "Saint Maybe".

3. That tasty papaya salad what I ate earlier in the week.

4. The Australian federal government getting something right by rejecting a lift on the parallel import restrictions for Australian books. Really, this was just another arm of the free market lobby, disguised as a moral concern for consumers. Contrary to popular belief, an amount of legal protection for the culturally vulnerable is actually ok.

5. Feeling like it is a respectable time of year to start playing "David Grisman's Acoustic Christmas". The music composed in honour of Jesus' Big Day doesn't really blow my skirt up, but something appeals to me about eccentric and genre-twisted Christmas albums. (Not Bob Dylan's.)

6. Learning of an Adult Swim program entitled "Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" I haven't seen it, and frankly it doesn't matter as I'm fairly certain no TV show can live up to a name as good as that.

7. Having written another truly progressive folk song called "Coming Down", as well as the first song I've ever written on a piano, "The Suicide Bomber" -- feeling ready to record my new album now.

8. Every year, the silly season is a little easier to digest as split-family struggles recede into the past.

9. Healthily burgeoning visit statistics for this website.

10. Louise, the best thing about my life.

After lobbying ninemsn to take down their fraudulent piece on the cost of refugee benefits in Australia, I received in my inbox today this email:

Wil New
Customer Service
ninemsn"

Brilliant news, and confirmation that consumers who care can make a difference. If you also value trustworthy news, write to ninemsn and congratulate them for taking down this story here. My original story is here.

Last month, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reported the president and publisher of Variety group, Neil Stiles, as having said, "I'm not optimistic about this habit called journalism."

Coming from one of the globe's most widely circulated entertainment-trade publications, this is not a good sign.

Stiles' creed is that service and customer are the way of the future. This can be read as: we will tailor our reportage and content to what the public wants to hear. But even then, will the projected extra traffic bring back the ol’ rivers of gold? Likely not. Internet advertising revenue isn’t what it used to be either.

Meanwhile, “customers” are finding it hard to take issue with a domain selling them exactly what they want to hear, truth be damned.

Those with any interest in hard news will know that even the most major news reporters are caving in and calling populism the answer. Within Australia, the nation’s highest circulation broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, plasters inconsequential celeb stories across its homepage almost every day.

The difference between reliable journalism, marketing and opinion writing is increasingly spurious. Apparently when evaluating where to downsize, newspapers have turned straight to reporters, who have been identified as the most expendable staff members. The justification? No one is interested in reading hard news content anymore. We have always had to keep an eye on the media, but to this extent? Who, now, is going to fulfill the thankless task of attempting objective reporting?

Many of us have turned to bloggers in search of news content with integrity, upon recognising the mainstream media’s blundering amid economic plight. But is this an answer?

It seems that consumers online are still choosing fantasy over reality, celebrity gossip stories over hard news coverage. Unfortunately Waxman's Hollyblog is no match in net traffic for the likes of trash-gossip peddler Perez Hilton. Similarly, even within the Hollyblogosphere, many are choosing the unreliable flash journalism of Nikki Finke over more reliable sources.

Finke excels in the goodies-and-baddies model of journalism, where each story reads like a pantomime and the truth can be distorted at will, reported without cross-reference; even publication dates are edited without notice to the reader. The blog is attractive because its simplistic and adversarial reporting reminds us of Hollywood artifice. But unfortunately the truth is never as neat as a Pixar screenplay.

The biggest problem here is that bloggers - myself included - don't seem to be entirely liable for the misinformation they publish.

However, many have pointed to the fact that we have never been able to lay our complete faith in the mainstream media either.

I have devoted a gobsmacking amount of time since the publication of my last post on Australian asylum seekers to dismantling lies perpetuated by the Australian press. Here is one example: a ninemsn report (UPDATE Nov 19) on the cost of Australia's relatively meagre refugee intake. It has been slammed by both the national broadcaster's Media Watch and by its own statistical source, Centrelink, who have denied any truth in the figures the story is based on.

Yet those who follow the ninemsn link above will discover the story remains online! How is this possible?

People still read the story, and still quote it as fact. It seems like anyone interested in uncovering the truth has to do a lot more work to get to it.

Unfortunately work is a turn-off to a consumer repeatedly told that their entertainment is more important than locating the truth and the challenges it brings. Studies show that the internet fosters not only shorter attention spans but a "compassion fatigue". It is also within the interests of many high income earners to keep us engaged in fantasy, so that we are too distracted and befuddled to even consider holding them to their accounts.

Our fantasies exist because there is some inclination in us to desire them as reality. Sadly, they can be indulged by us, by market profiteers and by the media, so it is important to hold people up on charges of outrageous fantasy before they leak into real life. How else can we explain Arnold Swartzeneger's Californian election victory? How else do we explain the spike in army enrollments after the release of major war films? How else do we let Nic Cage get away with owning more than a dozen houses and two Bahamian islands, while half the world lives in poverty? When I tell my peers about Cage’s reported finance concerns, the irritated response is often: “don’t say that about Nic Cage, I like Nic Cage.”

If we are choosing these fantasies over reality, it’s a pretty sad indictment on the social pressures of our everyday lives. We must be getting something wrong if so many are so frightened of reality that they would choose to board it up with framed posters of wealth-hording cultural icons.

What do we do about this? It seems like the world relies on a minority of people who value truth enough to engage in the "habit" of real journalism. But when the rivers of gold dry up, and our traditional providers of hard news can't earn what they used to off internet advertising, and their front pages spill with celeb gossip stories, all competing for a few remaining dollars on the same dogged populist and fantasist grounds, what do we do?

Do the largely unregulated blogs hold an answer? Are they making any money, if newspapers aren't, or are they destined to be a community service too, just as the arts are increasingly being reassessed as (free music, free movies anyone)?

Waxman ends her article by saying, "we'll continue to do journalism, even if Variety chooses not to." Now consumers just have to choose journalism as well, even if that means locating its whereabouts.

I was writing a completely different blog entry about the future of journalism, when it dawned on me that I had a duty to be writing about something else. In Australia, the incrimination of asylum seekers has gone on for way too long.

The politicians who claim to represent us are talking big about the threat posed by a handful of asylum seekers, backed up by a hysterical media. We are debating whether or not to be kind to a few desperate humans on a couple of ships.

The sad thing is that we shouldn't even be having this debate. Consider this: the population of Australia is estimated to be 22 million at 2009. Last year, we took in 13, 500 asylum seekers (way behind global average according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR). Of those, 206 came by boat. Yet apparently these people coming by boat constitute a "national crisis"?

Moreover, asylum seekers arriving by boat are more likely to be deemed genuine refugees than those arriving by air. But we are still capable of looking at all of these individuals as "illegals", to borrow one of our prime minister's words, in turn borrowing a linguistic fear campaign from his predecessor.

Time and again I hear the one primary concern bandied about by the media and echoed by my peers: won't these potential immigrants place massive burden on our already limited infrastructure?

First of all, this argument is never leveled at the government when they encourage us to make more Australian babies. It is generally acknowledged that more people is a good thing. The economic growth which parallels population growth could entail resources to build roads and rail lines, improve healthcare and education, if our government has the will and the Australian people have the will to request it.

Wouldn't our intellectual resources be better suited toward chasing down high-income tax evaders, or those who are doing real damage to our infrastructure: greedy and inept politicians and developers? I don't how we can continue to blame immigrant population growth for problems it has nothing to do with.

Blaming asylum seekers is a welcome distraction for politicians and those with the wealth to create change, forever skirting their responsibility to help out. We've been duped. Look in their pockets for the answer to our infrastructure woes, not to a tiny fraction of the population of Australian immigrants.

If we are really that concerned about infrastructure, traveling the globe to just a few other countries will help us realise we don't have it so bad after all. Try traversing Mexico City in peek hour traffic. Congestion especially is a ubiquitous challenge of increased urbanisation - not ours alone.

Additionally, genuine refugees, as the majority of asylum seekers turn out to be, are revealed as good, hard workers; coveted assets in the communities they settle in.

The fact is we are not making many babies in Australia, and we need immigrants. So why not be kind to them? They are not a burden, they are entirely necessary to uphold the way of life we hold so dear.

The other big scare campaign runs like this: if we are soft on border protection, everyone will want to come here. The extension of this argument is implicit, but never vocalised: so we must be cruel to these people and put them through torturous circumstances to discourage others from coming here.

The potential for people to arrive on our shores is not limitless. The amount of asylum seekers processed annually depends on global circumstances - how much conflict, internationally, people are fleeing.

Australian activist organisation GetUp put together this fact sheet, demonstrating that the amount of asylum seekers arriving in Australian territory is not driven by policy change or awareness of a "soft target", but the amount of people who actually need to seek asylum.

The "we don't want to look soft" argument has been used to justify much cruelty in past, including countless failed and useless wars - look no further back than the rhetoric used to justify the invasion of Iraq for examples.

Softness appears to mean treating all people as equal, undeserved of torture; it is entering a dialogue where no one has any more or less rights than anyone else; softness is actually caring about the human cost of our actions. Are these things we really want to avoid?

The bottom line is that kindness is a good thing - whether you choose to denigrate its human impact by calling it "softness" or not. Despite the fact that asylum seekers should be desired by Australia rather than attacked, the argument that kind behaviour leads to those in need taking advantage of our kindness misses the point. There is no "taking advantage". Kindness isn't conditional, we do it because we care about people other than ourselves.

If softness is another word for kindness or generosity, then I, for one, don't mind being soft.

The internet does its own PR these days. People have a strange ability to bestow the lion's share of responsibility and kudos upon the machines they work with rather than the people driving them. Look at TV, for example: we prefer to blame television for its myriad psychological crimes than to acknowledge our responsibility to choose what and how we consume the product it broadcasts.

So it is with the internet. Only it is happening the other way around: these days we uphold the internet as a great equaliser, via which the truth will be revealed on an egalitarian, democratised platform, and all we need to do is stand by and wait for the statistics to come in.

Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. A fine example of this fantasy in action can be found right now on the Sydney music scene. Venues are closing left, right and centre; we have recently seen the closure of the iconic Hopetoun Hotel.

Sydney-based music promoter Leyne Elbourne of Cadence Commotions has appealed to the many locals who joined a Facebook group intended to save local venue The Hopetoun. "The fact is," she writes, "if more of the thousands of members of the 'Save the Hopetoun' group went to the Hoey more often...it may not have had to close its doors." She points out the disparity between our romanticised endorsement and our actions: "People need to actively support their live music scene, not just 'love' it from afar," she told the group.

There may be many reasons the Sydney live music scene is faltering, and our resistance to attend live music could speak of the place we have chosen for music in our lives, or the relevance of the music being played, but the argument remains - if we really do care about it, what makes us think that we can support its survival so passively?

The internet seems to be selling the idea that support automatically becomes action. That simply by being one of the numbers, you can drive change. In actuality, all this kind of action does is to place power back in the hands of marketers who have access to the data, so their product can be better targeted. We still need to be active rather than passive consumers, or "support" is as valueless as the single muscle twitch it takes to click a mouse button.

Also look toward the recent Twitter phenomenon for an example of internet services talking themselves up beyond their powers of social persuasion. The Twitter team had the good sense to launch themselves with a powerful PR department, trumpeting celebrity endorsement such as Ashton Kutcher's, with his trademark interminable banality in 140 characters or less. They have managed to lie to the media about their box office influence, which falls a long way behind other online services. Their product is slowly being revealed as a self-serving marketing tool, as demonstrated by surveys on Twitter user retention. If I were Jack Dorsey, I'd sell it off for the ludicrous sums on offer, before the few techies still using the thing wake up to the hype.

Worse than our dwindling ability (and that of the worldwide media) to separate internet PR from the facts, the myth of meritocracy has been shifted to and dumped on the internet.

We all want to believe it; we want to believe that the system we work in rewards people proportionately to the societal usefulness of their output. But the internet doesn't appear to provide this either.

Music is an obvious example: if you are good, runs the conventional wisdom, the wonder of social marketing will work its wonders and you will become a myspace success story, such is the democratisation of taste on the internet. All that's required is some to-the-minute technical knowhow on the part of the artist. Unfortunately this is bullshit.

An interesting debate unfurled not long ago on the discussion board of whatsrattlin, a Canterbury music interest group. It was posited that the internet has taken the power from the hands of the big four record companies and empowered artists to get heard at a lower cost.

However the majority of people who are finding music online are listening to ten second grabs before moving on to the next freely available tune, such is the nature of market glut. There may be more independent music available, but it is not really getting any more attention. The effect on the consumer mind seems to be that the overload of information is scary - so they turn to the publicly endorsed, or what has worked in past. And amongst those, the select few with marketing and PR budgets behind them may get a fair listening, so the cost is not zero.

I know a lot of miserable musicians who expected that they were good enough, worked hard enough, and were digi-savvy enough to make it. They were willing to adapt. But it didn't happen. The idea of moving "up" in the world remains strong, but for most musicians class advancement is a dead expectation or a 99.9% improbable dream. As drummer Bill Bruford points out in his autobiography, the social standing of musicians hasn't really changed that much. They've always been on the lower end of the social strata/income bracket. The record industry only changed this for a very, very select few people - most musicians now as ever, good or bad, are plugging away at the bottom of the human food chain. But, some do move "up" and they are the most visible, fueling the rest to ask what was wrong with them. This is the myth of meritocracy in action.

Lest I sound gloomy about all this - and I'm not really - I'd like to point out that there are people interested in sharing diverse and ambitious music in the world, and using these digital developments to be part of a community that does so. Subsequently, there's a lot of GREAT cross-pollination of musical tradition that is very exciting and available to all of us right now. Making money is a different kettle of kelp entirely - it depends on our expectations of what music should do for us.

Also, there are online activist groups who use the internet to incite us to further action. Observe Australian activist organisation GetUp's recent coal ad success. The internet is not the problem, it can still be a useful tool to mobilise those who care about the world around them.

However, instead of believing all the hype, perhaps we would be better served by a little scepticism; perhaps we would be happier acknowledging the real circumstances we live in rather than the fantasy of global democracy the internet props up. It may be seductive, but the internet PR is rarely true.

I've figured it out. What the world needs right now is another TV series about serial killers.

Oktober love,

Wyatt xo

Numerous chums and acquaintances have attempted to push this book onto me over the past couple of years, but having attempted Coetzee's meandering split-page experiment "Diary of a Bad Year", I declined. Declined, that is, until someone bought "Disgrace" for my birthday, all shiny and new - is there any better way to make someone read a favourite novel?

Considering all the acclaim - it won the 1999 Booker and propelled the author toward claiming the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature - I'd like to point out that the book is much more thin on insight than suggested. (Coetzee is up for the Booker again this year, with "Summertime".)

Philandering South African lecturer David Lurie flees to his daughter's farm after an affair with a student has him sacked. While he is there, his daughter is raped in her home - apparently as post-apartheid "debt collection" - but she decides to stay, to Lurie's chagrin.

The story is, seductively, succinctly told; I'll grant Coetzee this. However, a cursory unraveling of his thematic devices reveals more heavy-handed audience manipulation than literary umph.

Too often I find that authors use the weight of sexual shame - and rape - to bolster the credibility of their subject matter. It has the appearance of making their text seem richer and more loaded with meaning. But it is also a cheap trick - what sort of revelation does it lead to in "Disgrace"? What exactly is the insight?

This simple metaphorical device is just as tasteless when used to demonstrate a political dilemma. It surges our understanding of the presented dilemma past reason and into a space dominated by our sense of sexual gravitas, and we end up assuming that, because of the awfulness of sexual crime, the author must have something worthwhile to say; at worst, they must be right. Although often, the author has nothing more to say.

The story's sexual crime is even more tasteless when juxtaposed with the protagonist's philandering. Did anyone who read "Disgrace" ask how this - the book's most basic thematic thread - was a useful parallel?

Add to this Coetzee's academically irrelevant, tangential passages about Byron, and you have more hypocrisy than great art, if you ask me. And what was he suggesting was the way forward for South Africa? Did anyone catch it?

For those who haven’t been following, this year’s international film festival circuit has been subject to the ire of a brave few filmmakers concerned that festivals including Toronto and Melbourne have accepted funding and programming influence from the Israeli government in the guise of a cultural campaign to “rebrand Israel.” A number of filmmakers and entertainment industry practitioners – among them John Greyson, David Byrne, Julie Christie, Ken Loach, Wallace Shawn and Jane Fonda – have removed their films from the festivals or urged festival boycotts.

Greyson also named the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv as “the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” (quoting Naomi Klein).

The more influential (i.e. cashed up) of those opposing the festivals’ critics have expressed themselves by taking out an ad in Variety. They have accused the boycotters of demanding unnecessary censorship and admonished them for unjustly attacking Israeli filmmakers. By heading their open letter with “We Don’t Need Another Blacklist”, they have also drawn an outrageously histrionic parallel with the Holocaust.

The problem with this argument is that it conflates the product with the means. It is not Israeli films or filmmakers that the festivals’ critics are opposing, but the means for showing the films. This is not a call to discredit filmmakers from Israel, but an appeal to festivals and their directors who are profiteering from a government entrenched in upholding unnecessary war.

Ken Loach couldn’t have been clearer when he said the boycott was aimed "not at independent Israeli films or filmmakers", but at "the Israeli state."

But unfortunately festival organizers such as Melbourne’s exec director Richard Moore use easily virtuous censorship battles, such as he had with China, to bolster their humanitarian public profile, accept bloodstained money with their other hand, and still come off like heroes. He managed this by again conflating the boycotters’ motives with an attack on Israeli filmmakers, which is deliberate misinterpretation.

I do not turn a blind eye to reactionary atrocities performed in the name of Palestine, the consequences of which can be equally egregious, but the impact is nowhere near as crippling as the throttle placed on Palestinians by Israeli force. In the last year alone, as Greyson points out, Israel’s list of human damage includes, “The Gaza massacre that occurred last December, which resulted in 1,000 civilian deaths; the election of a Prime Minister earlier this year that has been accused of war crimes; the extension of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the destruction of Palestinian homes and orchards; and the growth of a totalitarian security wall, and the further enshrining of the check-point system.” So when Greyson says this is “not the right year to celebrate Brand Israel”, his position is understandable.

Additionally, TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey attempted to justify their spotlight on Tel Aviv, “because it is one of those cities where there is an incredibly diverse mix of cultures”, yet their program is devoid of Palestinian filmmakers. All countries may have some form of humanitarian maltreatment in their past, and all may attempt to exert some form of cultural influence through film, but when a country exploits cultural or financial clout so obviously to distract from humanitarian abuse, it is time for festival panels to be critical and separate the product from the propaganda.

Any message we can send to Israel that their current behaviour is mortifyingly inhumane is the right message to send. Cultural imperialism has long been the method to distract from more real and violent imperialism, and instill warm and convivial feelings toward an ill-willed state; this is the underlying purpose in the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Director General for Cultural Affairs’ attempt to, “show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” And if buying influence over film festivals’ such as MIFF’s programming – what could be more obviously culturally imperialist? – is the chosen method, then the funding must be declined.

It is war money.

Those who oppose the filmmakers’ decision to boycott are attempting to separate art from life. I suppose they would prefer film to remain diverting and ephemeral entertainment, and not engage us to any sort of response with the real world. But you can’t have it both ways – if you want your films to talk about life, you must acknowledge that they are part of an interaction with the people who make and consume them, and are therefore capable of adverse effects as well as momentary indulgence of fantasy or relief. These people are, ultimately, asking films NOT to be instruments of change.

But in a world where Western-backed governments still incite vast and indiscriminate massacres of civilians and get away with it, how can we ask for anything but change?

"Throw Down You Heart" is the soundtrack to a documentary made by flash banjo player and transcultural jazz/funk bandleader Bela Fleck. I haven't seen the film, but apparently it sees Fleck roaming Africa in search of the origins of the banjo. Sounds to me like as good an excuse as any to travel the continent. Power to Fleck.

The music made in the process, however, is a revelation in its diversity. In an age when a few assembled beats on a brightly coloured mix CD is marketed as a true cultural experience, Fleck reminds us that there is a lot more happening in Africa than is represented in the dollar bin at your local gas station.

I admit that the Sounds of Africa tripe, marketed to a consumer base hungry for some easily-digested reduction to imagined primality, has also infected my idea of what African music is. In my uneducated mind it had become synonomous with endless cheerful beats plastered, banal and lazy, on a repeated melodic line. It strikes me while listening to this collection that I've done it too - reduced my concept of African music to a few signifiers of bogus African-ness...

But there is such a variety of sounds, instrumental timbres and approaches to music-making contained herein; consider especially the myriad vocal tones of Fleck's collaborators, from Oumou Sangare to Anania Ngoliga. What's more, we find ourselves hearing genuine musicianship, adventurousness and compositional integrity.

I can often be found down the pub decrying the dwindling acknowledgment of complexity in the musical arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in current expressions of African identity through music, especially the output of the progeny of African diaspora in wealthier countries - those with the money to create cultural influence. It's called hip hop these days.

But the incredulity amongst my peers begins here - arguing that embracing complexity is the ideal, isn't that just a Western notion trying to squash culture imported from developing nations? Saying that we're just better again?

No. The idea that complexity is the cultural realm of the imperialist West persists even in academic circles (probably who should know better). It's demeaning to say that complexity does not exist in developing cultures. Because let's admit it: life is complex no matter where it's taking place. It's just that we've been sold the more easily digestible - and orientalist - product.

That's right, hip hop is orientalist and ultimately racist. It features the aggression, the tribal mentality, the genetically essentialist idea of violence - and more importantly the image of an entire culture hinging on a few token cultural characteristics to sum up the totality. The sad thing is that it's been marketed back to those it claims to speak for, and it's been mistaken for empowerment and identity affirmation. It's not, it's a limited view of a complex culture. Now we have to wriggle out of it.

The idea that rap or hip hop are more egalitarian musical expressions because "anyone can do it" is a mere comfort to a generation afraid of the motivation to mastery and learned effort; an effort it feels guilty for shunning. We are afraid of skill and the hard work that creates something wonderful, because it would reflect poorly on us while we are being so idle. So we are comforted by peer-generated content which dismisses ambition or any reach for greatness. Developing cultures continue to generate fine musicians we will probably never hear, and we continue choosing to consume the watered-down, usually Western-produced versions of the same thing.

ALL - really ALL of the political hip hop I have heard has been equally simplistic and lame, usually a general cry that everything is wrong and we need to fix it, or love will lead the way, without too much insight beyond these proclamations. We listen to rambling political diatribes reaching no conclusion - that sound good because they, so cleverly, rhyme - and think we are witnessing greatness because when they are over we don't have to think or act, although they have stimulated inarguable truths that comfort us. In addition, the statement is often overshadowed by personal ego.

Obviously this is an inflammatory thing to say. I know that I'm onto something when most people are pissed off when I mention it, as with this (increasingly frequent) dialogue. How could I dismiss an entire genre like this? After all, from a utilitarian perspective, seeing as it gives so many people so much joy it can't be that bad.

True, but I think more joy is to be found in the complex and the new, if we give it the time. So right now I bemoan that the avant-garde has been hijacked by punk, and that progressive music has been hijacked by metal. Instead of opening up new possibilities for music, these movements have restricted music to ploddingly mindless genre conventions, mostly to do with rhythm and noise dismissing other musical possibilities. Once the avant-garde and prog weren't genres, but ideas related to looking for new ways of thinking through music.

Even jazz has accepted a limited vision of its capabilities in the "theme-everyone takes a solo-return to theme" structure. Fleck's album suggests that the most experimental music at the moment is - get this - folk music. Even in my hometown, Sydney, the most adventurous musician I can think of is using a folk medium to communicate - Brian Campeau.

Are we really that saturated with musical product that we've given up, for now, on something new? We create our own cultural identity via the artistic produce we choose to consume, so let's create an identity more honest and more adequate for coping with the mess we know of as life, and choose complexity.

*NB: Yes, I am still calling them CD reviews as I am still purchasing CDs rather than downloads.

Despite the fact that journalism as we know it appears to be a sinking ship, fashion journalism has become the latest home of the chic flick. However, where "Prada" director David Frankel uses the genre as mere condescending fluff (he is capable of more), “Shopaholic” director PJ Hogan has, with impeccable timing, crafted a well-aimed reconsideration of what is valuable in our lives.

Consider this: what does Andy Sachs, protagonist of "Prada", believe in? We are advised throughout that she possesses some lofty integrity which goes AWOL under the employ of the villainous Miranda Priestly, but what exactly is the source of this integrity? What does Andy actually believe in beyond her career? Moreover, what do the filmmakers want to tell us is a good alternative to the alleged inanity and malice of the high fashion world? The film wants it both ways and lands in the hypocritical middle ground. It presents a fabulous, alluring world of glitzy fashion, but scolds its participants as vacuous. It ends standing for nothing.

"Shopaholic" actually propels its protagonist, Rebecca Bloomwood, through a fair interrogation of values, at the other side of which is a real and well articulated enlightenment. Through her boss she learns to stand up against executive pay rises. Through her family she learns that our possessions don't define us. And the whole film points toward the self-destructive nature of consumerism without blaming anyone for getting involved with it. Could there be anything more worthwhile to say to a chic flick audience (such as myself) right now?

I wish the critics would stop referring to "Prada" as a classic, and I hope we remember "Shopaholic" instead when we look back on the filmic representations of a world before the $ crisis.

In keeping with the title of this blog – gen y irony stole my heart – a few words on what that phrase actually means.

Humour obviously has great subconscious power over our interpretation of the world, though it can be difficult to ascertain exactly what that power is. Many have pointed out that our concept of what is funny is closely tied to our fear of death. (Some of my favourite cinema deals with the relationship between death and stand-up comedy; Lenny, Man on the Moon – I await the Australian release of Funny People.)

Gen y, with its unprecedented information overload (iOverload, MyOverload?) and its resulting Shutdown Complex, is always looking for techniques to sift through the roar of marketing, opinion and other more parochially-intentioned loud voices; they’re longing for an escape from the pressure to decide what is important and what is not. Enter: humour.

The easy answer is to say that nothing is important, and as I blabbed about on my last blog entry, this strikes a particular chord with an idle generation with more time to contemplate death than probably any other generation before it.

But we need to choose some things to flag as less worthy of serious consideration, and here is where humour is an indispensable tool. Consider sibling rivalry for example - the easiest way to repair a tetchy relationship with siblings is to acknowledge the rivalry as a joke, a game. It's also important for dismantling political fear campaigns: making light of that which we are supposed to fear can clear our heads.

In observing the trajectory of popular humour, especially the evolution of the cartoon sitcom, I’ve found myself asking why much of today’s humour – typified by the shooting star of TV comedy, Family Guy – makes me so uncomfortable. Humour can be uncomfortable because we want to, or we’ve been told we must, take certain aspects of life seriously, and if this is challenged, the very foundations of our existence can be at stake. Family Guy gives us permission to dismiss pretty much everything we may consider to be serious. But is this an answer?

We grew up with The Simpsons. The formula was inherited from the Roseanne model of family dramedy: everyone is deeply flawed and pretty much nasty to each other most of the time, but in the end we are endeared to the characters because they reveal that they actually care for each other beneath their sarcasm and self-absorption. The Simpsons added to the mix a surrealism that was once the exclusive realm of cartoons, but the show kept basically the same formula: borderline cynical satire and pop psychology.

What happened when you removed the pop psychology, and the “borderline”? South Park happened. Then when you remove the satire and replace it with dismissal in favour of pop culture referencing? And then make the whole thing move so fast that there is no time to reflect on the gravity of the subject matter? Family Guy. That’s gen y’s version of irony, admittedly at its lamest. It dismisses everything and tells us to take nothing seriously because it is easier. This is the directive power of humour. The image of the two stoners on the living room couch watching back-to-back Family Guy to escape their lives will turn up in future depictions of this generation, if there is any honesty in the world.

This is, once again, shrinking from the complexities which make us human. Giving up on taking anything seriously is a time bomb, and generation y is already dealing with the fallout by way of anxiety disorder.

Gen y’s particular irony lacks a heart because it is easier to lack a heart. Hearts are complex and hot damn they can hurt like hell. But there come landmark moments in anyone’s life when we are forced to give up on what we’ve taken for granted, or futile solutions we’ve relied on in past, and find a new path. Are we there yet?

So it turns out that - fancy this - more comfortable and prosperous generations are not necessarily any more content with their lives. Case in point: gen y. Most have been, not without reason, pointing to the unrealistic expectations set up in our youth.

There are a lot of blogs out there written by my peers asking: why, when I have so little to worry about, do I worry so much? On paper my life looks dandy, why do I feel dreadful all the time?

It is within the nature of parenting to want the best for one's children, and the baby boomers, with their unparalleled wealth and influence as a collective, were in the position to be able to provide. They systematically removed the need for their children - the bulk being generation y - to struggle for themselves, their food, their shelter, their essentials.

Nor did gen y feel the threat of conscription blowing past their mailbox. Nor did they feel any real threat from political power in general. In short, we didn't have to fight for our lives.

But, on the other hand, humans just as any living thing are programmed to fight for their lives - the only point in living is to keep living, and to make sure the species keeps living. When we don't have to do that, what is there left to do?

Ponder the meaningless of existence and our inevitable demise, that's what. And that's a lot harder to deal with than reacting to more immediate threats to our being.

Perhaps this is why existential humour and postmodern expositions on meaninglessness have resonated so well with my generation. A brief wander through the Adult Swim oeuvre demonstrates the y-ist psyche in ample measures. As art, it cuts through the constant roaring confusion of selecting what to worry about and says, "if only we didn't have to worry about this: death."

Death is apparently more readily digestible when it has proximity, when we don't have time to ponder it, only avoid its immediacy. I guess pondering only leads to one conclusion.

Having absorbed an ungodly dose of the 80's-born variety of neoconservative self interest, now heavily drummed into us (gen y is all about the individual and individual gain), a good remedy might be to revert to the other reason for being here: helping others in the species who do experience more immediate threats to their mortality. Perhaps turning our sense of purpose to others in dire circumstances would grant us focus and direction, and help clear up some of our pointlessness and confusion.

Once again, thanks for nothing neoconservatism, even your plans for utopian selfishness backfired.

True experiments in aural possibilities often start with an exploration of fears and threats of annihilation at the hands of current worldly changes. Charting the nightmarescapes composed or performed by previous artists takes us through the truly frightening sounds of machines taking over in the post-industrial era (from Edgar Varèse to Henry Cow and Zappa), the short-lived space age shortly thereafter (say, the difference between what Zappa and Gong were exploring), through to techno fears, morphing into the ever more digital. Listening to a universe blank but for the unsettlingly inhuman sounds of digital manipulation can be a heady experience.

The magic happens when the experiment moves past merely seeing what we can do with the noises and into revelatory composition. This is exactly what we're hearing at the moment from Scandinavia, where bands such as the popular múm have welded trendy tech noises with human and acoustically-devised sounds, which I believe the ear has been craving as relief; the results are uplifting. Tortoise's musical acumen, likewise, is now more than ever conquering their younger tendency to section off genres in their music. They are finding their own space by fusing their myriad references into more satisfyingly unique compositions.

Beacons of Ancestorship retains experimental edge: each track provides an idea of a combination of uncovered and recovered sounds. And so - I think this can be a mark of greatness - the album moves in the blink of an eardrum between being exceptionally new and exciting (the bulk of the album, from "Gigantes" on) to just plain annoying (as per the near unlistenable "Northern Something"). Perhaps you're not really experimenting if you don't occasionally make mistakes.

But of course, as I am obliged to point out in this age of postmodern minefields of opinion, mistakes don't exist except as the individual listener's projection.

Despite the very fine drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, my final hope is that we will move past this era of obsession with beat, as if it were the sole contributing factor to enjoyment of music, and make progressive musics with drum sounds mixed a little further back.

*NB: Yes, I am still calling them CD reviews as I am still purchasing CDs rather than downloads.

As with virtually all global print media, the Hollywood trade publications are wondering if they'll be extinct in a few years. The Hollywood Reporter is not fairing as well as Variety, and there is speculation that THR may be bought out by its long-time competitor.

So, today's Big Q: if I were appointed the colossal responsibility of saving the drowning publication, what would I do? In three simple steps:

1. Gather all THR's opinion writers and get them blogging. Readers are demanding even their hard news delivered with opinion - we don't believe in unbiased reporting anymore.

Let's face it, THR is dying because it offers nothing that isn't available elsewhere - it falls in the middle of the road, uncomfortably between wishy-washy edited opinion and lame 2nd-day reporting of celeb trash. To survive, THR needs to stand for something.

So call a spade a spade, an opinion an opinion, and a journalist a blogger. Don't edit opinion.

2. Cast aside the inner miser, exhume the dwindling coffers' leftover riches, slap pay cuts on all executive staff, and invest in just a few good reporters who are actually following the trail of Hollywood's dirty money. This means investing in just those one or two good leads for scoops that no one else wants to put up the cash for. Bloggers can't afford it. There's the difference between what they provide and what you can provide. Without taking any risks, THR ain't going to stop nosediving.

3. Acknowledge the future of newspapers and put it all online. The rivers of gold have dried up here as with every rag. The studios aren't advertising like they used to. Dinosaurs wanting to live in their publication's Golden Era, expecting that circumstances don't change and what worked in past will always work, should be bumped. Variety did it, you can do it too.

Final secret step: don't expect riches. Even those who are navigating the digital media storm the best (such as the LA Times) aren't locating the revenue they have been used to... maybe it won't exist again. Maybe entertainment journalism, like the arts they cover, will have to acknowledge a public service role in lieu of the moola - which means now more than ever we rely on people being good because they believe in something other than their own advancement.

That's right, I'm reviewing Roseanne.

I've been working in LA for the past couple of weeks, and increasingly aghast at the TV culture here: they're all gratuitous serial killer programs, advertisements for easy-anorexia-inducing pills, advertisements for erectile dysfunction remedies that begin, "No one likes an impotent man." I don't have a TV at home, but I suppose this is the real American experience.

While the shame quota runs high, and you can almost gauge the preoccupations of an entire country by their allocation of guilt in chosen media, I have found some respite on one of 1000 channels of junk. In the small hours when my Australian biorhythms hammer me blearily awake and my fuzzed out brain needs company, Roseanne Barr is there. She is there to remind me that the TV format can offer worthwhile entertainment.

What is so wonderful about the sitcom? It is capable of living more realistically on our level, not massaging our aspirations to financially elevated, apartment-bound, navel obsessed versions of how we should be. It makes me wonder where the economically struggling characters are in sitcoms now? Do we not believe they exist? Where does this leave the less privileged majority of audiences?

The realism of Roseanne's family's situation also grants the show scope to deal with dilemmas not approached so often in today's sitcoms. It doesn't talk down. By the end of each episode, the characters are inevitably forced to face their denial of one of life's gray areas. Yet they still laugh. Thence, the humour is not dismissive, but healing and inclusive. The background rumble in the laughter comes as "it's okay - we all deal with this."

Plus, Roseanne as a character is a portly, opinionated, not glisteningly-picture-perfect woman who has authority in her environment but does not get punished for being who she is.

This review is a simple lament. What happened to the honest sitcom featuring characters living the way the majority of us live: struggling.

I'm finding myself wondering why we seem to be accepting more brash cruelty and unfair stereotyping as stand-ins for genuine humour these days.

The Hangover delivers exactly this variety of ugliness with shattering remorselessness. The apparently market research-devised, soulless comedy takes a dog-eared concept - four guys have hell-raising bucks weekend in Vegas, have to pick up the pieces and find their lost buddy - and attempts nothing new with it, except to see how much more abhorrent it can be than its predecessors.

During one unoriginally slapstick scene, the pic's token obese sidekick is hit in such a way that would send anyone outside of a Hollywood farce directly to hospital. Cue laughs. The attacker points at the just-for-laffs and so-dumb-its-funny non-character and exclaims, "it's funny because you're fat."

Cue guffaws. But is anyone insulted? Is this accepting the lowest of the low?

Here's the nub: our portly anti-hero says nothing back, looks at him dumbly, and the movie congratulates our and his complicity by lumbering hatefully onward. Systematically, the film catalogues stereotypes of those who least need stereotyping - Asian people, obese people, women - and robs them of any right to talk back or explain themselves. We are even asked to laugh at the heroes being callously degrading to a number of animals. And every time, the victim will sit there and take it.

The most sinister stamp of hollow scripting and timelessly shallow Hollywood pretense is revealed in presentation of its alternative to subservience to the white, self-serving, male pack: its treatment of women characters sees a dichotomy set up where only two possibilities are available: the nagging, "evil to her core" (this is an actual quote) wife, or the submissive, dumb, unquestioning and unopinionated happy whore. A diverse and forgiving spectrum of female identity.

Pretending to deal with stereotypes head-on, it slips a more insidious attack on each target minority under the radar. And yet we, and they, remain silenced.

To top a list of not even epic failures, The Hangover lacks an original plot, original characters, twists on character types, or any exploration of any possible new ground not explored extensively in every other movie you have ever seen.

The Hangover mistakes human meanness for comedy, and we seem to have gone along with it. Perhaps because it lets us off the hook: if they are that bad, can we absolve ourselves of similar sins by not being as bad as them?

...

Instead of rampaging against the film (is it too late to say that?), I guess I should find questions to ask myself. This was not difficult as almost everyone I spoke to about the film has been more offended by my offense threshold than I was offended by the film. A number of questions I may dance with at the next disco:

Don't portrayals of stereotypes help us relax into a position where we can laugh at their non-relation to real life?

Why is it sacrilegious to be upset by a film this cruel?

What is it about this time that sees a film like The Hangover so expansively lauded, such a money-earner, and being talked about in the same breath as the untouchably pretentious Academy Awards?

Welcome to Wyatt Moss-Wellington's review blog. So far it reviews film, music, life, social media, blackened bubblegum and economic crises.

In light of increasingly ubiquitous, hyped-up reports of economic doom and gloom, I have noticed a few enlightened souls are now pointing out an error in our use of language – that is, the tenuous link between clinical depression and economic depression.

The unquestioned coalescence of the two is, in fact, a furphy – people as a whole have not reported themselves as any less happy during harsher economic times. In his book "The Myth of the Great Depression", historian David Potts even suggests that we may have been happier in our lowest economic ebb of the last century, for the sense of purpose and community brought about by common struggle. (Courtesy Tony Wellington's "Happy?: exposing the cultural myths about happiness" for conducting my attention to Potts' work.)

However the term “depression” has been adopted because something rings true, and some comparisons are worth making.

The clinical variety of depression doesn’t exist without reason – it is all too easy to ignore its important psychological function. Depression lets us know when there is something wrong within our personal lives, when something needs changing.

Economic depression is the same. It tells us there is something wrong with the way we are organising the fiscal world. This should be fine; this means we have an opportunity to put some hard analytical work into our global financial arrangements.

The only reason the current economic crisis could be a problem is if we believe we should not have to go through such hard times.

This is exactly the sort of incredulity I am hearing from all sides now: how could something so terrible befall us? Isn’t it unfair?

Since when did we enshrine the idea that it is somehow unfair for us to have to occasionally stumble and fall? That we should remain forever comfortable, forsaking the necessary collective questioning that brings us together and makes us stronger? It is as ludicrous as the concept of limitless market advancement.

Of course, the media, entertainment industry and our religious leaders have a lot to answer for in perpetuating the myth that we can be happy – and prosperous – absolutely constantly. Perhaps now is the time to hurl these reductionist notions out the window. Toss the Dalai Lama fridge magnet (“why is the Dalai Lama always smiling?”); respond with critical jottings to sensationalist doomsdayism in your rag or mag of choice; reject reality TV’s ruthless ideal of reaching the perfect self in the short-term spotlight of forgettable stardom.

Unemployment, of course, is the word thrown back in defence of currently ordained misery. What worse a blow to one’s sense of purpose could there be?

I can relate to this. One of the most miserable and hardest times of my life was spent unemployed in London, for four months over one of the UK’s sopping, bitter winters. During this time I had to open my meagre address book and go through the names of all the people I’d met since arrival, then ask them for couch space for a week.

But by doing this, I got to know and bond with so many gorgeously warm and loving former acquaintances I would never otherwise have explored a deeper friendship with. Within four months I found myself relating to new communities of people – communities I didn’t know existed – who also provided an emotional support network.

Even unemployment can be beneficial, if we are brave enough to look long-term. This is no “harden-up” speech – things can get tough. It can last a long time. But we can feel it, share it, and together build something stronger and wiser.

Happy community building everyone – I’m excited.

In an era when demeaning schlock like "Slumdog Millionaire" can beguile millions into spending millions, massaging contemptuous fetishism of poverty-induced violence masquerading for genuine concern, India is crying out for more generous cultural exchange between the US and itself.

By far the best idea I’ve had while combing the aisles of my local Blockbuster this year was to hire "Outsourced". On some occasions, the American tradition of dramedy rises above its inherent predisposition to paternalist judgment and is capable of approaching sensitive subject matter with uncharacteristic subtlety. If you’ve forgotten how joyously astute American rom coms can be (the political variety are a dying breed in Hollywood; we rely on the occasional gem like "Two Weeks Notice"), check it:

Comfortably employed Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton) is selling Americana kitsch knick knackery from a call centre in the States. Wasting no time, screenwriter George Wing outsources his company to India in the first scene. Todd is sent to train his replacements, one of whom is the immensely likeable actress (and female lead) Ayesha Dharker.

The ensuing comedy of cultural exchange is, surprisingly, almost as unobtrusively analytical as the 2005 Swiss drama "The White Massai" (is this film a classic yet?) At every moment the viewer expects the familiar cultural condescension to come crashing down hard (for example, in a memorably pragmatic dialogue on arranged marriage), but it never does, and the conclusion is about as enlightened given the circumstance as one could hope.

Outsourced retains some forgivable reliance on American plot contrivance, employed with enough knowing mirth and joy in narrative form to get away with it. None of this spoils the joy I feel seeing Indians and Americans being realistically kind to one another onscreen.

It's directed by John Jeffcoat.