In philosophical terms, this is indisputable confirmation of the old truism about “When it’s your time to go…”

Almost as astounding was the media coverage. I’ve yet to see a report which doesn’t describe Mike Edwards as a “founder-member of ELO”. At least one, and I imagine more, say he played with them at their first gig in 1972.

This is arguably kind of a bizarre expose of the game of Chinese Whispers that the worldwide media often indulges in to the exclusion of that old-fashioned stuff…what was it called again?…Oh yes, research. Particularly when it comes to anything in the field of popular culture, one tends to notice.

Mike Edwards, whatever his talents and achievements may well have been, wasn’t a “founder-member” of the Electric Light Orchestra. The founder members were Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood, Rick Price and Bev Bevan, all members of the band The Move at the time. This is because ELO was a spin-off band from The Move. After ELO started up, The Move continued to record as The Move and issue singles at least.

There are two members in the Wikipedia article on the Electric Light Orchestra listed as “joining the band” after the initial four - Bill Hunt and Steve Woolam. (Neither of whom were cellists.)

According to Wikipedia’s article, the first cello players in the band, or at least the ones who played at the first live gig in 1972 were Hugh McDowell and Andy Craig.

Mike Edwards joined some time after this. He also joined after their first album, which is something of a giveaway, and also something which only one article I’ve seen so far saw fit to mention, although that report also listed him as a “founder-member”.

Edwards also left the band prior to its period of greatest success and fame, from 1975 to the early 1980s. (Well mostly the middle to late ’70s really.) To clarify, I think he was there for part of 1975, but not there when they finally hit it really big and stayed there, from later in ‘75 on.

So he is actually a non-founder member of ELO who left before they got big. I guess that wouldn’t have made for quite as catchy copy.

Grand job all round by the media on this one.

It’s hard not to wonder, if they can screw up a relatively simple story like this one on a worldwide basis, how reliable the information we get in other areas can possibly be.

You get the impression that if they’d been around in those times, they would have reported Jesus’ death on a worldwide basis as: “Carpenter dies in freak hammering accident”.

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“METAL patients at kicked down security doors, threatened to kill staff and trapped nurses in a room.”

Unfortunately the source failed to specify whether the trouble started in the Slayer Ward or the Pantera Wing.

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Saw this one on the front page of the Nine/MSN website:

“David Beckham is set to open a gastro pub with TV chef Gordon Ramsay.”

If they’re planning to advertise it as a “gastro pub” you’d hope that both potential investors and hospitals in the area have been alerted.

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NEW NORCIA ABBEY ALE (Malt Shovel Brewery Camperdown NSW) 7%

This is an attempt to do a Belgian abbey-style beer at the lighter end of the scale. It’s meant to be a golden ale rather than the other lighter Belgian abbey style, the more astringent or citrussy witbier, which to me generally tastes like dishwashing liquid gone intriguingly wrong, although I’m told others enjoy it. Anyway this isn’t that, and it comes over as something of a compromise between the fruity, desserty highly flavoured Belgian style and a conventional Australian lager, which is why this one might be as good a place to start for more conventional beer drinkers who are looking to branch out. It doesn’t have the creamcake richness of the abbey-made Belgian beers, but it has a lot of the character, and is balanced to be a surprisingly easy drink with that. If they can deal with the sweetshop edge, I can see Charlie Carlton Draft drinker dealing with this beer. It’s actually very carefully and cunningly made, and is an extremely convincing attempt to simulate a Belgian style beer. Label does not make it remotely clear whether the cited monastery in Western Australia or the Malt Shovel Brewery in NSW is responsible for the product you’re drinking, but with these results, it doesn’t matter. 7.5 out of 10 with no hesitation. I’d definitely buy this one again.

COOPERS 1862 PILSENER (SA)

After approximately 983 separate comprehensively failed attempts to produce a Victorian mass-produced lager type beer that made you wonder why they’d even bothered, when they’ve already got two or three of their own unique beers that work and they might as well stick to that, Coopers finally flipped over all the cards and decided to produce a European mass-produced lager style instead, and, amazingly did a better job than any of the knothead major breweries here that are allegedly brewing a perfect replica of Heineken, Becks, Carlsberg etc under licence. This is probably the first ever big brewery Euro-style lager produced here that actually tastes exactly like a good big brewery Euro lager, and to keep your eyebrows floating above your forehead line, it’s also just about the only beer made here labelled “Pilsener” that really does taste like an authentic Pilsener made overseas, for example Pilsner Urquell, which is made in Pilsen and is kind of the defining brew on what pilsener should taste like. And it’s real good at it. A clean-drinking, more-ish beer, with a cleverly discreet spicing of hops that never gets in the way of pouring it down the old glug-hole. As nobody has hardly ever considered buying it, by definition it’s pretty much the most underrated beer in the entire country. If you’re deliberately drinking the ridiculously pallid and overpriced local imitations of Stella, Becks or Heineken and ignoring Coopers 1862 Pilsener, you are defining yourself to an entire generation as an idiot. This is a far better beer than any of those. Actually, it’s an insult to compare it to those. 8 out of 10.

DOGFISH HEAD 90 MINUTE IMPERIAL IPA (Milton, Delaware, USA) 9%

This is an astonishingly good incredibly highly-flavoured specialty beer that when you read the specifications, you figure was pretty much designed to go pear-shaped, only when you drink it, you realise the mad scientists behind it must have been spared the asylum for a reason. They constantly add hops for 90 minutes, they try to balance it out with what they themselves term a “ridiculous amount” of barley malt, and then they dry-hop it again in the tanks. To me it sounds like we’re lucky they didn’t blow up the entire planet. The character of the resulting brew, though containing enough hops to give you that just-face-smacked feeling in your upper cheeks, if not the other cheeks as well, has so much rich malt for balance, that it actually comes over more as one of the fruitier, chewier, red Belgian abbey beers as it does one of the American hop-crazy IPAs. It is a very creamcakey brew, but the hops cuts back on any cloying propensity, and the balance is so good they get away with everything. With that alcohol content, you’re not going to have a session on these, both on a flavour and a head-banging basis, but if you’re a true beer adventurer, and not married to the CUB house style, I strongly recommend trying one of the Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA’s. It’s one of those real “one-off” beers that works. Way more distinctive than their 60 minute IPA stable-mate, although that’s definitely not crap either. I give this one 8.5 out of 10. But I have to say, even if you drink it as cold as I think you should drink it, it’s a sippin’ beer, not a chuggin’ beer.

SIERRA NEVADA PALE ALE (Chico, CA, USA) 5.6%

When anyone says “US Pale Ale” this is the one I think of as the defining example of the style, and every part of that is meant in an entirely complimentary fashion. Despite all the hops characteristic of the style and the barley malt they have to use to balance it, it drinks almost like a lager. I doubt there’s a conjuring trick more elusive in the US Pale Ale arsenal. If I say it’s one of those beers you taste and immediately react in a subconscious kind of way, “Yep, that’s the way beers were meant to taste”, I guess you’ll either get what I mean, or you’re probably a wine connoisseur. If there’s a dud on the Sierra Nevada roster, I’ve yet to come across it, but as much as many of their other beers are either distinctive (Torpedo IPA) or good solid examples of a style (Kellermeister Weissbeer), this relatively unassuming and undemonstrative beer gets the job done. I think one of the hardest tricks with the US Pale Ale style is to ram in all the requisite metallic hops that define the style and the desired drinking experience without hurting the recipient’s face. This one tapdances through the whole act like it’s just another night in the casino showroom. It’s a brilliantly considered beer. I’ll give it a 9 out of 10 and feel a bit like I’m dudding it out of a slightly higher mark.

KOOINDA PALE ALE (Rosanna Vic)

Bang! There it is right in the side of the head – a tremendous sack of hops. And bang! There it is again, on the other side of the head. You could get to like this abuse if you’re partial to the style at all. The style is what the serious beer-browbeater bamboozler types like to call US Pale Ale these days, which generally means to the Johnny-Joe Average beer drinking palate of Australian type people it sits very high up the C.A.F. scale, which, on a family show like this, stands for “Coppery as heck”. There’s actually a fair amount of flavour activity going on in this beer, kind of an amazing amount for a beer of only 4.7% alc per volume, but subtle it isn’t, and it’s not trying to balance out the hops kick with anything else either. The wine connoisseur types among beer drinkers would tell you that you should never drink a beer like this too cold, but I’m a beer drinker and I’m telling you that there’s every chance you’ll enjoy this one most when it’s about as cold as you can get it without the bottle cracking. If you like the style, this is a solid 6.5 to 7 out of 10. If you generally sit on a Melbourne Bitter, and find something like Fat Yak to be a little “Indiana Jones world of adventure” for your liking, you don’t go anywhere near this beer or anything in the US Pale Ale style, because Fat Yak is about as mild and compromising in that style as you would find.

RED DUCK BENGAL INDIA PALE ALE (Camperdown Vic) 7%

I don’t know what the Bengal has to do with anything, so the style here is IPA, or India Pale Ale, which in practical terms usually translates to darker and heavier than the US Pale Ale style, with the bucketloads of astringent hops still scuffing up the dancefloors of your mouth. When the American brewers make IPA, it tends to be a cue for them to go completely berserk with coppery flavours, but the Red Duck mob have their own little tapdance signature on each of the traditional styles they approach, and this has a nice undercurrent of malt to contest some of the hop assault. I wouldn’t call it balanced so much as they put the two influences in there and let them fight it out, but they had a fair idea what they were doing, and it works, if you like a lot of robust, two-fisted flavour action in a very big tasting beer. It’s just not a summer session beer, but I could sit on a few of these when the calendar ticks over to shiver-time. Again, I strongly recommend you drink it cold as Albert Park Lake on a July insane-joggers-only type morning. 7 out of 10.

HOLGATE HOPINATOR DOUBLE IPA (Woodend, VIC) 7%

The sell on this one which is not exactly a major conundrum given the name on the label is that it’s hop-heavy for people who like a tongue-ripping coppery beer. The promise in the fine print is that the hop attack is balanced by, and I quote, a “higher gravity”, which sounds like they flew the keg to Planet Jupiter, but I gather when you strip the fluent brewerese cryptology away, means the malt, which is cricket bat solid in abundance, and does the job as advertised. There’s plenty of stinging wild hops in there, but it is flavour-balanced, and the other thing that makes it work the way it does, which would seem like a negative to some of those straying off the beaten VB path, and did to me as well at first, is what at first seems to be chronic under-carbonation. In effect, it makes the beer drink smoother and takes the edge off the herbal assault. The brewer is right to be proud of this one – I think it’s far and away the strongest on their roster. Oddly enough though, if you really want a hops drenched beer that’ll kick your tastebuds through your earhole for a field goal, there are many others that will do that trick more emphatically, particularly from the US small brewers. The other impressive thing about the balancing act in this one is that you won’t get that nose hair-singeing alcohol rush from this one even though it’s 7% alcohol, and the interesting thing about that is that it appears to be the over-hopping that actually causes the balancing act in that case. A solid 7.5 out of 10, not for everyone, but real good at what it is, and also pretty unique.

DOGFISH HEAD PALO SANTO MARRON Malt Beverage (Milton Delaware USA) 12 %

Ok, what they’re calling it is an unfiltered brown ale, with a lot of the character coming from Paraguayan Palo Santo wood in the tanks they use to make the beer. What I’m telling you is that it falls into your face-hole somewhere between a porter and a stout, and it’s got what the wine-soaks would call coffee and port and liqueur notes and what uncultured roughneck types like myself might call a hint or two of cough medicine characteristics as well. The wood’s in there, and it mellows the whole approach, but it’s fundamentally full of scorched malt and not subtle about it, and it’s got a sweetness and not subtle about that either, and it’s good, but I’ve had Belgian beers that tasted as rich, more complex, and drank breezier than this. It does carry its alcohol-overdrive pretty well, but it’s probably one you’d try for something different, and just have the occasional one of, rather than your new favourite special occasion brain-destroyer beer. There’s too much craft, time and effort not to rate it 7 out of 10, but I really couldn’t rate it any higher than that.

ROGUE DEAD GUY ALE (Oregon, USA) 6.5%

Somewhat reddish cloudy beer commendably free of brewerese weasel words on the label, but also more or less impossible to assess what they were trying for as far as style goes. A surprisingly unassuming US pale ale to the point of anonymity – on the upside its an easier drink for Aussie-centric beer chuggers than most, but on the downside, they’ll still bridle at the hops-load, and the more cavalier and adventuresome beer palates will be constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. The two good things about it are the wood of the keg on the tongue and the ease of scoffability. The downside is that, especially for the alcohol content, you’ll wind up still wondering what it was trying to achieve. I’m going to notch it up to 6.5 out of 10, mainly for combining some real if muted flavour with real drinkability.

ANCHOR STEAM BEER (San Francisco, USA) 4.9%

The label explains – if you have access to a Hubble telescope-powered magnifying glass or a young person to read it to you - that the “Steam” in the monicker doesn’t refer to a brewing process as such, but a semi-insulting name for beer from the region in the past, in the days of primitive Flintstones-like brewing techniques and no ice whatsoever. It’s not one of those “Ice” or “Cold” deals, where the key word refers to the type of filtration used. (And used, in those latter cases, apparently to filter all possible flavour out of the beer.) They add that the brewing methods of those far-off misty times in San Francisker – i.e. not all that much over 100 years ago – have long since become a matter of speculation at best, so they pretty much make something called Steam Beer and that’s the end of it. The result is a kind of rich orangey-coloured thingo that sits not all that far from the “US Pale Ale” style that is apparently rampant among small-batch brewers in the US today, but is a lot less pushy about it, and I mean that in a good way. It’s an exceptionally well-balanced beer with plenty of flavour that drinks smooth, like a Vegas lounge-bar Sinatra-knockoff only wishes he might be. The hops are there, but there’s a lot more swing than sting, and the malt balances, but never gets syrupy, thus avoiding starching the proverbial pants of drinkability. I happen to like Anchor’s Liberty Ale, which pushes the hops in a slightly more agenda-setting way, but along with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, this may be as close to a “session beer” by Australian definition, as you can get out of the US Pale Ale style. By any standards, it’s a real good one. I’d say 8 out of 10, conservatively. It and its stablemate are beers I come back to again and again.

JAMES SQUIRE MALT RUNNER (Camperdown, NSW) 5.2%

This is labelled as one of those Malt Shovel brewery “limited release” beers, with a “Winter ’10” dating, so whether it’s long for our pop-shop shelves or might make a magical reappearance in Winter ’11 I have no idea.
They call it a dark lager. The guy at my pop-shop, who generally has some vague inclination what he’s talking about, called it a brown ale style. I’d probably say somewhere in between, which is what makes it kind of an interesting beer to me.
Where you define it, in what scientists may well call the visible dark beer spectrum, may determine how much you like it. He thought it was a little character-lite, by the standards of the more complex boutique overseas brown ale styles, I’d be guessing.
I say, by black beer (as opposed to porter or stout) standards, there’s a lot going on in terms of flavour, yet it still drinks pretty much like a lager, and I rate the trick reasonably highly, especially with the conjuring trick in the flavour which comes over kind of sweet at first, but balances that with a bit of rough action in the malt to cut the schmaltz on the finish. Viewed as a black beer (which it isn’t exactly, but it’s closer to that than anything else) it falls just short of being something really special, but much like the lady in the song “Killer Queen”, it’s “extraordinarily nice” anyway, and certainly one of the better beers in that style produced here. It’s just a squiffteenth of a shade too gluggy to be considered a session beer by summer standards, but you could pop away a couple of these in the colder months. 7 out of 10.

Semi-Cautionary Note: Under all normal circus-pantses, I avoid any vague suggestion of fruit-infused beers like the plague. Well, I suppose I might drink a cold plague-infused beer if there was nothing else available and the weather was over the 100 Fahrenheit mark in the old money, but never a fruity-flavoured one. So I only discovered after purchase that this had some sort of minor amount of cherry-derived extract in it. However the use of it is so considered and under-handed that it really adds just a hint of flavour, or character rather than flavour, and you’re not going to think you’ve tumbled off the beer ranch and landed in the margarita lounge instead. But for those who are religious about this sort of thing, and really believe that beer should only contain the officially sanctioned magic spell ingredients of hops-yeast-malt-water, let this bit of typeface scribbling constitute fair warning.

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THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1963)

The version all the movie books rattle on about is the 1932 one with the director, cast, crew and some of the same cobwebs as most of the major studio horror movies of the early 1930s. Apart from the fact that it screens here about as often as coronation footage of Emperor Hirohito – in fact the books can rave about it all they like but for the last 46 years and counting, it’s almost impossible to see in this country – the reality is that it is a slow, creaky movie with some isolated great moments in it. The 1963 remake by director William Castle, despite being 15 minutes longer, dances a lot more lightly on your mental tootsies, and effortlessly zips through its comedy-mystery-horror set-ups with no pain whatsoever. The funny stuff’s funny, the black humour is creepy, there’s an all-time classic roster of British character actors cluttering up every room of the haunted house, and there’s some sly stuff in there comparing the American way of thinking with the English, and sending both of them up at the same time. Unfortunately, as a result of Channel Nine stopping showing antique movies all night some years ago so that leftover nightclub gutter loiterers could host brain-liquefying phone competitions for insomniac idiots, now this version is about as easy to see as the original.

IT’S A GIFT (1934)

Maybe the least well known of W.C. Fields’ really great movies, kind of an expanded version of his earlier short feature The Pharmacist, I think in my lifetime, this one screened once at midday on television here about 30 years ago. A fairly jaundiced portrayal of small-town American life, and folks who wonder where the humour of Married With Children, The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill etc originated could do a lot worse than check this out. W.C. Fields plays the guy who runs the town general store and is utterly defeated by all aspects of domestic and retail life. The unforgettable showstopper scene involves a cranky blind and deaf customer called Mr Muckle who has a rather cavalier manner with his cane, and Fields desperately tries to marshall away from such obstacles as two glass doors and a large display of light bulbs while being continually distracted by a long-unserved customer who shrieks repeatedly with increasing desperation about his urgent need for “Ten pounds of cumquats”. After Mr Muckle inevitably decimates the store, and then causes several major traffic accidents crossing the street unassisted, Fields casually reveals that he’s the house detective from the hotel across the road. In the best W.C. Fields movies, there’s kind of an inherent assumption, if not article of faith, that anything involving human beings can’t possibly work except maybe by accident, and for people who happen to be of a like turn of mind, nothing much has changed in the last 74 years.

HELLZAPOPPIN (1941)

Famously anarchic stage show vehicle for the long completely forgotten comedy team of Olsen and Johnson was toned down for the movies, but remains a bizarre send-up of Hollywood musicals. Just to get warmed up, it starts with a tuneful musical production number set in Hell, complete with chorus girls revolving on a giant rotisserie. Any movie which begins with the stars turning up in Hell in a cab with one of them commenting: “That’s the first taxi driver who went straight where I told him to go” is arguably on roughly the right track. Actually the first 13 or so minutes are about as close as you’ll ever see to getting cartoon logic in a live-action picture, and none of that stuff has anything whatsoever to do with the rest of the movie. Some of it’s pure cornball, and some of it’s insane, some of it involves live goats and chickens for no apparent reason, not to mention the guy who plays noughts and crosses on a horse’s arse and runs away laughing maniacally, and it’s all so fast, you can probably watch it four or five times and still pick up stuff you missed.

It’s somewhere around this time that the director of the movie within the movie drops one of the most telling lines in motion picture history: “This is Hollywood. We change everything here,” and from there the movie kind of at least looks like a Hollywood musical, only no-one but the romantic leads seems to care about the plot, and every so often when they get bored with the plot, you get scenes where the projectionist (played by Shemp from the Three Stooges) screws up the movie and characters get stuck in the top and bottom halves of the frame; not to mention an old-fashioned title card turning up on screen insisting that a Stinky Miller leave the theatre and go home because his mother wants him, a message repeated so often that finally the romantic leads stop in mid-song and don’t go on until Stinky actually does leave. Eventually the screenwriter who’s pitching all this to the director asks him what he thinks and the director shoots him.

In their next picture, Crazy House they improved on this ending, when, as the juvenile leads went for the traditional closing romantic clinch, Chic Johnson produced a rifle and shot them, explaining that this was one movie that wasn’t going to have a happy ending. The same movie had a ton of Hollywood in-jokes including a beauty with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in character as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, and a self-putdown gag for the ages, when Johnson buzzes the boss of Universal Studios over the intercom and announces “Universal’s number one comedy team is here” to which the boss happily responds “Ah, Abbott and Costello – send them right in!”

Olsen and Johnson’s next follow-up was a similar mixture of ripe corn and outright mental instability – a comedy-horror movie called Ghost Catchers – which has one of my favourite throwaway gags of all time. A criminal gang apparently comprised entirely of otherwise short of work contract character actors, is working a haunted house routine, utilising an array of Halloween type costumes. Having infiltrated their hideout, Olsen and Johnson are led down a long series of winding passages by two little people dressed in elf costumes. Eventually Olsen notes in a conversational tone that he suspects they’re being taken to meet Snow White, and one of the elves stops, turns around, and shaking his head, says disgustedly: “Everywhere we go. EVERYWHERE we go.” Trust me, there won’t be a dry nostril or Disney copyright infringement notice in the house.

The reason I went through those gags in almost terrifying detail is fundamentally because you’ve got about as much chance of seeing Crazy House and Ghost Catchers as you do of seeing a white rhino emerge from your compost heap, juggling gold Kajagoogoo albums and singing “Mammy”. Not only aren’t they available at all on official DVD or VHS, or even the $3 bill style unofficial DVDs which exist in increasingly screaming proliferation over at our good friends at eBAY, not only haven’t they screened once on any form of television or revival movie house here in the last 50 years at least, but the only VHS copies I’ve ever been able to locate boasted soundtracks which apparently had been used in some form of road paving activity, and possibly also as the staging ground for a number of international ice hockey fixtures.

However Hellzapoppin is relatively freely available. Find it and you too can enjoy the most unlikely and unnecessary Orson Welles movie reference in history, plus the crusty old specimen wandering around endlessly with a potted palm tree yelling for a “Mrs Jones” who on being asked “Don’t you know we’re shooting a motion picture here?” responds “That’s a matter of opinion”. Not to mention the sweet-faced female romantic lead explaining to Olsen and Johnson that the reason her family can afford a massive estate with a full-scale outdoor theatre out the back is because, quote unquote “We’re disgustingly rich”. Plus one of the leads saying in complete exasperation “Not another one of those movies where they put on a show” even before they get to the part of the movie where they put on a show. Hellzapoppin – it’s all this and Stinky Miller too. Like they say at the start, “Any resemblance between Hellzapoppin and a motion picture is entirely coincidental.”

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It contained this remarkable piece of copy:

“It’s our equivalent of The Office and tops anything else tried in this genre in this country” – Crikey

At first, mesmerised by the astonishingly gruesome description, it didn’t occur to me that Crikey was the name of a website, and I instead mistook the word for editorial comment, as in “Crikey! You’d have to be clinically insane to consider watching it – I barely got through it alive.”

That confusion surmounted, it occurred to me what a wealth of meaning and implication can be corralled into one brief sentence.

“Our equivalent of The Office”, eh? Once again, the punch-line to a time-seasoned joke flits to mind – “What you mean ‘we’, White Man”?

Why anyone would want to make an equivalent to The Office in the first place – presuming the makers of The Librarians did – remains a mystery of labyrinthine and vertiginous proportions to me.

The whole supposedly super-naturalistic, “it’s funny just because it’s embarrassing”, no energy, no exuberance, no life, no deposit refunded, school of modern comedy, as celebrated in The Office (either version, and throw in any future ones made in Latvia or wherever) is a guaranteed direct route to Slumber-Time Central for me.

The Office to me, particularly the original version, is a blancmange. Often it seems like a slack-paced nerf facsimile of a comedy show. All the best and the fondest of good wishes to the people who enjoy it, but to me this isn’t exactly comedy.
To me, The Office is a modish and - in terms of those who followed in its footsteps, with a lot less of a clue, even less of a point-of-view, comic or otherwise - a poisonous fad. What we get out of that fad is unimaginative, directionless, sterile, dull and unfocussed mood pieces, masquerading as comedy shows. “The Office” is better than that description, but there’s not an adjective in there that I don’t think fairly describes portions of that show.

Someone could have done the Fawlty Towers of clerical office comedies, but “The Office” wasn’t it, and that idea, which isn’t a bad one, still remains for someone else to do.

All the hurtling hubbub on the subject reminded me of the heady heyday of Steinfeld, (and, tragically, for countless, mind-shrivelling years afterwards), when people with no apparent notion of originality, routine human conversational skills, or detectable sense of humour, would transform my facial features to an acceptable replica of Joan Crawford’s “screaming face” from “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” by referring to any transcendentally dull passing phenomena within eyeshot as “This is so Seinfeld!” and then, by way of uninvited illustration, giving a painstaking blow-by-blow recounting of the shooting script from one of that series’ rigorously mirth-free episodes.

This phenomenon had only one minor point of appeal. It was the only time you could seriously contemplate the feeling of a bus driving over your head and find a positive, even highly desirable, side to the experience.

When people rattle on about how great The Office is, for some reason I can always hear Homer Simpson echoing down the decades and suburbs in his most doofus-like voice, repeating, “It’s funny because it’s TRUE.” I guess that principle ought to make, for example, The New York Times a laff riot, but I’ve yet to observe this in practice.

The other part of that richly fertile piece of blurb about The Librarians which hogtied my peepers, was the part that read, “…tops anything else tried in this genre in this country.”

(a) The Office is a genre now?

(b) For similar paucity of actual competition, you’d probably have to run down Anthony “The Man” Mundine’s career boxing record.

In short, this is a lot like saying that Otto “Knuckles” Marimba is the best free jazz bongo player in Vatican City. It may well be true, but it’s not really all that illuminating when you come to drink about it.

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[I should just point out that I’ve revised the comments above substantially. Partly due to a response from reader ’surelypaul’, and partly just out of fairness, I thought I should go and hire the entire run of The Office and watch it through in the manner it was meant to be seen, rather than go on four or five episodes (and other bits and pieces of episodes) I’d seen out of sequence.

I’ll post my re-assessed review of “The Office” sooner or later. But to preview the bottom-line, I’d say it’s a show which has long been awash in indiscriminate praise and ‘critical’ bubble-bath, and while it has its small mercies, and is by no means a complete disaster, any conception of it as representing some sort of milestone of great comedy television would be charitable to the point of hallucination. I see it more as kind of a low-wattage, misfired, road company alternative to I’m Alan Partridge (either series) or Saxondale (ditto), which never quite summoned the discipline or direction to establish to the viewer exactly what it wanted to be. Incidentally, to remove any possible avenue of ambiguity, the Steve Coogan shows I just mentioned, I definitely do believe to be milestones in great television comedy.]

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An article in the hilariously abrasive CREEM magazine of yore (and many years yore at that) once posited that the amazing thing wasn’t that George Harrison had subconsciously and accidentally incorporated portions of the Chiffons’ song He’s So Fine into his own hit My Sweet Lord, but that he’d done so in such a blatant and cack-handed fashion that he’d somehow managed to convince a judge in a court of law that he’d done it. *

To me, the amazing thing about the court decision that Men At Work’s famous national baggage, Down Under, plagiarised the well-known children’s earache, Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, is that when I looked up from first reading a report about it, the date-line didn’t read “April 1st”.

For clarity’s sake, I have to make a few points here.

1 – I am no fan, friend or booster of Men At Work, Colin Hay, Ron Strykert, Greg Ham, or any other member or former flute roadie thereof. I’ve never thought of Men At Work’s music as being anything other than an annoyance similar to a gigantic blowfly buzzing in through an open window in summer, except that you can at least give the blowfly a face-full of bug spray, a practice which it is, for better or worse, illegal to do to members of Men At Work under current federal and state law.

2 – If I never hear the song “Down Under” again, it will be several millennia too soon.

3 – I have never knowingly, or at least within memory, had any dealings – good, bad, indifferent or all of the above – with Larrikin Music, or its apparent owners, or parent company, or whatever they are, the UK publishing conglomerate, the enchantingly named Music Sales Group.

4 – Grand Australian tradition though it may well be, it would probably double my remaining life-span to never hear the song about the kookaburra again either.

Never, and I mean, in the timeless phrasing of pro wrestler/wordsmith Chris Jericho, “Neh-eh-eh-eh-EVER!!” in the 37 million or so times I, along with every other living Australian who hasn’t passed away from exposure to this song, have been subjected to Men At Work’s notorious ear-wash “Down Under” have I ever noticed that the flute line quoted “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”.

That’s a guarantee. 100% truth. Right to this day. I can sit here right now, with the famous mental toothache “Down Under” coming unbidden to mind, and not remember one part that to me sounded like the kookaburra song. Never occurred to me.

Now, enough people are saying it that there must be something to it – i.e. that there is some quotation in the flute part of “Down Under” that sounds like the kookaburra song. According to court testimony, apparently Colin Hay even sang part of the freaking kookaburra song on stage in 2002 during performances of “Down Under”.

(Actually, I have no idea what that proves. I worked out years ago, before it was anything like common knowledge that you can sing the whole of the Gilligan’s Island theme lyric to the tune of the Australian national anthem, or vica-versa, and the words fit the music perfectly. I strongly doubt the composition of one musical item had any influence on the other in that case - the fact that we, in many ways, clearly ARE living on Gilligan’s Island notwithstanding.)

The point I’m making is that, as with all Australians, I’ve been exposed to this song roughly as often as I’ve been exposed to direct sunlight, and perhaps to ultimately the same effect, and in all that time I’ve never once been struck to note, “Ah yes, the flute part is the kookaburra song.”

Here’s the other point. Larrikin’s lawyer stated they were after 40 to 60% of the income derived from the song. The song made the tens of millions of dollars it did because it was a WORLDWIDE hit.

So what percentage of people around the world, or even here for that matter, bought/loved/confirmed-their-taste-buds-were-located-in-their-rear-underpant-area-by-listening-to, the song “Down Under” specifically because they were enchanted by the way a bit of the flute diddley supposedly brought all the joy of “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” flying to mind?

To start with, I think it would be ridiculously kind to the Larrikin music side of the case to suggest that even 50% of the overseas market concerned even knew what that kookaburra song was. Overseas was the exact location that the real money came from. If we were talking about the royalties that came in from Australia alone, I doubt we’d be talking about a court case at all. Comparatively speaking the two parties could have split the difference and bought each other a cup of coffee, and the only argument would be over who had to pay for the biscuits.

Secondly, what made the song a hit, other than a worldwide intermission in anything resembling taste. Well, the song did. The music, very much the lyrics, the singer’s delivery of the song, the production, the engineering, the mixing, the instrumentation (including use of the wretched flute), the instrumental performances, the arrangement, and no doubt several million accountants’ headaches worth of promotion, advertising and marketing.

One part of one part of that was a guy playing a flute. Was the flute part of the sound that made the song “work” as well as it did? Well, maybe. Or “why not?”. Or “to a degree”. Would it have sold more, less or the same without a flute part? Who knows? All you can really say for certain is that the flute was a conspicuous part of the sound of the track.

But for argument’s sake, let’s all hold hands around the copyright séance table, (adjacent to the “assessing musical/monetary worth of the whole via constituent parts” ouija board), and agree momentarily that the flute being present on the record contributed to some degree to the track’s success.

Assessing how much it contributed to that success, as with the peculiar alchemy of just about any hit record, is (given all the other factors mentioned earlier, and that wasn’t necessarily anywhere near an exclusive list) completely impossible. So let’s for the hell of it say it’s 5% of the value of the song just being there.

(I’ll just point out that unless there’s some arrangement I’m unaware of in this case, that “5% value” wouldn’t be recognised in any songwriting royalty arrangement, as the composers were listed as Colin Hay and Ron Strykert. There may be some performance royalty payable to Greg Ham as the woodwind guy in the band, but I’d be guessing that this wouldn’t amount to 5% of the entire value of all money recouped from the song.)

And the next question that lurches into the starting gate is, of course, how much of that 5% specifically comes down to the flute part supposedly being derived from that timeless wonder of Australian musical fauna, “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”?

Or to put it another way, if he’d have played any other diddley-widdley flute line that came to mind and vaguely fit in with the rest of the music, how much difference could it have possibly made to the overall worldwide sales of the song?

Considering that, to me, the only part of the song where I’ve ever vaguely noticed what the flute guy was actually playing, was the introduction, and for the life of me, I can’t find any connection between that and the melody I’m familiar with, as part of unwanted lifelong mental luggage, as “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, the answer for me would be “None”. No difference at all. Had the guy instead blown his nose into the flute while performing the correct fingering for The Jetsons theme, I wouldn’t have noticed any difference.

My question is, if the flute line had been there, incorporated into the arrangement in the same manner, been in the same key, but hadn’t incorporated any material from the kookaburra song, would it have made one Transylvanian pfennig’s worth of difference to the song’s international success and royalties haul?

There’s only one rational answer to that question, I reckon. No. It didn’t, it couldn’t, and not even in a science-fiction movie in which Gary Coleman ruled a world of robot dinosaurs, assisted by former members of Bananarama, would it have been possible for this ever to make one iota of difference in the sales of the song “Down Under”.

However, according to everyone else, who can hear it where I can’t, there is a bit of the kookaburra song quoted in the flute part, somewhere in the track “Down Under”. The reality is, if they quoted it, even fleetingly (although that would also probably depend on how fleetingly, but let’s skip over that for now) and the song has a copyright holder (and it does) there is some financial obligation on the part of the quote-er to recompense the quote-ee.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but in a movie, if anyone even sings the Happy Birthday song we still all suffer on an annual basis at birthday parties spanning the globe, there’s always a listing in the musical acknowledgement section of the credits, because even that song had writers, and apparently still has a legal owner.

Then the question becomes, what do the Men At Work guys really, logically, fairly, owe the kookaburra song copyright holders, in terms of the impact that musical quotation made in worldwide sales. And I tell you what, if we’re talking MC Hammer’s use of the Rick James riff from Super Freak in the historical Hammer hit You Can’t Touch This, and I’m the guy in charge, I’d say, well, that’s significant usage. The riff from the former is an integral part of the latter. If it were me and I were assessing it, I’d say you could figure that as being in the 10’s of percentage of the later song’s worth, whether 10% or 15% or 20%, or whatever.

(Don’t ask me what the actual agreement/figure was – I wouldn’t have a clue. I’m not even aware of what the standard arrangement for something like that is, or if there is one. I’m just trying to make a comparative point here. Don’t bust my pants-bulbs over it.)

In the case of Men At Work vs Kookaburra Up Tree, I’m saying, taking all salient facts into consideration with a deeply furrowed brow and judge-wig at a comical angle, I reckon it’s worth about one-squiffteenth of 1%, and not a penny more, Stephanie.

I reckon if Men At Work end up having to pay much more than their opposition’s parking fees for the duration of the trial, they’ve been taken to the cleaners.

It matters to some minor degree that there is a flute part in “Down Under”. Quite frankly if the same guy had been featured in the mix in the same way, and had played the alien theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind throughout, or the Ron Grainer theme tune from Steptoe and Son for that matter, in place of the appropriation of some portion of the kookaburra song, the total difference to overall world sales would have been in the close vicinity of exactly zero per cent.

In the court of Leapster, I find, grudgingly, for the plaintiff, and award them the total of seven $10 parking stubs, and a weekly travel-card for the junior legal assistant who doesn’t own their own car. Parties to pay their own costs, and ensure I never hear either accursed song involved in the dispute ever again, on pain of torture. Case disgraced, and dismissed.

In conclusion, let me point out that Americans previously used to refer to the kookaburra as the “laughing jackass” and had the Americans concerned lived to see this day, they would have been gratified to find out that they were at least half right.

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* There is apparently a hilarious postscript to this case which most people I think are unaware of. Usually you just hear the part about how Harrison was taken to court for unconsciously plagiarising He’s So Fine in his song My Sweet Lord, and that’s where the story stops.

Maybe Klein then phoned him up to volunteer to represent him in any appeal over the plagiarism finding. I wouldn’t put it past him. I can only think that if Klein fought for ten years over the matter, that the $587,000 figure must have actually been what he paid for it, despite any alternative suspicions that might otherwise automatically leap to mind. I’d guess it would have killed him not to make a profit on the sale. I still find it hard to believe he didn’t, actually.

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ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS – THE SQUEAKUEL (2009)

It’s the nature of entertainment business executives to give the public more of what they’ve liked before. On the surface of things, it makes a good deal of sense, from a business point of view.

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of art, which movies are to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual case, (and there’s plenty of variation just in the list above, to veer sharply into the lane of understatement), to tell its story, and then that story is told, and that’s the end of the story.

There was probably a reason, when you think about it, that Dickens never did a Great Expectations 2, or an Oliver Twist sequel entitled Fagin’s Frolics. William Shakespeare somehow avoided the temptation to fudge a sequel involving various bench-warmer relatives of Romeo and Juliet having a similarly star-crossed romance, perhaps with a happy ending this time around. Beethoven’s fifth symphony was pretty hot stuff, but it apparently never occurred to him to re-work a few of the themes, trot out the “da-da-da-DUMMM” bit for another airing, and issue a Symphony 5B. He seemed content to get on with #s 6, 7, 8 and 9 instead.

No matter how compelling the characters, settings, themes or combinations thereof, the rule of thumb in art seems to be, when you’ve nailed it the first time, well, that was your creative adventure in that little world, and now you get on with the next development, wherever the contents of your head happen to take you. You don’t stick around and play with your food. You finish your plateful and move on to the next meal.

The odd thing is, we all get this, at least on a subconscious level. When the tale is told, and it’s a good one, and it’s well-told, as much as we liked it, or revelled in it, we really know it’s over when it’s over. If they produce a sequel, we might buy a ticket, go along and kind of enjoy it, maybe, but it’s generally a kind of pale photocopy of enjoyment. We KNOW the magic was in the first time around. We KNOW they’re playing with their food for our entertainment. That birthday cake tasted great on the first bite, but three pieces in and your stomach starts to perform stunt-flying manoeuvres. The movie business often seems dedicated to proving comprehensively that lightning isn’t the only thing that doesn’t strike twice.

The exceptions to the grinding truism that movie sequels are inferior to the originals are few. Generally those few involve a substantial revision of the original conception, (perhaps, for one obvious example, a tendency to greater comedic orientation than in the original version), and/or better casting, a superior screenplay, and a better (or more suited) craftsman as director.

But generally, they’re a washout.

There’s also an irony, or a fallacy, in the Bizness theory of “giving ’em more of what they already ate”. If you ask the general public what they want, regardless of which pop or mass culture area you’re talking about, they’ll ALWAYS indicate that they want more of something they’ve had before.

And then the Bizness keeps feeding that to them, and the public will go right on saying they want more of it, right up until most members of the public all suddenly realise they’ve mined that particular seam of entertainment dry, at which point someone ends up with a massive turkey on their hands flickering away in empty cinemas, and the public all rushes off to see something novel/new/different which they never told the Bizness people they wanted, because they didn’t KNOW they wanted it, right up until they saw or heard it. (And whatever that is, it will soon enough be strip-mined, sequelled, and imitated to death as well, prior to the next big thing coming along.)

And this is the fallacy of asking the public what they want. Most of the general public don’t have the inclination to indicate they’d like something different, and don’t have the imagination to hazard a guess or express a preference as to what that “something different” might be. Which is absolutely fair enough – it’s not their jobs.

What you might expect, though, is that the showbiz execs who are paid to analyse this kind of information, would know better than to fall for the same three-card trick over and over again. But, quite frankly, if you put enough accountants and brothers-in-law in roles that really demand a creative mind, this is the kind of result you’re probably bound to get.

The pursuit of endless sequels (and needless, ill-conceived remakes – just as poisonous and creatively-challenged a phenomenon) is, necessarily, a determined pursuit of the law of diminishing returns, certainly creatively, generally in terms of quality, and arguably, also financially. The funny thing is, on some level or other, we all know it. The other funny thing is, nobody really does much about it, and this is not like the weather, where you CAN’T.

Anyway, let’s nail some specifics, and talk about some movies in this here movie column.

The brouhaha with the Scream pictures when they first surfaced was about how clever they were, playing with the conventions of the slasher horror movies, turning them on their heads, and underscoring them with knowing humour. I have no doubt that the thoroughly revolting word “savvy” was bandied about at some point.

I don’t know about all that. The first Scream had some in-movie winking at the format and formula of horror movies, with the characters describing the “rules” as the bodies fell. This didn’t diminish the scares, (it was used well on occasion to build chills), but if it delivered so much as a laugh, I wasn’t in the room at the time. Actually, the banging on in the dialogue about the “rules” got kind of tiresome to me.

The laughs came from some unexpected slapstick involving the killer, and a few bits of sly commentary in the movie-making itself, rather than the dialogue per se. However what made the movie work as well as it did, along with Wes Craven’s technical facility in manipulating you through a horror movie, was the excellent capturing of atmosphere and place in the small college town, and some endearingly eccentric performances that allowed you to care about the characters.

It’s Drew Barrymore’s small but telling role near the start that sets up the whole picture. The various Cox-Arquettes and Arquette-Coxes did their jobs too. No matter how clever the horror movie is, it’s harder to get really sucked in if you don’t care about the characters. You “bought” the college atmosphere too. These kids have lives, hopes, dreams etc. And some lunatic is killing them.

The undertow of wry self-commentary was important in giving Scream its own peculiar life, but it was a long way from being the whole deal.

As Scream 2 demonstrated pretty well. The Courteney Cox performance is a little more of a caricature, the David Arquette one simultaneously more stock-comedy and manic, there’s no Drew Barrymore, and Neve Campbell’s lead character is given less to demonstrate why we should care about her.

So we run through more rope-a-dope with the audience expectations, more jack-in-the-box set-ups, more horror “rules”, more fitful “commentary” that doesn’t really comment on anything.

The skill demonstrated in running the ropes of the horror movie genre delivers some good solid scares, and it is mostly an entertaining movie, but there’s no real core to it at all. It probably would have skated by, but where Scream 1 delivered an ending that was something of a wet-end, and lacking for brains in the logic department, the many climaxes of Scream 2 are (a) completely ludicrous on any level, (b) a series of car-crashes in execution. And those climaxes just keep-a-comin’.

Ten years later, the abattoir artistes behind Saw IV dispensed with the “knowing self-analysis of horror movies” stuff and just built that right into the movie, rather than telling us all about it so we knew how clever they were. That wasn’t such a bad idea, probably. They also dispensed completely with humour. That was more of a mixed blessing.

For those who don’t know, the Saw saga (and odds are there must some web-galoot out there who calls it a saga) concerns a serial killer type guy called Jigsaw who was active in the first couple of pictures, got crook and kind of roped in an assistant or two after that.

At the beginning of Saw IV, he’s very crook – to the extent that he’s dead. However his trademark killings are still going on, which means there’s still some assistant out there doing his work. There’s cops coming at him from one end, the FBI from another, and all concerned are trying to nail down who the active Jigsaw is, who just might be one of the people involved in the investigation.

So it’s a whodunnit, along with a horror picture once over heavy on the surgical levels of guts and gore, plus the killer’s trademark gimmick, of conceiving bizarre torturous traps in which the victim or victims’ fate/s are often in their own hands, kind of.

The peculiar backwards morality behind the Jigsaw killings is kind of an interesting point of distinction with this movie, right until they morality us to death with it. There’s just far too much background/origin information on why the original Jigsaw became what he became, until it becomes like a particularly psycherligical Law and Order: SVU episode gone horribly wrong. It also successfully diminishes the Freddy Krueger of this particular franchise from being a kind of supernatural figure into being an old tired man who went bananas. Quite a bargain heading in that direction, then.

And for all that the movie has technical facility – not so much editing as footage chopped up like highly energetic coleslaw, and some “Say, how did them movie folks DO that?” shot transitions – it sometimes handles routine exposition like lumpy gravy, is riddled with incredibly poorly incorporated flashback material, and the build to the ending struck me as incoherent to world and Olympic levels – I literally couldn’t tell if one of the parallel expositions being shown was a flashback or a “contemporary” sequence, and once I had worked it out, I still didn’t know why it was there.

Saw IV can’t even sustain its own logic. It pimps on this regularly, whenever it suits. It has some effectively grisly moments, and some clever gimmicks, right alongside idiotic gore flinging that comes across like a gross-out routine that two 12 year olds might have come up with. It’s not exactly an actors’ showcase type of film, but alongside the performances that get the job done, there’s a few that clunk like a loose nut in a power mower. Any thought of characters an audience member might actually get involved with was apparently dispensed with prior to the soup course at the first luncheon meeting concerning the picture. The result is that it’s not really that scary. Hard to be scared on behalf of characters you can’t care about. I think I may have mentioned that before. Can’t say after this one I’m desperately HANGING to see Saw V.

It’s hard to see how they could have screwed up on the 21st Century Batman sequel, right up until you see the picture. And by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re determined to, make sure you pack a lunch. Or two.

The first Christian Bale one was an ok action/adventure movie, with a certain smell of obsession, danger and the odd question of principle, to help flesh things out. Adding in THE franchise villain of Batman’s world to the mix in the sequel shouldn’t have hurt, exactly.

So where did they go wrong, to cut to the chase. Well, it’s two and a half hours long, to start with. Roughly one hour of that comes down to Batman and the Joker demonstrating their duelling psychological obsessions (directly opposed and yet somewhat strangely similar, and interdependent in a way) – and that’s the whole guts of the picture, and apparently nobody in charge realised it.

The other 90 minutes is a loud exploding series of hiccoughs and explosions, with some vaguely desperate attempts to claim contemporary significance by comparing what the Joker does with terrorism. To say this is in poor, or no, taste might be fair comment. But what cripples the picture is that it has nothing to do with the core of what the movie is so obviously about – the Batman/Joker dynamic.

And you can also throw in that Christian Bale mostly decided to deep-asthma-breathe his dialogue in standard cartoon superhero fashion, rather than acting like he did in the first picture, that there are only about 97 climaxes too many, that the Joker as portrayed in this movie is a complete unreliable, unpredictable maniac, who can also pinpoint plan a highly complex scheme that would be beyond the resources or planning abilities of the greatest military minds in history, that the long-term Batman comic book villain Two Face is introduced and blown off in one picture for no reason, and that even at the movies with full multi-track sound, in between the explosions, the musical score farting away, and the mysterious clanking noises that all big movies have up the back of the mix somewhere for no apparent reason, I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue at all. I think they won an Oscar for making me not hear the dialogue.

Heath Ledger is pretty good. It’s a valid interpretation of the Joker character, and different from anyone else’s. As far as the make-up goes, I could have come up with the same given about ten minutes, a bag of flour, and the continuity girl’s lipstick.

The answer to the conundrum of making a great Batman/Joker picture is pretty simple. Instead of just happily tearing off bits and pieces of ideas from the comics concerned and turning them into a theme park, they just have to read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and convert them as faithfully as possible into movies. But of course the ever-delightful mantra of “This is Hollywood and we change everything here” will doubtless prevail. Maybe they can make the next Batman picture three and a half hours long and have 243 climaxes. Think I might sit that one out.

A Night at the Museum 2 – err, has anyone previously ever made a “lo-concept” picture? This one’s pretty simple to explain. In fact, arguably the previous sentence was two words too long. Ben Stiller – currently heading for a Dan Aykroyd-like longevity record of not actually being funny while repeatedly appearing in comedy movies – plays the guy who is night guard at a museum where all the exhibits come to life at night, including dinosaur skeletons, and famous people from history and stuff like that there. The basic result – and level of ambition – is a cross between Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Toy Story, only a great deal dumber and more incoherent than either.

This may be the first movie with attention deficit disorder. It can’t remember what it’s trying to be from second to second, much less sequence to sequence, and keeps throwing in irrelevant spot gags like one of the more irritatingly patchy Family Guy episodes. Incidentally, that’s an approach that works a lot better in a half-hour series than a 104 minute movie. Everyone except the people who made this movie probably knows that already, of course.

What makes this a great deal worse is that the movie wants you to take it seriously (when it remembers) and actually care whether Ben Stiller’s team of good guys beats the bad guy team involving Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible and Napoleon. It’s not only centred on a premise that’s fairly stupid but it can’t even retain any consistency on what the premise is. The “to thine own self be true” subtext it can barely be bothered paying lip service to. The intermittent thud of rah-rah USA-boosting is nauseating in this context, not to mention coming off as shallow enough that toddlers could swim in it unsupervised.

Performances, like everything else in here, vary wildly. Owen Wilson is annoying as usual. Stiller is virtually a straight male lead. Christopher Guest is wasted, given very little to do as Ivan the Terrible. However the guy who plays Napoleon is given plenty, and just isn’t funny at all. Amy Adams is cute and fun as Amelia Earhart, but the role’s not funny and the dialogue tends to be wearing. Robin Williams gets the job done as Teddy Roosevelt, but that’s not a funny role either.

Steve Coogan IS good as a tiny little Roman Emperor, it’s difficult to work out what Ricky Gervais’s character was meant to be, other than Ricky Gervais. (This may well have been a design flaw at script level, like most of the rest of the movie.)

But there’s one guy in A Night at the Museum 2 who may well enter the annals, if not top the all-time listings, for a wig-flipping performance in a doggedly unnecessary movie – Hank Azaria, as the evil Egyptian pharaoh with a rather foppishly theatrical manner, and a Boris Karloff-imitation voice that just won’t quit. He’s just fantastic. He would have committed grand larceny of the entire movie, had there been one there to steal.

Otherwise, suffice it to say that about three-quarters of the way through I suddenly realised that I couldn’t even work out what kind of audience they THOUGHT they were aiming at when they made this picture – general, adult, or exclusively kids. Still couldn’t tell you on that one. Oh, and by the way, the special effects are tremendous. And, as usual, what an undetectable difference that truly does make in entertainment when the rest of the picture is one big vacuum cleaner spill.

And finally we come to Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel, in which the entire concentration of inspiration and telling wit involved in the enterprise was plainly expended on the title. I’m going to waste very little time on this one. It’s a kids’ entertainment. It’s proficient enough at what it is, I guess. I would have thought Betty Thomas has demonstrated sufficient talent as a director that Hollywood might be able to find her something to do a little more, err, essential than this, but she gets the job done, and neatly, and (and this could be a lesson to virtually every other film covered here), in good time as well. The “Our heroes go through trials and tribulations, but when things are darkest, they prevail” plot-line has hairs on it that are older than most of our grandparents, but no-one went to the cinemas expecting King Lear, or even King Leonardo and His Short Subjects. By contemporary standards, it was a little short of leavening gags to keep adults awake.

(There was just one that I liked. A harried MC type, hosting the big climactic talent show remarks that there’s a lot of acts on, and we have to get through them in a hurry “because the heating goes off at ten”. I laughed solo in the cinema at that one.)

I mean, it was pap, and the music was fairly grisly. But then most of the actual chart music of right now, other than the voices being at normal speed and the concept of “booty” being mentioned rather more frequently, is pretty much identical to the oeuvre of the Chipmunks and the Chipettes. And just about every movie I mentioned elsewhere here is pap, only this one more or less did what it set out to do, and completed the task in under 90 minutes. My nine-year-old niece thought it was just peachy. I didn’t have to keep asking her, in a whiny voice, “Is it over? Can we go yet?” I guess that’s a win-win. I just couldn’t recommend it that strongly to anyone over nine years of age.

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Official ratings on the LeapsterMovie “Ours is one better”, out-of-eleven MPHOAH scale:

Scream 2 - 6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH (docked 0.5 for multiple idiotic endings)

A Night at the Museum 2 – 5.5 out of 11 (would have been about 3.5 without Hank Azaria and the effects)

Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel – 5.5 out of 11

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If there was a sustained outbreak of people smashing their thumbs with hammers as part of ill-conceived home DIY endeavours, what would be your idea of an appropriate solution? Slapping a massive new licensing fee on all hardware stores? Cutting off every third person’s hands so there was no risk of them hammering their thumbs anymore? Banning the use of hammers on all odd-numbered days to cut down on the incidence of self-inflicted hammercide? I’m tending to assume, unless you’re a complete thundering loon, that those options would not be considered rational solutions by anyone.

On a level which is not by any means a million miles away from this kind of logic, the gazebos in charge of liquor licensing in Victoria have attacked the much-trumpeted problems of drunken and drugged young fatheads loose on the streets, kerbs and dance floors of Melbourne Town, committing random acts of violence against strangers, each other, and probably, given the level of brain-activity concerned, themselves by accident. (And, forced to make a choice, I’d like to see rather more of the latter, and rather less of any of the alternatives.)

Unlike some kneejerk ‘fight the power’ types, I don’t think this whole scenario is a beat-up, incidentally. I don’t think there’s any shortage of this kind of violence, and I don’t think there’s been a time where it’s been any worse, on a general basis. Basically, I’d be struggling to think of any time since I was of an age to legally consume alcohol and be out amongst those doing same, where people here handled being drunk any worse. I don’t think the ‘party’-type drugs are doing them any favours either.

However, it’s how the State Government’s liquor licensing pharaohs are going about their business that’s bunching my lingerie at the moment.

The operators of the well-known loveable live music rat-hole The Tote have just been forced to close its doors and put all staff members on the bread-line, and probably a fair few musos who had regular-ish gigs there as well. This, according to co-licensee Bruce Milne, was specifically due to massive hikes in the licensing costs, due to being assessed as a high-risk venue, according to the liquor licensing nabobs. (There were other factors, but enforced increased costs due to liquor licensing requirements are the common thread running through all of these.)

The problem here is that according to local police quoted on the issue, and virtually all those who have regularly attended live music events at The Tote, dating back to when that was the music venue name and the pub was still officially known as the Ivanhoe Hotel (when dinosaurs ruled Collingwood), the only high-risk involved was of getting drunk, playing pool or the jukebox and having your ears sand-blasted by some live music. It’s not like the Tote was any sort of volcanic hotbed of violence. A lot of the people who went there knew each other. It was a good-times type venue. You’d have more chance of getting into a fight standing on any street corner in the CBD of Melbourne any night of the week. And probably, realistically, at the footy too, not that they’ll be conducting a major liquor licensing hike at sporting events that will put them out of business.

In a judgement which smacks of hasty “knees-bent running about” type thinking, from middle-management nobs who want to be seen to be making decisions to justify their pay-cheques, but aren’t really equipped for thinking about decisions, the Tote was ruled high-risk because it was in a high-risk area.

This is a tremendous nonsense. According to the papers, the whole CBD of Melbourne is a high-risk area these days. By that kind of logic, every licensed venue in Melbourne, from the kerbside cafes that serve the odd beer to the old buffers’ “establishment” clubs to the Windsor Hotel, and beyond, should all have to pay skyscraping licensing fees. They’re all in a “high-risk area”.

What would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t using their skull as a suppository is that the nature and track record of the individual business would have to have some input in whether a particular venue or other liquor-selling operation was truly high-risk, and thus deserving of higher licensing fees. Otherwise the laws are a nonsense. Otherwise, the stated aim of all this general pissfarting around – to achieve a safer Melbourne, via appropriate controls on liquor sales (and I’m only guessing that that’s what they’re trying to achieve, because the current approach will obviously do absolutely nothing to achieve that aim) becomes a statement without any rational foundation.

In the case of The Tote, the wrong people were victimised. The list of those so victimised would include Bruce and James Milne, all the staff, all people who have looked at The Tote as an oasis for scruffy, disreputable loud live rock music for decades, the bands, the live music industry, anyone in Melbourne into what, for want of a more agreeable term and for the sake of brevity, we’ll call ‘alternative’ music.

A virtual non-risk venue was called high-risk, and licensing fees in line with being ‘high-risk’ were levied, forcing the licensees to realise they couldn’t afford to operate the pub with that sort of financial albatross around their necks. (I won’t say “make a profit” because I have my doubts as to what sort of “profit” they were making even under the previous licensing and security costs regime.) The venue was forced to close, specifically due to this situation. If the liquor licensing schmedleys think this made one person on the streets of Melbourne safer on an average night (or any night), they’re absolute turnips. If they DON’T think that, why has this situation been allowed to occur on their watch?

The message that a lot of people aren’t getting is that, as bad as the unnecessary loss of The Tote is, it’s probably the finer edge of a wedge as large as the Rialto building.

The other week I dropped by a small grog shop, Swords, in the South Melbourne Market. The friendly and helpful Joe who runs the joint asked me to sign a petition – something I normally do about as often as I transform stale rye bread into gold with a wave of my magical pinkie finger. I signed this one, however.

Apparently liquor licensing, in its slightly short of infinite wisdom, has designated this tiny cubicle of a grog shop as a “high-risk” operation, complete with matching licence fees/security demands etc, because it sells liquor after 8pm. We’re talking about a miniscule little box of a shop in a fruit market that sells a small selection of wine and boutique beers to the kinds of yuppies, bored young well-heeled mummies, and harmless shambling loner types like Unca Leapster that you’re likely to find wandering around the South Melbourne Market, for Odin’s sake.

Forget selling crateloads of CUB product at retail beer-barn prices, and I can’t even think whether or not they sell spirits. It’s a boutique wine and beer outlet. The nearest thing they get to unfettered lawless liquor-driven excess is that the moustache-bearing nice guy in charge of the operation gives you a mixed six-pack discount for beer whether or not you realise that there is a mixed six-pack discount. It’s not exactly Tombstone, Arizona in there.

As the manager guy rightly pointed out to me, the only real beneficiary of stores like his, and others in the same chain, or of a similar kind, being forced out of existence by insane and mis-applied licensing fees, will be the liquor mega-stores and drive-thru chains, who can afford to soak up licence-fee hikes (although I bet some of them won’t be delighted by them either – I doubt every suburban Joe or Jolene running a local franchise of a big-name chain liquor outlet can afford these kinds of fee hikes and security costs either) and will pick up the business from the smaller retailers that go under.

(Of course, we’ll end up with less choice of retailers, and less access to choice of product, and those making small-batch beers will have less access to customers, making their operations less viable, but I have a feeling that liquor licensing is a fair few decades away from addressing that as a problem, or even recognising it as one.)

There are any number of ‘worst parts’ to the current liquor licensing approach in this state, but a couple of them stand out like Fido’s scrotal area. Number One is, the designation of what’s “high risk” is demonstrably being applied completely indiscriminately, and unique businesses with strong appeal to a particular market are being effectively forced out of business, when there is absolutely no need for this to occur.

Number Two is, and this is the heartbreaker, and the bit that makes all this so irredeemably idiotic, forcing liquor sellers like The Tote and specialist liquor retailers out of business achieves absolutely NOTHING towards making Melbourne a safer place to live in terms of alcohol-fuelled violence, which is the whole aim/panic behind liquor licensing’s current actions. Even considering the notion, for five seconds, over whether closing The Tote or a tiny licensed grocer like Swords at the South Melbourne market, could make the average person in Melbourne less at risk of being donged on the scone by a hormone-charged, booze-soaked ninny of a nightclub escapee out on the streets filled with rage because he’s (a) a plonker, and (b) couldn’t pick up on the night in question, would tell anyone given to rational thought that the whole idea is insane.

The main problem is, quite frankly, young idiots who are far too full of themselves (not to mention drugs and alcohol), driven more or less insane by head-splitting crap tinker-toy dance music over the length of an evening while they’re trying to pick up, attending people-factory type huge nightclub/pub style venues, getting maggotted, and being comprehensively unable to handle it and still act in a manner vaguely resembling a human being.

Fixing the problem is not as easy as identifying it, incidentally. Cutting down operating hours doesn’t remove the problem. It’s a logic akin to cutting down the number of people hammering their own thumbs in DIY accidents by limited the use of hammers to odd-numbered days. If people want to go out and get obliterated and then inflict themselves on the innocent citizenry, and this is acknowledged as being a problem, you have to do the non-populist, non-rabble-rousing, long-term, hard-yards solution, which is analysing why young idiots feel like that and act like that, and then going about the business of trying to effectively educate (and penalise, probably) them, so you eradicate the cause at the root of the problem, as best you could achieve this.

Anything else is a band-aid solution, at best.

Closing joints like The Tote, similar music venues, small specialist liquor outlets etc, isn’t even a band-aid solution. That’s like trying to help your cut finger to heal by sticking it in hot fat, rather than putting a band-aid on it. There’s no benefit to this course of action whatsoever. The people concerned with liquor licensing in Victoria should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Because they apparently don’t have that level of thought or imagination working for them, my alternative is that they should be publicly shamed into feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves. And then they can pull the finger out, leave the weirdo/small/specialist/harmless venues and liquor retailers alone, and go about actually addressing the problem, like they were meant to in the first place. Idiots.

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Determinedly oddball little picture set in a New York City of a previous century, when, going by what you see on screen, the entire population apparently consisted of the dozen or so principal cast members, and exactly one policeman. Manages to mix in a little French history, a fitfully persistent theme about idealism v. life-tarnished cynicism, and a murder mystery format that ultimately fails to contain either a murder or any great deal of mystery.

Joseph Cotten busts plenty of acting chops playing some sort of alcohol-sodden roué, who is part amateur detective, part stony-broke bum, part rather voluble ‘man of mystery’ type, and kind of a freelance good Samaritan, although one who appears to be constantly on the make. At the behest of an innocent French girl (Leslie Caron, who is so saintly, it becomes somewhat nauseating), Cotten investigates the strange case of a rich old buzzard of a former French general who is tucked up in his mansion, surrounded by a couple of servants and his kinda-sorta mistress/carer (Barbara Stanwyck) all of whom seen keen on the old boy popping off sooner rather than later. Everyone in the picture is after his money, for one reason or another, and maybe Cotten is too, as far as we know.

As the Leonard Maltin guide says quite rightly, we don’t find out the true identity of Cotten’s character until the last shot of the picture. What it doesn’t say is that when we have found out, we still don’t know why that guy is involved in this story, or what relevance his identity has to any part of the story. In short, they may as well have revealed at the end that it was Cardinal Richelieu, or Lou Costello, or Trigger the Wonder Horse as they guy they actually chose, although the choice the writers made WAS kind of a cool one.

But the picture’s got atmosphere, holds the attention, squeezes a little suspense, and, apart from Cotten’s turn as the cloak-wearing chappie of the title, Barbara Stanwyck does some screen-holding underplaying in a performance that manages to convey a considerable downstairs conflagration lurking somewhere under the petticoat-region (this kind of thing is something of a Stanwyck standby), and Jim Backus affably steals scene after scene (that was his standby) as a garrulous publican.

Having sat through the entire movie and watched it reasonably intently, I can honestly say that from a storytelling point of view, I’d still be struggling to detect what the point of the exercise was. My assumption would be that to the director *, if not the various hands credited with story and screenplay as well, the motivations of the various featured characters – and in particular the comparisons between youthful idealism, aged cynicism, and various shades of morality, avarice, and jaded pragmatism in between – were of considerably more interest than meeting any generic expectations of a typical crime-based movie. I guess you have to give them points for headstrength, in the unlikely but appealing circumstance that being headstrong had a noun-form version.

Beyond that, as mood pieces go, it establishes a mood. It also holds the attention, if in a hazy and somewhat indescribable way. And that’s about the works. However, if you like to see something a bit different among your vintage Hollywood job lot, this might just about fit the bill, or at least kill 81 minutes in relatively painless fashion.

(7 out of 11 on this site’s trademark MPHOAH scale)

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* I’d never previously heard of The Man With a Cloak director Fletcher Markle. From a quickie look-around on imdb.com, it seems that most of his work was done for television, and most of that on shows no-one has seen for decades. His most striking career entry is that apparently he was an uncredited screenwriter on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. Who knew?

** I can’t even work out the title, much less the rest of the picture. Why is he ‘the’ man with ‘a’ cloak? Think about this for a second. If you were asked to describe some guy you’d seen in a bar or wherever, presuming this is all happening in an alternate universe where they still wore cloaks, you might say “Oh, you mean the man with the cloak!” or you possibly might admit that you’d seen a man with a cloak. I can’t think of any conversational circumstance where a person would describe someone else as “The man with a cloak”. Even “A man with THE cloak” I can kind of imagine coming up in conversation, if THE cloak had magical powers, or was worth $20,000, or was a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation or something. But not “The man with a cloak”. Who would say that in that fashion, other than something entering the very early rounds of their first serious bout with the English language?

There’s nothing in the picture to explain this quirk of expression in the title either. But then there’s nothing in the picture to explain why the Joseph Cotten character turns out to be who he does either. There are some solid clues as to who he is. I think I picked just about every last one of them up as well. There’s just absolutely no reason to connect them all and arrive at his true identity, because that identity has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s like they put together a locked-room mystery set in some isolated chalet in the 17th Century, featuring a range of suspects like the cook, the maid, the butler, the cheating husband, the vengeful wife, and then at the very end, the murderer is revealed to be the Green Goblin from the Spider-Man comics, who hasn’t turned up anywhere in the rest of the picture.

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