#Netflix The Åre Murders, 2025. Two Swedish tales: a city female cop rests in a remote ski town and helps the locals investigate two murders. Like The Bridge-lite, with a clash of approaches and personalities helping resolve the cases. Chilly but fairly mysigt (like Danish hygge).

#LawlerTheatre #Fringe The Lucky Country. How do ‘minorities’ - racial, cultural, sexual, etc - fit into this fine country, built by chance by the second rate? This lovely musical/song cycle explores some knotty problems through wit, melody and the talents of the beautifully diverse cast.

#PalaisTheatre #VictorianOpera Katya Kabanova. Delicious Janacek opera given a powerful live cinematic treatment - and the cast are up to the close scrutiny of the cameras too (operator from Kip Williams’ Dorian Grey/Jekyll & Hyde/Dracula). Amazing playing & singing and a very successful production.

After all these years the dreadfully/joyfully kitsch 1991 Seiko Giant Pocket Watch is still in #MelbourneCentral (from #Daimaru days) and still performing, albeit with the brand half-rubbed away, one figure broken, and the long, draping watch chain removed temporarily permanently.

#RMIT artwork: an unidentified flamboyant bust and the heroic Man in Black II (Robert Bridgwater, 2010).

#PrimeVideo Midsomer Murders, Season 5, 2002. Surely there can’t be more serial killers out there? But golly, the settings are gorgeous and it delivers a strong dose of nostalgia.

After decades Indonesian favourite #Nelayan closes, consolidating to the newer, showier place around the corner, Enak.

The mystery of the disappearing letterboxes. Eventually I went into a Post Office to post, and was entertained by a slice of wintery childhood: robins in the snow. 🐦‍⬛🌨️

#ThisIsNoFantasy #GertrudeSt Kevin Chin ‘From the Ruins’

#Malthouse Season 2026 launch event, celebrating 50 years of Hoopla, Playbox & Malthouse Theatre. And the sweet (lolly) cart afterwards!

#Beamafilm Mad About the Boy, The Noel Coward Story, 2023. Surprisingly fascinating and even moving portrait of a man who wore studied upper-class flippancy as a mask to his true identities. And always an outsider pretending to be inside, despite his considerable talents.

Announcing a six-month CBD police state order two weeks after signing Treaty is a pretty good bit

#Netflix Copycat, 1995. Rather stupid serialkillsploitation but very well done, with good performances from Helen Hunt & Sigourney Weaver, and even a little nod to Vertigo. Has its cake and slices/dices/eats it too (perhaps a Darrell Lea cake?)

#OKru The People Under the Stairs, 1991. Extremely similar to Home Alone the previous year, and with just as much intelligence, wit & satire. Which is to say: I hated it.

#SBSOnDemand Caravaggio’s Shadow, 2022. Atmospheric take on the painter’s turbulent life, though it has a lot to do: - straightforwardly sensational bio? - artistic summary? - personal interpretation? - queer reckoning? In the end a bit of everything and, so, not satisfying everyone 🤷‍♂️

While I was in #Richmond I crossed over to #Cremorne and checked out #FF Fitness First’s new digs and the redevelopment site in the old Bryant & May matches factory (1909, designed by William Pitt who also did the Princess Theatre & Rialto Building), now the site of the Hoxton Hotel.

#SophieGannonGallery Natasha Bieniek ‘Cocoon’ opening, miniature paintings (& one giant one) representing the inner city’s garden lungs.

#DaineSingerGallery Lane Cormick ‘Nicola Daniel Otellario’. Enigmatic and inert installation of huge panels of text (a 1998 interview with an influential muso) and hanging glass tubes of glacial oak.

#DaineSingerGallery Alice Wormald ‘Window Dressing’. Aesthetically and intellectually engaging puzzle paintings of 3D collages, mysterious window view scenes using veils of transparent paper and cut & folded magazine photos.

Trip to #Brunswick via tram and a walk through once-familiar streetscapes, then walk and tram into the city.

#PrimeVideo Midsomer Murders, Season 4, 2001. A bit more gory this season and an ever-topical bit of mushroom poisoning to spice things up.

I saw this Japanese soccer top in a cafe, liked it, found it online while eating brunch, ordered it & it was delivered days later - isn’t the modern world remarkable? Of course delivered to the wrong address, as all parcels are no matter how carefully labelled, so something still to be fixed, Elon!

#tubi Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, 1995-2010. Japanese writer-director-star filmed in his parents’ house on no budget and seems to have had a lot of fun, which comes across via tomato salsa, plasticine, stop motion & imagination! Stupid, bonkers, & so-bad-it’s-almost good.

#Plex The Man in the White Suit, 1951. Lesser Ealing Comedy in a minor key, but that still means it’s a superior and quietly enjoyable ride, though a befuddled Alec Guinness is not quite convincing enough.

#SumnerTh #MTC Rebecca. More the book than the film, with astonishing Kip Williams-like staging, but instead of his piercing, cruel characterisations, Sarks is softer & more forgiving. But it reduces the thrilling tensions & ambiguities developed by Hitchcock due to production Code restrictions.

Energetic and enthusiastically watched performance in #FedSquare, probably part of Big Games Night Out 2025 #BGNO which filled the Atrium with game machines!

#OigallProjects #GertrudeSt BMDO ‘The World’s Smallest Horse’. Is it furniture design or installation art?…

#SBSOnDemand The Red Shoes, 1948. A logical extension for Powell & Pressburger: colour and drama taken to extremes at the ballet. And how magnificent this strange melodramatic metadrama is!

#SBSOnDemand Black Narcissus, 1947. Perhaps the strangest Powell & Pressburger: a clash between English sang froid and Himalayan passions that brings doom onto the nuns as - eventually - sexuality runs amok. Sensational.

#SBSOnDemand A Matter of Life and Death (AKA Stairway to Heaven), 1946. Yet another wonderful Powell & Pressburger film, a fantasy romance that is quizzical, curious, and very, very life-affirming. Fantastic in every sense.

#YouTube The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943. Beautiful restoration of Pressburger & Powell’s wartime film: the old commander is a Blimp full of old-fashioned bluster, but then we flashback to his youth & middle age… An astonishing film, full of humanity & generosity, impeccably acted; I cried

#SBSOnDemand Dark Habits (Sp ‘In the Shadows’), 1983. Singer takes refuge from killers amongst nuns in convent, music is an important (hmmm). OTT ‘clash of religion & secularism’ works well and, in only his 3rd film, Almodóvar has already assembled an astonishing collection of female performers.

#SBSOnDemand Spirits of the Dead, 1968. 3 chapters based on Poe, typically mixed: a wicked woman gets a horseback comeuppance (Roger Vadim; pretty & boring); a man’s wickedness thwarted by his doppelgänger (Louis Malle; excellent); washed-up actor in Rome loses his head (Fellini; high self-parody).

Outsourced food highlights while Hilby was away, including my trip to Sydney & #Thailander #QV, #Stalactites, #Archies, #TwoBirds, #SoJo, #WildGeese #SarahSands, #MondoDiPasta, #Oppa, #Brunetti, #Mamak, #Superhiro, #Kakilang, #Monzarella #Williamstown…

I don’t like this recent fad of eating places covering a well-used window with a screen churning out meaningless advertising

#RoadTrip to #Williamstown: town sights and a drive to the other side of the peninsula for the beach. Then sights on the trip back 🌈

#RoadTrip to #Williamstown: lunch then a beach-side ice cream and walkies in the botanic gardens

#RoadTrip to #Williamstown: sights along the way… 🚲🚇🎢🏭

#RoadTrip to #Williamstown: by car - looks fun! #acrobat

#SBSOnDemand I Know Where I’m Going, 1945. Headstrong woman goes to Scotland to marry a millionaire, but is stranded with the locals & reconsiders her priorities. Another lovely & heartfelt Powell & Pressburger, gorgeous with a whiff of mysticism. Plus a completely hidden amazing special effect!

#NGVI French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A chocolate box of delights, as always slightly exhausting, but buoyed by the quality and tempered by no-nonsense excellence among the prettiness. 2/2

#NGVI French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A spectacular final room of Monets proceeded by a chocolate box of delights, as always slightly exhausting, but buoyed by the quality and tempered by no-nonsense excellence among the prettiness. 1/2

#NGVI French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. To display the absolute treasure trove of C19th paintings the NGV had created an impressive series of ‘French’ interiors, though fortunately they couldn’t upstage the art!

The party that promised "free speech on campus" has made sure there can be no free speech on campuses.

#YouTube Savageland, 2015. No-budget mockumentary: on the US-Mexican border something terrible happens; an illegal worker survives & is arrested for mass murder, but his photos imply something ghastly & unbelievable. Very well done balancing of racial satire with horror but outstays its first 40mins

Extremely cute pot at the #RMIT Ceramics Club Market Day - sorry but I didn’t record the maker - but it’s a bit like Seamus Mullen’s works in Sydney.

#mubi Atlantiques, 2009. Later made into a mysterious, atmospheric feature film, this short has some striking images and an oblique, implied tale of ocean escape, death and return.

#SBSOnDemand A Canterbury Tale, 1944. Enchanting Powell & Pressburger fable: 3 troubled wartime travellers arrive in a town unusually attuned to history, where the past is alive in the present; as they travel to Canterbury, minor miracles occur. A jump-cut at the beginning predates 2001 by 24 yrs

Adulting at work.

#melbournelife signs of spring: flowers on the balcony zombie plant; daffodils in the #FitzroyGardens; flowering tree in the #TreasuryGardens.