GENEVIEVE PARLEY finds out how director KEVIN SMITH bounced back from disappointment to make COP OUT, his new buddy comedy starring Bruce Willis and 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan.

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SAMANTHA COLWELL tells ZENOBIA FROST what it’s like to talk about genitalia in front of hundreds of people.

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EMMA BELL speaks to SVEN SWENSON about his newest play THE BLITTERLING.

The black box plays host to black humour in a new play that kickstarts the indie theatre season at La Boite. Tragedy takes centre stage in Sven Swenson’s The Bitterling, and the prolific playwright this time offers audiences an unusual family reunion amidst Brisbane’s catastrophic 1974 floods. “It’s a story of reconnecting relationships,” Swenson says, “when three generations of one family are trapped in a house by the rising waters.” Consequently, “the flood becomes an additional character in the play.”

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ALASDAIR DUNCAN catches up with REBECCA SPARROW to talk about her latest book, a collection of motivation and inspiration for teenage readers called Find Your Tribe (And Nine Other Things I Wish I’d Known In High School).

Brisbane writer Rebecca Sparrow made her debut in 2003 with The Girl Most Likely, a tale of a former high achiever in the throes of a quarter-life crisis. Teenage audiences embraced the book and its heroine Rachel, and girls began emailing her in their droves, sharing their own experiences and, to her great surprise, asking for advice. Sparrow began to take on motivational speaking gigs, addressing high school students on the subjects of resilience, perseverance and self-esteem, but it took the birth of her own daughter, Ava, to make her realise her next great ambition – a frank, funny book of life advice aimed at teenage girls, the kind of thing she never had growing up.

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Film reviewer, TIM MILFULL munches on croissants and slurps excellent coffee as the 2010 ALLIANCE FRANÇAISE FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL rolls into town.

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Based in Portugal, married to Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox), and designer of all things treasured and unique? TESS CURRAN chats to the beautiful FERNANDA PEREIRA and discovers that having it all doesn’t mean you can’t still be really really nice...

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ZENOBIA FROST reviews CIRCA’s sell-out Brisbane show.

The Judith Wright Centre played host to Circa’s self-titled show on March 3^rd, which sold out in record time. The one-night-only performance is a ‘remix’ from favourite shows of the past – often acts I had once seen and was glad to revisit.

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Ready to take up residency at the Brisbane International Comedy Festival with her new show, A Rare Sight, Irish comedian MAEVE HIGGINS takes time out from disciplining her cat to chat with JACK LANGRIDGE.

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Gaming News

Your Face In Dead Space

Fans of Dead Space can get themselves digitally inserted in the sequel, although you might wind up a corpse if you do (in the game). All you have to do is come up with an inventive death sequence, which you can describe in words or pictures or by making a video, then put it up on www.deadspacegame.com/contest. The winners will get their kill and their mug into the finished game. Only over-18s can enter; see the website for more info.

Move It, Move It

Sony have unveiled the PlayStation 3’s new motion controller, which is called the Move. It’s tracked by the PlayStation Eye camera, rumbles and also seems to do everything a Wiimote with MotionPlus can do. Plus, it has a colour-changing sphere on the end. There’s a secondary controller as well with an analogue stick stuck on it, just like the Wii’s nunchuck. The real difference between this and Nintendo’s version will come with the games – over 20 games that use or at least support the Move will be coming out by the end of the financial year.

Ass. Creed in trouble

Ubisoft’s unpopular new anti-piracy measures – which require players of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 to be online to play and boot them off if disconnected from the Internet – have been put to the test and found wanting. Ubisoft’s servers were out of commission for six-and-a-half hours in a row, during which time many players weren’t able to play the games they’d paid for. The company is blaming the server problems on denial-of-service attacks.

Red Dress +1

Battlestar Galactica – the recent TV version, not the old school one – is being turned into an MMO by German company Bigpoint. Players will be able to take on the roles of cylon or human characters in the game, which promises to be a mix of “space combat, exploration, and mission-based gameplay”. The big news is twofold. One, it’s a webgame you’ll be able to play in your browser, even though it’s 3D. Two, it will exist for a limited time only, suggesting that the storyline will actually have an ending as opposed to the MMO standard where you just keep going until you get bored or the developers get sacked.

Acceptable In The ’80s

Microsoft are bringing out a new Lips game focussing on music from that blessed era known as thee 1980s. The announced song list includes such treats for your earbuds and vocal chords as David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Rick James’ Super Freak, Kim Wilde’s Kids In America, The Police’s Roxanne, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love and Toni Basil’s Mickey. Good luck hitting all those high notes.

In Brief

A new ad for Dead Or Alive: Paradise features a stereotypical gamer yawning and spanking a monkey. No, an actual toy monkey. At least there’s a degree of honesty about the game’s purpose in there.

A sequel to Scribblenauts (pictured) is due this year. Scribblenauts 2 will be able to recognise 10,000 more words than the original, including adjectives.

Game Review

HEAVY RAIN

Developer: Quantic Dream

Platform: PS3

Rating: MA

Genre: ‘Interactive drama’

Choose your own adventure

French developer Quantic Dream and the ambitious David Cage initially made their mark with a unique game called Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy in the US. It played as a cross between a movie and a point-and-click adventure game, only instead of pointing and clicking you performed actions based purely on context. Heavy Rain is not a sequel to Fahrenheit, but runs on a similar premise. Quantic Dream have themselves dubbed this genre hybrid ‘interactive drama’. In Heavy Rain you’ll take control of four main characters throughout the game, all of whom are searching for the Origami Killer, who drowns young boys in rainwater. There’s the depressed and disturbed Ethan Mars, whose son has seemingly been kidnapped by the Origami Killer, as well as enterprising journalist Madison Paige, private eye Scott Shelby and FBI agent Norman ‘Inspector Gadget’ Jayden.

The phrase ‘interactive movie’ has been bandied about in video games for some time, but Heavy Rain easily comes closest to accurately fitting that description. The action is propelled by the player in an almost directorial sense; the gameplay either takes the form of directly controlling a character while they hunt for clues or explore, or an action set-piece, which is essentially an extended quick-time event where you need to hit on-screen prompts. The fascinating thing about this game is that missing button prompts won’t cause you to fail or hit the game over screen, but does alter your actions and, in some cases, the course of the story. No matter what you do, and no matter how severe the consequences of your actions, the game marches ever onward to one of its multiple conclusions. Visually, Heavy Rain is spectacular, especially the rain itself, which is an intrinsic part of both the plot and aesthetic of the game. The highly expressive facial animations are quite incredible too, and the soundtrack memorable. Heavy Rain does have its issues, though. The dialogue is sometimes very wooden and stilted, and this is further exacerbated by the voice acting. Some of the characters are great, others are horrible. Many of the voice actors are French and accents sometimes filter through, shattering suspension of disbelief. There are also several fairly obvious plot holes. Irritating though these flaws are, there’s no doubt that Heavy Rain is a progressive, compelling experience that every gamer, or even non-gamer, should try at least once. 

****½          

TOASTFARMER

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A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DYING IN INDIA – J.M. Donellan

(Interactive Press)

An exhilarating, oft-bizarre journey through the land of many gods

An enigmatic creative personality, Brisbane-based Joshua Donellan’s work breathes exceptional talent and yells out for wide recognition. A Beginner’s Guide To Dying In India, the author’s second book after 2008’s self-published What Rhymes With Chaos?, is a story of a fictional character Levi Kent, a successful young man whose life literally comes crashing down one day, soon leading him to embark on an extended travel that eventually helps him make sense of it all.

Here’s how it starts: Levi is unceremoniously sacked from his lofty job under dubious circumstances; his house burns down; his girlfriend inexplicably joins a convent (or, in the author’s words, leaves him for a “bearded hobo who died two thousand years ago”). Soon afterwards – and again, completely out of the blue – he receives a phone call from his terminally ill older brother, who requests Levi flies to India for his funeral (later making Levi an offer he simply cannot refuse). Shell-shocked by his recent sufferings, Levi books a one-way ticket to Goa … and what follows is a singularly unbelievable adventure through the country of “one billion people, thirty million gods, far too many monkeys and not nearly enough sanitary bathrooms.” All sorts of strange characters pop up along the way, Levi’s ordeals gradually get hairier yet amongst it all, his droll sense of humour and willingness to face fate never leave him even in the most unlikely situations. Ultimately, he realises he’s on a soul-searching trip of a lifetime – the one with the pace and unpredictability of an Indian tuk-tuk driver. 

Imbued with a deep knowledge of the world’s second most-populated country and peppered with all sorts of musical and pop culture references, A Beginner’s Guide… is simply impossible to put down. Donellan’s contemporary reader-friendly, highly intelligent style and literary language mastery are a joy to savour while his revelatory opus also offers a fantastic insight into the Indian culture, pantheistic traditions and a myriad customs and things which, while seeming alien to most Westerners, make perfect sense when given a closer look. Snappy, colourful and heaps more exciting and spicy than butter chicken.

****½

DENIS SEMCHENKO

SPOOK COUNTRY – William Gibson 

(Putnam)

The godfather of cyberpunk finds mysteries in the present

Back in the early eighties, William Gibson became a cultural icon and tech-prophet after coining the term “cyberspace” and writing the seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Since then, perhaps reflecting the cumulative integration of technology and society, his novels have veered closer to present day and further into the mainstream. From the far-future world of Neuromancer, to near-future San Francisco in his Bridge trilogy, and most recently to the contemporary America of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. 

The main protagonist here is freelance journalist Hollis Henry, hired by Node magazine to write a story about an emerging art-form called “locative art”. The story also follows two other characters: Tito, member of a Cuban-Chinese crime family, and the drug-addled translator Milgrim. Unfortunately, they’re all a little too detached to form much connection with, and the plot, involving a missing shipping container, the CIA, and encrypted data smuggled in iPods, is intriguing, if a bit thin. 

While the characters and plot may be on the weak side, it’s Gibson’s knack for grounding his novels in the “now” through the use of cultural references and cutting-edge tech that really makes Spook Country shine. His technique of describing and cataloguing items of fashion, pop culture, and tech reveals just as much about the characters as it does about the post-9/11 world they inhabit. Gibson’s prose too, is the best it’s ever been, and makes this book a joy to read. This is Gibson’s most accessible novel to date, and worth a look even for those with zero interest in sci-fi or Gibson’s past glories.

***

STUART DUNSTAN

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