THE STARS

Sydney, trad pubs, wind (plus a MIFF missed connection)

★★★★★ Sydney

There’s a city around one hour north of Melbourne, via air travel, that is one of our nation’s best kept secrets. We recently spent a weekend in this up-and-coming metropolitan region after a friend told us about its beautiful beaches and year-round clement weather. We were pleasantly surprised to find that it actually had a lot more to offer than midwinter swims and sunbaking! For example, there is a new Metro system linking the vibrant Western suburbs to the city’s oddly desolate CBD (hopefully this will enliven it). There were a few decent bars open past 9pm, and live music in one of them! Best of all, we purchased, from a kindly tobacco vendor, a packet of fine imported cigarettes for only $12.50! And not a fire bomb in sight…yet. Beyond the stunning veneer, we could intuit some resurgent energy amongst the tanned and toned local population, as if they were emerging from some tyrannical dark age. Anyway, if you haven’t heard of it, we recommend you check out Sydney for yourself. There are a surprising number of affordable flights out there. We think it has the potential to become one of Australia’s great cities. 

★★★★ MIFF 

Eschewing the “Sydney at home” sunshine we’ve been having lately, we opted to spend this fleetingly beautiful August inside dark rooms watching movies. As usual with MIFF, the best approach was to go for films that won’t get a Nova screening. That meant no Cuckoo, I Saw The TV Glow, or Good One, and instead a dozen or so restored, grainy, and low budget numbers—the kinds of buff-magnet films where rumpling your bag of popcorn produces genuinely hate-filled “Shhh’s!” from the punters. Out of these we loved: Dead End (1977) by Parviz Sayyad, which follows a wistful teenage girl (and her vigorous, pinafore-wearing, futch-coded best friend) in Tehran as she pines after a sideburned older man who has taken to standing outside her window spying on her; the “structural tomfoolery” of middle-age lesbian NYC autofiction rom-com (say it again slowly; all components are important) MURDER and murder by Yvonne Rainer (1996); Hoard (2023), a deeply strange, visceral, and unsettling debut by British director, Luna Carmoon, who captures a new archetype: the grotty pixie dream girl; Dying (2024), Matthias Glasner's extremely long, extremely German drama that made us really understand that, to quote Tolstoy, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but also unhappy in a way that may happen to be closely connected to a Volkgeist (we're in no rush to book a dentist appointment). We also had a scintillating time discussing the minor works of Peter Weir at our movie speed-dating event, which resulted in several follow-up dates and…a missed connection: we are calling out for IZZY! “I would very happily crash my Argo onto her rock of Scylla if only I knew where to steer,” writes your would-be suitor. Please contact TPE for details.