I don’t get out as much as is recommended by The Inner Funkster’s Inner Urban Guide so it was with great joy that on Wednesday July 13 at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar on Lygon Street that I quaffed a glass of excellent South Australian red wine going by the name of ‘Black Chook’ and then ambled across that memory-soaked avenue arm-in-arm with buddies Jai and Tolley, all of us rugged up in extremis against the 6.30pm whining cold, and ascended the stair to the purple brocade and ormolu gleaming that is Cinema Nova, an establishment at which one of us had worked for many years, another was yet in the midst of working for many years and the third had not worked at but seen many a film in partnership with either of the other of us, over many years.
We were there for the ‘Comics to Animation‘ film night, and what a cavalcade of eye joy greeted us as the films splashed, one upon the other, onto the screen: a hallucinogenic dream-vision from Clint Cure; various wigged-out and very funny pieces from Ben Hutchings (‘Successo, The Successful Barbarian’? Genius.); a bold and hilarious ficto-history of South Melbourne from Adam Ford; Kirrily Schell‘s wry and poetic ‘Toots’; the all-too-short 3D animation treatment of Dillon Naylor’s little girl vampire ‘Batrisha‘; hard devil-rockin’-music clips from Glenn Smith and Ross Tesoriero, all culminating in David Blumenstein‘s local classic, ‘Herman, The Legal Labrador‘. And this isn’t even an exhaustive list. There was, let me tell you, an Imperial Tonne (or is that ‘ton’?) of the Right Stuff at the Nova in Cinema Number Three that night, pictures dancing before us, giving us Delight.
Kudos also is due to Monsieur Blumenstein for his ‘curating’, or ‘sequencing’, or ‘getting the films into an order of some sort’, because it was put together like a good set of music – following rhythms, breaking them up, giving you a bit of a surprise from one piece to the next. The ebb and flow of it all was like a piece of meta-animation in its own right. It’s a damn fine showcase of what’s goin’ down on our streets, comics-into-animation-wise, and I hope it has a life beyond this screening.
Take it to the world, Dave!
Bernard Caleo 26 July 2005