Greetings, intrepid readers! I am very please to present to you the first in a series of science articles from my dear friend and colleague, Simon Hanslow. Simon is currently completing his second degree and is well on his way to becoming an authority on everything on, within and around Earth, with the notable exception of us pesky human beings. Simon has chosen to begin his contributions to Wonderbread with a somewhat ambitious take on what the next century may hold for the planet and those who inhabit it.
-Morgan
The next generation of modern society will be affected in serious ways by the much debated “climate crisis” that may soon arise on this planet. What would be the ramifications, if any, of said disasters for the modern culture?For instance an example used by Al Gore in his 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” describes a situation wherein the refugees arising from displacement globally could eventually number in the hundreds of millions (in many disaster scenarios, this number can climb to even a billion). In such a situation, would the traditional values of the societal zeitgeist survive? To present an alarmist view of the situation: what of the simple fact that if you look around right now, every single thing on your desk, table etc., comes either directly or indirectly from oil. Imagine a world without plastic, imagine a world where the simple luxuries we take for granted like abundant food and diverse entertainment are not present, where the shoes you wear belonged to your father because it’s difficult to make new ones where the comforts of western civilization become a hindrance rather than a boon. The outcomes of the next 100 years are no more or less extreme, complex or terrifying then the previous century, the difference is that that experience rarely carries and we must learn anew how to adapt to changing conditions in an unstable future.
Greetings, faithful readers! We’re very excited to announce a pre-release look at the exciting new Australian film, Cedar Boys, due for release on July 30.
The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama. Read the rest of this entry »
The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977},Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re pleased to present the work of guest writer Aiyesha McInerney: her submission on the life and times of Jean Renoir, Orson Welles and Renoir’s arguable master-stroke, 1939’s The Rules of the Game.
It would be genuinely remiss, at this late stage, to discount outright any of the films considered momentous by the foremost critical minds of the Western World, as subsequently critically or cinematically unimportant, in opposition to their accrued reputations. The re-evaluatory anti-establishment instincts that reside within most contentious critics have wrought their best and their worst on our modern understanding of the world that the cinema gifts us with, and yet, these films still stand tall.
That having been said, it would be equally negligent not to consider the possibility that many of the films elevated to the status of pantheon members are as celebrated on account of their oft-torturous histories as their content, which is not to their detriment, but ought be taken into consideration nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »
If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.
I’ve been noticing that we’ve been getting a lot of traffic from http://noahdavidsimon.blogspot.com to this article. If that’s how you came here I appriciate your interest, but you should know that I denounce that moron and everything he stands for. He wholesale re-imagined this piece and bent it to his own delusional, misogynist agenda. I hope that, should you read this article, you can see that it’s really got nothing to do with sexual politics of the ancient near east, rather the ties between the common mythic traditions of Mesopotamia and the early ancient Israelites. I hope you enjoy the piece and can appreciate my desire to not be affiliated with religious nut cases.
When we turn to significant landmarks in human cultural history it is often easier to acknowledge that a landmark occurred than it is to pin down the specific details of that landmark. It is an oft touted idiom that “history is written by the victor” and, even when we are not concerning ourselves with military victories, the same phenomenon of historical whitewashing occurs with cultural revolutions. While historians agree that the Western world is a predominantly democratic one, one would be hard pressed to find two who reached a consensus about the origins, birth and development of the concept. Did it begin with the Ancient Greek senate or was that such an alien form of democracy from that which we practice today that it doesn’t bare comparison? The same problems arise for any historian that attempts to trace the origins of the momentous cultural development that was Israelite Monotheism. This article will attempt to trace the roots of Monotheism in Ancient Israel and assess the speed with which it was adopted. Read the rest of this entry »
Author’s Note: This short review-cum-analytical-overview was penned several years ago, and having been touched up in places appears to pass muster sufficient to be posted to dear old Wonderbread, but remains above all a kind of brief conceptual summary of the issues at stake in post-colonial, globalised literature, the ever-evolving canon of which Massey’s The Floating Girl is certainly (if only tangentially) a part of. That said, the book functions, by and large, as a relatively simple and straight-forwardly told detective story and not as a self-consciously ‘literary’ text, and in its dedication to an unabashedly minimalist aesthetic such as befits serial fiction the book defeats any attempts at more in-depth treatises on its structure and contents through its sheer brevity. Perhaps more would be gleaned by analysing the series in its ten-book entirety, a task to which I am happily not equal. — Martin Kingsley
Homi K. Bhabha’s poststructural theory of cultural hybridity (specifically to do with hybridity in the wake of colonial incursion) highlights that, following the highly aggressive encounters between colonising cultures and those who inhabit the place to be colonised, a “third place” is created, inhabited by an entirely different people to either of those that contributed to its creation yet owing much to both. These “third places” are geographical as well as cultural hybrids, composed both of equal trades of social practice, ritual and theory as well as the products of nationalist resistance, and may tend to produce cultural hybrids to inhabit more easily these new and largely constructed places. Read the rest of this entry »
Denying that the period retrospectively known as the New Hollywood (often bookmarked for the sake of conceptual bookkeeping with the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde [1967]) produced some of the greatest American films of all time is the worst kind of anathema to most students of the silver screen, and for good reason. For a brief, shining moment, it was possible to be both an artist (an artiste, in fact, or even an auteur if it so pleased you to be) whose work was celebrated in locally circulated underground film journals and, simultaneously, a commercially successful director who was, metaphorically, invited to all the best parties, and under these conditions young, ambitious directors could genuinely thrive. Read the rest of this entry »
Cumulatively, the period that began in the late 1940s and proceeded all throughout the ’50s and ’60s was one of unprecedented legal, industrial, ideological, methodological and artistic upheaval for the movie-making industry in the United States. Not since the very dawn of industrialized movie making and the subsequent birth of the major studios (RKO, Universal, Warner Brothers, United Artists and so on) had so much suddenly seemed both so tangible and so possible to so many, particularly those who had previously been shut out of the business by the big hitters. Kevin Heffernan, in his terrifyingly comprehensive article Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead (1968), describes the period as one “during which issues of audience, text, and industrial context intersected.” (p. 75)
The Paramount Decision (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 US 131) of 1948 played no small part in this aforementioned upheaval, as Bill Osgerby indicates at length in his article, Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, “Otherness,” and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie. Specifically, he writes that the Paramount Decision smashed the majors’ “‘vertical’ monopoly of distribution and exhibition” by ruling against “the major studios’ ownership of cinema chains” (p. 2). Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to what is, I hope, the first of many history articles on Wonderbread. In completing a double major in cinema and history I’ve learned many interesting things and would love to share some of them with you. Some of my fellow history students will also be contributing articles, so keep your eyes on the History category. I’d like to open with an article I wrote earlier this year for a class on Ancient Israel. It explores the similarities between the Ancient Israelite creation and flood stories and those of the Babylonians before them. Ultimately, we can see that there is common mythic tradition in the Ancient Near East.
-Morgan
When we examine the narrative and thematic structure of Genesis 1-2:4a we can see a structural and thematic core which appears to originate from a broad mythic tradition which existed in the Ancient Near East, long before the Israelites codified their scripture in writing. The central parallels exist in the Babylonian texts of the Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis epic. We can find elements of each of these ancient stories present in Genesis, however, it is the differences (rather than the similarities) in these narratives that reveals to us the details of the philosophy of the Iraelites which distinguished them from their contemporaries. It is worthwile, however, to consider the similarities because these provide us with useful information about the collective experience of life in the Ancient Near East. Read the rest of this entry »
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{2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds. 
