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Maribel Verdu is stunningly believable as the opportunistic bitch step-mother with the apple
Blanca Nieves is a thorougly modern Snow White set in Spain a century ago and filmed in black and white without any speech. There are enough twists in the presentation of this story to provide an element of surprise and the film is so lushly made and the drama so finely presented that the audience remains captivate for nearly two hours.
The masterful use of bald melodrama, familiar tropes and a well known plot allows writer and director, Pablo Berger a free hand to stage the story using the best techiques of a century of film-making. The modern camera and depth of acting brings the black and white silent artform a century forward and the integration of a beautiful soundtrack with a silent film engages the senses of a modern audience.
The actors bring every element of the story to the attention of the audience as a series of unforgettable vignettes, each of them a powerful image and cinematic moment as well as an integral part of the story.
Setting the film set a century ago provides a classic fairy tale atmosphere while delivering a thoroughly recognisable world of media, glamour and false heroes. It connects the world of Gatsby with a more distant darker past.
The use of a century old film style to present the world of the time allows the use of high melodrama without being too cheesy and the twentieth century is much more like our own than the premedieval setting usually associated with the tales recorded by the brother’s Grimm.
It is hard to know what mainstream audiences will make of this, the Oscar winning silent black and white film the Singer did well on the arthouse circuit two years ago but was hardly a block buster. This film is less hollywood and is unlikely to make it onto the screens in most shopping malls.
It is also the third Snow White movie in as many years. We have had the sword and sorcery Snow White and the Huntsman starring Kristen Stewart in Joan of Arc armour closely followed by the would be post-modern comedy, Mirror Mirror starring Julia Roberts as the wicked queen. They each sat firmly within their genre and barely broke the surface of the regular flow of film that washes across our screens.
I will mark Blanca Nieves down as being something that little bit extra, it would easily make my top ten for 2013, but I will not be recommending it around the water cooler at work. I suspect it is just one step too far for the suburban cineplex.
The CSIRO’s Amalie Wright reimagines the urban park
Future Park: Imagining Tomorrow’s Urban Park is a new book by Brisbane-based landscape architect Amalie Wright.
Her book deals with the challenge we face of living in cities – places where over half the world’s population now live.
“My aim was to demonstrate how shifting populations require a lot from the urban spaces of our cities and how essential it is to re-imagine them accordingly,” Ms Wright said.
Her book also examines spaces that have often been officially off-limits, so that we might picnic next to a sewage plant or enjoy the benefits of temporary pop-up city parks.
Through art, politics and engineering innovation, “Future Park” includes surprising stories of the economic, social and environmental benefits of parks, told with insight and humour, making the subject accessible to anyone.
Ms Wright challenges us all to stay involved, asking readers to not just use and enjoy their local parks, but be part of the remarkable transformation occurring around what a park can and should be.
“Whether as citizens, policy makers or designers, we all can play a role in making the most of our parks,” she said.
The first public parks were created on urban ‘greenfields’. Once these designated sites had been used, cities looked towards post-industrial sites, and built parks in places that had suffered from environmental degradation, neglect, abandonment and conflict. With finite stocks of urban post-industrial land now also approaching exhaustion, more ways of making parks are required to create inclusive, accessible and resilient urban places.
Future Park invites Australian built environment professionals and policymakers to consider the future of parks in our cities. Including spectacular images of public spaces throughout the world, the book describes the economic, social and environmental benefits of urban parks, and then outlines the threats and challenges facing cities and communities in an age when more than half the world’s population are urban dwellers. Future Parkintroduces the need to embrace new public park thinking to ensure that benefits continue to be realised.
John and two Ians at the LinkedIn session hosted by Kenmore Chamber of Commerce
Described by some as “facebook with a tie”, Linked In is social media for business. It is flavour of the month in Brisbane this month, with Kenmore & District Chamber of Commerce and Cooper Networking both holding sessions with this as the major topic.
This follows the emphasis on social media marketing at the Small Business Conference on July 25 in Southbank. See related story http://westender.com.au/mobile-media-future/
At its core of LinkedIn is a map of the connections between people, which offers a bit more sophistication than the single category of ‘friends’ that underpins facebook.
LinkedIn adds sophisticated Resume functions to this, reminiscent of most job finding networks and then adds a layer of social media that allow you to post articles, comments and thoughts to your profile, business page, or groups that you belong to.
Today at the Kenmore & District Chamber of Commerce, members Ian Reynolds and John Belchamber presented tips for building your business with LinkedIn.
During the interactive session they provided 7 ‘Must Do’ Tips For Building Your LinkedIn Profile:
Update Your Profile: make sure it tells people why they should do business with you with text, images, videos that tell your story for you;
Update Your Employees’ Profiles: people will look at their profiles when they’re researching your business. Make sure that they’re representing you well;
Start A Business Page: add your products, services, video and special offers and then spread the word to get people following your business;
Connect With The Right People: work out who you want to talk to, connect with them and then communicate with them;
Start And/Or Join Groups: join the groups where your prospects are active and/or that are related to what you do. Don’t spam groups with your content. Start business related conversations that add value to other members;
Become A Person Of Influence: post useful content using the 80/20 rule (i.e.only 20% about what you sell) and ask/answer questions to get yourself known as a person that knows their stuff
Start And/Or Join Groups: join the groups where your prospects are active and/or that are related to what you do. Don’t spam groups with your content. Start business related conversations that add value to other members
The session generated vigorous discussion, questions and advice from people with the full range of experience. Among some of the more controversial topics was the discussion around employees who build contacts with customers through Linked In and then take them when they move on.
Many companies are now writing into employment contracts that LinkedIn connections are part of the intellectual property developed while working for a company that belong to the company upon termination of the contract.
As if the concept itself is not controversial enough, the discussion about how this might be enforced is a minefield for both employers and employees.
The CCIQ strategic plan will roll the brand out into the suburbs
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland, QICC, is working with local chambers of Commerce seeking accreditation to deepen its reach into local communities.
According to the QICC, the top two purposes of this program are to
reposition CCIQ as a vibrant and vital organisation by aggressively promoting and reinforcing it with all stakeholders, and
Introduce a compelling regional chamber value proposition that will see a consistent brand and position adopted across Queensland
For local chambers this means significantly better access to CCIQ resources, participation in CCIQ programs and, hopefully, better access to the corridors of power.
The Brisbane West Chamber of Commerce and Kenmore & District Chamber of Commerce are in the process of dissolving their current structure to reform as CCIQ – Brisbane West. The Brisbane West membership has already voted to proceed with the merger and the Kenmore group formally announced plans and a special general meeting for November 17th to vote on the issue.
Businesses in 4101 are generally covered by Business South Bank, West End Traders Association, the South West Chamber of Commerce or a combination of those groups. An overview of the local chambers with links to their websites is provided on this site.
Jo Bragg (l) and Michelle Maloney (r) of the Environmental Defender’s Office flank Andrew Paterson of Quantum Breakthrough.
Campbell Newman claims to be reluctantly in his suppot for his Attorney General’s current attack on the fundamental principles of law, but the raft of legislative change being rammed through parliament is better described as enthusiastic.
Solicitors from the West-End based Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) crossed the river last night to bring the Sustainable Engineers chapter of Engineers Australia in Spring Hill up to date on the implications of the unwinding of thirty years law in the so called reduction in “green tape”.
EDO chairwoman Michelle Malone addressed the incredible paradigm shifts in fundamental legal principles that are taking place as grass roots movements form mechanisms to overcome the global attack on the environmental protection laws.
Senior solicitor Jo Bragg focused on the harsh reality of the incredible roll back of environmental protection that is currently taking place in Queensland.
Despite their regular work as environmental engineers and passion for the environment, many of the engineers in attendance had no idea of the scale of the legal battles taking place in and about the legal framework.
The recent Westender article http://westender.com.au/coal-water-battle-comes-to-west-end/ about the Alpha Coal court case that pits a community group against the might of Hancock Coal is one example of the Environmental Defender’s work and the problems we face.
That mine site will cover 65,000 hectares of the Galilee Basin (next to Clive Palmer’s China First coal mine) and the pits themselves will cover 20,000 hectares. Stradbroke Island is 17,000 hectares in size so we are talking about a series of holes in the ground larger than that enormous island.
The community group is opposing it on the ground that the mining company cannot dig a hole that size without impacting on the water table on which the local community depends (not to mention the environment that supports them and their livelihood.)
One of the changes which the Newman government is pushing through parliament right now is the removal of the rights of people and community groups to bring cases like this to court. What is not widely understood is that, generally speaking, people or community groups do not have the right to prosecute alleged criminals for breaches of the law. The EDO has fought hard to include such rights in recent environmental laws.
The Queensland Government is tearing up 13 pieces of environmental legislation and replacing the Sustainable Development Act with the Queensland Planning for Economic Development Act. This is one aspect of the government’s campaign against Green tape.
As part of these changes the minister for planning will have the final say on a whole range of rulings with the Environmental Protection Authority reduced to an advisory capacity.
Jo Bragg has clocked up an incredible 20 years at the Environmental Defender’s Office, and points out that limited as these laws have been, it is the hard work of thousands of volunteers in hundreds of community groups that have achieved those results.
“We simply need to ramp up the fight,” she said.
Michelle Maloney explains the unique role of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance
Michelle Maloney took a more philosophical approach explaining the underpinnings of the movements by local communities around the world to take the development of law into their own hands and reverse the onus of proof.
She fronts Earthlaws.org.au which highlights the efforts of CELDF in the USA and other groups around the world who are simply asserting their right to a healthy environment and are finding ways to challenge any organization that endangers that.
As many people have found out the hard way, the legal framework essentially protects property and the rights of property owners. Since corporations claimed the same rights as human individuals in the late nineteenth century (after a concerted campaign over many decades – well documented in Ted Nash’s Corporate Gangs of America) they have regularly asserted their right to trade without interference as protection from regulation that attempts to restrict their activity.
Underpinning these shifts in the legal focus is a philosophical movement that challenges the central role of humanity in most social, philosophical and religious frameworks. This is a view that underpins movements as diverse as Deep Ecology, Sea Shepherd and most indigenous cultures and differentiates them from our hierarchical, growth driven view of the world.
She referred to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, the agreement between the Crown and the Whanganui River in NZ and the recognition of the Rights of Nature in the 2008 constitution in Ecuador as outgrowths of this movement that are setting legal precedents.
Michelle Maloney’s Earth jurispudence slide
Michelle cited philosopher Thomas Berry as a major inspiration for many of the proponents of this movement. She recommends his book Great World as the easiest and most powerful introduction to this world view.
From a legal point of view the shift is from a anthropocentric view of the world to what is generally called earth jurisprudence. She has synthesized the major shifts into five categories.
Subject human laws to “higher” laws that refer to the source of our creation (science, religion, …)
Replace the notion of nature as a commodity with the idea that there is a community of interconnected subjects with legal rights. (legally a “subject” has the right to representation)
Give nature (animals, rivers, trees) similar rights to humans, and those currently claimed by corporations.
Replace pro-growth economic and political systems with those that recognise and respect natural limits.
Replace legal definitions that exclude (or dismiss) cultural diversity/indigenous values with a democracy that encourages diversity.
The range of reactions from the engineers present reflect the gulf between this view and the status quo, but also the power they have to generate enthusiasm and new ideas.
Dick Desert is smokin’ hot in front of the Desert Blues … a live and dirty backing for Vamp n BurnLola the Vamp will weave together a series of improvisations at Vamp and Burn in the Old Museum (pictured)
Vamp n Burn is coming to the Old Museum on Saturday 2nd of November after a successful first season at the Spiegeltent in Melbourne. It is a unique cabaret show where a bevy of local and interstate burlesque dancers improvise to the live blues of Desert Blues Cartel.
Desert Blues Cartel will perform their dirty blues, setting the scene for host Lola the Vamp, and some of Australia’s finest burleque performers who will improvise over the New Orleans style blues. All this and more at 8pm Saturday 2nd November at the Old Museum.
