Phil Jeng Kane

Amy Schumer is the “it” comedian of 2015. Her Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer has become a huge hit with an audience ready for a different take on female friendships, sexual politics and middle-class self-entitlement. If you haven’t seen the series, ignore my non-comedic description (I studied political science in the 1980s) and catch it on your subscriber service. That over-used term “mete...

November 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland was two months ago.  Adolf Hitler was in Munich, about to speak to a large room filled with people celebrating the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Sixteen years previously, the Putsch was the failed coup that became Hitler’s first significant step in his rise to power. The 1939 speech was in the original beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller. Hidden in a pillar was ...

Like many people, I first heard about Amy Winehouse when her worldwide hit song Rehab swept across the globe, taking all before it. Suddenly it was everywhere and so was she. Soon, the story became “troubled star struggles with drugs”. Winehouse’s music was on high-rotation; she was winning awards and becoming a tabloid staple. Within an amazingly short period, she was both fiercely beloved by fan...

Perthians, who were quick on the draw, may have seen MARSHLAND (La Isla Minima) as part of the Spanish Film Festival back in March. If not, here’s your opportunity. The film is set in 1980 against civil unrest as a result of General Franco’s death, although he died several years previously. After 36 years of Francoist rule, Spain has voted to become a democracy. What this means is anyone’s g...

Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys is acknowledged as a bona fide musical genius and the man who changed the way modern popular music was created and recorded. In that productive era known as the 1960s, the work he did on the album Pet Sounds set the bar for bands like The Beatles. However, Wilson is also known for his problems with drugs, mental disorders and family discord. For many years he was tho...

If you know your movies you’ll be aware The Wrecking Crew was the name of a 1969 Dean Martin movie in which he played the spy Matt Helm for the third and final sequel of the series. Catch those flicks on one of those new-fangled digital channels some time, they’re stupidly entertaining. The Wrecking Crew is also the name that was coined for a group of session musicians working in Los Angeles in th...

Ren Xing (Yang Xinyi) is a young girl being brought up in contemporary Beijing. Her Mother (Li Xiaoran) and her Father (Qin Hao) are busy, thirty-somethings; business people who don’t give their daughter much attention. She seems content playing with her iPad and being looked after by the nanny. Mother and Father are always jetting away to places like Paris and Tokyo for business. Ren Xing’s grand...

Eleven-year-old Alexander lives in a blasted landscape of old, concrete buildings with a Soviet feel. There is the occasional person living in shacks or small shops, but this land feels depopulated and broken after some unknown disaster or perhaps war. It transpires that young Alexander lives in a small enclave with his extended family. This secure compound is filled with other children and their ...

Young Stet is a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  He has a junkie mother who is utterly no help to him. His only support is his teacher Ms. Steele (Debra Winger). She has identified him as a boy of extraordinary singing talent. She pulls strings and gets him an audition for the (fictional) National Boychoir Academy. Eventually Stet is accepted into the Academy, but only after his father Gera...

Ben Stiller knows how to play impotent rage. Many of his characters seem to be wired narcissists with anger management problems. In one way, the character of Josh Srebnik whom he plays in Noah Baumbach’s WHILE WE’RE YOUNG (2014) seems like an older and slightly wiser version of Mel Coplin, the adoptee searching for his biological parents in David O. Russell’s FLIRTING WITH DISASTER (1996). Picking...

It’s 1978. Cam Stuart (Mark Ruffalo) is a man from a well-to-do Boston family who should be able to walk into a highly paid job based on his connections. However, he is manic-depressive (or bi-polar) and he doesn’t always take his medication. This gives him a reputation for volatility that isolates him from his friends and family. Cam meets Maggie (Zoe Saldana) and they marry.  For a time the rela...