All The Beauty And The Bloodshed (2023) - Movie Review

I fractured my arm earlier this year. It was the first broken bone I’d had since high school, and while it wasn’t as bizarrely timed as those particular incidents (first ever broken bone was on my first day of Year 7, and the second and third happened a year later almost to the day), there was still some weirdness to it since it involved a literal legs-out-from-under-me pratfall in public due to a slippery floor. Even on accident, I just can’t help but make a public spectacle of myself.

At any rate, I went to the hospital to get it checked out, they confirmed it was indeed fractured… and then I got prescribed Oxycodone (or OxyContin, as it's more widely known) to deal with the pain. I usually don’t even bother with pain meds (and this isn’t some macho ‘I feel no pain’ nonsense talking; I just don’t really notice if they’re working or not), but since that first night after the break had me in utter sleepless agony, I figured it was worth trying. The main effect I remember it having, aside from the dulling of the pain as it should’ve done, was this woozy, drowsy sensation that lasted for a good few hours. It was… nice. Pleasant.

What wasn’t so pleasant was the isolation of being stuck inside, in pain, and feeling generally useless because I wasn’t able to get household chores done. Not to get too into it, but had I not accidentally thrown out that very Oxy prescription at one point, that isolation might have led me to do something very stupid. As I got into with Talk To Me, I have something of an addictive personality, along with hedonistic tendencies, and while I haven’t tried to get any more Oxy since then (and likely never will), there’s still a part of me that wonders what might’ve happened had I not thrown out that bottle. Would I still be taking it now? How close would I get to becoming part of that terrifying statistic?

Poker Face (2022) - Movie Review

I picked this film purely for nostalgic reasons, and I don’t mean that in a fond way. Russell Crowe’s directorial debut, The Water Diviner, was one of the first movies I ever reviewed on here way back in December of 2014. That was back when I was still heavily in the phase of obsessing over people who talked about movies, as opposed to obsessing over the movies themselves, and I still had a lot of growing up to do as a writer and just as a person in general. Chances are there are quite a few films from back then that I’d likely have a different take on if I were to write about them today (hell, that has definitely been the case for a few of them, like The Babadook), but Crowe’s first attempt as a director has never struck me as one of those potential examples. So, let’s see how he goes at his second attempt in the chair, and him now writing the script as well.

The Witch Of Kings Cross (2021) - Movie Review

Time for a bit of local colour. This is an Aussie documentary by Sonia Bible about Rosaleen Norton, an artist and provocateur whom the media had dubbed ‘The Witch Of Kings Cross’. Kings Cross itself is quite an infamous stretch of the Sydney landscape, so it really says something when Norton’s exploits were enough for that kind of honorific. And as someone who knew sweet F.A. about her going into this, I found myself fascinated by what this doco had to offer.