The grim reality of filmmaking in Australia: the glam of Hollywood it is not

7 April 2025

Tangentially related to last Thursday’s post… Australian actor and filmmaker Matthew Holmes (The Biscuit Effect, Twin Rivers, The Legend of Ben Hall, and The Cost), speaks out in an open letter about the lamentable state of the Australian film industry:

All my films have won awards at film festivals and received fair to excellent critical praise. They have been sold and distributed worldwide to Showtime, HBO, Stan, Prime Video, Apple TV+, SBS, Vudu, Tubi, Peacock, 9GEM, and Foxtel and they’ve been released on DVD and Blu-Ray. Yet, the financial return I’ve seen personally from all four films combined would barely amount to $6,000.

Certainly there are successful, well-off, Australian filmmakers.

Yet it is defies belief that a director like Holmes, who’s made a number of award winning, and well received features, is in the predicament he finds himself in. Holmes isn’t alone. Other Australian directors, with quality work to their names, struggle to obtain funding, while other, far inferior offerings (names not being named) get the green light.

We Are the Stars, Gina Chick, tops 2025 Dymocks Top 101 Book poll

7 April 2025

We Are the Stars, by Australian author Gina Chick, has claimed the number one spot in the 2025 Dymocks Top 101 Books poll. We Are the Stars also enjoys the distinction of being the first work of non-fiction to top the the list in almost twenty years.

Notable fiction inclusions (being titles I’ve also read) in this year’s Top 101 include Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

Every year, customers of the Australian bookseller vote to determine their favourite titles of the previous twelve months.

Meta using the work of Australian authors to train AI platforms

7 April 2025

Two years ago it was ChatGPT being trained with books written by Australian authors, without their knowledge or permission. Now Facebook owner Meta is doing the same thing: using the works of local writers without permission or royalty.

A number of Australian authors, including Sophie Cunningham, Hannah Kent, Tim Winton, Helen Garner, and Alexis Wright, using a tool developed by The Atlantic, have found their work has been added to LibGen, a database Meta is using to “train” its generative AI platform.

The company claims their use of the novels constitutes fair use, as, apparently, only “limited” amounts of copyright material is being used.

If the Meta AI technology in question is what I saw on Instagram a day or two ago, on the search tab, then it’s not much to write home about. I typed my name in to see what would happen, something that appeared to stump the AI platform.

Instead of saying something about me, someone’s who been online here for over twenty-five years — how could Meta’s AI technology possibly not know about that? — it returned a spiel about an English football player called Frank, who has the same surname as I do.

If the writing of some of Australia’s best authors can’t help the technology figure out what day of the week it is, just how useful is this AI platform going to be?

Cinemas are just so twentieth century

3 April 2025

Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, says cinemas are dead. There’s a bold call. Certainly it can be argued there is no need for cinemas any more. No one needs to go to a cinema to see a movie nowadays. They can do that from the comfort of their own home.

Despite the ease and convenience of watching films at home, negating the need for the middle-person that is a movie theatre, I think cinemas will be with us for a while yet. Going to the movies is a social and entertainment experience. A night on the town, sort of thing. Patronage might be down, and we might see some closures, but I doubt cinemas will go away completely.

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film, movies, trends

The fifty best Microsoft products? This is not an April fool

3 April 2025

I wondered if this was an April’s fool joke. A list of the fifty best things Microsoft (MS) ever made, compiled by The Verge.

Among inclusions is Clippy, a well intentioned though sometimes annoying paperclip-like assistant, that shipped with Office 97. There’s also Slate Magazine, originally a MS publication. Solitaire is an obvious highlight. But no mention of NotePad. Or Windows NT4? This has to be an April fool’s prank.

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humour, technology

Don’t blame Apple for the failure of Apple Intelligence, blame AI

31 March 2025

Allison Morrow, writing for CNN:

Apple is not the laggard in AI. AI is the laggard in AI.

Here is a technology that’s still in the early days of development, has been hyped to the hilt, and heaped with lofty expectations. We’d call it vapour-ware if it didn’t actually exist. There’s some very smart people working at Apple, but it seems surprising they’d go promising the earth without better understanding what they were dealing with.

Some blogs are digital gardens, but not all of them

31 March 2025

Brisbane, Australia, based blogger Colin Morris, writing about website analogies:

My site isn’t a garden. I’ve seen garden sites, tended to grow and sprout and flower. Ordered in rows or disordered in natural growth.

disassociated is not a garden, a digital garden, either.

A digital garden could be seen as progression, an evolution even, of blogs and personal websites. Whereas content on blogs — old school blogs like this one — is usually considered complete when published, a digital garden’s content is often a work in progress. Articles, or posts, which start out as seedlings, are added to as research into their subject matter continues, or new information comes to light. It’s a sensible approach since knowledge is never complete.

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blogs, IndieWeb, self publishing

AI scraper bots like your website content, you should feel grateful

28 March 2025

Herman Martinus, creator of the Bear Blogging platform:

Bear is hit daily by bot networks requesting tens of thousands of pages in short time periods, and while I now have systems in place to prevent it actually taking down the server, when it started happening a few months ago it certainly had an impact on performance.

I check my website stats every morning, and high hopes that something I wrote might have gone viral, wanes almost immediately when I realise AI scraper bots have been at it again.

I considered trying to block the data scrapers, but read that such methods are often ignored. I suppose I should feel faltered that developers of AI bots think the content published here is worthy of training one of their LLMs. There seems little else I can really do.

Does the world no longer need white male authors?

28 March 2025

Jacob Savage, writing for Compact:

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize — with again, not a single straight white American millennial man.

Have white male authors been over presented for too long? Most likely. Other voices, especially from groups that have been pushed aside for too long, should be heard. But I’m not sure if it can be said that white male writers are intentionally being sidelined. We’re seeing more of the work of people we didn’t previously, and it turns out to be excellent.

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authors, books, literature, writing

The Inner West Film Fest part three, scary clowns, road trips, and other films

27 March 2025

The Inner West Film Fest returns for its third outing, between Wednesday 9 April to Thursday 17 April 2025. The inner west — for readers outside of Australia, and that’s a fair few you — is a group of suburbs to the west of downtown Sydney, not too close in, but not too far out either. Newtown, Leichhardt, Balmain, and Marrickville, are among the suburbs in Sydney’s inner west.

Flat Girls by Jirassaya Wongsutin, Who by Fire by Philippe Lesage, and The King Tide by Christian Sparkes, are but a few of the titles screening. Check out the festival trailer for the vibe.

The mysterious death of a young woman’s uncle triggers family turmoil in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, trailer, by Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni. The title screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2024, but isn’t in theatrical release in Australia, as far as I can see, so check the streaming services.

Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) a short by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is set in a repressive world where kissing is illegal. Don’t snigger: it might happen. Luàna Bajrami, who featured in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (presently stream-able on Kanopy, by the way), stars as Malaise. See the teaser here (Instagram link).

With or Without You, trailer, by Kelly Schilling, an Adelaide, Australia based filmmaker, is a road trip story about three people, at odds with each other, forced to drive together across Australia. With or Without You opens in local cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.

Why do clowns and horror stories go together so well? I have no idea. But if you like horror movies featuring sinister clowns, then Clown in a Cornfield, trailer, directed by Eli Craig, might be for you. Also opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 8 May 2025.

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