ABC Unleashed: Whip it Good!

As the Spring Racing Carnival begins in earnest this weekend, Michael Hutak says new rules restricting how jockey's whip their horses are causing controversy.

Outside Melbourne Cup time, Australia's multi-billion dollar horse racing industry usually attracts the attention of the wider general public for all the wrong reasons: betting scams, race fixing, money laundering, "colourful" racing identities, horse doping and claims of animal cruelty are the typical narratives.
However, 2009 has been a year for rougher-than-usual hand-wringing for racing's bosses, faced with a public outcry over horse fatalities in jumps racing, the disturbing re-emergence of positive swabs for performance-enhancing drugs, cyber-attacks from the Russian mafia on Australia's booming online betting shops, and, taking centre stage at the moment, sweeping changes to the rules regarding the use of the whip in races.
The grand irony to all this negative publicity is that the racing game loves nothing more than a public row, and that's exactly what it's got following the introduction of the new whip regime at the start of the new season on August 1.
Racing NSW Chief Steward, Ray Murrihy, explained the new rules to the ABC: "Up to the last 200 metres they can only hit a horse 5 times. You can't lift your arm up above your head. (We have had certain jockeys who use to use the whip as if they were chopping a log with an axe.)
In the last 200m, you have to give the horse an opportunity to respond. You can't hit it every stride, but only every second stride, and on one occasion in the last 200m you can hit three strides in a row."
The cause célèbre came on August 22, when Sydney apprentice Daniel Ganderton was fined his riding fee and winning prizemoney percentage (about $4000 in all) and suspended for six race meetings after his winning the Group 3 Silver Shadow Stakes at Randwick on a three-year-old called Deer Valley.
Ganderton flouted the new restrictions, riding his mount with the whip right to the line, to win the race over another rival which was ridden within the new rules. Ganderton told stewards the horse wouldn't have won without the extra pressure, however, while the jockey copped the punishment, his mount kept the race, prompting calls of foul from punters and owners.
The Silver Shadow being a coveted event, the "winner" was now a much more valuable stud proposition, while the owners of the runner-up got zilch.
Even Murrihy admits that had the Silver Shadow been run on July 31, there would have been no fine, reprimand or suspension for Ganderton. "No, none at all. Wouldn't have contemplated it."
Jockeys, and high-profile owners and trainers have since gone ballistic, threatening what amounts to the turf equivalent of civil disobedience. "I'll be doing everything I can to win" said leading jockey Peter Robl. "And if that means hitting more than the allowable three strides in succession, then I'll be doing it. You won't find any other rider that won't do it in a million-dollar race when you are neck and neck with other horses."
Adman and racehorse owner, John Singleton, chimed in with advice to jockeys not to "worry about your fine, I'll pay you double the fee, just win the race". Big-time bookie, Robbie Waterhouse complained it was hitting his hip pocket: "Everyone is talking about not wanting to bet unless they see horses ridden out with the whip. I think it is starting to have an effect on betting turnover."
His wife, leading trainer Gai Waterhouse, dismissed the new restrictions as the unwanted handiwork of "do-gooders". Others bizarrely claimed it was all the fault of meddling "greenies".
While such carefree commentary is refreshing in an an age when sportspeople clog up the tube with banalities and platitudes, Robl claimed he'd been "misquoted" when pressed by stewards and said he would comply with the new rules.
The stewards then warned trainers and owners that it was an offence under the Australian Rules of Racing "if instructions are given or inducements are offered by any person that might result in a rider breaching the whip rules".
It may be an offence but enforcement is the issue. The jockeys also claim the new rules "are putting the health and safety of riders at risk", while they count how many times they've hit the horse instead of concentrating on riding naturally. Murrihy counters: "There's been markedly less interference in races. We haven't had a suspension for careless riding in the last 200m since the whip rule started."
It's not like the jockeys didn't know what was coming; the changes were announced in March after a wide ranging public inquiry conducted by the Australian Racing Board, taking submissions from both racing industry insiders, horse and animal welfare groups and the general public. They've had six months to prepare. Now they want the rules changed to allow them unfettered discretion to use the whip in the last 100 metres. The Australian Racing Board will hear their case next Thursday.
It's true that Sydney jockey Blake Shinn would have almost certainly lost last year's Melbourne Cup on Viewed had he ridden to the letter of the new rules.
By my count he hit the Bart Cummings-trained gelding 26 times in the last 200m. A rule punishing jockeys for excessive or improper use of the whip has been in place for more than two decades, however it was rarely enforced and never in living memory when horses are fighting out a tight finish.
"Historically, as long as horses were in contention for a placing, stewards were very reluctant to deem any riding excessive," admits Murrihy. "You could have had two horses fighting out a finish being hit 40 or 50 times with the whip. Now I don't recall ever in my career stewards penalising riders for being excessive when a placing was in contest. These new rules are designed to bring Australia in line with most other countries and with community standards that find it a bit abhorrent that a horse can be hit 40 or 50 times with the whip."
The new regime is more in line with South African rules which came into effect on January 1. In the UK, where animal welfare groups have been very successful in targeting abuses in horse racing, the whip is used very sparingly, and Murrihy says "it's fair to say now around the world the very best riders use a lot less whip".
Australian jockeys historically have an international reputation for being very tough on the animal and that strong whip riding was an accepted practice. Murrihy says people would be outraged today at the style of three-time Melbourne Cup winning jockey Jim Johnson, last week inducted into racing's Hall of Fame.
Australia now is only playing catch-up and many of today's best riders such as Kerrin McEvoy, Damien Oliver, Corey Brown, use much less whip to great effect. The modern jockey is more athletic, with more upper body strength and a propensity to put the whip away in the closing stages and really push their horses to the line.
It's generally accepted that the best "hands and heels" rider in the modern era was Peter Cook, who rode from the 60s to the 80s. Cook was a quiet, kind rider who could get the best out of a horse without the whip and who seldom resorted to it even in the tightest finish.
However punters, if one were to treat them as an undifferentiated mass, still want to see the jockey win at all costs, ideally with a whip in each hand with every last ounce extracted from the animal in a tight finish. To most, the whip is the accelerator.
Murrihy says ultimately it's counterproductive. "If you belt a horse hoping to instil a fear of the whip, chances are you'll make it into a dog. It won't respond to the whip, it gets sick of getting a hiding, it lays down and won't do its best."
The other innovation in force since August 1 is the exclusive use of a "less severe", padded whip which has a bark worse than its bite. Critics point out, if you're hitting horse with a whip and it supposedly doesn't hurt, then why restrict its use at all? Murrihy says the new whip is more accurately described as "a kinder whip, not that it doesn't hurt.
There's a general abhorrence to belting animals with anything, so if you simply say I'll give you a whip that doesn't hurt as much and you can hit it 40 times in the straight with this, I don't know that gets you over the welfare hurdle!"
Lou Reed used to sing about the whip "in love, not given lightly", and PETA believes the whip should be restricted to consenting adults only. However the whip is part and parcel of the relationship between human and the domesticated horse, a bond of master and slave stretching to pre-history.
In the equestrian world eventing and dressage, there are rules prohibiting and penalties applicable for excessive use of the whip. So it should stay in racing, and it will.
New rules in the racing game are always met with resistance by vested interests. When the administering of steroids for racehorses was banned in the early 1990s, many trainers claimed it would be the end of racing as we knew it. For some it nearly was: one leading Sydney trainer didn't train a winner for four months after the ban came into force.
In fact predictions of turf Armageddon have been the rote response when, for instance, whenever a "foreign" horse won the Melbourne Cup, when mobile phones were allowed on racecourses, when the TAB was first introduced and then when it was privatised, when the AJC Derby was moved from the Spring to the Autumn, when female jockeys were first given licences, when Robbie Waterhouse was banned over Fine Cotton and 17 years later when he was allowed back on the track, when cable TV broadcasts of the races began, when betting exchanges were allowed to operate, when night racing started - every change has been met with claims of falling sky.
All I can say is, as a journalist, it sure makes great copy.

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Race Invaders

Michael Hutak writes about our responses to the globalisation of that distinctively Australian event, the Melbourne Cup...

<Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal and spontaneous, not perfunctory. I can call to mind no specialised annual day in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a conflagration of conversation, and preparation, and anticipation and jubilation. No day save this one.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

When Mark Twain attended the Cup in 1895, Melbourne's population was barely a million and yet 10 per cent of the colony's population turned up that day to witness the event, a remarkable turnout. With Melbourne's population today roughly 3.5m, the Cup is only now again approaching the sort of mass appeal it enjoyed at the turn of the 20th century. Crowds of around 400,000 are expected over the four day carnival, precisely double the attendance in 1993 when Irish champion Vintage Crop became the first internationally-trained entry to win the race, heralding the advent of the Cup's "modern era", an era that coincides with the march of globalisation in trade and communications and in the horse racing business. The success of the event in recent years has been driven in part by the considerable public interest generated by the international contingent that hails typically from UK, Ireland, France and more recently Japan.

So it's Cup time again, and the international horses have arrived in numbers looking to win Australia's greatest horse race, this year worth a hefty 5.65 million Australian pesos. Eight internationals will start in the race and they make up seven of the top ten in the betting market, surprising considering for the visitors, it is no easy feat to win, with just two wins since Vintage Crop's (Media Puzzle in 2002 and Japan's Delta Blues in 2006). Add Australia's strict quarantine conditions to the rigours of travelling a horse across the other side of the world to race two miles, often in scorching heat, then for most the adventure ends up a folly costing at least $100,000.

Still, each year, as the first Tuesday in November doth approach, so crescendos the chorus of whining from local trainers and owners who can barely contain their protectionist disgust at the perceived superiority of the international runners. This Spring His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, was the first to deflate the national ego two weeks back when his classy chestnut All The Good strode away with the Caulfield Cup. This cued locals to bemoan more pillaging of homeland's glory, but they neglected to mention the win was the Sheikh's first Group 1 win in Australia in more than a decade trying.

On cue, the tabloids have been cranking up the emotive language in a brew of envy, gall and indignation: "we" are at "the mercy of the raiders"; the "foreign invaders" are so good they have an unfair "stranglehold" on the Cup; there are "fears" this year that "foreign" jockeys will "blight" the race by engaging in team riding, an illegal practice. And the broadsheets have also got into the act: "Australian racing's defence of the Melbourne Cup from a European blitz took a battering," railed the Sydney Morning Herald when construction tycoon Lloyd Williams' 2007 Cup winner, Efficient, was scratched from this year's event during the week. The nation must be at risk when it's left to a former casino boss to "repel the European Invasion" and save the nation from turf capitulation and global embarrassment.

And then there's Bart. Winner of the race an extraordinary 11 times, every year the old marvel clambers up onto the soapbox to tell why the foreigners should stop coming. This year Cummings said it was a case of "spot the Aussie", prompting a good comeback from Ireland's Aiden O'Brien, Coolmore's private and the world's leading trainer who is here with Cup favorite Septimus and two other lesser lights. Asked why his horse, the highest-rated stayer in training, would win: "Septimus, when you ask him, he gives it all.''

The visitors aren't averse to making their own threats, with UK jockey John Egan facing charges for calling local officials "tinpot Hitlers"! On Sunday Tom Magnier, son of Coolmore tycoon John Magnier, threatened to scratch Septimus, making the extraordinary claim that the Flemington track was "not safe, and we'd rather take the horse home than race in the cup... if the track isn't watered." The visitors always call for the track to be watered to improve the chances of European horses which prefer soft racing surfaces. Officials usually oblige, prompting more push back from the locals that the internationals are getting preferred treatment.

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Twain's comment above illustrates the extraordinary popularity the Cup and horse racing held in earlier times in this country. It's not unreasonable to claim that Australians have historically displayed an obsession with the turf not seen among any other people, not even the country which was its cradle: mother England. In fact the thoroughbred is a man-made, in-bred genetic freak which to be eligible to race must be able to trace its family tree back to just three foundation Arabian stallions imported to England in the 18th century. The bluebloods of the turf hold a flattering mirror to the British aristocracy, to which it is its plaything. Breeding is everything, old chap, and the notion that we can breed "the best" with "the best" to realise the equine equivalent of a monarch, the champion racehorse, is the kind of ideology that can launch both a global empire and beget generation upon generation of upper-class twits. With inherited wealth to spare, the poms take their time with their horses, racing them sparingly while young, breeding them to stay the "classic" distance of a mile and half and beyond.

In Australia, it's different. Racing has been a working class and mass entertainment, and we often hear that in Australia the racetrack is the great leveler, where both toff and tradesman are equal before the judge's decision. (Tell that to the 'greencoat' standing guard at the Members' Enclosure gate.) Since the Cold War, we have bred for speed, not stamina, and for a quick return. We buy them as yearlings and race them into the ground at two and three, and then pass them off like a sub-prime loan to the nearest sucker at the first hint of unsoundness. Two year olds scampering with all the precocity of a Chinese gymnast are our go, pounding their baby legs over sprint courses for big prizemoney in races like Sydney's Golden Slipper. As for the Melbourne Cup, its two mile marathon distance has always been an anomaly, and before the era of the "overseas raiders", local trainers used to greet the "Kiwi invasion" of stayers in the English mould with a similar derision.

The Antipodean breed, while technically a thoroughbred, has historically not run thick with the bluest blood of the most influential UK and continental sirelines. Not until the 1990s, when the bloodstock industry went through a period of consolidation and globalisation which has seen the emergence of two dominant global breeding and racing operations: Ireland's Coolmore Stud and Dubai's Darley, owned by Shiekh Mohammed. Following the Shiekh's $400m purchase earlier this year of the country's biggest stable, Woodlands Stud, the two rivals have each established large Australian operations. Coolmore's billionaire owners race Cup favourite Septimus while the Sheikh's big hope, All the Good has been scratched. The racing game as it turns out is a fount of tolerance for the big spending Emir who, along with his brother Sheikh Hamdan build a global empire after rescuing the British racing industry from terminal decline when the local aristocracy were going through a tough patch in the 1970s.

With 24/7 coverage online and on cable TV, racing fans now follow the best horses on a global racing calendar: the Dubai World Cup in May, the Kentucky Derby and Royal Ascot in the Northern Summer, the Arc de Triomphe in October, the US Breeders Cup and the Melbourne Cup in November and the Japan Cup and Hong Kong Internationals in December. The ascension of the Melbourne Cup to the attention of this exalted audience has been due in no small measure to the trailblazing efforts of Weld and Vintage Crop and those that have since made the journey in numbers with, it must be said, not much success.

However the Cup going global seems to have ruptured the proud maelstrom of the Australian turf and the role a horse race plays in the national narrative. In a globalised world dominated by the large developed and emerging economies, "little Australia" must punch above its weight to stay in the game. But faced with international competition in the Melbourne Cup, the locals view themselves as wanting, their bubble of self-congratulation lanced like a boil full of hubris. For the rest of the year they remain convinced that our racing and horses are the best in the world. Except, when one looks at the results of the international horses, three cup wins in two decades, their dominance is also a myth. The key to this conundrum? Anthropomorphism. Thoroughbreds do not vote and are not citizens. Horses are stateless, have no truck with nationalism, couldn't care less about good breeding and have no idea what a cultural cringe is. They win because of talent and circumstance, not what it says on their trainer's passport.

Hutak's Cup tips: New Zealand four year old Nom du Jeu has a regal carriage, a powerful finish, deep wells of stamina and class to spare. Dermot Weld is back again with the classy mare Profound Beauty. With a postage stamp weight of 51.5kgs, and Glen Boss wasting to make the ride, the smart money is on. Melbourne grey Barbaricus has been the local revelation of the Spring. Will race handy and fight on to the finish.
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The Meltdown Cup

When John Howard dedicated his government to transforming Australia into the world's greatest share-owning democracy, the sly fox was tapping into that kink in the national identity that we love to gamble. That the nation "stops" for the Melbourne Cup is often cited as key evidence in this claim. But if the share market maintains its current trajectory, Cup Day may roll around to find a nation already dead in its tracks.

While the Spring racing hots up with tomorrow's star-studded Caulfield Guineas meeting, several big corporate sponsors of racing have announced they are are pulling their heads in at this year's Melbourne Cup carnival, courtesy of the global financial crisis. Investment banks are dropping out, stockbroking firms are winding back, headline sponsors are cutting costs posing the proposition that this year's Cup may see less gross fare for the ruling class and more fanfare for the common man. A paradigm shift from the pusillanimous to the parsimonious.

Being a long-time racing journalist, turf student, and devotee of the thoroughbred, I must admit to greeting this development with more than a degree of delight and a shiver of schadenfreude. For this turf traditionalist, the collapse of global capitalism is a small price to pay if it can make the big end of town less conspicuous at the track, and restore the focus back onto the horses, the hoops and their ding-dong battles for Group 1 glory down the Flemington straight. (Note to the uninitiated: racing aficionados adore alliteration, hyperbole, jargon and cliché.)

Once upon a Spring, it was the horses that were the stars, but since the mid-1990s attention on the nags has steadily diminished and the Cup carnival swung fully into the posture of the "Major Event", replete with corporate marquees, private boxes, hospitality on steroids, all-pervasive PR, marketing gone mad, and world's best practice gladhanding and networking.

Across the racecourse the strategy has worked: the Melbourne Cup Carnival is Australia's largest spectator event attracting well over 400,000 over its four days. Inside the so-called Birdcage is Australia's pre-eminent Major Event corporate location: a sprawling rabbit warren of elegant impermanence, corporate tents filled with celebrities major and minor, a roll call of inherited wealth, trust-fund kids, captains of industry, scions of the judiciary, society matrons, dubious divas, ladies that launch, fund managers, IP lawyers, media moguls, paperback writers, ad-men, minions of marketing, hangers-on, free-loaders... all guzzling as much free champagne and gorging as much gourmet finger food as is inhumanly possible.

"Major events are not fun, they're exhausting," says a media industry CEO who last year scored a coveted invite to the Birdcage's most sought after venue, the Emirates tent, where he witnessed the paparazzi go berserk over the fashionista face-off between Jennifer Hawkins (Myer) and Megan Gale (David Jones) against a backdrop of bubbling Venetian fountains inside the marquee. This is not as enticing as sounds. "You may be rubbing elbows with the elite of the elite, but you're still standing in queues for dining tables, in the company of people you wouldn't normally spend time with, overindulging in ways you know you will regret the next morning."

As corporate muscle displaces tradition, many long-term members of the Victoria Racing Club feel diminished when they previously felt exalted. There was a time when the Members Enclosure was the elite domain; today it's a kind of purgatory of privilege: still too exclusive for the public enclosure, not yet accepted into the Birdcage's cosseted inner sanctums. Maybe the pendulum will swing back a little for the old-world hoi polloi this year as hard times bring a reality check to the masters of the universe. Heaven knows they deserve a break.

Outside in the cheap seats, for the great plethora of punters who cram into Flemington's public areas over the carnival, this is all academic. Such is its scale, the crowd today is its own story and the disconnect with the races, while subtle, is certainly palpable: horses parade, races are run, winners return to scale, race after race but people are having too much fun to pay too much attention.

Part of racing's mythology is that Phar Lap's 1930 Melbourne Cup win gave heart and hope to an Australian public dispirited by the Great Depression. However in both the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, racing in general suffered from a reduction in gambling, resulting in reduced prizemoney, racetrack closures and a contraction in the breeding industry. Having just got over last year's equine influenza outbreak, the oulook is bleak.

With levels of personal debt in Australia today reportedly twice that during the Great Depression, and no nag the calibre of Phar Lap set to line up in this year's event, it seems like no one in their right mind should be gambling this Cup Day. And yet many will do just that. Collectively we will splurge like a nation plea bargaining temporary insanity, to the tune of at least $125m. Just whack it on the national plastic. For this one day of the year, we will splurge and gorge and guzzle - and when we wake up the following morning, head hurting, wallet empty, we will have little option but to say to ourselves: you can't complain Australia, you once had had it, and had it good.



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First published online at ABC Unleashed

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Market penetration

A LONG time ago, in a land far away, The Blob was one of my favourite movies. Apparently they're doing a remake. That's about all I can be bothered finding out about the remake of the The Blob at this stage.

If you want to know more go and look it up yourself. There are stacks of online resources where you can get all the information you could ever possibly want - and never possibly need - about The Blob and the remake of The Blob. All the goss, all the speculation, all the dross that's unfit to print, but that's so easy and painless to publish online.

And herein lies a problem. The web is awash with too much publicity for nothing worth promoting. Too much spin masquerading as informed opinion. Today movie marketing and film culture are interchangeable, indistinguishable. It is almost exclusively a commercialised sphere - not exactly news in an era of unprecedented penetration of the market into everyday life, almost everywhere on Earth.

American cinema, in particular, is looking wan and tired as its big screen epics heave and clumber round the cineplexes, creating carefully staged ripples of soon-to-be-forgotten pyrotechnic spectacle. As a mass cultural phenomenon, The Movie seems to be losing its conceptual lustre before our very eyes, fragmenting into re-usable chunks of corporate output, part of a matrix of cultural products that includes games, DVDs, marketing and merchandise. Profits are up, gravitas is down.

The surging games industry, now a bigger entertainment "sector" in raw market terms, is itself driving much movie content, while throwing up a greater challenge to the global cultural hegemony of "Hollywood" than TV ever did in the '60s. TV's challenge spurred a financial crisis in the movie business. Today its challenge is one of relevance, supercession and obsolescence. If Hollywood doesn't speak for America Inc. or serve the nation as Washington's mouthpiece anymore, who does it speak for? Moreover, who cares?

The US movie business is geared to serving shareholders and corporate masters over audiences. In fact they're in the business of creating audiences; it's the audience that's the product, not the movie; it's the audience that delivers the profit, not the movie. Most movies are just steaming piles of creative and intellectual waste made only to deliver us - and we're just here to be seduced then abandoned (A.K.A. entertained). This is rarely a satisfactory contract, and irreparable disconnect is imminent, if not already upon us. Even in the face of unprecedented competition for entertainment dollar, the movie business appears on a mission to drive away its key profit driver - its audience - through sheer boredom and indifference.

In other words, enough words wasted on the remake of The Blob. I may catch it on cable in a year or two. Then I'll forget it immediately.

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Moulin Rouge Splits Genders

A new poll has found that Baz Lurhmann’s MOULIN ROUGE has sparked a rift between the sexes, with women and men split equally for or against the controversial ‘Hollywood on the Harbour’ production. The snap survey of close friends and associates, taken at the weekend, reveals that of those who had actually seen the movie, sisters universally saw Lurhmann as a girl’s best friend, while for the masculine gender, it’s a case of ‘no Can-Can do’, Baz-boy.

Women, without exception, said that they “loved” the film. Some reported “feelings of joy” upon exiting the cinema, others hailed it “a creative triumph.” One Bondi-based IT consultant, who can’t be identified, declared it “the chick flick for a digital generation”. Fellow Bondi resident, Suze, claimed the film’s emphasis on “decoration, singing and dancing, tragic fantasy, and cultivating community” all reflect largely, if not exclusively, “chick aspirations.”

“It’s about the triumph of fashion over formula, of largesse over logic,” said Suze, a media advisor for a public agency. “Watching it was like leafing through the pages of a beautiful magazine.” Jodi, a skincare consultant from Bondi Junction, agreed. “It’s primarily concerned with looking good – and you know I can appreciate that.” Her friend Rachel, a photographic agent from Darlinghurst, declared Rouge “a romp” with canny Scotsman Ewan Macgregor oozing the “it” factor.

“Ewan is so dreamy,” sighed Rachel, prompting a loud scoff from her husband, Andrew. “It’s greatest sin is that it’s just plain boring!” said the self-described “tech-wreck survivor”. Like all the men polled, Andrew rejected the film outright, branding it “rococoesque and shallow”. Geoff, a commercial photographer from Petersham, said he simply failed to suspend disbelief: “The few moments of exhilarating spectacle are dwarfed by a maudlin landscape of overwrought sentimentality."

Josie, who actually works in the film industry, told The Bulletin she copped the full brunt of the emerging gender split first hand. “I walked out calling it visionary and the boy I saw it with ridiculed me for the next two days. “But seriously, putting aside the hype, I think if this film had emerged out of nowhere we'd all be calling it visionary,” Josie added. “And for anyone who grew up in the 1980’s the soundtrack is just fantastic.”

“That’s the problem” countered Alister, a print manager from Summer Hill. "It’s just postmodern pap. It’s got nothing to do with the real, historical Moulin Rouge. There’s no real connection with Paris, or the French, or the Belle Epoque!

“And there’s no CAN-CAN! Lurhmann should hang his head in shame,” Alister exagerated.

The only odd woman out in the poll was Catherine, a TV writer from Surry Hills, who vowed to “never ever” see the film. She blamed the climate of conflicting word of mouth for her indifference.

“I’m getting on with life,” she said. “Barring acts of god, I shan’t be going.”

-MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in "The Bulletin"

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