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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Metal Skin (1994)

Stars Aden Young, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Morice, Nadine Garner

Australian writer/director Geoffrey Wright's new film has been a long-time-coming and judging by it's savagery, he's had plenty on his mind. Like his promising 1992 debut Romper Stomper, it takes place on society's frayed edges, but where Romper's forthright engagement with racism struck a nerve, Metal Skin's confused and ugly vision of the world risks alienating audiences with its jaundiced world view.


Motorheads expecting "Days of Thunder Down Under" will be disappointed. The hotted up Chargers and GTR-XU1's career impressively around desolate streets but are secondary in screen-time to the main game: broken lives, doomed love, social disintegration. The kids are bad, their parents are mad, and everyone's one push away from the edge.

Set in the inner-urban wastelands of a bleaker-than-usual contemporary Melbourne, Metal Skin follows four troubled twenty-somethings as they walk the tightrope of love and fall off, one by one. There's lots of snogging and lots of sex, but all four are either unloved, unlovable or degrees of both.

Revhead misfit 'Psycho' Joey (Young) is in love with Roslyn (Garner), but she's in an destructive relationship with drag-racing anti-hero Dazey (Mendelsohn). Sevina (Morice), a delusional black magic devotee, in turn loves Dazey, who uses, then rejects her.

After an impressive first half spent chiselling these characters, building their connections and their world, Wright literally loses the plot, lets the whole shebang off the leash and the film spins out into a series of gory, ugly and hysterical episodes.

This is a pity for the gifted Young, who continues to deliver outstanding performances in ordinary films. Morice, Mendelsohn and Garner also do extremely well to draw genuine pathos from their near comic-book characters.

On a technical level the film is equally impressive in design, cinematography, and editing, with action sequences that pack a punch not seen in local cinema since Mad Max 1. But all these noble efforts of cast and crew are wasted in a script which gives in to the decadence it seeks to portray, lamely opting to trundle out a bunch of downbeat melodramatic cliches - from an homage to the "tower scene" in Hitchcock's Vertigo down to the ultra-violent car chase finale.

Metal Skin is a glorious failure, an exiting disappointment. It's own newspaper ads admit as much when they scream that "everything is about to got totally out of control. "And so it does, but to what end remains a mystery.

Rating B-.

- MICHAEL HUTAK
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First published in Beat Magazine

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Interview: Alex de la Inglesia

Alex de la Inglesia interviewed by Michael Hutak, September 1995

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If nothing else, Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Inglesia is in your face.

“I hate the real violence but I love the violence in the cinema. Violence is necessary in all artistic creation. Violence is part of humanity. Shakespeare works with the same idea. There is no drama without violence. My mum is violent, my dad is violent - the best thing to do is laugh.”

Emerging from the patronage of countryman Pedro Almodovar, Inglesia is on the phone promoting his latest film, Day of the Beast, an occult/sci-fi/splatter black comedy, which won six Spanish Academy Awards and has just opened locally. It tells the unlikely tale of a middle aged Madrid priest who discovers the antichrist is about to be born. He enlists the services of a tabloid TV host and a death metal freak in a desperate and hilarious attempt to stave off Satan and save the world. In the best Spanish traditions of the theatre of cruelty, gory, grizzly, and garish are words that spring to mind. And funny. Very funny.

“Day of the Beast is a local story - a story about the chaos that exists today in Spain. I set myself a hard task - to make an action film with an old man as the star. It is black humour - oil and water. The old man discovers a big secret, that the world is going to end, and this is too big a task for him.”

Portrayed as a decaying, morally bankrupt sespit, Madrid comes off very poorly in Inglesia’s vision, but “it’s not just a critique of cities, the problem is the people. When you put so many people together.

“The worst people are the normal people - who watch TV and go to the supermarket. I prefer people who say ‘I am not normal’. I’m afraid of the people who are satisfied.” When I ask if these people aren’t precisely his audience he lets out a strangely evil laugh, like I’ve caught him out. “I don’t think of my audience. I think of me. I try to explain the story, that’s all - like Hitchcock, the best director in the world,” he says, before adding cheerfully, “People enjoy it when you insult them. Ha, ha.”

While he may have disdain for the common man, his two features to date have been box office hits with the great unwashed in his native country. Day of the Beast, which cost just $US2 million, was the most successful local film in Spain last season. His first film, Militant Action, produced by Almodovar, was also a hit. “It was about handicapped terrorists who attack normal people. It’s a black comedy.”

Inglesia describes himself as a country boy who went to Madrid to draw comic books. He then started working in film, first as a set designer, then as an art director, before he got his big break when Spanish film’s most famous bad boy Almodovar read his script for Militant Action and offered to produce. “This is the best thing about Almodovar,” says Inglesia without missing a beat, “We have nothing in common at all. He loves Douglas Sirk. He is homosexual. Almodovar is not a person who likes followers.”

Talking from Mexico on the set of his latest film, Inglesia’s enthusiasm for his chosen craft pummels infectiously down the phoneline, his pidgen English struggling to match the obvious speed with which the ideas are coursing maniacly through his head.

“I have one or two proposals in Hollywood. Little movies I can make in Spain. I can do anything I want in Spain. I have no limits.” Coincidental to Australia, Spain swung to the right in elections earlier this year after 13 years of socialist government. “It was a very open country,” he laments, “in the last 20 years it was a cultural paradise, now it’s like the finish - the party’s over.

“That’s why I’m working in Mexico. In my next movie all the people are talking about God. It’s so funny. It’s a road movie with an android sex slave and a nymphomaniac girl of 12 years. But we needed more money - the budget is $US6 million which is very expensive for Spain so we are making it in America. Ciby2000 has the rights.”

“If I work in Hollywood I want a big budget. The most thing I love is sci-fi movies. But I want to do something not commercial - very violent, very sexy. Sci fi now is pathetic. When you have $US50 million budgets you have to make a family movie. This is not me.

“I work fast, I’m afraid to respect things. It is dangerous. I don't believe in talent, I only believe in work. I am only learning now - I have only made two movies. Movies aren’t mystical, they are work. I think if you make 80 movies, then you are a good director. The most important thing is work.”

MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in Beat magazine

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