MAN ABOUT TOWN

This is 21 year old Scottish actress Karen Gillan , who previously appeared in Doctor Who in the fourth series episode The Fires of Pompeii . Filming on the new series will start in July, to be screened at Easter 2010. Squee! And in other Who -related news, here's an extended trailer for season three of Torchwood - Children of Earth . Again, squee!

Richard Watts talks with filmmaker Bert Deling about his 1975 masterpiece Pure Shit , which has just been released on DVD after years in the wilderness. In 1975, the soft-focus historical melodrama Picnic at Hanging Rock was the acceptable face of the Australian film industry. It, not Burt Deling’s low budget junkie drama Pure Shit , was the movie the Australian Film Commission took to Cannes the following year. “The Film Commission had given us money to make Pure Shit and when we showed it to them, two thirds of the way through… they simply broke their contract! Never done it before and as far as I know never done it since; [they] just said ‘Sorry, we’re not giving you the money to complete it’,” Deling tells MCV . “We got the money together to complete [the film], and then we got banned. We got it unbanned – the Film Commission refused to take it to Cannes with all the rest of the crinoline films. All those people were doing their damndest to make sure that this film was never seen...

A dark family drama about grief, guilt and denial, Leaves of Glass is the second play in British playwright Philip Ridley’s so-called ‘Brothers Trilogy’; and while lacking the bite of his visceral fable Mercury Fur , it is equally unflinching in its clinical dissection of familial secrets. Steven (Dan Frederiksen) is a buttoned-down businessman married to his materialistic former secretary, Debbie (Amelia Best). His younger brother Barry (Johnny Carr) is an alcoholic, drug-addled artist. Both are haunted by the past, and by their father’s early death; a subject their mother, Liz (Jillian Murray) – who favours trivialities and banalities over hard truths – would prefer to avoid. The play unfolds in a series of fractured scenes which force the audience to piece together the plot, hinting obliquely at the undercurrents in the brothers’ lives rather than spelling out the painful details. When the shocking truth is finally revealed, it is truly gut-wrenching - one of the most...

Quite a lot, actually. I haven't posted much in recent weeks, as you might have noticed. It's been a strange month all considered. Two friends died - Leigh from cancer, Josh by his own hand - which has left me in something of a solemn and contemplative state. Consequently, compared to April, when I was seeing comedy several times a week, in May I've been spending a lot of time at home, reading, drinking, brooding and watching DVDs. Both the guys' wakes were held last weekend, one on Saturday and the other on Sunday. I like wakes. They're much more preferable to the glum solemnity of most funerals. As you'd expect from such occasions there were tears, but also laughter aplenty, and the opportunity to catch up with an array of old friends, some of whom I've slowly drifted apart from over the years for a variety of reasons... Josh's wake was the same day as the Eurovision final, which I watched in the company of my friend Sam and a gathering of like-minded...

Saturday May 9th, Melbourne, Australia. More than 1000 undead lurched through the streets of the city. We came, we saw, we ate the flesh of the living. Or something like that...

It doesn't feel like a week since the Comedy Festival ended. Did I really see 31 shows and generally laugh myself stupid at acts such as the Barry Award-winning The Pajama Men, The Bedroom Philosopher's Songs from the 86 Tram and Eric: The One Man Sketch Comedy Show ? It already seems so long ago. The last week has been emotionally exhausting. A friend committed suicide, and there's been a work situation that's taken up a lot of my time. Together, these two events have left me totally knackered. On top of all that, I've been offered a new part time job as a journalist at Arts Hub, which I'm still weighing up; I've been to see a shit film ( X-Men Origins: Wolverine , which makes X-Men 3: The Final Stand look good by comparison); some gorgeous visual art by Peter Madden and Joanna Langford at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces; and a semi-good play ( Leaves of Glass by Philip Ridley at Red Stitch Actors' Theatre in St Kilda, more of which shortly). I'm...