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Jake Wilson

Jake Wilson is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne and reviews films regularly for The Age. Formerly the Melbourne correspondent for Urban Cinefile and a co-editor of Senses of Cinema, he has contributed to a range of print and online publications, including Kill Your Darlings, RealTime, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Meanjin. Some of his film writings are archived on his personal website.

Jake Wilson reviews 'Lies I Told About A Girl' by Anson Cameron

June-July 2006, no. 282 01 June 2006
Anson Cameron’s Lies I Told about a Girl may not bend the public record enough to qualify as ‘alternate history’, but it does take off from an intriguing speculative premise. What if the young Prince of Wales, sent ‘down under’ for a term at an exclusive boarding school deep in Victorian logging country, had arrived in 1975, the year of the Dismissal? And what if the prince – known her ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'Australian Film: Cultures, identities, texts by Adi Wimmer

July–August 2008, no. 303 01 July 2008
It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'The World According to Y: Inside the New Adult Generation' by Rebecca Huntley

May 2006, no. 281 01 May 2006
Those young people of today, with their iPods and mobile phones, their tight-knit friendship groups and brief romances, their social activism and distrust of big-P Politics, their yearning for independence and need to conform … what’s really going on in their minds? Not much that sets them apart from the rest of mainstream Australia, or so it appears from Rebecca Huntley’s The World Accordin ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'The Piano' by Gail Jones

September 2007, no. 294 18 November 2022
Early in Gail Jones’s novel Black Mirror (2002), an Australian artist dives into the Seine to retrieve a bundle that may contain a drowning baby. Before rising to the surface, she experiences a kind of epiphany in the face of possible death – ‘a willed dissolution, a corrupt fantasy of effacement’. Later she revisits the experience in dreams, swimming through a surrealist underworld of dis ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'Michael Winterbottom' by Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams

February 2010, no. 318 01 February 2010
I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'Jane Campion' by Kathleen McHugh

December 2007–January 2008, no. 297 01 December 2007
The third full-length English-language study of the films of Jane Campion is a book that will probably be of more interest to the dedicated student than to the general reader. The American scholar Kathleen McHugh is a stiff though clear and conscientious writer who takes care to make her research visible and to spell out any possibly unfamiliar ideas. She has the academic knack for seizing upon pa ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'In the Vernacular: A generation of Australian culture and controversy' by Stuart Cunningham

February 2009, no. 308 01 February 2009
‘I never thought Australia needed culture of any kind,’ drawls Barry Humphries in Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s recent documentary on Australian ‘trash’ cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Perverse aesthete that he is, Humphries cannot resist the idea that lack of refinement might be a sign of vitality: ‘Culture is yoghurt, isn’t it, or mould? It grows on decaying things.’ Unlike ... (read more)

Palm Beach

ABR Arts 08 August 2019
Curiously, there are now two feature films titled Palm Beach, both named for the same upmarket suburb in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The first, made in 1979 by the late avant-gardist Albie Thoms, is a ragged detective story improvised from Thoms' outline by an ensemble cast. The new Palm Beach is a much more conventionally polished comedy–drama, directed by the actress turned director Rachel Wa ... (read more)

Jake Wilson reviews 'Warner Bros: The Making of an American movie studio' by David Thomson

June-July 2018, no. 402 25 May 2018
David Thomson has been an essential writer on film for around half a century, but in certain circles his reputation has long been in decline. The reasons are obvious enough. He writes too much, and sometimes carelessly; he lets his feelings run away with him; an Englishman who followed his dream to the United States, he hardly pretends that Iranian cinema, say, could possibly be as important to hi ... (read more)

The Bookshop

ABR Arts 21 May 2018
Watching The Bookshop, adapted from the late Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel by the Catalan director Isabel Coixet, admirers of the English novelist have the chance to test their memories. Which parts of the dialogue and the third-person voice-over narration (delivered by Julie Christie) come directly from the book? Which are newly invented? And which have been sourced from elsewhere? The hunt ... (read more)
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