‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.

Readers who encountered Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ when it was first published in 1952 (as part of her short story collection The Apple Tree) would have heard in the story an echo of the German assault on Britain during World War II, images of rural England under attack from aggressive birds an apt metaphor for everything the country had recently endured. Yet what lifted the story from being merely an allegory of a past war to a tale that resonated – and continues to resonate – beyond its time is the cyclic nature of the birds’ incursions.

The Surfer opens with its Australian-American protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage, giving his teenage son a surf-inspired pep talk: the ocean, he says, is ‘pure energy’. And like life, either you learn to ride it ‘or you wipe out’. These words could well have come from Cage himself, an actor known for his self-described ‘nouveau shamanic’ performance style, whose late-career oeuvre seems designed to repeatedly bring the sixty-one-year-old to the brink of spiritual oblivion.

When I was a teenager in Melbourne in the 1980s, fretfully and privately imagining a grown-up life in which I was au courant with ‘culture’, I watched whatever arts programming the ABC threw at me. I have a very clear memory from that time of viewing a story about Anthill Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. I saw footage of Winnie, played by Julie Forsyth, buried up to her neck and speaking, what seemed to me at the time, a whole load of nonsense. 

There is something about Seth Rogen. From his first role in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, to his breakout lead in Knocked Up (2007), and across his various writing and directing efforts (Superbad (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), The Interview (2014)), Rogen’s strength has always been his ability to mix puerile farce with sincere emotion in a way that is both undeniably dumb and deceptively smart.