May Minutes, June Agenda & AGM Agenda

Agenda for the AGM - click here to download

Minutes from the May meeting - click here to download

Agenda for the June meeting - click here to download

July Friday Night Film - Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins

Friday 2 July, 2010

7:30pm

Wesley Chapel

(Echuca-Moama Uniting Church)

A spolied and bored uppercrust Edwardian English family has their world turned upside down by a nonsensical nanny who teaches them how to enjoy life.

Man on the Moon - review

This month's Friday Night Movie rated a moderate 3.6 with EMFS members. The consensus seemed to be "Good movie, could have done with less Carrey".

I'm not a Jim Carrey fan, I have to say. His brand of physical comedy leaves me wanting. Wanting to see him flung into the darkest recesses of space. (I did like The Mask, but it was based on a comic book, after all, so his cartoonish efforts worked to the film's advantage.) However, in films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the last half of The Truman Show - and, if I'm being honest, the parts in The Mask where he's NOT playing the Mask, but regular guy Stanley Ipkiss - Carrey proves himself to be quite an absorbing actor.

In Man on the Moon, you get half-and-half. Carrey, as Andy Kaufman, is engaging. But Andy, himself, is so often playing a role that we rarely get to see the real him, and are therefore subjected to Carrey's clownish interpretation of Andy's antics. And it's because of this that the movie suffers. The scene where Andy's "Foreign Man" debuts at the Improv, doing terrible jokes and impressions, only to launch into a spot-on Elvis, doesn't quite come off the way it should. Andy didn't imitate Elvis; he became Elvis. There's not a hint of satire in his performance because the performance itself wasn't satire. Watching Carrey do it, it all becomes very over-the-top; his movements are overly pronounced, his lip quiver nearly becomes a sneer. His physical comedy bleeds through, turning the Elvis performance into another joke instead of the punchline.

In all, not a bad movie. But more than a few of us left last night wishing Edward Norton had been cast instead.