The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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John Farnham: Finding the Voice review – a gushy account of Australian music history

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This eulogistic documentary has Farnham’s blessing, but we learn very little about the man himself as everyone else reflects on his career

The biggest question I had going into director Poppy Stockell’s documentary about the beloved Australian singer John Farnham is: how many times will it deploy that song? You know, the one reminding us that we’re all someone’s daughter, we’re all someone’s son. The song that arrived in 1986 and became seared on to the national psyche, to be played and replayed ad infinitum, and may God curse the swinish face of any so-called ‘Strayan who doesn’t like it.

Will You’re the Voice be played once? Twice? Will it be reserved for the last act? How long can we look at each other keep watching a Farnesy doco without hearing this amazingly catchy tune about standing up to injustice? The answer is: about halfway through the runtime. But even then we hear the song in pieces, as the story around it is recounted.

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