Darryl Mason

How To "Cut And Run" Without "Abandoning Your Mates" This post was originally published on 'The Road To Surfdom' blog By Darryl Mason As expected, the wild and unhinged rantings of John Howard, Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson and Peter Costello regarding the Kevin Rudd plan for pulling Australian troops out of Iraq, is about to bite them back in the worst way. Tony Blair is but a few hours away from announcing the withdrawal timetable of UK troops from Iraq, with around 1500 to be pulled out within weeks, another few thousand by Christmas and all but a few ‘trainers’ out by the end of 2008. From the UK Guardian : The prime minister is expected to say that Britain intends to gradually reduce the number of troops in southern Iraq over the next 22 months as Iraqi forces take on more responsibility for the security of Basra and the surrounding areas. Ministers have taken on board the message coming from military chiefs over many months - namely that the p...

The David Hicks Hex And Mocking Phillip Ruddock This is a piece I wrote for the Road To Surfdom blog on February 20, 2006, following a nationally televised debate/forum about the five year long detention of Australian terror suspect David Hicks In Guantanamo Bay. By Darryl Mason - 'The Orstrahyun' It's not often you get to see a roomful of Australians laughing at the Attorney General, twice, in the space of an hour. And it wasn't a pretty sight. No doubt Phillip Ruddock was expecting a particularly uncomfortable afternoon when he went along to the taping of SBS's Insight forum show debating the American detention of terrorism suspect, and Australian citizen, David Hicks. You can only imagine Ruddock never expected it to go as bad as it did. How bad? Absolutely terrible. Ruddock was given numerous chances to make his case for why the Howard government had not done more, earlier, to pressure the Bush administration into getting the David Hicks military trial unde...

Why Are Movies From The Great Young Directors Of Today So Few And Far Between? Directors In the 70s Burned Up The Screens, Today's Star Directors Make Cameo Appearances An excellent story from the New York Times looks at why so many of the great young directors of the 1990s are so unproductive. Some of them, like Kimberly Peirce of Boys Don't Cry (1999) fame, are moving at a Kubrickian glacial pace. She's got a new movie out this year, Stop-Loss, but that's almost eight years between films. Darren Aronofsky turned out Pi (1998) and Requiem For A Dream (2000), and then six years drifted by until he directed The Fountain. David Fincher has moved a little faster since his groundbreaking serial killer smash Seven (1995), with Fight Club (2000) and Panic Room (2002), but still it will be five years between movies when Zodiac is released later this year. David O. Russell sated hungry adult humour audiences with Flirting With Disaster (1996), and then delivered brilliantl...

Napoleon : The Greatest Movie Stanley Kubrick Never Made By Darryl Mason In 1968, 40-year-old director Stanley Kubrick had the cinematic world at his feet and one big movie project germinating in his head. Stanley Kubrick had started his career as the original independent filmmaker, at a time where it was nigh impossible to make movies outside the studios, and through the previous 15 years he had directed eight films -- some of the most acclaimed, debated and controversial ever made. "Spartacus" (1960), "Lolita" (1962) and "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) clearly demonstrated Kubrick's ability to use pitch-black humor and great spectacle to tell tales of the true heart of man as few filmmakers had told them before. His films had been feted by critics as cinematic masterpieces or dismissed as overblown indulgences, and although all were profitable, they were hardly box-office triumphs. But Kubrick's l...