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<TD>Date: Thursday, Jan 19 2017, 3:36pm<BR>
Full event listing at <a href="http://www.indymedia.ie/events">www.indymedia.ie/events</a><BR></TD>
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<H2><a href="http://www.indymedia.ie/article/106050">Screening Of 'Head On' (1998)</a></H2>
Dublin | Arts and Media | By Dublin Film Qlub <h4>Event Time: Saturday, Jan 21 2017</h4>
<P>Season 7 of the Dublin Film Qlub, 'ADAPTATIONS, continues with...<br />
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HEAD ON <br />
=adaptation of the novel 'Loaded', by Christos Tsiolkas, of 1995=<br />
(Dir. Ana Kokinnos, 1998)<br />
English<br />
Cast: Alex Dimitriades, Paul Capsis<br />
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Saturday 21 Jan 2017<br />
2:30 pm.<br />
(doors open at 2pm)<br />
The New Theatre<br />
Temple Bar<br />
Dublin 2<br />
Day Membership: 8<br />
(free tea, coffee, and biscuits)<br />
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The club is now crammed tight with people, mostly men. The music is a savage ceremony, men walking around each other, making eye contact, flirting, but flirting in a detached cynical manner, to avoid the humiliation of rejection.<br />
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Christos Tsiolkas, 'Loaded' (1995)<br />
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The novel 'Loaded' is told from Aris point of view one ordinary, epic, catastrophic day in the life of a nineteen year old party-loving boy in Melbourne, Australia. His identity as a Greek-Australian gay man (and his refusal of that identity) is colored by his distorted ideas of what a real Greek man is strong, masculine, straight-acting, never off guard, never poisoned by feelings. The book is set within the impoverished Greek diaspora in Melbourne (a faithful portrait of an unseen city, much like the monstrous portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic in Wildes story). The film holds on to that crucial context, but it eliminates Aris constant rewind-and-play in the cassette of his memory, and with it the accounts of sexual abuse, casual alcoholism, and relentless bullying in the family background of Ari and his best friend. In this way, Head On becomes a more universal snapshot of disaffected youth.<br />
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The book keeps referring to Ari gulfing down food, drink, LSD, snorting or injecting whatever comes his way, jumping on cars and bikes, scuttling and zig-zagging through everything to fill his empty days with more --random inverted commas for dialogue, and slapdash headings, masterfully reflect this rush in Christos Tsiolkas writing. But film has a unique ability to show time in motion, and Ana Kokinnos brilliant adaptation is a racing pulsing sleek bullet of a film that sweeps you away with Ari. Some scenes (the Greek party, the alleyway encounter) are astonishingly faithful to the text, and others (notably the key sex-scene with George, which eliminates his racism) simplify the novel to shift the focus from race to racing, from adoptive culture to addiction. In its relentless fast-forward motion, the film comes into its own by identifying something in Ari that the novel itself is only half-aware of. This is a man paralysed by fear, who thinks trust is a weakness he can not afford and love is a luxury that he can never deserve.<br />
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© Dublin Film Qlub 2017<br />
You are welcome to quote this material, but we request that you give the source</P>
<p><small>posted on: Tuesday, Jan 3 2017, 11:51pm</small></p>
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