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Keywords: Fantasy

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The Rings of Power: Flawed jewels

    • Juliette Hughes
    • 19 September 2024

    The latest series of The Rings of Power is a real curate’s egg. Whether having some bits that are good among other bits that are on the nose is a conundrum that this viewer must sort out for herself. Do the bad bits ruin the whole thing?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Only in America

    • Peter Craven
    • 25 July 2024

    It’s easy, isn’t it – much too easy – to invoke the standard response that only in the so-called Land of the Free could these things transpire. A vulgar, mendacious man who has refused to believe that he lost the last election is now the improbable victim of an assassination attempt. And the incumbent president, who has not done badly at his impossible job, surrenders his chance at re-election.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    All sound and Furiosa

    • Eddie Hampson
    • 30 May 2024

    With Furiosa, George Miller returns to the Mad Max franchise that launched his almost five-decade-long career. Apocalyptic wastelands with their cacophony of blaring engines and vistas of desert panoramas are second nature to him by now. But fans of the film (myself included) must sadly admit that Furiosa is tanking at the box office, and is only the most recent in a string of female-led actioners that have flopped.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The sovereign good

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 25 November 2021
    32 Comments

    Attitudes towards truth have changed. Now we accept the idea that there are different sorts of truth: the phrases historical truth, narrative truth and emotional truth come trippingly off the lips of vast numbers of people. Then there are the complex notions of fantasy and fiction: we have long subscribed to the notion of novelists making up various ‘lies’ or fantasies in order to tell underlying truths about human nature. But we also have to accept, I think, that a gentleman’s word is no longer his bond.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Turnbull's magic budget bowl is a fantasy

    • Joe Zabar
    • 07 December 2017
    5 Comments

    Many of us have grown up with Norman Lindsay's classic tale of the magic pudding; the pudding bowl that never empties no matter how often the pudding was eaten. It seems that the magic pudding bowl has been borrowed by the federal government, if the proposed new business and income tax cuts are anything to go by.

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  • PODCAST

    ChatterSquare S01E02: Hansonism, fear and fantasy

    • Podcast
    • 21 February 2017

    Is there an upside to Hansonism? In this episode, we try to figure out what One Nation actually has to offer. We also talk about fear and how some Americans are dealing with the Trump era by turning to fantasy literature. Is this just escapism?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The long haul

    • Lisa Brockwell
    • 08 December 2015
    3 Comments

    There is another life where we end up together. We wake in the same bed, startled but not sorry; the timber frame is warm, hand-caulked with the day-to-day dedication of the long haul. The air between us no longer electric, all now sanded smooth. But whose dog jumps on the end of that bed: yours or mine? I don't plan to think about my husband or your wife; let's leave my son right out of it. Fantasy, no more dangerous than eating gelato and dreaming of Mark Ruffalo.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Housing fantasy quashed by culture of entitlement

    • Ellena Savage
    • 06 November 2015
    23 Comments

    When I was a child, the house I longed for in my adult future was blonde-bricked, double-storied, concrete-paved, white-carpeted. Now I am older, and renting a room in such a house is possible, if I share the place with six other paying adults. Because it is 2015, I live in Melbourne (the sixth-least affordable city to live in in the world), and am not a merchant banker. No concrete plot will ever by mine, I say in tune with the million other people my age who have just assimilated that knowledge.

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  • RELIGION

    Atheist Pratchett's Discworld has lessons for Christians

    • Michael McVeigh
    • 16 March 2015
    4 Comments

    'You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world. Otherwise it's just a cage.' When I heard English author Terry Pratchett had died, I immediately jumped online to start looking through some of my favourite quotes from his books. The above, from Witches Abroad, is one of many that have accompanied me over the years.   His 44 Discworld novels could be broadly described as comic fantasy, or fantasy satire, and yet that's really just the starting point for the immense variety of complicated ideas they explored in such a fun, joyous way. Perhaps strangely for someone whose work is so grounded in atheism, Pratchett has had a profound impact on my religious faith. Read more

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Women heroes of Muslim-Christian unity

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 June 2012
    3 Comments

    When a Christian man takes out his anger by literally kicking the legs out from under a crippled child, two women, a Christian and a Muslim, rush to help the child back to his feet. The women keep the peace in this deeply divided village, but the 'unity' is tenuous and to some extent a fantasy.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australian invasion anxiety in adolescent fantasy

    • Tony Kevin
    • 09 September 2010
    13 Comments

    What do young Australians take away from John Marsden's novels - and now, the film Tomorrow, When the War Began? They are more than escapist fantasies. They convey value messages, calling on young Australians to cherish our country, not to take it for granted, and to be prepared if necessary to kill and die for it.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Children and other wild things

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 December 2009
    4 Comments

    Max has an erratic imagination, and is prone to extremes of emotion. There are hints of mental illness, but, really, he is simply Every Child. Following a ferocious fight with his mother, he flees into fantasy and becomes king to a group of melancholic monsters.

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