Weaving's back in drag, but it's no Priscilla

Cloud Atlas stars Hugo Weaving and Susan Sarandon, pictured at the Toronto International Film Festival. Photo: Getty Images

 

Ed Gibbs, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

The world premiere of Cloud Atlas met with a mixed reception, but its star Hugo Weaving isn't fazed.

It was greeted with a lengthy standing ovation, then just as quickly slammed by critics, following its world premiere at the Toronto International Festival on Sunday night.

Cloud Atlas - the Booker-shortlisted, multi-layered novel that many believed impossible to turn into a film - even has Hugo Weaving donning a women's fat suit.

Yet the controversial film - a sprawling, multi-story tale of karmic repercussions throughout time and space - also offers its all-star cast, including Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, the chance to have fun and ''play dress-ups'', as actor Jim Broadbent puts it, with its cast playing multiple characters that bizarrely jump gender, race and age.

For Hugo Weaving, Cloud Atlas offered the chance to re-team with two of the film's three directors, the Wachowski brothers: the duo responsible for The Matrix movies that made him a star. Ten years on, much has changed, though - notably Larry Wachowski, who has since become Lana.

''I don't think it's ironic at all,'' Weaving says, of the gender-swapping roles the film's cast has to perform. ''I think there are certain things that Larry - now Lana - is interested in. A lot of them connect up with his - now her - journey. This feeling of being trapped inside a body since the age of nine, feeling like, 'I'm not this person, I'm actually that person', I guess whoever we are, there are certain things that we want to express.

''When I first worked with them, in The Matrix days, they'd finish each other's sentences, or talk together. They're incredibly tight-knit. Now, they're more individual, I guess.''

Their new film, co-directed with Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer, takes the viewer on a lengthy, troubled journey, from the South Pacific of the 18th century through to a post-apocalyptic future rife with warring factions and cannibalism. Weaving's other characters in the film include a Machiavellian figure named Georgie and Bill Smoke, an authority figure reminiscent of his Agent Smith character in The Matrix. Playing a nurse, though, was more extreme than even he could have imagined.

''The prosthetics came in at a very late stage, so I spent a lot of time in my fat suit just trying to get used to it,'' Weaving says of Nurse Noakes, a fearsomely full figure far removed from Mitzi Del Bra, his drag persona in Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert. ''Whenever I look at it, I'm still uneasy about it.''

Weaving joins a substantial number of Australians in Toronto, where local cinema has been enjoying its biggest showing in years. The event - the single largest gateway to the lucrative US market - has premiered Cate Shortland's Lore and Tony Krawitz's Dead Europe to great acclaim, in addition to Wayne Blair's musical smash The Sapphires, the big-wave documentary Storm Surfers 3D and Robert Connolly's Julian Assange biopic Underground. Catriona McKenzie's indigenous drama Satellite Boy has rounded out what festival programmer Jane Schoettle describes as Australia's ''splashiest'' showing to date at the event, now in its 37th year and second only to Cannes for market dominance and star-pulling power.

Cloud Atlas, meanwhile, will have a release in Australia early next year, and joins a string of films that have generated Oscar buzz at the festival - an event that provides early indicators for award favourites. Among the most notable is Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines, which stars Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper as a pair of troubled fathers, and features an excellent performance by Australia's Ben Mendelsohn.

The 2012 Toronto International Film Festival runs until September 16.

Wake with a difference at Sydney's The Hellfire Club

Back when the Hellfire Club was located at the site of the former Blackmarket Café in Chippendale, it appared in the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving. In the particular scene, Keanu Reeves follows the white rabbit and meets Carrie-Anne Moss for the very first time at a dance club in this building.

Back then, the Hellfire Club would host bondage nights where leather-clad patrons equipped with whips, ropes and hot wax let their imagination run wild. In 1997, several members of the Bandidos gang were gunned down in the basement by two members of the Rebels bikie gang. It took two years to shut the place down. The building has since become a café furniture showroom.

The Hellfire Club, now relocated to Oxford Street, gets a mention in the article below. There’s more information on the original club and its role in The Matrix in the fourth volume of Sydney on Screen: Where Heroes & Monsters Play available for purchase here:

www.sydneyonscreen.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/sydney-on-screen-where-heroes-monsters.html

Annette Sharp in the mask she wore to The Hellfire Club, Oxford Street, Sydney. Picture: Justin Lloyd Source: The Daily Telegraph

Annette Sharp, The Daily Telegraph, reports

Perhaps I should have Googled The Hellfire Club's dress code before accepting a friend's invitation to visit the once notorious venue for his recently departed mother's send-off.

Knowing his exuberant tastes, it came as little surprise when, after serving as full-time carer to his beloved mum for the last decade of her life, he chose a non-traditional venue for her mourning party.

At 49 and single, he had earned it - so why not at The Hellfire Club? I had visited Sydney's premiere S&M venue just once before - some 17 years earlier while on a couples' night out proposed by an impossibly curious Bass Player I know.

Back then it was located at the Blackmarket Cafe in Chippendale - the memory of the foreboding site lingers to this day.

The entrance of the purple gothic-styled haunt was filled with dozens of menacing bikers. Inside, along with the bikers who would become synonymous with the place in 1997 when two Bandidos were shot dead, was a sweaty throng of Irish backpackers.

And in every other corner was a pasty-faced middle-aged man in a soiled polyester suit - travelling solo for cheap thrills.

On a torture rack centre stage was a woman in enormous white Bonds cottontail underpants, beige pantyhose and bra, being stung with a riding crop wielded by the venue's famed bondage master Tom - in leather chaps and mask.

I have been called naive many times in my life but the benchmark was set that night when I took the impish Bass Player's advice concerning Hellfire Club dress code.

Back then there was no way to Google the club which, like a sort of sordid Brigadoon, comes to life only one night a month ... at midnight.

So I took his "come in bondage gear" invitation as any Pollyanna-on-the-prowl might - enthusiastically. Encouraged by assurances his wife would be wearing "leather lace-up corset', I improvised hotpants, heels, stockings, strategically placed trouser-braces and leather jacket. I thought I'd done rather a decent job until we met that ruinous Bass Player and his wife in Chippendale and I found, to my abject and shirt-less horror, she was dressed in a floral Laura Ashley dress!

The rest of the night was spent fending off Master Tom's advances - my outfit oily burley to the dungeon master, who saw it as a sign I was rack-ready.

So last weekend, almost 20 years on, I was not going to make the same mistake - and pulled on skivvy and skirt under a large woollen overcoat.

These days the Hellfire Club has found a perfect home on Oxford St where the clientele are more high-minded, better groomed and most assiduously not packing.

The years have been good to Master Tom, aka Craig Donarski the promoter, now twice the man he once was. Although the modern dress code states "no effort, no entry" and rules the minimum dress code is a G-string, Satan's Bass Player, sensing an opportunity, arrived with leather masks for all to ensure admittance.

These days Hellfire is a bit like Disneyland for mums and dads at a fraction of the cost. There are large animal characters - a lifesize panda was at one point ravished by a stripper who ended her performance ripping off his head - fabulous fetish costumes, pool tables, nude body-painting and, of course, the rack - which these days is used by chubby couples who spank each other and make up before spanking each other all over again.

After the Bass Player's wife and I observed such a demonstration (played to Cold Chisel's Breakfast At Sweethearts), I made a visit to the ladies room where a young woman, shocked by what I was wearing, implored me to shed.

"I have to take it all off!" she entreated.

Grateful I had taken my mother's childhood advice and was wearing my trusty cold-weather singlet, I obliged, swapping skivvy for singie.

My husband by this time was chatting with the dungeon master. Concerned he was about to be evicted for failing to wear a loincloth, I joined them and was stunned to find he and Master Tom were having a reunion - they were once kindergarten pals at Fairy Meadow Demonstration School on the South Coast. RIP Mrs A.

Sydney on Screen: Where Opera Meets Oprah

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Excerpt:

"Successful daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful (1987- ) chose Sydney for an on-location shoot in 2007 to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary. Much of the filming took place on the city's waterfront. On arriving for the opening of the international Forrester fashion boutique, Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) makes a beeline for Circular Quay and Bennelong Point to take in the sights. Hit television series Dynasty (1981-1989) featured establishing shots of Sydney in a 1986 episode that saw Alexis Carrington Colby (Joan Collins) travel to the Australian Outback on a surprise visit to see Ben Carrington (Christopher Cazenove)."

"Just past the intersection of Hickson Road with Towns Place, you may recognise the overpass ahead of you featured in The Matrix (1999). In the classic scene shot in front of the overpass, Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) rushes towards and into a phone booth seconds before it is crushed by a truck. When Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) inspects the wreckage, Trinity’s body is gone. The same overpass was used in Kangaroo Jack (2003) and Better Than Sex (2000) starring David Wenham and Susie Porter."

"Argyle Place underwent an incredible transformation during the filming of Mission Impossible 2 (2000) when it stood in for Spain. In one shot, a religious procession celebrating the “Fallas de Valencia” marches up a dusty and gravelled-looking Argyle Street, past the Garrison Church. In another, Tom Cruise runs up candlelit stairs that link Argyle Street to Watson Road. These steps as well as the church can be seen in Playing Beatie Bow (1986)."

For information on how to obtain your copy of "Sydney on Screen: Where Opera Meets Oprah", contact sydneyonscreen@hotmail.com

Sydney on Screen: Where Heritage Becomes Fantasy

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Excerpt:

“Science House is one of the few Sydney buildings built in the commercial Italian Palazzo style. Designed by Peddle Thorp and Walker in 1928 as the result of an architectural competition, construction was completed in January 1931 at a cost of 45,000 pounds. Located on the corner of Essex and Gloucester Streets, Science House plays a starring role in Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) as the Chinese Consulate in Houston where Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) is being held captive.”

“Governor Phillip Tower and Governor Macquarie Tower appeared in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) that filmed in the lift lobby area. In the scene, two hundred and fifty extras walk in one direction while Neo (Keanu Reeves), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) head the other way toward a lift leading to Le Vrai Restaurant. The sandstone walls inside the foyer were made to look like black granite and were covered with lightweight painted and papered foam on which a giant fake clock was attached using sticky tape.”

“After rescuing Kitty Kowalski’s (Parker Posey) runaway car in Superman Returns (2006), Superman lowers the vehicle in front of the fountain at the corner of Martin Place and Pitt Street. The very same fountain appeared in the “lady in red” sequence in The Matrix (1999). In an iconic moment in the movie, Laurence Fishburne sets everything and everyone into freeze frame during an agent-training program while a stunned Keanu Reeves looks on. Other productions shot in the area include Son of the Mask (2005) and Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997) starring Richard Roxburgh, Cate Blanchett and Frances O’Connor.”

For information on how to obtain your copy of "Sydney on Screen: Where Heritage Becomes Fantasy", contact sydneyonscreen@hotmail.com