GAMES
FORZA HORIZON 4
PC, XBOX ONE
Taking the hundreds of cars and incredible driving simulation from the more serious Forza Motorsport series and applying it to a fantasy world where a racing festival is allowed free rein across half a country (or three), the consistently excellent Forza Horizon games are all about variety. From buggies to supercars and from dirt racing to city streets, there's something for every sort of rev-head. And Horizon 4 is the biggest, best and broadest of the lot. This time the action moves to the United Kingdom, taking in rocky mountains, dazzling forests, crumbling castles, pristine lakes and the entire city of Edinburgh. The biggest departure from previous games, aside from the now seamless integration of other real players in the shared open world, is the seasons system. The whole game shifts between summer, autumn, winter and spring at the end of each real world week, so you have plenty of opportunity to take in season-specific championships, kit out your cars in appropriate weather gear and appreciate seasonal changes like the falling leaves, blooming flowers or frozen lakes. TB
The rebooted Heathers clique is no longer white, rich and blonde.
FREE-TO-AIR
HOW 'MAD' ARE YOU? OCTOBER 11, SBS, 8.30pm
A scene from the SBS documentary, How ”mad” are you?
Another "social experiment" documentary, this two-part film aims to address mental illness and the surrounding stigma, despite an estimated one in five Australians being affected. Ten "participants", drawn from different ages and backgrounds, are brought together for a week of experiments and challenges for the study; five of them have a history of mental illness, and five do not. All will take part in the same specially designed tests overseen by clinical psychiatrist Dr Steve Ellen, and designed to highlight the symptoms and character traits of common psychiatric disorders. A panel of experts, meanwhile, are watching unseen (at least for the first two days), analysing the participants and, in a slightly disturbing competitive way, trying to guess who has which disorder or "putting their professional reputations on the line", as the narration informs us. It's not quite Survivor: Personality Disorder, and the documentary has good intentions (as well as stigma the producers also hope to raise questions about methods of diagnosis and social implications thereof) but it feels more invasive and less personal than programs with similar premises, like the ABC's You Can't Ask That. KN
FILM
THE TALE (FOXTEL)
The American documentary maker Jennifer Fox arguably bites off more than she can chew with this tricky yet raw exercise in dramatised autobiography. But you could also say this is precisely the point. Laura Dern plays a version of Fox herself, forced into a traumatic confrontation with her past when she rediscovers a story she wrote aged 13 describing her "relationship" with her 40-year-old running coach. Played in flashback by Jason Ritter, this character in hindsight looks like an unequivocal abuser, abetted by his adult lover (Elizabeth Debicki), also idolised by the young Fox. But there can be no single, definitive account of what occurred, either for the on-screen Fox or her real-life counterpart: the film itself is yet another fictionalised version of her "tale," which we're nonetheless invited to understand as true in its essence. What remains beyond doubt is that Fox is putting herself on the line, wrestling with painful feelings that remain unresolved; she has an ideal partner for this enterprise in Dern, yet again playing a "difficult" character with fearless empathy. JW
STREAMING
HEATHERS, STAN, FIRST SEASONS AVAILABLE NOW
Post-apocalyptic fantasy: Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds.
A reboot of the 1980s cult black comedy Heathers was always going to be an ambitious idea, and Stan's new series, unsurprisingly, doesn't always pull it off. Updated for the social media generation, perhaps the most interesting revision is that the Heathers clique is no longer white, rich, blonde girls; here the bitchy, bullying Heathers are the more traditionally marginalised. Ringleader Heather Chandler (Melanie Field) is a "body positive" bad girl and her sidekicks are gender-queer Heather Duke (Brendan Scannell) and biracial lesbian Heather McNamara (Jasmine Mathews). This inversion of tropes offers opportunity for some great lines (and the Heathers are all great comic actors), but is bound to cop some flak. Meanwhile Veronica, the disillusioned popular girl (played by Winona Ryder in the original and here by Grace Victoria Cox) is the conventionally attractive blonde,drawn in by new kid and rebel JD (James Scully, lacking the charisma of the original's Christian Slater), who convinces Veronica to rid the school of its bullies by murdering the lead Heather, and making her death look like suicide. The series loosely follows the film's plot, but at 10 episodes is forced to rework many storylines, and halfway through the narrative begins to feel forced, despite some sharp writing and hilariously bleak portrayals today's culture of narcissism. KN
CULT
SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS (UMBRELLA) M
The Tale: A tricky yet raw exercise in dramatised autobiography.
The product of an imagination fed by comic books, spaghetti Westerns and (surely) a heavily Christian upbringing, this 1989 post-apocalyptic fantasy from writer-director Alex Proyas (Dark City) is one of the most striking Australian debuts of its era, carrying mannerist MTV style to the point of mystical contemplation. The hero (Norman Boyd) is a drifter in a black coat who emerges out of the desert and finds an uneasy haven in an isolated shack inhabited by a wheelchair-bound tinkerer (Michael Lake) and his sullen sister (Melissa Davis) who dresses herself up like a doll in the fashions of the past. The two men bond over the project of building a flying machine, an analogy perhaps for the dream of escape to Hollywood. We have to wait through the whole film to see if their creation will take off. Yet Proyas' visual authority is evident from the first frame to the last, freezing these grotesque figures against the barren landscape in a Gothic manner that parallels the Jane Campion of Sweetie (released the same year) as much as it echoes Mad Max. JW
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