Latest news with #Unflinching
The Australian
09-08-2025
- Sport
- The Australian
Trainer Mathrick pins Valley hopes on in-form Shoeless
A frustrating week could end with a flourish for Cranbourne trainer Shawn Mathrick at The Valley. Mathrick had found the perfect race at the ideal venue for speedster Unflinching on Saturday, duly entering him for a 1000m contest on a track at which the gelding had won six times. • PUNT LIKE A PRO: Become a Racenet iQ member and get expert tips – with fully transparent return on investment statistics – from Racenet's team of professional punters at our Pro Tips section. SUBSCRIBE NOW! The bargain online buy had thrilled Mathrick with his trials leading up to his return to racing but the racing gods were having none of it, conspiring against the trainer. 'I set him for that race and he trialled enormous. The horse was airborne,' Mathrick said. 'I had him scoped and he had a trapped epiglottis and an infection. Unbelievable. 'He's on some medication so he's now a couple of weeks away. 'He'll be fine soon enough.' • Brad Waters' The Valley Saturday tips, race-by-race analysis Consistent galloper Shoeless could ease Mathrick's disappointment in the EDSA Group Handicap (1600m). Mathrick has Shoeless racing in great heart with three wins and five minor placings in the gelding's last eight starts. Mathrick said Shoeless could have added at least another couple of wins to his recent tally had the son of Shooting To Win had more luck in his races. Shawn Mathrick has handy miler Shoeless racing in the best form of his career leading into Saturday's meeting at The Valley. Picture: Racing Photos via Getty Images 'I think he should have won his five,' Mathrick said. 'He's had no luck, been locked away on the fence and couldn't get out but he just has that big powerful finish at the end.' The trainer said Shoeless's last-start win in Adelaide was better than it looked on paper with things looking dire at the halfway mark before the five-year-old powered home under jockey Zac Spain. • Melbourne Cup plans grow for US stayer 'He didn't handle that track at Morphettville,' Mathrick said. 'He was off the bit about 800(m) out and I thought, 'we're in trouble here' but when he balanced up, he hit the line hard.' Shoeless will be one 13 runners in Saturday's $130,000 race at Benchmark 74 level. Jockey Craig Newitt will ride Shoeless from barrier one at The Valley. Mathrick said a strong early gallop would suit Shoeless's strong-finishing style. 'With a bit of luck, with the rail in the true (position), he'll be able to get home at The Valley,' Mathrick said. 'They don't have to go mad in front because he can sprint for 600m. 'But it would be good if they went mad.' Shoeless is an $8.50 chance to earn another reward for his consistency with a win at The Valley.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Chronology of Water' Review: Kristen Stewart's Directorial Debut Is a Stirring Drama of Abuse and Salvation, Told With Poetic Passion
I'm always up for a movie directed by an actor I love. Often, that actor will turn out be good at directing other actors, and building a serviceable movie around that, and that's about it. Yet there's still an adventure involved when you feel like you really know an actor. I went into 'The Chronology of Water,' the first movie directed by Kristen Stewart, with a heightened curiosity and a heightened hope. I've long felt that she's a great actor and a great star. What would she reveal as a filmmaker? The hope paid off. 'The Chronology of Water' isn't some pretty good, prosaic, actor-directs-actors-how-to-read-the-script thing. It's far more artful and captivating than that. It's based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who told the story of how she grew up in a sexually abusive household, and how she attempted to squirm away from the legacy of it — through competitive swimming, through sex and drugs and anger and other escape hatches, and ultimately through becoming a writer in the mode of Charles Bukowski. Yet for a long time her escapes didn't work. She was too imprinted with the sickness that had been visited upon her. More from Variety 'Amrum' Review: Fatih Akin's Understated Coming-of-Age Tale Is Generous, Classical and Soul-Stirring Kristen Stewart's Directorial Debut 'The Chronology of Water,' An Unflinching Portrait of Abuse and Addiction, Earns 4-Minute Cannes Ovation Bono Rocks Cannes With 7-Minute Standing Ovation for 'Stories of Surrender' All of this is incredibly internal. It's the sort of thing I've seen a hundred filmmakers try to dramatize, and what you tend to get is good intentions, a lot of piety about abusive households, and maybe a workable shadow of the consciousness the film is out to capture. Kristen Stewart shoots past all that. As a writer-director, she's working on the high wire — making a movie that's all about consciousness, one that shows you everything but never spells it out too obviously. She presents Lidia Yuknavitch's story out of sequence, in impressionistic closeup moments that sear themselves into your imagination, as if every shot were a sentence ripped from a hidden diary. This is the beauty of what movies can do. They can be voyeuristic and honest — give us privileged glimpses of the forbidden, of what people are really like, of all the muck and pain and yearning we cover up. Lidia, played by Imogen Poots, keeps flashing back to the San Francisco home in which she grew up with her older sister (Thora (Birch); her mother (Susannah Flood), who was lost in a passive fog, always looking the other way; and her father (Michael Epp), in his horn-rims and Clark Kent haircut, who was sharp and handsome and stern, and highly attentive, and full of stinging scornful words, with a rage that snapped like a whip. When they open Lidia's college-acceptance letters in the spring of 1980, even a three-quarter scholarship isn't good enough for him. He's so destructive he regards that as failure. And that's not the half of it. The film never explicitly shows us his sexual abuse of Lidia, but there are moments that creep up to it, that dramatize everything around it (or you'll hear something he said). And this gathers into the spell the movie casts — of placing the abuse at the center of everything, but it's also as if it were a ghost. When a parent abuses a child, the experience can be too horrible to bear, so that what happens is that the core of the child's identity gets fractured. It becomes torn, compartmentalized. That's part of what's so evil about it. And that's what happens to Lidia. She goes out into the world as a high-school swimmer, then as a debauched college student, but what she's really doing is putting on a mask. The her — who she is — isn't totally there. Imogen Poots has always had a radiance about her, and she doesn't tamp down on that. She invests Lidia with her full charisma. That extends from when she becomes a couple with a folk-singing sensitive guy (Tom Sturridge), except the passivity that makes him soothing enrages her (so she rages back at him), to the moments when she's drugging and fornicating, to the scene where she finally says 'Fuck you, motherfucker' to her father. The film's imagery of water is at once rapt and concrete. Water is the thing that holds Lidia, that allows her to escape, that mirrors the fluid quality inside her that's her way of compensating for unspeakable pain. Lidia endures, takes big bites out of life, and goes through a lot. She gets pregnant and decides to have the baby (her sister agrees to help her care for it), but the baby is stillborn. She guzzles vodka out of her flask and embraces the ecstasy of sex, fucking men and then women and then men again, always reaching for transcendence, but even when it arrives she can't…transcend. She's chained to those girlhood memories that are her but that she must deny, so that she's never quite anyone. 'The Chronology of Water' invites us to experience each moment as if it were happening, but the movie is really telling the story of a spirit — the one that tries to survive, and become whole, through each moment. And that's what Poots' stunning performance captures: Lidia's hunger and desolation, but also the hidden space inside her, the room where her secrets are. Stewart, working with the cinematographer Corey C. Waters and the editor Olivia Neerghaard-Holm, stages the movie like a numinous documentary that's being lived and remembered at the same time. The drama is pointillistic, the way it was in 'The Tree of Life' — the poetry of images that illuminate and scald. Lidia gets a swimming scholarship to Texas Tech, drops out due to her dissipated lifestyle and then, through the random connection of a friend, gets a chance to join Ken Kesey's class at the University of Oregon. The fabled author of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is going to write a collaborative novel with his students, and the 70-year-old Jim Belushi, who plays him, sparks the film with an irascible beatnik joy. Kesey takes Lidia under his wing and gets her to think about words in a new way. The scene where she's invited to deliver one of her prose-poems at a reading is remarkable. Her words don't sound written — they sound like spasms of memory. That's why she's a true writer. Stewart films virtually the entire movie in closeup, without establishing shots — and, more significantly, without the kind of expository setup that so many scenes in movies have but don't need. We aren't told that Lidia is going to the beach to scatter the ashes of her dead infant, or that one of her mentors (played by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon) is going to liberate Lidia's imagination by beating her with a strap, or that she's going to transition into becoming a writing teacher. These realities just arrive; they're part of the liquid flow of life. But by the end we emerge as if baptized. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
