Horton, Scott and Yang.

It has monopolised the news this week in Australia: at the Swimming World Championships, Mack Horton refused to stand on a podium during a medal ceremony with Chinese star and alleged drug cheat Sun Yang. Horton had already made his attitude towards Sun well-known when, during the 2016 Olympics, he claimed publicly to have no time or respect for drug cheats. That's the right attitude to have towards them.

But after those 2016 remarks, was this protest fully necessary. It was certainly courageous, if immediately polarising; his teammates gave him a standing ovation in their athletes' village but Swimming Australia gave him a warning. Then the next day, UK swimmer Duncan Scott pulled the same protest, prompting to Sun to angrily mock him as they left the pool deck.

This is how I see the controversy following Sun. His first accusations of cheating surfaced in 2014 when he tested positive for a drug he took for a heart defect; world swimming's governing body FINA slapped him with a three-month ban for that. I think that was warranted because while Sun and his trainers definitely should've researched its legality first, he still took it for health reasons. But now he stands accused of smashing vials of his own blood so they can't be tested, and the World Anti-Doping Authority has thus been prompted to intervene and ban him for life if necessary.

I want to be very clear that I am entirely on the fence regarding what all three parties have done (or, in Sun's case, have allegedly done) here. Horton and Scott protested peacefully and sincerely, and I do think Sun's reaction to Scott's protest was arrogant. But as this fiasco has unfolded, I feel sorry for all the other swimmers whose achievements in these World Championships have been overshadowed and ignored. Nonetheless, doping is deservedly illegal and unfair. I am not saying or even thinking Sun Yang is innocent; I am just waiting to see if WADA, whom I trust, finds him guilty. They are the ultimate experts in these matters and therefore, that's when I will say he is.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #147: Walt Disney: His Life and Legacy (2015).

Disney. That word conjures up thoughts of mice with oversized teeth, an upright-walking duck, a raccoon-fur-wearing adventurer, theme parks and repeatedly happy endings. But Walt Disney, the man who started this iconic, global entertainment juggernaut, had quite a complex, divisive and chequered history. The remarkable four-part 2015 documentary mini-series Walt Disney: His Life and Legacy makes a very daring effort to tell his tale with brutal honesty and balance.

Naturally it unfolds chronologically, from Disney's childhood in Chicago and Missouri to when he arrived in Hollywood in 1920 after serving in World War I. Then it documents how he and financier brother Roy gradually established themselves in America's burgeoning animation industry which they transformed forever in 1937 with the seminal feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, before establishing the Walt Disney Company and everything which came with that, until Walt's death from lung cancer in 1966.

Director Sarah Colt and writer Mark Zwonitzer have come closer than maybe anybody else will to capturing the essence of Disney's achievement and that's precisely because of their conscious effort to show him warts and all. Underneath his wholesome public image, Disney was an active anti-communist who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and openly hated unions, to the point where he fired employees who supported them. His manner of running his company even prompted all his animators to strike in 1941 for better pay and working conditions. To their huge credit, Colt and Zwonitzer explore these scandals very objectively for a nonetheless infuriating and moving effect; it's the series' zenith for me.

But even so, their affection and respect for Disney's work shine through, and they invoke very engaging and lucid contemporary interviews with iconic Disney staff like the composers the Sherman brothers and Disney biographer Neal Gabler. Colt and Zwonitzer, with narrator Oliver Platt, also manage perhaps inadvertently to provide a broad tapestry of filmmaking and Hollywood history, and one which hints at how Hollywood became the commercial and escapist behemoth it is now. Walt Disney: His Life and Legacy therefore succeeds not just at covering and examining his story from a contemporary angle, but also at proving that indeed it all really did start with a Mouse.

Detoxing in Capricornia.

This week, my region of Capricornia, in Queensland, Australia, has seen a fierce debate rise. Our state government intends to build a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in the city of Rockhampton. That would normally, I imagine, be a unanimously popular initiative, but the problem is the intended location. That is a vacant block of land just several hundred metres away from a residential estate, on Rockhampton's outskirts. Naturally those living nearby have begun protesting so staunchly they've made Queensland's state TV news.

Now, after a related Facebook post I made which caused an ongoing debate of its own (62 comments and counting), I've developed cognitive dissonance here. Initially I was angry about what I considered these residents' apparent insistence (or maybe just the media's insistence on portraying them all this way) on tarring all addicts with the same brush as unrestrained deviants, because two of my relatives have been addicts, but now I've been led, however reluctantly or subconsciously, to be able to understand and empathise more with their grievances. Several friends of mine, to their credit, suggested alternative and more remote locations for this facility - which, keep in mind, hasn't even been built yet - which I do think would be suitable.

Nonetheless, the thought from this debate which I've been most stewing over is the separate debate over whether addicts choose to become addicts. I genuinely have to take the middle ground on that; there's surely a subjectivity to it, and I suspect some people first take drugs simply to sample them, even though they may know of the addiction risk. But regardless, while I know very well how addicts can be prone to violence or depravity, in my experience the drugs themselves influence that more than the user's personality (although I acknowledge, of course, that therefore everybody could decrease their capability of those if they never touched drugs). We are all a fusion of good and bad; it just comes down to which side we choose to exhibit more often.

Anyway, I've come around to the idea of the Queensland Government building this rehab facility elsewhere, but I still think these residents would do well to view addicts more open-mindedly and call me naive but I'm convinced many addicts would consult this facility out of a genuine desire to turn their lives around. I do not for a second condone their lifestyle choices, but as someone who's had to contend with stereotypes for most of his life as a member of another marginalised discourse, I can empathise with them in that sense.

Now, in closing, addicts may or may not choose that road for themselves. I'll let you take whichever angle you like there. But either way, we can (and I believe should) do whatever we all can to help addicts kick the habit.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #145: Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes (2018).

Roger Ailes was the founder and CEO of Fox News, that bastion of pro-right American TV journalism, until his resignation in 2016 following a spate of sexual harassment allegations. The documentary Divide and Conquer covers how he went from a Republican Party advisor and media consultant, to TV executive, to establishing his all-conquering Fox News before his fall from grace and death in 2017.

This riveting piece of work is easily one of the best documentaries I've seen in years. Like the finest investigative journalism, director Alexis Bloom treats her subject here with consistent objectivity, balance and impartiality and the result is all the more credible and informative for it. In other words, it shows all the traits his network's programs don't. As it digs deeper into how Ailes ran Fox News, it ultimately also offers a lucid snapshot (pun intended) into how journalism in general actually works, beyond what we see on our screens at home, and just how closely it can intersect with politics. Ailes was a GOP king-maker who used his network to influence Bill Clinton' impeachment, among other things.  It isn't one-sided either; Bloom prominently features interviews with FN presenters like Kimberley Guilfoyle, Glenn Beck and Sandra Smith, and she keeps Ailes' family out of it for discretion.

Bloom also shows admirable restraint in covering the numerous sexual misconduct allegations which ended Ailes' career; rather than interviewing the complainants themselves, she invokes actual news reports of those allegations before depicting how the FN team coped with them and his subsequent resignation, before he died under a year later. This does not mean, however, that Bloom now asks us to sympathise with him, although nor does it become judgmental. Instead, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes becomes a powerful expose on corruption and bias in our mass media, and one that's just as fast-paced as any typical day in a newsroom.

But perhaps its greatest strength

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #144: The Fundamentals of Caring (2016).

Paul Rudd is Ben, a retired writer. Needing new work, he takes a six-week course to become a caretaker and then is hired by single mother Elsa (Jennifer Ehle) to be an in-home carer for her teenage son Trevor (Craig Roberts), who has Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The anxious and sardonic Trevor, who was raised in England, has a fascination with American roadside attractions and therefore Ben suggests they go to see several. However, Trevor is set in his ways and refuses, and Elsa worries Ben is becoming too attached to him. Ben soon proposes that he and Trevor take a road trip to see the world's deepest pit, a plan to which Elsa and Trevor reluctantly agree. Then, off Trevor and Ben go to see this pit. In the process, Trevor develops feelings for Dot (Selena Gomez), a teen runaway they pick up at a service station, Trevor learns why Ben chose to become a carer, Ben learns more about his two adolescent charges and these three misfits all slowly bond and discover the reasons for that.

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Based on Jonathan Evison's 2012 novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, this 2016 Netflix release is a sheer delight alone for how it tells a story about disability in which the disabled character actually drives the narrative and defies stereotypes. Writer-director Rob Burnett tells it himself with no shred of judgment or indiscretion and unrelenting good humour, and visualises it fittingly with photography which feels like the kind you'd record on a road trip; it's relaxed but ever-moving. Ryan Miller's pulsating score compliments this nicely. The cast are uniformly brilliant, particularly Roberts, who seems to enjoy making Trevor really work for our affections (although Roberts himself is able-bodied), and Gomez, who makes Dot's tenuous strength gradually obvious for greater effect. Even Rudd, who's best known for comedic roles and as Ant-Man, gives a strongly balanced turn.

Maybe it's because I myself have a (neurological) disability, but for me this is a shimmering gem with more heart and soul than a church choir singing Amazing Grace. As a road movie, a coming-of-age story, and a celebration of difference, The Fundamentals of Caring is fundamental viewing.