Recent Articles
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
- 0 Comments
Captain Phillips is the tale of four brave, doomed Somali sailors. These are men that spend their days trapped in a nightmarish sand-blasted hell with an infinite desert behind them and an infinite ocean in front. This is a world where the life expectancy is a smidge over 50 years, where power comes down the barrel of an AK-47 and where life is about as cheap as it gets.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Monday, October 14, 2013
- 0 Comments
The first shot of Prince Avalanche is apocalyptic; a lush green forest transformed into inferno. We see the fire consuming everything in its path, homes: lives and memories reduced to ashes. Cut to a year later. It’s 1988 and two workmen trundle their way along an apparently infinite road. They are Alvin (Paul Rudd), a self-important, finicky stuff-shirt and Lance (Emile Hirsch), a a horny, consciously shallow layabout. Dressed in Mario Brothers style dungarees they're a classically constructed odd couple.
It’s not the most obviously dramatic situation, yet there's a slightly Samuel Becketty feel to the setting. The men's slow and steady progress down the highway is mirrored in the film's deliberate pace, it's going to get where it's going in it's own damn time. The relaxed pace forces the audience to try and work out what makes these men tick and how they bounce off each other. With little else going on but dialogue and scenery, the film lives or dies on our emotional attachment to the characters so it's fortunate that both men are deftly and consistently sketched out.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
- 0 Comments
Beware the curse of the sketch character spinoff! For every The Blues Brothers there's a thousand shattered dreams: failed gambles that a character that works in sketches has the potential to carry a feature length film. A bad comedy is the most painful of bad films and with a genuine stinker under their belt a hitherto wildly popular comedy character can become irrevocably tainted with failure.
Worryingly, Bad Grandpa (or to give it its full title Jackass presents: Bad Grandpa) fits squarely within this genre. I'm vaguely familiar with the Jackass series, sort of remembering this character from the shows I've seen on TV. The gag is that Johnny Knoxville in old man make-up gets himself into scrapes you wouldn't expect an old man find himself in. As far as sketches go it's a decent idea; people's reactions to seeing an old man in Jackass extreme situations adds a small yet sigificant twist to the format. Also, most importantly, Johnny Knoxville does a brilliant caricature of a grumpy, slightly confused old man struggling to retain his dignity in a world that keeps kicking him in the crotch (often literally).
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Sunday, October 6, 2013
- 0 Comments
They all told me: be afraid of Slavoj Žižek, be very, very afraid. They said he eats interviewers for lunch, stalking from country to country dropping cluster bombs of harshly complex Marxist theory on terrified audiences. After reading The Sublime Object of Ideology it was easy to buy into this; while I got through the book, I felt like most of Žižek's argument as to what ideology is was whooshing right over my head. So when I bumped into him angrily griping about people leaving to go to the bathroom during the credits of this film I jumped a mile and thought he was about to bite my head off.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Saturday, October 5, 2013
- 0 Comments
.jpg)
Freaky post-humanism always appeals to me. From Cronenbergs "new flesh" to Giger's biomechanics to artcyborg Stelarc's self modification - throw technology and flesh into a cultural blender and what emerges is both pregnant with meaning and looks cool as hell. These combinations of human and machine usually tend towards horror: the subject often disgusted and alienated by the sanctity of the body being violated. While I guess this is understandable I've always been enthusiastic about these possibilities. Would becoming one with technology really be so bad? Anyway, aren't we already utterly integrated with technology?
Friday, October 4, 2013
Friday, October 4, 2013
- 0 Comments
John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island”. Jay Alvarez thinks otherwise. In his debut film, I Play With the Phrase Each Other, a gang of interconnected characters live in a self-imposed technological solitude, communicating only through mobile phone conversations. Alvarez says:
“This is an announcement of youngness. The movie screams our modern nausea, our florescent [sic] nightmare. It speaks for the first time all of the grinding lives spent on one end of electronic data transfer."
To create a film where the characters only communicate over the phone is a brave cinematic choice; a purposeful excision of interpersonal dynamics; a reduction of humanity to a chorus of tinny voices that bounce endlessly from antenna to antenna.
As I hurled my half naked body against a steel-grated fence I felt a bit ridiculous. Fucking a fence, I figured, is going to look silly however I go about it so I may as well go all out on this. I dug my fingertips deep into the slats, whipping it backwards and forwards, metallic reverberations filling the air as I furiously slammed my groin over and over into the quivering barrier. Why was I lewdly rubbing myself against a fence on an overcast Autumn day? To explore the division between public and private space, to understand something about society’s treatment of the mad and, on a personal level, to end summer with a bang.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)