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Saturday, August 31, 2013
Saturday, August 31, 2013
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| My Heart is a Strange Cabin (2008) - Eleanor Crook |
Eleanor Crook brings the dead to life. She's a great fit for Barts Pathology Museum: a cathedral of science literally full to the rafters with formaldehyde reliquaries, the organs and bones of the long dead floating in pickled serenity. A sculptor, she works primarily in wax, the human anatomy, both in rude health and various states of distress and dismemberment. By way of an example, her companion throughout the lecture was an incomplete wax sculpture of a disfigured soldier. Half his face a mangled mess, the other handsome, soft and androgynous, one intact eye mournfully staring off into the middle distance.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
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| Riddick is finally back! ... You know.. Riddick! That guy from Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick? Yeah, him. |
It's been thirteen years since Pitch Black. Nine since The Chronicles of Riddick. Was anyone really clamouring for the return of Vin Diesel's fantasy/sci-fi superhero? Pitch Black was an above par science fiction actioner - a B-movie with a few touches of real class - though nowhere near classic status. The ill-advised Chronicles of Riddick was an aesthetic and narrative disaster, an expansion of a daft, confusing universe nobody particularly cared much about in the first place. Chronicles took a well-deserved critical and financial mauling and the franchise was left for dead.
Yet this franchise, much like its central character, has proved difficult to kill. I don't think anybody was expecting Riddick to return, yet here he is, clawing his way back onto screens apparently by sheer determination. Riddick is Vin Diesel's pet character, developed from games of Dungeons and Dragons he played as a kid. Diesel's love for the character is palpable, for example to finance Riddick he leveraged his own house as collateral. The appeal of this film, produced on a relatively $40 million budget, with a very quick shooting schedule is obvious: it's the scrappy underdog in a market of high-gloss focus-grouped assured successes. This is a labour of love. But is it any good?
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
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"Fuck the man!" was the yell reverberating around POP MODERN last night. Much of this exhibition is devoted to sticking it to authority, to cocking a snook at the establishment and viciously sneer at the bastards with the gumption to tell us what to do. POP MODERN, now in its 11th year, runs alongside the annual Portobello Film Festival. These are new artists with fresh ideas, a common theme finding new ways to experience the world, to pump us up with antipolitik bravado, to get us in black balaclavas reclaiming the streets from the 'the man' that would seek to control us.
Of course the anarchistic spirit was a bit dampened when 'the man' showed up to rescue us from a bin someone had set on fire. But more on that later.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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Finally a genuinely lefty action flick! Elysium is an unapologetically blunt political allegory, designed from the ground up to showcase inequality, cruelty and economic enslavement. But the politics are just the jam stuffed deep inside a delicious cinematic doughnut. The dough surrounding this tasty socialist jam is a visceral science fiction survival story with astonishing special effects, cool as hell future technology and several great performances.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
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The plot of the The Way, Way Back is so weirdly specific it must be real. An awkward, introverted teenager is brought out of his adolescent funk by working in a water park. It's a strange concept, simultaneously utterly mundane and off the wall. The film is set in the modern day yet feels oddly timeless, a cocktail of quasi-retro imagery that feels ripped straight from the 70s or 80s.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
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The phenomenon known as infrasound has some very strange effects on human beings. These are sounds lower in frequency than 20 Hz, below the normal limit of human hearing. Infrasound has the effect of inducing anxiety, uneasiness, uncontrollable feelings of fear and awe. In nature they're found in the roar of the tiger and other large predators - the theory being that that human beings are hard-wired to experience a surge of adrenaline at hearing them - triggering a fight or flight response to escape a hungry predator. When the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the undisputed star of Jurassic Park, roared full blast through the BFI IMAX sound system I felt that instinctive, primal fear - an awe that cut past all intellectual analysis right to the animal core of my brain.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
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A pleasant looking middle-class family, the children all grown, is sitting down for their reunion dinner. The scene couldn't be more relaxed. The lighting is low, the food looks good, the familial bonds seem strong - this is the very image of happy, peaceful normality. So why am I sitting on the edge of my seat fervently hoping for the Dad's head to explode? Why am I filled with anticipation to see the boringly artistic ditzy couple be sliced up by machete wielding psychopaths? You're Next does a disturbingly great job of making you like a bloodthirsty sadist - setting up a gaggle of annoyingly moronic characters and slowly feeding them one by one into a meat grinder.
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