Tucker and Dale vs Evil is built on a simple germ of an idea – what happens if you use the hillbilly-slasher framework, but portrayed from the hillbillies’ perspective? And what if said rednecks are actually innocent sweethearts, the “murders” caused by freak accidents (that are hard to describe without mentioning Rube Goldberg)? It’s a…
Given the Academy Award nominations were just announced today, it seemed a good a time as any to finally publish my top 10 films of 2012 list. My criteria for inclusion is a little shaky, but critically acclaimed films like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty and Flight are all yet to be released in Australia…
“…Well, I guess I need to choose my words more carefully.” Justified is a show that always chooses its words carefully, particularly during the tense showdowns that occur frequently on the show. It’s like a ‘40s noir film in the way that the dialogue is carefully crafted, the relaxed Southern rhythm belying the subtle, clever…
Beasts of the Southern Wild creates a world unlike any other I’ve encountered in either real life or fiction. It concerns the ragtag residents of “The Bathtub,” a small Louisiana community on the wrong side of a levee, in perpetual danger of disappearing beneath the ocean every time a storm hits. The tale is told…
Shallow Grave concerns the misguided actions of a group of university students upon discovering their new flatmate is (a) dead and (b) in possession of a suitcase filled with cash. It was the breakthrough film for Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor, and it’s easy to see why on both counts. Boyle’s filmmaking is flashy, energising…
Videodrome is a mad, grotesque nightmare, all writhing flesh and flicking hallucinatory visions. We switch from one scene to the next without a narrative umbilical cord to follow, like a torpid couch potato flicking between channels. The movie is dank and forbidding, dripping with amniotic fluid, an aborted mutation. Max Renn (James Woods) is the…
Noirs are at their best when they reveal the darkness hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilisation, with ever-present shadows stretching across the screen. Killer Joe is a grimy neo-noir, but its characters wear their darkness on their sleeves without the façade of civility. Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) discusses the murder of his mother with…
I was expecting, thanks to its marketing, The Loved Ones to be a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, with a broad, comedic take on the prom night slasher film. I certainly hadn’t anticipated the gutpunch of an early scene where a girl drives alongside a dog, who, recently stabbed, pants futilely for air. It gets darker from…
The Deep Blue Sea begins with a suicide attempt scored with over-dramatic classical music, overlaid with histrionic strings. The music bothered me, though it’s very appropriate to the film on the whole, a classically-produced melodrama where characters alternate between either politely saying things like “See, I rather foolishly thought that my indifference would hurt your…
Dubstep has been the whipping boy of popular culture for some time now. It’s not undeserved; there are plenty of genuinely terrible songs in the genre (Nero – Crush On You and Benny Benassi – Cinema (Skrillex Remix) are good examples of the lazy, paint-by-numbers songwriting that warrants the hate), but a lot of the…
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