“Even people who have never encountered snow can imagine what it’s like to walk through it. You leave footprints – declivities. When you step on fresh snow, you pack it down. You pack it down onto the sidewalk and when all the loose snow later blows away, it actually leaves a positive record of that…
Puzzle pieces lie strewn across a dusty table in the suburbs of Perth. They form an incomplete geography: crude continents assembled from matching pieces surrounded by isolate islands, shards without a partner. The camera lingers on this puzzle; we know it will never be completed. There are mere hours til the immolating shockwave of an…
You could probably make an argument that Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick’s debut feature film (later described by the man himself as “amateurish”), is some kind of lost masterpiece. The argument would likely involve cherry-picking the film’s rudimentary anti-war themes and include a lot of stills. Unfortunately, when you actually watch the damn thing –…
In Objet d’Art, we take a look at the use of inanimate objects in film and music and their changing meanings, aesthetics and emotional purpose in different contexts. The bicycle is a potent, versatile symbol of freedom. It’s a symbol of the freedom of unconfined, joyful movement – in The Muppet Movie, the miraculous freedom…
Margin Call seems like the perfect post-Wolf of Wall Street palate cleanser. Scorsese’s film wielded kinetic entertainment as provocation, presenting the unlimited excess of the American dream before turning the camera on the audience and insisting on their culpability. Margin Call isn’t on the same level, trading absurd hedonism for dry didacticism on the verge…
When you turn up to your local multiplex and fork out for a bucket of popcorn and a couple of tickets to Hercules, you’re not going in expecting a cinematic masterpiece. This is, after all, a film about Greek demi-god Hercules with The Rock – sorry, he goes by Dwayne Johnson now – in the…
Freaks and Geeks is finally – finally! – available on Australian DVD today, so it seems as good a time as any to look back on the classic high school sitcom (a label that sits a little funny nowadays, but we’ll get to that). It’s customary when looking back on a show this old (if…
Once My Mother isn’t necessarily an exemplar of expert filmmaking. Chronicling the life of director Sophia Turkiewicz’s mother, Helen, who travelled the perilous journey from war-torn Poland through a Siberian gulag and Zimbabwean refugee camp before arriving in Australia, some formal failings are understandable: Turkiewicz filmed the bulk of the documentary with no funding, meaning…
Xavier Dolan’s first two features seem like they needed to be made by a young director. I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats each feature Dolan as lead actor; the former examining his character’s tense relationship with his mother, the latter instead positioning him at the vertex of a similarly tense love triangle. I doubt an…
Princess Mononoke’s recent release on Blu-Ray provided me an opportunity to truly appreciate the gorgeous animation of Miyazaki’s seventh feature-length film. My previous viewings of the film had been low-quality (pirated) versions – in fact, I can distinctly recall watching the film at a friend’s place on a burnt DVD when, halfway through, the disc…
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