If you watched the trailer above for Zero Dark Thirty, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a cinematic Call of Duty, a jingoistic portrayal of the war on terrorism, an action film where Bert Macklin, Drazic and Joel Edgerton kill Osama Bin Laden. Certainly, the last hour of the film is a tense, cavernous…
Girls is the perfect title for a show featuring characters who spend most of their time in a kind of arrested development: twenty year-old adolescents, unfettered by and uninterested in responsibility. The latest episode flipped that on its head, with each character in “It’s a Shame About Ray” coming across as a child play-acting as…
The peeps running the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival do an amazing job of picking artists many months before they make it big. A couple years ago it was Mumford & Sons and Florence and the Machine. This year’s lineup featured up-and-comers like Alt-J and Of Monsters and Men. What they aren’t good at is considering…
Cloud Nothings are a band with one foot squarely in the past, with a sound revelling in what actually made the “grunge” era of the nineties good (if you want to listen to a band who revelled in the worst of grunge, check out Creed – better yet, don’t). Their other foot, though, is stamping…
Japandroids have been one of my favourite bands since their incredible debut Post-Nothing. Their Australian fanbase has expanded rapidly since the recent release of Celebration Rock – a damn good thing, since it meant that the duo finally made the long trip over from Vancouver to play their first-ever Australian show in the gentle warmth…
The early Nightmare on Elm Street films – whether they’re good (one and three) or bad (the rest) – focused on maximalist scares – full of big special effects, buckets of gore and a sneering Freddy centre-frame. In New Nightmare the scares are subtle, building upon real fears – a child’s fear of the boogeyman…
Spartacus is and always has been a show drenched in violence (also sex, though that’s mostly peripheral to the narrative). This is clear from opening scenes where we see Spartacus and his men slice their way through countless nameless Romans. This is a concern for me in this final season. The violence in the first…
Last Saturday, my partner Jae and I spent a day liveblogging the Triple J Hottest 100 at TripleJae. We spent the day finding out our predictions were half-good, half-terrible, comparing the infamous Warmest 100 to the actual results, and, of course, our thoughts on all the songs in the countdown. We were both baffled by…
Justified has been pleasantly understated and understatedly pleasant over the first episodes of this already-impressive season; even moments like Boyd cleverly poisoning (and, as we found this week, killing) his preacher rival felt almost light-hearted. “The Bird Has Flown” brings some weight and consequence back with two plotlines, each wringing genuine pathos out of situations…
When I picked up this “part-sequel part-remake” of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre second-hand from a video store for a couple dollars, I was fully expecting a very bad movie. And, hoo boy, it did not disappoint! This film actually warrants the description “so bad it’s good.” It loosely rips off the plot of the original,…
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