Guillermo del Toro usually brings his own unique designs to blockbuster filmmaking; Pacific Rim, surprisingly, feels more like a pastiche. It’s visually a hodge-podge of Godzilla, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Matrix sequels, and is filled with overt references – there’s a Star Wars quote, and GLaDOS from Portal voices the film’s computers. The lack…
250+ posts into ccpopculture, I’m beginning to reconsider my initial decision to avoid star ratings entirely. 200 words isn’t a lot, and finding space to talk about what’s interesting about an artwork while also assessing its quality is difficult – my reviews regularly include an awkwardly shoehorned “Recommended” or similar. But star ratings are problematic.…
Everyone should be able to relate to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion – after all, who hasn’t gone a little crazy when their flatmates went out of town? Spending the week in the same dressing gown, killing time (and maybe some other things) … we’ve all been there. Repulsion is a dizzying spiralling descent into psychosis, crafted…
In the space of two of episodes, Under the Dome has transformed from a show with a lot of potential to an example of wasted potential. There’s time to turn things around, but this is certainly not the way to do it. Trapping your characters inside a dome should increase the stakes. There should be…
Gummo is an imperfect curio, an interesting failure. Harmony Korine’s directorial debut attempts to convey a sense of hollow malaise in a poverty-stricken town while conjuring bizarre imagery that’s disturbing or fascinating – often both. There are frequent demonstrations of Korine’s abundant ability: it’s not hard to draw a line between a scrawny adolescent lifting…
Upstream Color is strongly inspired by Terence Malick’s filmography, whether it’s borrowing particular shots or themes – a hand gently brushing across a surface, a flock of birds silhouetted against a pale sky – or appropriating the feel of his films. The resemblance surprised me given director Shane Carruth’s last movie, the intensely intellectual time…
Ju-On: The Grudge is apparently the scariest Japanese horror film ever, and it’s certainly filled with memorably creepy images: children’s hands running through someone’s hair in the shower or ghostly figures emerging from beneath the bedsheets to drag people away to oblivion. The film has a scrappy, low budget feeling which is actually an asset…
Truly talented artists seem impenetrable: how can a person produce something transcendent, beyond and yet encapsulating human experience? Many artists seem more than human, the idiosyncrasies and oddities that allow them to complete their work characterising them as “eccentric.” The subject of Harland’s Half Acre, Frank Harland is such an artist, an impossibly talented painter…
“Just think about it. We could have met every girl we’re ever going to meet.” The above quote – one of the few considering the consequences of imprisonment – pretty well sums up what Under the Dome is doing wrong. The show is quite happy to consider the question “What is the dome?” but is…
It’s easy to characterise Traffic as a by-the-numbers message film, a screed against the “war on drugs” that even colour-codes each of its various storylines to avoid confusion. Each storyline is custom-built to demonstrate the futility of the early-‘90s anti-drug initiatives of the United States, whether it’s someone immediately rising to replace an incarcerated druglord…
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