CLPPNG is a dark, often difficult record. It’s despair; it’s disgust; it’s the acrid sting of bile in the back of your throat. It wields its malignant soundscape — a swirl of hard-edged textures, a maelstrom of noise — not as an outcry of aggression (though there is anger here), but as a manifesto of…
I’ve recently begun contributing to The Essential, a great new Australia film/music site. My first contribution was found in the middle of a Writer’s Roundtable asking the question “What is your favourite score/soundtrack and why?” The whole article is definitely recommended, with my colleagues producing some great responses, but my answer is included below: I…
The notion of films adopting a “videogame aesthetic” is – or was – a common critical observation, wielded as pejorative or praise depending, seemingly, on the critic’s personal opinion of videogames. Since at least The Matrix – a film visually and conceptually indebted to contemporary videogames while inspiring the design of games to come – and even Tron before…
The Trip to Italy is a hard film to dislike. Sure, your jealousy of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan might curdle into distaste. They’re both charming fellows, talented (and affable, if you believe Brydon), but when they get to make a television series-cum-feature film that sees them traipse around the most picturesque locales in Italy,…
Under the Skin is a challenging viewing experience. Those attending entirely off the back of “I heard Scarlett Johansson gets naked in this” will find themselves faced with a film more in tune with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey than Species. From its opening screen of black inexplicably infiltrated by white lights and rings that…
This isn’t going to be a review of Prince Avalanche. Stop by Rotten Tomatoes and you can find a raft of those, talking about the charming atmosphere of David Gordon Green’s buddy comedy, the laidback performances of leads Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch and the way the fire-ravaged California forest and Explosions in the Sky…
There’s been a wealth of conversation recently about the increasing homogenisation of superhero films: Matt Zoller Seitz kicked off the discussion with his piece on “Things Crashing Into Other Things” and I can’t dispute his points. Even if you enjoy most of the new wave of big budget superhero pictures, it’s hard not to notice…
It’s a rare film that can balance the supernatural and the psychotic. It requires walking the razor’s edge of taut surrealism without toppling into ridiculousness or incoherency. A few films have succeeded – Repulsion, The Innocents, The Shining, Eraserhead. And now, The Babadook. A feature length adaptation of Aussie director Jennifer Kent’s 2005 short Monster,…
Child’s Pose mounts a stinging attack on Romanian bourgeois corruption that avoids didacticism or familiarity by assuming an unconventional perspective. The story is found in the ripples resulting from a car accident that leaves a child dead and the driver potentially facing charges; however, it is not told from the point of view of the…
Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…
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