A Band Called Death is an oral history of a band called Death (surprise), the first black punk band (and one of the first punk bands, full stop, even if they didn’t call themselves that at the time). Formed in Detroit in the early ‘70s, their music was vital and visionary, but never caught the…
Mystery Road does, as the title suggests, concern a mystery of sorts. An indigenous teenage girl is found murdered on the outskirts of an outback Aussie town, and Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen, fantastic) investigates. His inquiries turn over dusty rocks, disturbing the dark creatures from their hiding places. In spirit of noirs like Chinatown…
Successful art is defined by its ability to transform, to transcend. To take us beyond thin paper pages bound into a novel to the world beyond, to surpass men and women playing make-believe to something true. All art is built on artifice, but great art makes you forget about the brushstrokes, the actors, the instruments…
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – through Tyler Durden – stated that “self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…” Invisible Monsters – written before Fight Club but released afterwards – is a novel expanding upon that idea, arguing that self-improvement and self-destruction are one and the same, each as solipsistic as pleasuring one self. The unnamed narrator of…
As a disaster movie, Black Sunday feels almost quaint compared to the destruction reaped in modern superhero films; the film sees the Goodyear blimp descend upon the Superbowl, laden with plastic explosives, a threat level a few notches below Superman tossing Zod through Metropolis’s skyscrapers or the Chitauri laying waste to Manhattan. The difference between…
Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is a lengthy hike indeed: the film stretches over nearly two-and-a-half hours, chronicling the life of Nelson Mandela from young revolutionary to iconic leader. A half hour in, I was dreading the next couple hours; the first thirty minutes thrusts its way through a checklist of Mandela’s early life –…
The Last Detail finds a couple navy lifers – Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), better known as “Badass,” and Mulhall (Otis Young), better known as “Mule” – accompanying a young man called Meadows (Randy Quaid) to a prison in Portsmouth. Meadows is eighteen years old facing eight years in the brig. The length of his punishment is…
One of my favourite novels is Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, a document that posits a futuristic dystopia where books and liberty alike are immolated in streams of fire. It’s touching and prescient and achingly well-written. It’s also founded on a belief that I reject, the notion that television is an ignorance-inducing tool of slavery. Bradbury’s…
The Marked Ones is the fifth Paranormal Activity film, the latest in a series that’s seemingly unstoppable. The reason for the series’ longevity isn’t complicated; people (especially teenagers) love to be scared. These films are primarily a vehicle for frightening its audience, and The Marked Ones is very much in that tradition. It eschews the…
This isn’t going to be a review of the Big Day Out. Unless you have a press pass with VIP access and the like, I don’t think it’s really possible to review a music festival. Even that hypothetical journalist isn’t really covering the whole festival, with four or five groups playing simultaneously across the venue…
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