I didn’t write about music all that much in 2013, but I did set aside a bit of time to listen to music, so I thought I’d share the albums that I most enjoyed last year. Honourable mentions go to Future of the Left – How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident, which just…
There was something volcanic about Future of the Left’s show last night. The sweltering heat in a tightly packed crowd and the smell of bushfire smoke in the air contributed, but the fierce, white-hot rock that erupted from the stage was the main factor. The band channelled something primitive, Andy Falkous straddling the stage like…
The Ghost Writer is a tense, understated thriller, eschewing violence for political intrigue. Director Roman Polanski channels his classic noir Chinatown, with Ewan McGregor’s ghost writer standing in for Jack Nicholson’s private detective, with the corruption here inspired by Tony Blair rather than California’s seedy underbelly. There’s also an inversion of Polanski’s “predicament” in Pierce…
Six months after ccpopculture began, I hit my two hundredth post and commemorated the “event” by making a few changes to the site. I changed the name (from Carbon Copy to ccpopculture), and introduced both Extended Cut and Double Feature as alternative posts – up until that point, every single one of my posts had…
The full title of this flick is H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond, but if you’re looking for a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s famous works of gothic fiction, you’re shit out of luck. If you’d prefer a film that combines the demonspawn and bondage of Hellraiser with the grotesque special effects of Reanimator (plus its deliciously campy…
Another couple reviews hosted on other websites, each for a film whose leading ladies are likely to be nominated for Academy Awards soon enough: August: Osage County, a film with a great cast and screenplay that never really come together to create a great film. Philomena, anchored by an excellent performance from Judi Dench but…
Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) sees himself as a failure. As he flips through his personal budget, rifles through negatives in his job at LIFE magazine or stares at the eHarmony profile page of co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), he emits an aura of vacancy. It’s like he’s barely there and, sometimes, he isn’t, lost in flights…
If you believe The Dissolve and The AV Club, Computer Chess is one of the best films of 2013. I don’t entirely agree, but the film is appealingly different, an eccentric little movie filmed using (comparatively) ancient video cameras. It initially concerns a gaggle of geeks in the 1980s competing in a tournament pitting chess-playing…
The Graduate and Harold and Maude have a lot in common. Each tell stories about a May-December romance, with the male the younger partner (still a rarity in mainstream films), but are more interested in interrogating bourgeois malaise. They’re both satires laced with black comedy, but each has a real sadness at the core. Folk…
My Top 20 films of the year are listed below. For most them, clicking on the title will take you to my review of the film from earlier in the year. One qualifier before I begin: this doesn’t neatly fit into a “films of 2013” from a cinematic release perspective; thanks to film festivals and…
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