Eden (2014)

Eden feels kinda pointless. Maybe that’s the point. Following an aspiring garage DJ, Paul (Félix de Givry), a slender surrogate for director Mia Hansen-Løve’s brother and co-writer Sven, the film’s first half largely eschews the typical party aesthetics – the neon-streaked dancefloor, the incandescent beaches – for overcast streets and rumpled apartments, like something out…

Battles – La Di Da Di

At the centre of Satoshi Kon’s final film, Paprika, is a parade like no other. Woven from dream fabric, a colourful melange of animated household items, frogs, pachinko robots and a dizzying array of additional miscellaneous figures – including the Statue of Liberty – sway and frolic through an inchoate dream city. The cavalcade of…

We Are Your Friends (2015)

I’ve done a lot of travelling in my time. There was a lot of dancing, more music than I could shake a glowstick at, and enough glorious (at the time) experiences that there’s definite “nostalgia” (cringeworthy recollections) to be “remembered fondly” (blatantly denied). We Are Your Friends captures all of that and then some. At its heart,…

HEALTH – DEATH MAGIC

The Loudness Wars are over. One of the last over the trenches were L.A. band HEALTH, though their contributions to the victorious effort – measured in the maximalism of modern pop music – were overshadowed by the final wave of reinforcements. In the wake of the searing synths of their compatriots Crystal Castles, the drum-machine…

Hot Chip – Why Make Sense?

My earliest memories of Hot Chip are on the dancefloor. The place was Common People, circa mid-2000s. It was a scungy Brisbane nightclub for hipsters before that term had become the nebulous pejorative it is nowadays, the descendant of the Depot and the ancestor of a string of replacements (Gossip, Magazine, others). Common People only…