A Bigger Splash is a distinctly musical film. It’s a music film, too – with Tilda Swinton channelling her versatile Bowie charisma as a world-famous rockstar and Ralph Fiennes exhibiting some irrepressible dance moves as a record producer – but what makes the film sing is how director Luca Guadagnino effortlessly bridges its distinct tones.…
So I Can’t Play H! is a fanservice anime. Or maybe the fanservice anime, given how shamelessly it’s calibrated to accommodate animated depictions of the naked female form. Here’s its premise: a slender Grim Reaper named Lisara (Aya Endo) strikes a deal with perverted high-schooler Ryosuke (Hiro Shimono), wherein he will supply her with ‘energy’ that…
I wanted to hate Youth. I usually walk into movies wanting to like/love them, but given my antipathy for Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty, I was hoping for some more ammunition in my argument that it’s terribly overrated. Youth gave me sufficient ammunition, I’ll give it that. Sorrentino’s take on affluent, existential aimlessness, spent…
Dope begins with three dictionary definitions of the title, suiting the purposeful restlessness of a movie that’s neatly trisected into three distinct sections: each one assured, stylish and articulate. The first half is a teen film – all the colourful kineticism of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl except with, y’know, something to say…
Freezing Vibration is the follow-up to Freezing, a 2011 fanservice anime which suffered from lacking any apparent target audience. Taking a conventional premise – a primarily female-populated high school spiced up with frequent magically-augmented battles – the first season failed to provide any kind of interesting plot, wasting its time on progressively tiresome hierarchical disputes.…
On the way to completing my Science degree, most of my electives were spent on Philosophy courses, thanks to a roughly-equal combination of intellectual inquisitiveness and a desire for bludgey subjects. My favourite course was probably the one titled Philosophy of Time Travel, which looked at the philosophical and metaphysical ramifications of time travel; specifically,…
Maybe I’m not the audience for Entourage. I’ve seen very little of the show – snippets here and there of the later seasons that my wife forced herself to sit through, presumably out of completist compulsion. So I had no sense of good will towards movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier), his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy…
Alex Garland’s work as a novelist (The Beach, Coma) and screenwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine) is, at its best, defined by a careful command of tone balanced with obvious intelligence. It should not come as a surprise that Ex Machina, Garland’s first time behind the director’s chair, demonstrates these qualities in abundance. This sparse sci-fi…
Elijah Wood sure has slipped comfortably into B-movies after his stint at the Shire, hasn’t he? When I first stumbled upon Open Windows, I was expecting something along the lines of Wood’s bomb-in-a-piano thriller Grand Piano. There are similarities: both films are quintessential B-thrillers, escalating a catchy premise into something tense (and a little silly).…
Like most punters heading to Soundwave at Brisbane’s RNA Showgrounds this weekend, I made some effort to dress the part. With my carefully-groomed beard and thick-rimmed glasses, I’m neither a metalhead nor a punk, but the combination of a black Refused T-shirt, contact lenses and a relatively unkempt beard served as concession to the hard…
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