Over at the 500 Club, Jesse Thompson and myself took a look at some films screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Sunday the 3rd of August. My lineup for the day included Journey to the West, Fish & Cat, We Are the Best! and The Immigrant. Read the roundup at The 500 Club.
An adaptation such as the recent Golden Age trilogy prompts questions about the nature of what is and isn’t a “remake.” Do we treat these three films as a fresh adaptation of the long-running dark fantasy manga, or as a reinterpretation of the 1997 anime series closely inspired by that text? When we evaluate the…
This satirical take on the degradation of ‘60s counter-culture contains genuine insight, positioning Nixon’s election – seven years prior to filming – as the death knell for hippies. The narrative uses the election as backdrop rather than focus, however, centring its story on the collaborations and copulations of lothario hairdresser George (Warren Beatty; the synchronicity…
Over at the 500 Club, Jesse Thompson and myself took a look at some films screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday the 2nd of August. My lineup for the day included Norte, the End of History; Eastern Boys; Two Days, One Night; Goodbye to Language and Afflicted. Read the roundup at The…
I love films that gradually sneak up on you, films that effortlessly establish an engaging world without an overarching conflict before developing into something possessing immense emotional weight. The necessary balance to achieve this kind of affecting social realism must be difficult to attain, but it’s on full display in Clio Barnard’s surprisingly touching The…
Guardians of the Galaxy promises the kind of irreverent disdain for blockbuster norms that founded the Marvel Studios juggernaut, way back when they handed the reins to Mr. Favreau and Mr. Downey Jr. It features an unapologetically weird crew of intergalactic outlaws – green-skinned princesses and rocket-wielding raccoons – in an unapologetically weird universe mined…
Lucy is a deliriously unhinged future cult-classic, a joyously overstuffed treatise on the Meaning Of Life scrawled in Comic Sans and rendered in a vivid mélange of gunfights, car chases and stock footage. Its frankly ridiculous concept – Local Woman Uses More Than 10% Of Her Brain – could have easily produced an enjoyably daft…
Confession: I spent the majority of Vampire Hunter D thoroughly puzzled. Not necessarily at the narrative – though its convoluted miasma of vampire aristocracy, big guns and faces-in-hands is a good distance from coherent – but at how little the film in question met my expectations. Didn’t I watch this a while ago? Didn’t it…
“Even people who have never encountered snow can imagine what it’s like to walk through it. You leave footprints – declivities. When you step on fresh snow, you pack it down. You pack it down onto the sidewalk and when all the loose snow later blows away, it actually leaves a positive record of that…
Puzzle pieces lie strewn across a dusty table in the suburbs of Perth. They form an incomplete geography: crude continents assembled from matching pieces surrounded by isolate islands, shards without a partner. The camera lingers on this puzzle; we know it will never be completed. There are mere hours til the immolating shockwave of an…
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