• Pages

  • Site Sections

  • Tags

  • Archives

The Bling Ring – Sofia Coppola A waste of space movie about a waste of space lifestyle

Tweet     The Bling Ring – Sofia Coppola A rarity: a movie without a single genuine emotion throughout its full 90 minutes. The unspeakable ersatz world of celebrity slavishly but pathetically emulated by a bunch of young people descending like a plague of designer-brand locusts to strip celebrity homes of every famous named product […]

Lawless – John Hillcoat. Stupid men doing stupid things in very stupid ways for pretty stupid reasons

Tweet    Lawless – John Hillcoat Stupid men, doing stupid things, in very stupid ways, for pretty stupid reasons. Hillcoat and screenplay writer Nick Cave re-unite after the gratuitously violent The Proposition to delight us with the gratuitously violent Lawless. I wrote this of that first film, much admired by some. “A new genre – […]

Hangover 2 – TwitView: Men as moronic dick-led drunks

Tweet Hangover Part II – Tod Phillips (Twitter Review) Moronic dick-led barfbuddy drunk guys, charming as farts in a lift, lost in Bang Cock. Thai Muffball, Pretty Boy assf**ck. Ho Ho. H2=H1. H3? No. I Beg.

Sci-Fa Not Sci-Fi: Science farce not science fiction

Tweet Skyline – Colin and Greg Stausse Sci-Fa not Sci-Fi: science farce not science fiction. Final score: Latex 10 – Literacy 0. Graphic designers Colin and Greg Strausse (Avatar, Iron Man2, 2012 etc) should have stuck to their day job. As directors, well where should one start? Everything in this movie is derivative and deeply […]

Avatar – Bambification of Aboriginal narrative

TweetFilm, performance, screenplay, art Technical, Effects, Art direction Avatar – James Cameron Avatar sucks: the bambification of an aboriginal narrative. A sentimentalised pastiche of a Native American stereotype. The Na’vi sound like Hollywindians and worship an Earth-mother who looks like a fibre-optic willow tree spiritually reified by tinsellated dandelion-seed-like Christmas tree baubles that slo-mo around […]

Aw c’mon guys, gimme an Oscar

Tweet Is Anybody There? – John Cowley Is there a nation on earth more contemptuous or contemptible about the old than the British? Politically and socially we under-resource shamefully large numbers of the elderly literally to the point of starvation; or we freeze them to death. Politicians with a toxic self-serving sentimentality exploit them. We […]

Surveillance – sick movie, sick genre

Tweet Surveillance – Jennifer Chambers Lynch A sick movie – in a sick genre. Do not be conned by the publicity for this sleazeball movie: it is not a thriller. It is a horror movie pretending to be a thriller. The essence of the horror movie for me is that the tension, the suspense, arises […]

The New World – New? New to whom?

Tweet The New World – Terence Malik Critical response to this movie beggars belief. If he had just made the dullest movie ever (people walked out of my showing), Malik could be forgiven. But this empty, patronising, sentimentalised farrago of historic lies is scandalously ethnocentrically, totally white European. It perpetuates the worst form of a […]

The Hunted – Essay: aesthetics and morality in film

Tweet The Hunted – William Friedkin The Hunted is a nasty little film. Brutal and brutalising. Because it displays considerable mastery of many aesthetic techniques of film-making, the way in which is it bad raises interesting philosophical and aesthetic questions. It is what one might call an aesthetically immoral movie. The attribution of moral concepts […]

The Village – All veils – no Salome

Tweet The Village – M Night Shyamalan The biggest twist in Village is the way it’s filmed. Cinematically dishonest, it cheats the audience by misusing the ‘grammar’ of film. A ‘cry wolf’ movie: music, shot selection, editing, constantly threatens a fright……then nothing. By the time it does make you jump your adrenaline’s sluggish from false […]