Scavenger Hunt 19 - October 2016 - #12
Spanish hunters are exceedingly cruel. Once they have decided that a hunting dog is no longer fit for active duty they string him up by the neck from a tree branch and watch him slowly strangulate to death. While they watch his paws kick at the air in a death dance of sheer panic they laugh in bemusement. The hunters call this "playing the piano" as though the…
Finally. After all this time I've managed to catch up with It Follows. It was trying to get away from me but I was slowly plodding after it. It made the mistake of coming to a stop on my coffee table. It was then only a matter of time before I pounced on it and rammed it into my Blu Ray player. Settling in to the couch with trepidation and fear, I was scared out of my wits that it…
Sydney Film Festival 2018 - #9
Lynne Ramsay immerses us in the subjective experience of a fractured psyche, in You Were Never Really Here. Eschewing a coherent plot, she at times negates typical generic conventions to destabilise the expectations we would have of a straight-forward action movie. This prevents the main character, Joe, from collapsing into a one-dimensional surrogate for our own hyper-masculine hero fantasies.
Through Ramsay's formal contortions, Joe's subjective experience of trauma, dislocation and alienation are strongly felt.…
Sydney Film Festival 2018 - #8
A tryptych of sorts, Foxtrot is separated into three parts, each panel focusing primarily on a different member of an Israeli family; father, son and mother.
On the first panel, when the military inform the father that their son has been killed while on duty, the stark constrast between the families emotional distress and the military's standardised process for handling it is pure black comedy gold.
The second panel takes us to the middle…
Everything I love about cinema started right there in the 1890s. The Lumière Brothers started a long tradition of realism, capturing life on camera and providing a snapshot of different times, people and places. In extension of this, Alice Guy-Blache utilised this new mass media to reach out and engage broad audiences in social commentary and make…
The moment the music began and the prologue started scrolling up the screen I start sobbing.
And I couldn't stop. By the time I got home my eyes were red and sore. I have had one of the shittest years of my life.
But Star Wars is still there. It will always be there.
It takes all our epic struggles, the conflicts with our families and ourselves, and transforms them on the big screen into dog battles in space and…
