I really liked The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan when I read the book twenty years ago. I had never seen the film, so I thought I would check it out. I was a little disappointed. After watching the film, I picked the book up off the shelf and read it immediately. It is only a hundred pages. Harold Pinter's script pulls the dialogue straight out of the book. Ninety percent of the scenes were lifted straight off the…

Until the Luanda Leaks early this year, I had no idea that Isabel Dos Santos existed. As soon as I did and learnt more about her dastardly deeds I found myself becoming infuriated.

For a long time, Isabel Dos Santos has been the richest woman from the African continent. She is the daughter of the first president of Angola, who took power when the country won independence from their European overlords. She then studied Electrical Engineering at Oxford in the…

I still remember the first time I watched The Breakfast Club. It was 1994, I was fourteen years old and on a school excursion with my year 9 Japanese language class. We were visiting a small central western town in NSW called Cowra. During World War II, it had been the site of a POW camp that included a population of approx. 2200 Japanese soldiers. The camp was primarily notable for the Cowra Breakout. In 1944, a thousand of those…

Notably, the cinematography in 1917 is undoubtedly exceptional. Making it seem like a single cut lent the film a sense of relentless urgency and at times a suffocating claustrophobia. Combined with its reproduction of this specific time and place, with all its devastation and horror, the verisimilitude achieved is excruciating and renders this film a harrowing experience. It certainly underscores exactly why war is fucked.

There are some thrilling moments of war time action in this film from our heroes…

Film School Drop Outs Challenge 2017 Week 1 - Auteurs - Pioneers of Film - Lumiere Brothers , George Melies or Alice Guy-Blache

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…

Thanatos, Eros and the Art of Zen - Japanese Erotic Cinema Project - #1

I went to see this film at the cinema on my own. Nobody else could go but I wanted to anyway because I am precipitously dementing into a Sion Sono fan. And it has the word porno in the title, so there is that.

There was a lesbian couple sitting next to me. It doesnt matter that they were lesbians. But with the same sex marriage…