Kong: Skull Island (Electric Shadows podcast)

The Electric Shadows Podcast reaches Episode 20!

In this landmark episode, myself & Rob Daniel talk Kong: Skull Island – but did we go ape for it?
We also go off track into some trademark tangent undergrowth, and find time to tackle Paul Verhoeven’s controversial Elle, Anna Biller’s deeply feminist melodrama The Love Witch, plus Fassbender-Gleeson Traveler drama Trespass Against Us.

FEMINIST GRAB-BAG: The Love Witch & Elle

The Love Witch

Love is a many-splendoured thing. It can also be deadly, especially when magick’s involved.

Such is the takeaway from The Love Witch, a flawless ’70s-style melodrama from writer-director/musician/editor/set-art-costume-production-designer Anna Biller.

An obvious “passion project”, in more ways than one, the film is a delicious slice of feminist theory masquerading as Technicolour confection.…

CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: Beauty And The Beast (2017) & Get Out

Beauty And The Beast (2017)

Obligatory “tale as old as time” reference.

Disney’s original Beauty And The Beast holds a special place in my heart: it was, according to my parents, the first film I ever saw in the cinema; aged just eighteen months.

Kong: Skull Island: monkey see, monkey well done

SPOILERS

 

A U.S. flyboy plummets out of the sun; hooked to a parachute.

His fighter plane death-spiraling into a flaming wreck on the white sand of Pacific beach. His panicked grappling with a Japanese pilot, his nemesis; a battle to the death on a clifftop drenched in searing light.…

CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: The Great Wall & Trespass Against Us

The Great Wall

To misquote the film’s tagline, “Three years, $150 million to make, what were they hoping to prove?”.

Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall is at best a misguided curiosity – people kept trooping in and out of my screening like it was a visitor’s ward.…

Logan (Electric Shadows podcast)

In Episode 19 of The Electric Shadows Podcast, Rob Daniel & myself get all X-cited about Logan, Hugh Jackman’s swansong to the X-Men franchise. And – spoiler alert – this Wolverine can really cut it in a film that boasts amazing action, genuine emotion, and a chilling vision of where Donald Trump’s America is heading.…

Logan: an elegiac, sincere, and bloody end to an era

SPOILER-FREE

“You should take a moment, feel it.”

We’ve come a long way since a fresh-faced, devil-haired Wolverine first popped his claws in an Alberta biker’s bar back in the original X-Men.

Now, seventeen years and nine films later, Hugh Jackman is heading down south of the border for Logan; a farewell letter to the role that took him from a London production of Oklahoma!

20th Century Women: sun-dappled reflections on ’70s history; both personal and cultural

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The surrogate bunch in Mike Mills’ latest, 20th Century Women, is certainly unique; if not quite unhappy.

It’s tough being a kid: discovering your sense of self, your place in the world.…