Month: March 2017
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.…