Month: March 2017
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Beauty and the Beast: Classic remake, or remade classic?
This gotta be the shortest delay for a Disney live action remake right? I mean we had Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty by any other name) followed by Branagh’s Cinderella, then Favreau’s The Jungle Book and David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon; but Pete’s Dragon came out in ’77 and never really hung about in the public consciousness. Beauty…
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Looking at: Monster Factory’s positive creativity
There’s a moment I love in the 31st episode of Monster Factory. Well, there’s moments I love in every episode of Monster Factory but this one is illustrative. Griffin and Justin McElroy are playing 2009 MMO Champions Online, staring at the create a character screen, they have to choose a superpower, each represented by a…
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Kong: Skull Island – A better Sahara
Did you ever watch Sahara? I don’t think many people did, it’s not that good. I think it’s one of the contenders for the title of the biggest Hollywood flop. It’s the bizarre, sloppy, racist attempt to turn Matthew McConaughey into the action star he never was. Part of the joy of the thing is…
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Beyond Postmodernism: Post-truth
If modernism and postmodernism are defined primarily by their relationship to the metanarrative, where does that leave the contemporary world? Newscasters have been chatting a lot over the past year about post-truth politics, a mode of discourse in which the notion of the factual is deemphasised in favour of creating a new reality which supports…
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Weekly Roundup 12/03/17
Sundays are for waking up at six am to work yet another shift, rising from your bed, and blinking your eyes at the horror of still being alive. It may not be much of a life, but at least it’s mine. It’s also a good time to read everything you missed out on over the…
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Can we talk about Ghost Recon: Wildlands’ weird racist and sexist trailer?
So, the clumsily titled Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is out. Surprising, as I had heard just about nothing about it. I guess it was doomed once they figured out it would be going head to head against Zelda and the Switch. Nothing dominates the conversation like first party Nintendo software, even more so when…
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The Student: An uncomfortable film
Seems like there was some internal disagreement on how to translate the title of The Student. The poster in the cinema’s foyer read student, the film’s subtitles meanwhile chose to interpret it as The Disciple. Reading online the transliterated original would have been (M)Uchenik which also adds a pun in there involving the word Martyr.…
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Certain Women: A film with resolve
If Certain Women feels empty it is almost certainly by design. What better way to ring in Women’s History month than with this collection of stories regarding the diminishing effect the patriarchy has in the modern age? Kelly Reichardt is one of modern cinema’s leading formalists, exploring the place of women in society within her…
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Viceroy’s House: A paean to colonialism
If there’s one subject a British filmmaker needs to approach with caution nowadays its colonialism. I mean, sure, our history, and indeed our present, is full of shit that needs approaching with caution, but following Brexit, the subsequent rise in nationalist sentiment, and the belief among many of our elderly that a rapacious, destructive, grasping…
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Logan: Aging out
It is the tragedy of Jackman’s Wolverine that, while the character he plays is portrayed as functionally ageless, immortal, to watch the evolution of his portrayal is to watch his struggle against the forces of time. It would be wise for him not to return to the role, he can go on to star in…
A Grand Quiet 