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The Great Wall: A Communist Spectacle
I am woefully underprepared to talk about Chinese film, it’s a huge whole in my knowledge i am desperately trying to fill up. Now we see the release of the most expensive, expansive Chinese film of all time and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Is it an attempt to position China…
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Fences: August Wilson’s August Play
Fences feels like an accomplished play. Everything that I’m sure shone throughout the various stagings of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning classic shines here. Under Denzel Washington’s direction though it never feels like it quite makes that leap to a film. That’s not to suggest inferiority by no means, I’ve never seen it staged (and…
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The Space Between Us: A Straight Fantasy
The most baffling thing about The Space Between Us is that it ain’t an adaptation. It reads like a YA sci-fi romance novel. It’s like someone saw only the title to The Fault in Their Stars a couple of years ago, heard about its success, and decided, ‘Sure, I could do that.’ That someone is…
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Beyond Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a trap. Linguistically it defies definition, that post- positions it as a critical framework that can only be defined by its relationship to modernism. It also presents itself as the end game of criticism, how does a culture evolve from a postmodern one? Would that be a post-postmodern world, it’s too linguistically clumsy…
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Looking at: Passengers’ Awful, Awful Message
I didn’t write a review of Passengers at the time because I was busy and lazy. I got thoughts though. It was a film I actually saw in the cinema with family, they left the theatre thinking it was a functional (if forgettable) action sci-fi romance. I left convinced that the position the film takes…
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Looking at: The McElroy Brothers’ Approach to Reference
I’ve been wanting to write about The McElroy Brothers for a long time. I’ve been following their work for maybe five, six, years now. Every time I got get to go I stopped , where to start given the enormity of their released work? A recent piece by Jaime Green for bkmag.com covers their collected…
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Fifty Shades Darker
It was getting incredibly spooky in the theatre playing Fifty Shades Darker. Appropriate, film is structured like a B horror movie, except instead of scares, the action here is far spookier in nature. Thing is, it’s a form that works with an audience, those enjoying the screening were the ones engaging in conversation, with themselves…
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Toni Erdmann
There is no reason why Toni Erdmann should work. It’s a near three hour long comedy conducted in German and English and Romanian in which everyone’s primary concern appears to be conducting a business transition that would involve the outsourcing of hundreds of local jobs. Our lead, Winfried Conradi, is the father of the consultant…
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Looking at: Semiotic Transference in Minecraft: Story Mode.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of Telltale’s adventure games we tend to hear very little about Minecraft: Story Mode. I’m gonna say because, more so then any of their other properties it is explicitly a work of Young Adult fiction. Even though a fair argument can be made for Tales from the Borderlands being fairly kid…
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The Lego Batman Movie
There’s a problem with making a Lego film franchise: nobody knows what Lego means. I mean, Phil Lord and Chirstiopher Miller’s The Lego Movie is a firework. Like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street it is so insistent that it demands more. Of course we’re getting more. But what, in this…
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A Grand Quiet 