The following blog post is about Bob Brown (the Australian activist and politician), documentaries and their function in wider social movements. Readers of a nervous - or G/green - disposition may want to look away... Two disclaimers/scene setters. First up, Bob Brown. The man is clearly a mensch, with oodles of physical and moral courage,... Continue Reading →
Saw the Ben Affleck/Matt Damon/Viola Davis film "Air" today. It tells a version of the story of how, in 1984, the footwear company Nike signed then-rookie basketball player Michael Jordan and made a tonne of money (actually, probably several hundred tonnes of money) by creating a shoe that would get everyone buyin'. Short version -the... Continue Reading →
Short review of long (130 minutes?) film. This very well-made film is a paean to a "simpler" time, when America was king of the world. The whole thing is drenched in various nostalgias and yearnings for (mythical) pasts that are not actually compatible, but the whole thing is moving at Mach 10 (or 10.3 in... Continue Reading →
Take a bit of Westworld (the Yul Brinner movie, not the TV show). Take a bit of the forgotten 1996 medical thriller Extreme Measures (Gene Hackman, Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker). Take a bit of an even-more forgotten schlock novel from the 1970s called "The Glow" and a few other old off-cuts. There, you've got... Continue Reading →
Film review: Yeah, look, if you're looking for some relatively undemanding and competently made tosh, with a not-entirely-convincing feminist "sub"text (i.e. smacking-you-in-the-face-text), with some eye-candy and moments of levity, then Black Widow will fit the Bill - or, more aptly, the James. Scarlett Johansson climbs into her latex suit again (I have not seen her... Continue Reading →
This is a film where, with some reservations, you should believe the hype. From the bravura opening scene, where we see the desperate hero's job interview lies get ruthlessly exposed, through to the deeply weird and unsettling climax, this socialist parable is a scabrous and strange attack on, well, almost everything. Your jaw will be... Continue Reading →
How many innocents lose their lives, In the gloss of the packaging? Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, by the great British punk singer TV Smith. Bag It is a good documentary, in the vein of Roger and Me (where Michael Moore tried to get a face-to-face interview with a General Motors chairman), Supersize Me (where a now-disgraced film-maker... Continue Reading →
We watched the documentary. Excellent if problematic, it was basically a morality play: a bunch of old white powerful men in a self-designed and policed echo chamber are eventually brought low by a scrappy band of diverse (gasp) women. And so immediately after the film there was to be a discussion. And a bunch of... Continue Reading →
"The horror, the horror" said Kurtz. He may have been talking about this film, which as a horror movie is a horror. Tom Cruise is some sort of US army Indiana Jones (I'd love to see his job description) who stumbles on a tomb in Iraq of an Egyptian naughty daddy-killing and inevitably not-quite-dead princess,... Continue Reading →
Not a huge Austen fan (that says more about me than her, perhaps?) but there were quite a few laugh-out-loud moments in this film, based on a novella that wasn’t published until 50 years after she’d snuffed it (there IS a novella of hers called Love and Friendship, but the film is based on another... Continue Reading →
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