Category Archive: FILM
The Babadook
As usual, the Australian film industry has worn its thin skin off patting its own back in praise of a predictable, derivative mess. “The Babadook” (even the name is a yawn) has some (very) minor suspense, good acting from the major characters and awful acting from some minor characters. The script is amateurish and lazy. If this film were shorter, it might make a workmanlike student film. Every poor horror film requires most or all of these elements: A cute, shaggy pet dog. Preferably white. An insect infestation. A concerned and mild-mannered neighbour or work colleague of the opposite sex….
Continue Reading →Andrei Rublev
(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966) The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make. Patience is repaid with interest.
Continue Reading →Reversal of Fortune
Insulin
(Dir. Barbet Schroeder) (1990) A contemplative, but playful account of a cause célèbre. Millionairess Sunny von Bülow’s vegetative state persisted from 1980 to 2008 (when she died, aged 76). The cause of this coma was alleged to be an injection of insulin by her second husband, Claus von Bülow, a classicist and former assistant to oil king J. Paul Getty. Bülow was convicted by a jury in 1982 and this film, based on the book by his appellate counsel, Alan Dershowitz,concentrates on the relationship between legal team and client during the appeal to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, seeking to…
Continue Reading →Primer
(Dir. Shane Carruth) (2004) Two commercial engineers create a time machine by accident and start bumping into their other selves. Made on a shoe-string, incomprehensible, with confusing exposition and techno-chat designed to cover gaps in plot, this film is, nevertheless, engaging and different – nice, weird playing by director Carruth and Dave Sullivan as Aaron and Abe.
Continue Reading →Black Swan
(Dir. Darren Aronofsky) (2010) Natalie Portman is no Divine Zucchi as she samples various vices in an attempt to turn Odette into Odile. A heroic attempt by all concerned to synthesize the struggle and sacrifice of art looks and even feels impressive but, alas, is artless, a cliché, and ludicrous.
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