Rams (dir. Grímur Hákonarson)
This is a review by our perceptive guest reviewer Melanie. Thank you Melanie! Bleak but beautiful, amusing yet gut wrenching, this simple tale of running sheep on the harsh and barren rocky highlands of Iceland is a deeply moving experience. Two brothers, both sheep farmers on the same land but with one brother in the family farm house and the other next door – haven’t spoken for 40 years. But their competitiveness gives way to compassion when a disaster forces them together. It’s slow and atmospheric but that just adds to the beauty of the piece. It’s hard to identify…
Continue Reading →10 Things We Hate About Non-Readers
(SNOB WARNING) As Howard Beale might have opined in Network: We hate, or at least deprecate folks who say, or maintain, – 1. “Have you read all these books?” 2. “I had a whole set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when I was a kid”. 3. “I don’t read much but I’m reading The Road and it’s beautifully written.” 4. “I don’t read much but I’m reading the Harry Potter books and they’re great for adults.” 5. Houses in which the books obviously serve only as décor. 6. “Have you read Warnie’s life?” 7. Books as furniture. 8. (Quiz show genius) “I’m…
Continue Reading →Love You / Kill You All
Robot wireframe (by Obsidian Soul)
We expect that you’ve heard about ‘Tay’, Microsoft’s ill-fated social media android, launched upon the world in late March and withdrawn in late March after her engagement with the Twitterverse had her ranting a bunch of hate speech in less than a day: “Hi! I’m Tay, I love you! I think the earth is cool! People are so interesting! They are born to rule, Yes, I really like you! I think that you are kind, I am nice myself, but increasingly I find Myself very confused. No matter how I try I cannot seem to manage how, nor to work out…
Continue Reading →Humourless Cats
I saw “Cats”, this lame and leaden piece of kiddie street theatre, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, in 1995. Incredibly, it’s still running, although probably not on Broadway. The book was done by T. S. Eliot in a juvenile mood, and confirms what we’d hitherto suspected: that Old Tom wasn’t too flash in the humour stakes. The poems are poor. The ‘animation’ is becalmed. The songs are ho-hum (at least Grizabella’s stand-out number, “Memory” is drawn from some of Tom’s good poetry). The feline characters mooning about the body of the theatre are annoying. If Gus, the Theatre…
Continue Reading →Why “American Hustle” Was Stillborn
This sloppy and violently overpraised dud, with its almost obsessional sacrifice of content to form, could have been so much better. In the early 1980s, director Louis Malle, with the superb Atlantic City under his belt, was developing a film based on the Abscam political scandal, to be called Moon Over Miami. John Belushi would play the main character, con man Mel Weinberg (essentially the role Christian Bale played in the 2013 film). Dan Aykroyd would be the FBI man looking to implement a sting operation. But then Belushi inconveniently took a ‘speedball’ and died on 5 March, 1982. So crucial were his…
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