Films
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Your Death Is Very Important To Us
Acting brought me to Portsmouth, for a short film about death, memory, and the future of exploitation. I shan’t say too much about it, as despite being an extremely niche blog there’s still the possibility that the people involved will find this, and I’ll have broken some crucial aspect of my contract. I played a Read more
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Return to Seoul
I went to the cinema on a whim. I noticed it cycling by, and it was too perfect to ignore. I passed at 4:29, and there was a film showing at 4:30: Return to Seoul, a film I had heard about without learning anything about, in my usual, hyper-obsessive, hyper-avoidant, spoiler-avoiding way. Sat a few Read more
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Film Review: Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve
“Today’s mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what is not needed. A dog, if you point at something, will look only at your finger.” David Foster Wallace I’m currently reading “Everything, everywhere, all the time”, Stuart Jeffries’s fun pop-culture polemic about how post-modernism has taken over both the world and our souls. Read more
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Film Review: Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai
“The body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears” 1994 was a different time. Quentin Tarantino was considered talented. Hong Kong was a British colony. And Wong Kar Wai was a relative upstart, rather than the superstar he became after In The Mood For Love. Tarantino himself was a big Read more
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Film Review: Limbo, starring Amir El-Masry and Vikash Bhai
This film opens with two middle aged Scottish TEFL teachers doing a sexy dance to teach “consent 101” to a bunch of bemused asylum seekers. The scene is beautifully and starkly framed; these woolly liberals grabbing butt, not those seeking a better life, are the butt of the joke. But as the camera cut from Read more
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Shoplifters review: Kore-Eda’s heartbreaking film of belonging and surviving
A child falling from a concrete walkway; the oranges he was carrying rolling away on the road below. A bunch of exhausted construction workers bitch and moan in the minivan on the way to the site. A local fixer, pressurising a granny to sell up her house for development, accepts tea and denies the primary Read more
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