Playlist: Virgin Prunes - Sweethome Under White Clouds / Q And Not U - X-Polynation / Pylon - Human Body / US Maple - Missouri Twist / Blood Incantation - Chaoplasm / Wölfbait - Bile / Ulcerate - Yield To Naught / Zs - Corps / Oneohtrix Point Never - Woe Is The Transgression / Dead Kennedys - Moon Over Marin
]]>Olympus Has Fallen comes with a certain charm to its ridiculous premise and theatrical violence. Only a trace of that tongue-in-cheek attitude is present in this cheap and nasty sequel, which takes its jingoism far too seriously. It’s also a film that constantly takes its audience for mugs, and can’t even be bothered to get Gerard Butler and Morgan Freeman in the same place on the same day. That’s pathetic.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s metaphorical vampire movie is a little too on-the-nose at times with its ‘dream factory makes nightmares’ morality tale. But there is plenty of substance to dig into beneath the superficiality of its heightened, heady fashion world setting. And Jena Malone gives a knockout performance as the makeup artist who might be the angel or the devil on fresh-faced newbie Elle Fanning’s shoulders.
Tony Scott should’ve made more quick-smart disaster flicks like this one. It’s made out of clichés, for sure — and some real humdingers, too — but half the fun is pointing them out.
Sisters has aged badly, and even for its day must have played more like a messed-up episode of Columbo or something. Still, De Palma keeps things interesting — and tricksy — enough to make this Twilight Zone Hitchcock psycho-thriller worth the time.
I sure do know how to pick ’em. This reboot of Larry Cohen’s infamous early-’70s exploitation shocker has a decent concept, playing on the mother-child bond as opposed to the original’s no-frills mutant baby rampage. And it’s competently composed from a visual standpoint. Shame it was apparently edited by idiots, and acted by rank amateurs. Then there’s the whole anti-choice slant. Yeah, that. Not good.
Is there something particularly Korean about protracted revenge for slights? First we had Oldboy, where a man is imprisoned for decades by a former schoolmate over the discovery of a terrible secret. Then there’s I Saw The Devil, where a disturbed cop exacts tortuous retaliation on the misogynist serial killer who murdered his fiancée. Its explosions of violence are the very definition of gratuitous; its jarring tonal shifts between hardcore thriller and comedic Grand Guignol are frustrating for viewers like me who’d rather the good guy just got the job done, rather than stumble through a rogue’s gallery of deviants for over two hours, and to little cathartic end.
The real story of the ‘Westfield Watcher’ is profoundly more disturbing, but this ‘inspired by’ flick turns out to be a decent low-budget thriller once it gets the bump-in-the-night spooky-house horror trappings out of its system, all noisy soundtrack and jump scares and misdirection.
Props must go to the film’s side-stepping of generic tedium with its flair for a quirky character or two (Denise Crosby is pitch perfect as a suspicious busybody neighbour), not to mention its portrayal of an interracial couple as no big thing, though it’s amazing that even has to be said in this day and age.
]]>Sion Sono’s satire of organised religion and Japanese cultural mores is blunt in its approach for the most part, and despite its reputation isn’t too dissimilar from the more oddball anime series you might find on Crunchyroll. It’s also a whopping four hours long, but the time flies if you take it like binge-watching a box set (or like me, watch it an hour at a time over a few days).
Work deadlines and overruns made me a ball of stress that didn’t release till Bee and I arrived in Galway for a short break before Christmas. I’m an anxious traveller, not about the actual going from A to B but the fretting about connections and bookings and whatnot. Also, it’s been years since we had a holiday.
We had a fine time, but I’m out of practice in terms of being able to switch off for more than a day at a time. Our next break will be better, and I’m determined we won’t leave it so long till that happens.
Christmas at home was quiet, but seasonal lurgy lingered. Feels like we’ve been sick for weeks with one cold or another. It’s this weird weather, temperatures veering from freezing to double digits. It snowed this morning (not a lot, though it stuck for a while) yet it’s set to reach 11C on Sunday. Climate change sceptics can stick it.
I’ve been writing every day, whether for work or leisure, which is a good thing. I could do more, though, and better. I made a list on Letterboxd of all the film reviews I wrote for Thumped last year, 38 in all. I wrote feck-all about music, despite my previous bleatings. That’s my main task for this first month of 2017: finish this round-up I’ve been drafting for ages and start the year on a cleanish slate. More episodes of Enlarged Heart Radio to come, as well (the next is already prepped for the weekend).
My other project is a more technical one: moving this site over to WordPress. The hard part, as I feel like I’ve written here before, is getting my head around the dynamic publishing model (I’ve always had Movable Type set up to publish static pages) and adapting my templates to WordPress requirements.
It’s a long time since I’ve done much handcoding. I expect to break things, but it’s not like the old days when that mattered; who links to this place anymore? Anyway, I can probably set up my htaccess file to rewrite and redirect archive links, once I relearn how to do that.
Speaking of learning, will this be the year I dust off by big book on Javascript? Wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, first things first.
]]>I started this thing a year ago to get me through the winter blues, the inspiration of friends notwithstanding, and I’ve learned a bit along the way. Mostly that picking the right songs in the right order can be bloody hard sometimes, but also that fun should prioritise obligation.
Here’s to more in 2017.
Playlist: Monitor - We Get Messages / The Stooges - Fun House / Bluetip - Polymer / Bone Sickness - Paranoid Delusions / Ruined Families - We Want Everything / Fidelity Jones - Venus on Lovely / Horse Lords - Bending to the Lash / Dysrhythmia - When Whens End / Joy Division - Atrocity Exhibition / Graves At Sea - Dead Eyes / Kowloon Walled City - Daughters and Sons
]]>The wry title makes things pretty clear: the book is about Kim Gordon, not the band that made her name, and rightly so.
For sure, Sonic Youth was an enormous part of her life, but she’s as multifaceted as any person, and she doesn’t shy away from her struggles in defining herself as an individual distinct from that all-consuming identity. Identity, image, marketing: between her unconventional adolescence, her complicated relationship with her older brother, and her adult life in the venn diagram of creative worlds, these concepts loom large, constantly intersecting and blurring lines. Gordon’s clear, candid writing cuts through a lot of it, unapologetic as she is about being an artist, a creator, a woman in a man’s world.
]]>Still, there are times when Gordon displays an astonishing lack of awareness of her privilege. It’s all the more conspicuous because for the most part, she’s engaging and insightful, frank and open, even self-deprecating. She knows she’s a middle-class California girl, she understands she’s had experiences very different from the norm, starting way before Sonic Youth happened. And yet for all of that, a careless humblebrag namedrop here or there breaks kayfabe.
That’s not a universal criticism — there’s an oft-quoted line from the book, about interviewing Yoko Ono, where she’s unequivocal about the banality of what’s often perceived as an exciting lifestyle — but it’s almost as if, when she turns to her experiences of the art and fashion worlds especially, she slips into a kind of persona, a bubble absent of self-reflection, and you can virtually see her eyes gloss over in her words. I don’t think anyone reading really cares so much about her co-direction of a fashion brand, for example, when she writes about it so unpassionately. Why bother at all?
In stark relief, there’s an undercurrent of electricity ever present when she writes about her music career, even when she’s consistently self-effacing about her place or abilities. Unfairly so, in my estimation. Gordon might say she sees herself more of an artist than a musician, as she repeatedly reminds the reader — or herself — about her lack of traditional chops. But she’s the X-factor that really makes Sonic Youth what it is, while being the only one of the band who’s properly escaped its shadow.
All that being said, the book makes room — understandably so in the wake of the dissolution of Gordon’s high-profile marriage with Thurston Moore — for an essay about performance, and the damage caused by the cultural propensity for ‘heroics’; how it forces a destructive distance, or dissonance, between person and persona. The reader is under no illusion as to what Gordon means.
Girl in a Band is more than a memoir, and all the better for it.
Here’s a diegetic twist on the found-footage horror where the meta-narrative is more than just a series of links between episodes, as a team of cops race against time to rescue a missing family from a masked assailant, following clues from digital cameras recovered at the crime scene, but uncover a mystery far more messed-up than anyone could have expected. Props to French film prodigy Nathan Ambrosioni (he’s only 17, the bastard!) for a decent attempt at the kind of genre blend that usually separates or scrambles. However, it’s still primarily a found-footage psycho slasher, set in a spooooky abandoned building, in the deep, dark woods — hitting the cliché trifecta — so your mileage may vary.
The Forest is the kind of horror tale I can imagine working better as a chilling short story or novella, rather than its rendition here as a generic theme park dark ride filled with hoary mental illness tropes, making little use of its genuinely haunting woodland setting.
This straight-to-VOD techie sci-fi thriller sees a fish-out-of-water with necessary knowledge embedded with a battle-hardened military unit in pursuit of an elusive enemy and bears no resemblance at all to the plot of Aliens, no siree. It’s quite well composed for its presumably cheap-ass budget, and it’s got some dependable names in Bruce Greenwood and Emily Mortimer. However, the plethora of oddly unnatural US accents (considering the cast seems to be mostly American), the overwritten mouthfuls of dialogue and conspicuous plot conveniences — not to mention a massive helping of gamer-bait gear porn — underscore the artificiality of the whole thing.
31:
Rob Zombie does Saw meets The Running Man via the feckin’ Hunger Games with a bunch of faux-transgressive bullshit slapped on top. Not original, not scary, not thrilling, not clever. Yawn.
Cronenberg goes formal in this disturbing Hitchcockian psychodrama. Though it shares themes of loss, or mutation, of identity with the likes of Videodrome, it’s a different, more frighteningly grounded kind of body horror at work here in a tale of identical twins and the unusual woman whose presence in their carefully curated lives threatens to unravel the ties that bind them — to each other, to reality. It’s quite something.
Here’s the thing. Suicide Squad really looks the part. Kudos to the production designers for a bang-up job. It’s just a shame that none of that makes up for a cliché-ridden story of hubris that’s far too busy and convoluted for its own good, with unforgivable inconsistencies of logic throughout, and a bland cast apart from Margot Robbie, who’s the wrong kind of interesting as a misunderstood Harley Quinn. Oh, and Jared Leto is the worst; thank fuck he’s hardly in it.
]]>It’s a bit of a mess, this, Donald ‘Performance’ Cammell’s murder-mystery thriller in the vein of Hitchcock by way of De Palma but lacking either’s focus. Its cross-cutting compendium of clashing ideas was surely intended to produce exciting, provocative results, but they don’t coalesce into anything meaningful or sensical. You know what does make sense? That Cammell was, in the words of Anjelica Huston, a “dangerous man”, and there’s nothing particularly interesting in seeing that danger transmuted through his characters on screen. (By the way, I watched this on Shudder and missed about five minutes of the end between 1:36 and 1:41 because their video file is fucked, which is great.)
It’s hard to find a fair review of this one on Letterboxd; it’s all ‘this is shit/boring/etc’ with zero argument. That’s decidedly unfair to a remake that does quite a few things right.
]]>The reimagining of the story as one of a collective experience buried by repressed memory - an avenue the film doesn’t explore, admittedly - is a good approach, even if it undermines Freddy’s ambiguity (central to the plot is that the kids learn exactly who he is and what he did). The lighting design is smart, subtly (and not so subtly) hinting at the switch to the dream world. And the ‘microsleep’ subplot contemporised things, while leaving a thread to explore in any potential sequel.
(How about this: kids on modafinil find it gives them abilities in their dreams as in the Part 3. Eh?)
What really lets it down is a script that needed a few more drafts to iron out its logic-defying plot holes, haphazard character actions and motivations. The special effects, too, needed another pass — much of it looks poor for the mid ‘90s, let alone 2010. Too often the nightmare set-pieces lean on knowing references to the original movie turned up to 11, at the expense of novelty; worse, the end sequence is just a remix of iconic images from that first film, stripped of context and strung together with no rhyme nor reason.
And at the dark heart of it is an ultimately underwhelming bogeyman. Despite his Freddy’s meaner spirit, Jackie Earle Haley lacks Robert Englund’s leering, EC Comics expressiveness behind that mask of CG-enhanced make-up; he’s a pretender who’s hard to fear on the same metaphysical level.
All that being said, I’d still like to see a follow-up to this one, rather than yet another reboot.
Playlist: Glenn Phillips Band - Vista Cruiser / Ilenkus - Hunny Bunny / Wormrot - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Grind / Sofy Major - Infinite Pill Case / Psalm Zero - Stranger to Violence / Killing Joke - Tabazan / James Plotkin & Paal Nilssen-Love - Primateria / Cut Hands - Black Mamba / Dazzling Killmen - In the Face of Collapse / Child Bite - Apex of Anxiety / Saccharine Trust - A Christmas Cry
]]>That’s bad enough, being promised Siro availability, even receiving the router by courier, only for the on-site engineers to dash our hopes. What’s worse is that I doubt we’d even know that by now if we hadn’t chased up the supplier for an answer, especially with the end date of our existing contract looming.
A whole week of silence went by before I rang yesterday to demand confirmation, a yes or a no. They stalled, telling me the engineers were meeting to discuss the issue and that I would be called back this morning with the news. A likely story, that ‘meeting’; I’m wise to such fibs at this stage. And when the promised call didn’t arrive, you can imagine I was furious.
It’s funny how an ultimatum finally gets things moving, isn’t it? After ringing a few times (and getting the impression my number was red-flagged, how often the line went dead) I received a mobile call from an engineer who finally gave a straight answer: not possible. Weirdly enough, they apparently talked to me before Digiweb, because the sales team there didn’t believe me when I called them back to close the account. But I wasn’t having any more of their bullshit.
Better with the devil you know. By which I mean, I got right back on the phone to renew with our current supplier, eir. Despite all the trouble we had with them this past autumn, I’ve come to realise their terrible customer service is no better or worse than anyone else’s, so it pays to be pragmatic about it. Especially since it’s their fibre infrastructure regardless. So we reconsidered their offer of a reduced price contract, and now we don’t have to worry about losing our broadband connection over Xmas. No thanks to Digiweb and the Siro engineers at Actavo.
Anyway. Now that’s taken care of, we can look forward to the holidays — and an actual holiday, to Galway for a few days before Xmas. I’ve already booked dinner at our favourite restaurant, and I plan on doing a lot of nothing in particular.
Before that, though, I’ve got a print deadline looming, plus a day at the cinema for a couple of late press screenings. I’m missing quite a lot of Oscar bait lately, due to said deadline and other general unavailability. That’s always been the way, but it feels like more than usual this month. In the meantime, you can read my two latest reviews, for Moana and I Am Not a Serial Killer.
]]>Playlist: Khanate - Too Close Enough To Touch / bIG fLAME - Sometimes / Botanist - Helleborus Niger / Fat Worm Of Error - Special Bonus Thing / The Leaving Trains - Nothing Left / The Cosmic Dead - Rainbowhead / Mary Halvorson - Solitude / Nicola Ratti - Blossom / Portal - Curtain / TAD - Eddie Hook
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