Demob Happy

Solaris- Steven Soderbergh Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 version of Stanisław Lem’s science-fiction novel Solaris was a film I liked to pretend I enjoyed and understood as a wanabee film-buff adolescent. With hindsight the film remained largely obscure to me then, bar some strikingly illusory imagery, particularly those in the memorable final sequence. I haven’t had [...]

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FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT White Denim – Fits 8/10 Such is the strength and depth (to borrow a football cliché) of music Stateside at the moment that I find myself with three acts on heavy rotation at the moment from Austin, Texas, alone. OK, so Spoon haven’t done anything lately but [...]

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Waltz With Bashir – Ari Folman Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli TV show ‘Be’Tipul‘ – which became in turn the inspiration for the latest HBO phenomenon, ‘In Treatment’, currently championed in the UK by The Guardian – said of Israel that “one of our problems as a nation is that in our mind we [...]

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Juno – Jason Reitman For a long time I resisted watching Jason Reitman’s ‘Juno’. On paper it was the kind of film I avoided like a virus, yet reviewers kept telling me to see it. Even my most trusted blog buddy William Rycroft gave it the thumbs up, albeit with the helpful disclaimer “many will [...]

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Album Review: Super Furry Animals – Dark Days/Light Years 8.5/10 In a recent Pitchfork review Animal Collective declared that it must be “weird to be in a band with good musicians”, referring to the fact that they basically view themselves as electronic collagists than a band in the strict (i.e., formally trained) sense. It is [...]

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Film Review: The Wrestler – Darren Aronofsky 8/10 My irrational levels of excitement concerning Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Wrestler’ were not due to the hype concerning Mickey Rourke’s latest comeback, but rather from a misguided obsession with American wrestling from my adolescence. Not just the glossier WWF (now WWE) end, but the dingier minor leagues that [...]

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La Graine et le mulet – Abdel Kechiche 7.5/10 As a resident of France I was a little surprised by recent article in the Guardian by Jason Solomons about the re-birth of the French film industry in the wake of the nation’s first Palme D’Or winner (‘Entre Les Murs’/’The Classroom’) in many a year. Further [...]

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Love and death in a cold climate 5/10 In a recent bitch about Danny Boyle’s ever more frenetic visual style and expressing general irritation at the hyperactive mode of storytelling employed on his recent hit ‘Slumdog Millioanaire‘, my learned colleague David H. Schleicher posted the comment: “give me properly framed sustained panning long shots on [...]

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My final answer 6/10 In one of my favourite books about India, Rohinton Mistry’s epic ‘A Fine Balance‘, one character says “there is no such thing as an uninteresting life”. Set in part in the vast slums of Mumbai – formerly Bombay – at a critical juncture in the city’s history (the emergency powers introduced [...]

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Cuba libra 8/10 I was going to start this post with a summary put down of biopics and it’s many crimes against good filmmaking. From pointless impersonation (‘Ali’), to line-towing, officially sanctioned dross (‘Ray’), to films of such massive pretension that you suspect the filmmaker to be covertly, deliberately assassinating the credibility of its subject [...]

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