Demob Happy

Carry the fire 9/10 I was initially surprised to hear that ‘The Road‘, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and [...]

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Apocalypse redux! 8.5/10 Following on from my post about John Updike’s seminal ‘Rabbit, Run‘, ‘Rabbit Redux‘ is the second in Updike’s quartet of novels chronicling the life and times of America as seen through the eyes of everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Written – as with the other three – at the tale end of one [...]

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Fine revisionist Western 8/10 ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘ is a thoughtful and atmospheric film about the American outlaw myth. A careful and occasionally brutal revisionist western in the mould of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece ‘Unforgiven‘, Andrew (‘Chopper‘) Dominik’s epic has been crafted with a painstaking, sometimes self-consciously meticulous eye. Like [...]

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Wildly overrated 4/10 ‘Into the Wild‘ is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of “ultimate freedom” in Alaska. Sean Penn’s treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the director [...]

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Smoke and mirrors 9/10 Todd Haynes’ 2002 film ‘Far From Heaven‘ was a masterpiece of subtle subversion that paid homage to the richly coloured 1950s film style (and specifically the ‘women’s pictures’ of Douglas Sirk and his contemporaries). What could have been hollow pastiche is in fact a thoughtful and moving examination of US social [...]

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Citizen Plainview 9/10 Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film has been a long time coming and fittingly it is an epic of far broader thematic scope than his previous work. To confirm and elevate his status as one of the premier young directors at work today, ‘There Will Be Blood‘ is a daringly original and challenging [...]

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