Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
If there is a topic that seems to dominate among film geeks this year, it is Walt Disney's growing program of live-action adaptations based on their animated back catalogue. It was only back in late May that I wrote: 'It is a program of films powered by crass commercialism and audience nostalgia, and most of ...
Peter (Eason Chan) is a hairdresser living in Hong Kong. He meets a mysterious girl with an eyepatch, June (Shu Qi), and they have a one-night stand. He subsequently meets her again, and discovers the reason she wears the patch: June sees ghosts and apparitions with her left eye. Once drawn into her supernatural world, ...
One of the best films I have ever seen about art is Julian Schnabel's 1996 biographical drama Basquiat, which related the brief career of its titular New York contemporary artist. The film introduced me to Schnabel - a fine artist moonlighting as a film director - as well as its brilliant star Jeffrey Wright, of whom ...
Hollywood is, if nothing else, opportunistic. Take as an example Lamont Johnson’s 1983 science fiction adventure Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone. One-part space opera, one-part Mad Max pastiche, it took advantage of a then-new technique for shooting feature films in stereoscopic 3D – a novelty that had been popular in the 1950s but proved ...
Here's a thing: if you are reading this from North America and are of a sufficient age, you probably remember a 1984 made-for-television film named The Ewok Adventure. It was a spin-off from 1983's Star Wars sequel Return of the Jedi, and saw two human children get rescued from a crashed spaceship by the cuddlesome Ewoks of Endor ...
Jack Simpson (Mick Molloy) is a Melbourne slacker who uses three bowling club memberships to score cheap parking in the city's inner south - and to rent parking spaces to his workmates. When he is unexpectedly called up to attend the club and bowl competitively, he finds an unfamiliar world of cheap beer and aged ...
Saori (Momota Kanako) is an under-confident high school senior pushed by her peers into becoming the new captain of the school drama club. While she struggles to lead a group of enthusiastic young women into competing in the national drama championships, she receives unexpected help from the school's new teacher (Kuroki Haru) - who turns ...
