Sexbots, broken dolls and other artificial women
Artificial women have served as temptresses and traps in myths, legends and fiction, usually constructed to reinforce or critique a misogynistic worldview in which all female emotion and compassion is...
View ArticleMonkey business
The novel has been adapted countless times, with renditions as stage plays, films, comics and television shows. Interestingly, many of these have been produced in Japan, and have starred predominantly...
View ArticleClass fragilities in Little Men
Ultimately it is the comfort of privilege that blindsides Brian in Little Men. His place within white mediocrity becomes obvious when he cannot fathom someone else earning something, even succeeding,...
View ArticlePushing the audience: the Sydney Underground Film Festival
SUFF seeks to program independent international and local films that won’t make it to a cinema. But this does not mean that they are all low-budget, lo-fi or unheard of. ‘We’ve had films from Cannes,...
View ArticleFilm is never innocent
I Am Not Your Negro reflects the style of Baldwin’s speeches, excerpts of which are included intermittently throughout the documentary. It is simultaneously beautiful and witty, and also delivers a...
View ArticleWar/Peace: the Weather Underground and the present crisis
On 6 March 1970, an immense explosion tore through the basement of 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village. Two young activists were killed by the dynamite bomb they were constructing....
View ArticleHollywood’s lost women
Women get lost in Hollywood for a range of reasons. There are the suicides, the murders, the accidents, the ‘mysterious deaths’. Jayne Mansfield – who died in a car crash in New Orleans in 1967 at the...
View ArticleA dark truth behind ‘the scariest film on Netflix’
There is something sinister about Verónica’s assertion that the film is based on reality. It seems it was inspired by events that occurred in Madrid in 1991 – its major claim to truth is that it uses...
View ArticleWhat happened to sci-fi?
Sci-fi has depoliticised. Spectacle has replaced critique. Most sci-fi today just isn’t about very much, nor does it have much feeling to it: the feeling of not knowing who you are, like Deckard and...
View ArticleRocky and Trump
Rocky’s and Trump’s logic break down at the same point. Rather than attributing the crisis of working-class and ‘middle-American’ malaise to their genuine root causes – corporations and the government...
View Article‘The world is corpsed’: Marvel’s dazzling adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame
The Russo Brothers have redefined what it means to ‘take liberties’ with the source material. Beckett said the play should be set in a single interior? Then we’re going to use the whole universe. He...
View ArticleThe problem with ‘post-horror’
The enduring appeal of horror is its capacity to peer over the edge of whatever social and cultural boundaries we have nervously sought shelter behind, to confront the terrifying inadequacies of our...
View ArticleGesture without motion: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and giving up hope
There's no future in nihilism, but sometimes it seems like there's no future regardless. On this level, it can be therapeutic to wallow in it for a little while – just sometimes.
View ArticleValley of the uncanny dolls: the updated fetishism of the new Chucky
Chucky returns as an expression of the repressed proletariat that toils in the Global South, and it manifests itself through bleeding-edge technology – something as valuable as any raw commodity...
View ArticleThe new homicidal: the many lives of the Joker
What does this new Joker tell us about the twenty-first century? He says we’re lost, and we’re angry, and we’re entitled to more. But most of all, this Joker is just another man who feels like he...
View ArticleDirt Music and the ‘unfilmable’ novel
What marks great cinema – and great novels, and great novel-to-film adaptations, and great art in general – is a fire in the belly. Adapting a so-called unfilmable novel requires much more than just...
View ArticleFalling into the beautiful trap: the marathon as modern malaise
Taking proselytising outside of the gym and into the public, marathon-running has become the ultimate way to signal patriarchal and capitalistic virtues that are otherwise difficult to measure. By...
View ArticleFuture past imperfect: Blade Runner at thirty-seven
Here, at the edge of dystopia, time has finally caught up to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). Critiques of Scott’s accuracy in near-future prophecy usually focus on the lack of hovercars and the...
View ArticleWhat a feeling! The eroticism of Flashdance
Right now, somebody in the world is listening to ‘Maniac’ by Michael Sembello. The music triggers a memory: knee-high legwarmers, a dark leotard, and close ups of a young woman’s toned body as she...
View ArticleBirds of Prey (and the fantabulous emancipation of the female gaze)
The production of a film with a predominant and overarching (but not controlling) female gaze takes us one step closer to making the male gaze strange, gendered and escapable.
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