Borat Sagdiyev shuffles uncomfortably in his polyester grey (not black) suit, his eyes flitting around the camera before pleading: “Come see my movie film, if not success, I will be execute…” he promptly brandishes a worried yet innocent smile through a thick black moustache. Ostensibly, Sacha Baron Cohen; British comedian and creator of Borat, suffered a similar predicament in creating a big-screen version of his earnest yet deeply bigoted comedy Kazakhistani journalist Borat, or to give the film’s full title; [...]
Cult films, by their essence, tend to split folk into: “Whoa!” and “Whassatabout?” Brick changes nothing. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance 2005 for ‘originality of vision’, first time director and writer (or 2nd time if you count Evil Demon Golfball From Hell!!!, many won’t) Rian Johnson, through a decade of planning, scraping and saving, and eventually promoting, has whittled down Brick’s summary as: ‘A detective movie, set in a High School’. Despite this sounding like bread and [...]
There are two types of cinema audience; those looking for enlightenment and profundity from a flickering projector (the armchair romanticists) and those who take trivial pleasure in its degradation and disparagement (the dead-eyed pragmatists). M. Night Shyamalan knows this, and with his strewn of mainstream pictures he has unwittingly become the world’s leading enforcer in their separation. As many can guess, words like ‘separation’, ‘division’ or ‘half’ alongside words such as ‘audiences’ often summon tumultuous bowel movements from within The [...]
‘Television’s most talked about show’ is a marketing-tag thrown around so often it has become redundant. In the case of LOST, however, it is true firstly for being an irrefutably superior drama, and secondly, because the series asks the audience to fill in the mysterious blanks, something that has enraged almost as many viewers as it enthralled. Testament to the show’s strength are the theories that surround it: Are the characters already dead? Are they part of an elaborate experiment? [...]
Murder, corruption, coitus, war, tyrannicide, lesbianism, witchcraft, deities, breasts, large penises…’IT’S EDUCATIONAL!’ as The Pixies might say. Considering the popularity, or at least, spectacle of Hollywood’s renaissance with the swords and skirts epics: Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, et al, it was only a matter of time before Gladiator: The Series raised its hackneyed head; yet we may have feared not; brothers, for Rome, the amalgamated works of drama-titans HBO and the BBC, is an study of ancient civilisations not through it’s [...]