In brief: Wreck-It Ralph

So: there’s an arcade game called Fix-It Felix in which a muscle-bound vandal goes around smashing up a tenement building and terrorizing its occupants. A Super-Mario-a-like with a golden hammer, the aforementioned Felix, racks up the points while repairing the damage and is the hero of the residents. When the arcade closes at the end of the day, Felix is feted and enjoys the champagne lifestyle at a series of parties, while Ralph (voiced by John...

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In brief: Flight

And the Agitation Award for Having Your Cake and Eating It goes to … ‘Flight’. In scene after scene, director Robert Zemeckis revels in the beer-guzzling, vodka-gulping, snoke-snorting, cuss-word-spewing and generally smartass bad behaviour of emotional fuck up and genius pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington). Gasp as Whip cops off with a foxy air hostess, toots a line of the Colombian marching powder just to wake up, then heads off to a fly a...

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Haunted

In ‘Danse Macabre’, Stephen King describes James Herbert’s writing style as that of someone who puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror. ‘Danse Macabre’ was published in 1981 and the statement is fairly appropriate to the seven or eight titles Herbert had published by then (with the possible exception of ‘Fluke’). Certainly, the one-two punch of ‘The Rats’ and ‘The Fog’ – the former blithely disregarding, within its...

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In brief: Zero Dark Thirty

I wrote a piece about a month ago on the controversies surrounding ‘Django Unchained’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, the idea being to acknowledge the elephant in the room and make any necessary refutations or counter-arguments. I’d then follow up with in-depth reviews of both films, concentrating on them purely as films and not having to get bogged down with the baggage attached to them.That was the theory, anyway. In practice, I wrote the follow up ‘Django...

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The way we respond to light: a Q&A with Jeremiah Kipp

Watching your short films ‘Contact’, ‘Crestfallen’ and ‘Drool’, the first thing that struck me was their use of light. Is this a deliberate technique to open up an aesthetic dialogue with the dark themes you focus on?I’ll use CRESTFALLEN as a way to make the answer specific. The story is built around a possible suicide, and I remember while we were planning the film being haunted by the way Bart Mastronardi handled the suicide film in his independent...

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Light and dark: three short films by Jeremiah Kipp

Let’s start with ‘Drool’. It’s an experimental four-minute movie shot in tactile black and white. It fixates on the body. Its aesthetic is intrinsically queasy. And it defies easy description. Here’s my best shot: imagine the massage scene in ‘Emmanuelle 2’ if Lars von Trier had challenged Brian Yuzna to remake it.Welcome to the world of Jeremiah Kipp.‘Drool’ is a film to be experienced, rather than simply watched and then discussed or reviewed under...

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Iron Maiden: Flight 666

Reposting this from three years ago, in honour of Steve Harris's 57th birthday. Given their thirty-five year history and the carousel of line-up changes that saw two vocalists come and go before they even recorded their first track, Paul Di’Anno ousted on the verge of mainstream success and replacement Bruce Dickinson (having departed to pursue a solo career after two world-conquering decades) being swiftly recruited back into the ranks when...

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The Tourist

In 2006, the magnificently named Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made ‘The Lives of Others’, a real labour of love which he’d spent five years bringing to the screen. It was released to almost universal acclaim, netted an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and announced the arrival of a major new filmmaking talent.In 2010, von Donnersmarck made ‘The Tourist’, a Hollywood star vehicle in which he invested less than a year, only coming on board after Lasse...

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