Film
Back to the grind(house): Why "Death Proof" might be Tarantino's secret masterpiece
- 18 Aug 10
It’s been a full year now since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, his sixth (seventh if you count Kill Bill as two separate entities) and most recent full-length feature. Upon its release, Basterds was largely hailed as a kind of comeback. The director’s pals at Empire declared it 'an often dazzling movie that sees QT back on exhilarating form', and - Peter Bradshaw’s infamous pan in The Guardian aside - many of the reviews took a similar tack. My question, though, is this: from what kind of form is Tarantino supposed to have come back?
Who Ass-Kicks The Kick-Ass?
- 23 Apr 10
Early on in Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of the Mark Millar graphic novel of the same name, Aaron Johnson - playing the eponymous wannabe teenage superhero - details his masturbatory habits. Anything can set him off, no matter how high-minded his original intentions. Even a National Geographic-style photo of bare-breasted African tribeswomen is enough to get him dropping trou and making both himself and shareholders in Kleenex worldwide that bit happier. It's a sadly apt metaphor for a film that squanders every inch of its ample potential: any time he comes close to an interesting idea, rather than explore it fully Vaughn loses all self-control, retreating instead into gratuitous ultra-violence, witless profanity and fanboy wish-fulfilment. The film appears to be positioning itself as a tongue-in-cheek cross between Alan Moore's Watchmen and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films. Instead, it undermines itself as fatally as Zack Snyder's Watchmen adaptation, and ends up just another Xbox nerd's wank fantasy.
Thirst
- 10 Feb 10
A vampire film from the director of Oldboy is not what you'd expect from any of those words.
Fairly or not, both Park Chan-Wook movies and vampire movies carry certain expectations. Park is, of course, most famous for his 'Vengeance Trilogy' - Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance - a collective fever dream of deliriously stylish baroque revenge schemes, filled with hammer fights, eye-gouging and, in one instance, a scene that gives horrendous new meaning to the old line about a queue at an execution. Vampire movies, though tamed of late by Twilight and its ilk, by definition run on blood. Thirst, then, billed as Park Chan-Wook's vampire movie, would seem to give the Korean provocateur license to run riot, dousing the screen in creative blood-letting whilst restoring a sense of tragic grandeur to the genre. Which he does. In a way. But Thirst is defiantly not the film the words 'Park Chan-Wook's vampire movie' might lead fans to expect.
Brazen Best of Movies 07
- 20 Jan 08
Chris Vs. Summer - Weeks Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen & Seventeen: The End
- 06 Sep 07
This is it, folks. After four months and, by the end of this article, fourteen films, Chris Vs. Summer is over. I would say until next year, but for now I have no intention of repeating it. At this point I'm petitioning for Steve Vs. Summer. But that's next year. Right now we've got this summer to finish, and there's a proper dark night of the soul and everything to get through before the light at the end of the tunnel. Get ready for the horror of Rush Hour 3 and Evan Almighty, followed by the salvation of The Bourne Ultimatum and Knocked Up. It's like the scary bit at the end of Fantasia, only with Chris Tucker as the big demon and a load of dick jokes instead of the torchlit procession.