Column: Film and TV
Kony 2012: The film of the year and why
Kony 2012 is the film of the year in the same way that Nancy Gibbs, writing in Time magazine in 1999, argued that Hitler was the person of the century. It is by no means the best film released in 2012, but more than any other film … Read more
Column: Film and TV, Film
The Acting Talents of Kristen Stewart
The form of the meme goes like this: Random Internet jokester inserts random image along with superimposed text that reads: ‘Still more facial expressions than Kristen Stewart’. Add extra humour points if the image is an inanimate object or an entity without a face, say, an octopus. … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Thinking objects with Moonrise Kingdom
In the inaugural issue of Screen Machine, Huw Walmsley-Evans succinctly identifies the clichéd critical move vis-à-vis the films of Wes Anderson: almost without fail, the complaint is that ‘there are some real, valuable characters and emotions to be found in this film, but they are obscured by … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Pixar and Studio Ghibli, face to face
The English edition of Starting Point: 1979–1996, a collection of Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki’s articles and interviews, comes with a foreword by John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and director of several well-known animated films such as Toy Story and … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Fantasy without imagination
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that the hegemonic ideology loves to present itself as the natural state of things: ‘In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their … Read more
Column: Film and TV
All the real girls: Lena Dunham and sexual politics
In the very first scene of the pilot episode for Girls – Lena Dunham’s new HBO comedy series – 24-year-old aspiring writer Hannah (played by Dunham) is told by her parents over a fancy restaurant dinner that they are cutting off their financial support, which has enabled … Read more
Column: Film and TV
Five films to convert to 3D
In the Guardian, Dave Eggers described Terrence Malick’s films as ‘3-D without being actually 3-D’. It’s not too difficult to imagine what Eggers meant by this throwaway line. Just recall that indelible image from Days of Heaven of workers watching a storm of locusts rise from the … Read more
Column: Film and TV
The souls of successful men
Playing like an episode of Mad Men reworked into a treatise on the Current State of Twentysomethings, Any Questions for Ben? is a film insistent on its own contemporariness. Note the superimposed text at the start of the film pointedly informing us that Ben can’t stay one … Read more
