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Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
Lords of Chaos: The grisly film that has caused outrage
Jonas Akerlund’s new film, Lords of Chaos, is a rock’n’roll biopic, with all the wigs and gigs that that implies. But it is also a grisly, stranger-than-fiction comedy drama about murder, suicide, self-harm, devil worship, and a spate of arson attacks that scandalised a nation. Chronicling the outrageous crimes committed by a few Norwegian black metal bands and their hangers-on in the early 1990s, the film probably won’t appeal to lovers of Bohemian Rhapsody – and there have even been calls from some church groups for the film to be banned.
Sue TorresPublished 2 years ago in GeeksThe Aftermath: ‘A mildly engaging trifle’
The characters in The Aftermath face intriguing dilemmas. Four months after the end of World War Two, Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrives in Hamburg to join her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British military officer. How will they deal with the Germans, the vanquished enemy whose bombing of London killed their young son? Will they repair their marriage, now as chilly as the snowy landscape in which her train arrives? Will she fall into bed with the handsome German widower, Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), an architect whose grand house the British have requisitioned for the Morgans’ use?
Cindy DoryPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: Captain Marvel
A slow-motion explosion in a barren landscape sends Brie Larson flying to the ground, blue blood running from her nose. There’s a glimpse of Annette Bening holding a gun. Larson’s character, who has not yet become Captain Marvel, wakes from this memory in the form of a dream, but her real life is even stranger. She actually has an inner glow, bright light shining out from her hands. That opening sets up the film’s otherworldliness, its personal mystery – what is happening in that memory? – and above all, its action.
Sue TorresPublished 2 years ago in GeeksLois Weber: the trailblazing director who shocked the world
A nude scene! Abortion; birth control; prostitution! In the silent-movie era, Lois Weber’s films were shockingly ahead of their time – and also immensely popular. She wrote, directed, produced and sometimes starred in her films, and in 1916 was the highest paid studio director in the US, man or woman. She pioneered techniques including split screen and double exposure, for a time ran her own studio, and along with Alice Guy-Blaché was one of the two women who contributed the most to cinema at its start. But she died alone, broke and nearly forgotten in 1939. What happened?
Cindy DoryPublished 2 years ago in GeeksHollywood’s new kind of love story
A quiet revolution took place in cinemas earlier this year with the release of Captain Marvel. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise’s first female-fronted superhero movie, it wasn’t just what the film had that made it different, but also what it was lacking – a traditional romantic storyline.
Sue TorresPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: Us
he underclass is coming to destroy us, and we will deserve it. That is the simple, overarching message of Jordan Peele’s witty meta-horror film, Us. The ‘us’ he aligns viewers with is a middle-class American family of four, the Wilsons, and ‘they’ are their doppelgangers. The disenfranchised doubles have been living somewhere mysterious, cut off from the comforts of society. This other mother, father and two children appear one night in the Wilsons’ driveway wearing blood-red jumpsuits and wielding large golden scissors, the better to slice up their counterparts. Class warfare has rarely broken out with such frightening panache.
Alessandro AlgardiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: Dumbo
Some of us are counting the days until Disney stops churning out live-action / CGI remakes of its cartoons – Aladdin and The Lion King are next – but the live-action Dumbo promised to be something special. For one thing, the original 1941 cartoon was only an hour long, so there was plenty of scope for it to be expanded and developed. For another thing, the person in charge of expanding and developing it was Tim Burton, who loves classic animation almost as much as he loves magical tales of persecuted outsiders. With its retro circus setting and with a roll call of fine actors including Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito and Eva Green, Dumbo might well have been one of Disney’s best films – and one of Burton’s best films as well.
Mao Jiao LiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksAvengers: Endgame
If Avengers: Endgame is not quite the superhero blockbuster to end all superhero blockbusters, it certainly ends all of the Marvel superhero blockbusters that have been released so far. It’s the 22nd film that the game-changing studio has put out in the past 11 years, and almost every story thread from the previous films is woven together in its colourful tapestry.
Film review: Long Shot
Romantic comedies have an endless array of clichés to choose from. There are the mismatched lovers who are unaccountably perfect for each other, their respective wise-cracking best friends, the inevitable breakup and then the last-minute mad dash through the rain by one of them to win the other back. With Seth Rogen as a shambling, muckraking journalist and Charlize Theron as the glamorous US Secretary of State, Long Shot embraces every one of those tropes except for the downpour. Yet it is so cheerful and charming that it works as gleefully unambitious escapism.
Many A-SunPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: Pokémon Detective Pikachu
Pokémon may be one of the biggest multi-media franchises ever, having featured in video games, card games, comics and cartoons by the lorryload since 1996. But if you haven’t consumed any of those, the whole enterprise is pretty much unfathomable. After all, you don’t have to have read a Batman comic to follow the concept of a masked-man beating up bank robbers. Pokémon, on the other hand... well, it’s set in an alternate reality in which people go around stalking big-eyed, super-powered monsters, trapping them inside metal orbs like high-tech genies and then releasing these monsters so that they can have gladiatorial battles with each other. It isn’t clear what the monsters get out of this violent slavery, and the first live-action Pokémon film, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, doesn’t make things much clearer. If anything, viewers who aren’t already familiar with the franchise will stumble out of the cinema even more puzzled than when they went in.
Alessandro AlgardiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: Booksmart
Booksmart is actress Olivia Wilde’s first film as director, and it’s no surprise that she gets vibrant performances from her cast. Plenty of actors-turned-film-makers do that. Unlike most of them, she does a lot more, breathing hilarious new life into two tired genres. A female buddy film in the guise of a high-school partying movie, Booksmart is endlessly funny and outrageous, yet always grounded by its realistic central relationship.
Mao Jiao LiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFilm review: X-Men Dark Phoenix
“Who are we?” wonders Jean Grey – the telepathic, telekinetic, soul-searching heroine of Dark Phoenix – in the film’s opening voiceover. Any telepath around could have looked into her mind and answered: “Well, you’re not someone interesting.” This latest instalment in the X-Men franchise is flatter than a wafer-thin page of the comic books that inspired it. The film is done in by a drab script and a surprisingly dull Sophie Turner, whose performance as Jean, aka Phoenix, supposedly in emotional turbulence as she sorts out whether to use her powers for good or evil, has none of the wiliness and depth Turner displayed as Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones.