Judging by the trailer for The LEGO Movie, I thought it might be really interesting in terms of its mashing up of different pop-culture worlds (DC superheroes, Lord of the Rings mythology, My Little Pony cuteness etc) in a way that chimed with what I like about sweding – treating media franchises as folk culture […]
Gosh, but I love me some Paul Verhoeven. To my mind, the brilliantly perverse Dutch director is one of the greatest satirists in film history – certainly one of the finest ever to have worked within the Hollywood machine. He is consistently interested in wrongfooting audiences – challenging them to question their own engagement in […]
As soon as there were VHS home-movie cameras, there were people remaking their favourite films at home. Maybe people were doing it before video, though no examples come to mind (tell me if you know of any…), but my hunch is that it’s to do with youth and timing. Home-movie technology on film was usually […]
J.M. Tyree and I reviewed the Coen brothers’ latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, for the February 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. Josh and I co-wrote the BFI Film Classic on The Big Lebowski in 2007 and have covered a bunch of Coen pictures for S&S since then. (Here’s our take on No Country for […]
And so Jarmania 2014 begins! This year, the twentieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, sees a whole bunch of events dedicated to the artist and filmmaker. First out of the traps is Pandemonium, an exhibition by the Cultural Institute at King’s, where Jarman studied from 1960 to 1963, at the Inigo Rooms in Somerset House’s […]
This is my review from the January 2014 issue of Sight & Sound of Beth B’s documentary Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, about the NYC alt performance and burlesque scene. It features Bambi the Mermaid, Bunny Love, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Rose Wood, Tigger! and World Famous *BOB* and plays at the ICA […]
“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” It’s one of Margaret Thatcher’s most iconic quotations, even though, in the full context of the 1987 Woman’s Own interview from which it comes, she was actually saying something more nuanced – perhaps even the opposite of the assumed […]
So Channel 4’s Secrets of the Living Dolls looks like a whole other thing. Screening tonight, it’s a one-off documentary about female masking, a subculture in which mostly straight men “transform themselves into [female] dolls by squeezing into a second skin” by means of rubber body suits and masks. The doc’s subjects include a 70-year-old […]
2014 is the twentieth anniversary of the death of Derek Jarman, one of Britain’s most erudite, esoteric, erotic and exquisite visual artists of recent generations, and as queer as a glittery dildo reading Proust. From Thatcherite satire to reimaginings of Caravaggio and Wittgenstein, videos for Pet Shop Boys to gardening in the shadow of a […]
New York’s Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) has been archiving, preserving and exhibiting a huge range of video and multimedia work since 1971. It’s basically like Aladdin’s cave with a remote control. Personally, I’m partial to a bit of Ryan Trecartin, whose domestic sagas have bits of Jack Smith’s will-to-glamour and John Waters’s fucked-up-family vibes […]
