Futurismic now have my fourteenth Blasphemous Geometries column.
It is quite a bit shorter than my usual BG columns but this is because it is kind of a meta-column. Instead of grappling with a substantive issue, this month’s column announces (and explains) my decision to re-orient Blasphemous Geometries away from being about genre criticism and towards [...]
Entries from April 2009
April 30, 2009
BG 14 – The Criticism of Video Games
April 22, 2009
The Trap, The Wire and The Loop : Individualism as a Political Force
Over the past week, I have been thinking about two particular works. The first, is Armando Iannucci’s spectacular In The Loop (2009) and the most recent of Adam Curtis’ documentary series The Trap (2007). Both works examine the social and political fall-out from Tony Blair and New Labour’s decade or so in power. Both present [...]
April 20, 2009
J. G. Ballard (1930-2009)
As has been noted elsewhere, James Graham Ballard died on Sunday. This was not an unexpected event. Ballard had publically announced his terminal prostate cancer and had even written an autobiography Miracles of Life (2008) which served to tidy up some of the biographical facts that might have been glossed over in Ballard’s fictionalised memoirs [...]
April 14, 2009
REVIEW : The Bothersome Man (2006)
In 1927 Bertrand Russell delivered a talk entitled “Why I am not a Christian”. In this talk he rejected the logic of the arguments for the existence of God before moving on to issues such as Jesus’ moral character and whether or not he actually existed in the first place. In the 80 or so [...]
April 11, 2009
Rosemary’s Baby : Whimper Against the Machine
Polanski week has seen me write at length about the cinematic technique, intellectual pedigree and philosophical themes of Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy but for Rosemary’s Baby (1968) I would like to take a different approach. Arguably one of Polanski’s best known films, Rosemary’s Baby is wonderfully acted, perfectly paced and so tightly written and shot [...]
April 8, 2009
“I haven’t been into feet since ‘82″
Seeing as it is Polanski Week, I thought I would also link to an amusing little film that attempts to suggest that Roman Polanski might have some kind of foot fetish thing going on…
The film is called “Un Piede di Roman Polanski” and it was joint winner of the CineKink 2009 [...]
April 8, 2009
The Panic Tone – Polanski and Topor’s The Tenant (1976)
In my piece on Polanski’s Repulsion (1968), I highlighted the homage paid by Polanski to the generation of Surrealist filmmakers who came before him. In this piece, I want to examine the similarities in tone between another of Polanski’s films and the branch of French Surrealism that provided the source material for one of Polanski’s [...]
April 6, 2009
Cinematic Vocabulary – The Psychotic Break from Repulsion (1965)
It is a pleasure to return to Cinematic Vocabulary and kick off Polanski Week by looking at what I consider to be one of Polanski’s less appreciated films. While The Tenant (1976) is the darling of cinephiles and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is second only to Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) in terms of mainstream appeal, Repulsion is [...]
April 5, 2009
Polanski Week
While I try to move outside of my comfort zone in the films I choose to watch, sometimes I find myself in a place where only a certain kind of film will satisfy me. At the moment, that type of film is the psychological thriller. One of the masters of this particular genre is the [...]
