I have decided to split my favourite films into two distinct groups. The first group is a list of the films that I have particularly enjoyed this year but which were not made or released this year. It is a longer list than the other and because it is more a reflection of what I [...]
Entries from December 2009
December 29, 2009
Surprises of the Year : 2009 Edition
As I’ve expanded my film watching habits, I have frequently taken chances and moved outside of the kind of film that I might have expected to like (more on this when I put up my best of 2009 post!). Sometimes, the results were disastrous. Other times, I was nonplussed but looked into the director and [...]
December 28, 2009
Disappointments of the Year : 2009 Edition
While I have seen a lot of films this year, I have been relatively lucky as far as avoiding stinkers is concerned. Following disastrous trips to the cinema to see films like Jumper and Quantum of Solace on the grounds that I had a card that allowed me to get in for free, I have [...]
December 25, 2009
Syndromes and a Century (2006) – Repetition and Change
The role of a critic is a somewhat paradoxical one. At times of universal agreement over aesthetic principles, the critic serves as a guard dog. A martinet. Forever wielding his rhetorical staff to smack down those who refuse or fail to toe the line. Like Robert McKee we point solemnly to Aristotle’s Poetics and wearily [...]
December 20, 2009
Rage (2009) – The Future of Reality is Reality TV
Cinema tends to ask only a narrow spectrum of questions. Questions inspired mostly by writers who themselves are concerned only with asking a narrow spectrum of questions : Who are we? What is happiness? What is freedom? But comparatively few films seek to answer the question of how we (as a species, as a culture [...]
December 16, 2009
Where The Wild Things Are (2009) – Lost in Translation… With Muppets
There is a tendency in art house cinema towards the pseudo-intellectual. It is a tendency not merely to tolerate witless navel-gazing, but to actively celebrate it. To elevate its whiny introspection above all other forms of human activity. To revel in its portentous self-indulgence. To confuse its bourgeois posturing with grand tragedy and genuine insight. [...]
December 9, 2009
BG 22 – The Future is the Past : Assassin’s Creed II
Futurismic have my 22nd Blasphemous Geometries Column entitled “The Future is the Past”.
It’s kind of a thematic overview of the game Assassin’s Creed II and how that game relates not only to history but also to the concept of Sacred History via the use of prophecies and apocalyptic symbolism. It was a lot of fun [...]
December 9, 2009
The Girlfriend Experience (2009) – The Best Things In Life Aren’t Free
As anyone who has seen Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self (2002) documentary series will doubtless agree, one of the most important developments in 20th Century psychology was the creation, by Abraham Maslow, of the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy of needs is one part pop psychology, one part classical philosophy and one part mysticism. [...]
