If Cate Blanchett doesn’t win tonight’s Oscar for her performance in Blue Jasmine, I shall be gobsmacked. She gives a completely remarkable, sustained, emotionally rollercoastered tour de force performance as Jasmine, a New York socialite who finds herself in hard times after the suicide of her husband (a licentious Madoff-style crook of monumentally shitty proportions.)…
Read moreThe Good German
Steven Soderberg goes all Casablanca on us, with a black and white, forties-style film noir, The Good German. George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, a war correspondent in Potsdam, Germany, for the Post Armistice conference held by the victorious Allies. It starts as a murder mystery, when his venal, vicious snotrag of a driver is pulled…
Read moreThe Curious Case of Benjamin Button
I don’t do death. I’ve spent my entire life blocking out the fact that death happens. But yesterday I learned that my most dearly beloved – the sweet and loyal and gentle Finley Dogchild – has a tumour the size of an orange growing between the muscles of her right thigh. It’s not going to…
Read moreIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Ok, now that the movie’s finally out, it’s probably finally safe to talk about this….. Although Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features all sorts of Cold War triple agent spy-jinks and McCarthy-esque witch-hunts for hidden Reds, it would appear that most feared were those who might have tried to steal the movie’s secrets. The final…
Read moreBabel
Caught Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel on tv again last night – a beautiful, gut wrenching and entirely appalling exposition of the confusions and mistakes and misunderstandings that separate us. In light of the xenophobic wrath unfolding in Johannesburg right now, it’s a timely reminder of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – our humanity connects us, a person…
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