The contemporary media like to paint a picture of terrorists as ‘other’, a picture designed to make us feel safer in our middle class suburban homes. These others are somehow different from us. In the comfort of middle-class Germany in the late 1960s, a terrorist organisation sprang up from the suburbs, its army the educated […]
Who are the Jonas Brothers? They’re Generation Y’s version of The Monkees, an all singing, all dancing phenomenon prefabricated for your children’s entertainment by the House of Mouse, pressed from the same fabric as Miley Cyrus, whose show Hannah Montana they have appeared on. Australia seems to have dodged a bullet as far as the […]
It was Bette Davis, we are reminded in Isabel Coixet’s beautiful film Elegy, who said that old age is not for sissies. Successful author, lecturer and broadcaster David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) is staring into the mouth of old age, and finds that his life is empty and meaningless. Having divorced his wife many years previous, […]
Stop me if you’ve head this one. Here’s a film about a man who longs for a job in law enforcement, but due to shortcomings beyond his immediate control, he is forced into a career in consumer security. Blind to the jokes made around him at his expense, he is content, perhaps even a little […]
For poor old Poland during World War Two and in its aftermath, it was a case of the devil or the deep blue sea. Their homeland was the battlefield on which the Nazis pushed from one side and the Soviets from the other, and in Katyn, acclaimed Polish director Andrej Wajda continues his career-long exploration […]
We’ve seen Jackie Chan the martial arts hero and Jackie Chan the comedian, but having reached the peak of his profession and sat astride it for two decades isn’t enough for Jackie Chan. Canberra’s favourite son obviously feels the need to prove himself as a serious dramatic actor, and this film, produced by Chan’s company, […]
Young bride-to-be Susan Murphy (Reece Witherspoon) should have paid closer attention to old wives tales. No sooner did fiancé Derek (Paul Rudd) get a look at her in her bridal dress than a stray asteroid crashes to earth and knocks her flying. As the pair take their vows, Susan begins mutating into a giantess and […]
A synecdoche is a figure of speech, a close cousin of the metaphor, where a part is used to represent the whole or the whole to represent a part, like when you say “I’m going to the movies” when you are only going to see one particular movie. The characters in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New […]
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