Author: Alex Doenau

I’m not sure if I’ve ever left a movie quite so depressed as when I left Rocknrolla. I’m well aware that Eagle Eye made me hate movies, but for Rocknrolla I found myself bereft of words. When I see movies, even as I’m watching them I think what to write about them. Most of it never gets written or published, but I edit and revise in my head as I go along nonetheless. On Rocknrolla I drew a blank. The movie itself is like an oyster interrupted: an almost imperceptible gleam of a pearl surrounded by excrement. Some o fit doesn’t make sense, even if you’re paying attention. Some of it is obvious to the point of insulting. Most notably, the macguffin is the fucking briefcase from Pulp Fiction (so, too, is the gay S&M torture rape scene, this time in Russian!).
It may be a waste, but hey!, at least it’s a long and tedious one.

It’s quite possible that, in my life, I had never seen Temple of Doom before tonight. I remember my parents happily buying Raiders and The Last Crusade from McDonalds back in 1993 (yes, they sold Indiana Jones videos at McDonalds), but refusing to buy Temple of Doom because they didn’t like it.

I can’t blame them. It really isn’t a very good movie.

I’ll start by making the following perfectly clear: I do not recommend Burn After Reading. I found it hilarious practically from start to finish but I’m pretty sure that a lot of people will flat out hate it and, if you’re one of them, I don’t want you to pin it on me.
Of course, if you’re American, it’s done and dusted. In Australia, the fun is only beginning. My audience laughed a lot, and it was a pretty much sold out advance screening (seat E3, baby): but at the same time as the laughter was happening, some were heard to say “this is ridiculous!” And it is. It really is.

In lieu of me complaining about lacklustre video games, as I had planned to use this space, I’d like to take an opportunity to be depressed. It’s an article, right … but it’s an article with the following title:

Terry Pratchett: I’m slipping away a bit at a time… and all I can do is watch it happen

How is this not among the worst things in the world? True, thus has it ever been, but until it struck Pratchett it was little more than an abstraction. A person leading by example is a terrible thing in this sort of situation. Almost secretly, Pratchett’s first non-Discworld book since 1995’s Johnny and the Bomb, Nation, was published in the last month. I’ve read three Discworld books over the last two weeks (eighteen so far this year, that makes it – in order, for the first time since 2004), in between Adrian Mole tomes, but I feel I should put them on hold for a little bit so I can see what this book that “had to be written” is like. Saying this, I haven’t even read Wintersmith yet. I feel ashamed that I haven’t much liked the last few books in the series, either, but …
… now I just want to curl up in a corner and hide from the world. If you’ll excuse me.

I was quite excited for In Bruges. I quite liked its outcome. Having seen it, though, I’m wondering how it’s going to get away with quite so wide a release in Australia: it’s sweary, it’s violent, it’s funny, but it’s also melancholy. It’s about a pair of hitmen, their hot-tempered boss, a drug dealer and a racist dwarf. It’s pretty good!

I didn’t think that the first Hellboy feature was all that great, but I was excited for Hellboy II – probably because it seemed to Guillermo Del Toro appeared, in all of the promo materials, to have taken a leaf from his Pan’s Labyrinth book. That’s not to say, in the final breakdown, that The Golden Army is anywhere near the level of Pan’s Labyrinth, but it’s a good enough time.

The biographical graphic novel has proven, over the last thirty years or so, to be an effective way to tell a life story. Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor are grand, and greatly different accounts of their author’s lives; Art Spiegelman’s Maus blends Spiegelman’s own relationship with his father with his father’s account of World War II – with the twist that everyone is represented as an animal. Name recognition may stretch to two of those three titles, if I’m being optimistic, but I’m pretty sure that most people had never heard of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis before it became a film – and even then, most people still haven’t heard of it.

I don’t have particularly fond memories of American Splendor as a film, possibly because it was not so much personal as it was blazingly meta, but Persepolis benefits from a presumably direct translation into the animated form and, like Frank Miller’s Sin City, is co-directed by Satrapi herself. In black and white, Satrapi captures not just her own childhood, but the spirit of an age: Iran going from one peril to another, and how Europe reacted as outsiders looking in. In a few words, it’s pretty dang good.