** Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen Ruby Sparks, well… don’t. But also, this might ruin the plot somewhat!** Ruby Sparks. Ruby Sparks. Ruby fucking Sparks. Where to fucking start? This is a film I had a strong aversion to seeing. Visceral, guttural, bilious. I studied Pygmalion myths in high school, so like Tim Winton,…
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Well, it’s a quirky indie comedy time of year. My opinion of such flicks varies wildly. I loved I Heart Huckabees so much that I spent the Summer holidays between Year 8 and 9 learning about existentialism and Lily Tomlin. I hated (500) Days of Summer in the sense that I had to have three…
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I love a bit of nonsense. I love it when things are absurd, surreal or strange. I love anything that upsets a “natural order”. But how the goddamn hell does one ascribe it gender politics? I’ll give it a go, it’s what I’m here for. It’s the total conviction in benign logical fallacies that gets…
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Four confident women. Four confident women doing things. Four confident women supporting each other. Four confident indigenous women given prime screen time in a well-grossing Australian film. Four confident indigenous women not allowing anyone to insult them for their race or gender, and never compromising their personalities or identities. The Sapphires is the most woman-positive…
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Entertainment is action. Action isn’t just explosions and chases on a screen, but what a film can ask of its audience. Your body may not undergo the trauma in front of you, but your brain races to negotiate everything happening. In the action films I like, your brain has to keep up with the projection’s…
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Pixar’s Brave. Blah blah first lady protagonist, blah blah why did it take them so long. I’ve never held Pixar in quite the same regard as my contemporaries. I didn’t get into Toy Story back in the day, probably because cowboys, astronauts… toys in general, weren’t on my priority viewing list. I liked witches and…
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I was going to see The Dictator. Anyone who asked what my next column would be about in the past fortnight will have heard “The Dictator”, with more than vague trepidation in my voice. Most tried to warn me away, but sometimes there’s satisfaction in barrelled-fish shooting. There’s no fear you won’t get anything –…
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If Terence Davies’ film The Deep Blue Sea were the apex of a pyramid, it would be one of those faulty food ones. I’m not going to try to stretch that metaphor further, because I was just looking for an example of a flaw-riddled pyramid, and I don’t want to draw saturated fat comparisons. Rachel…
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The Avengers was released on my 21st Birthday. Joss Whedon’s impact on my childhood and adolescence has been recorded everywhere, from the essays I submit to real-life university subjects, to the airwaves as I stumble for words at 6am, to this very column. It felt like no mere coinkydink that Wednesday of all days was…
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My report on American Reunion comes replete with hazy memories and vague descriptors. I saw the production over a month ago, in one of those fancy pants media screenings because I was interviewing the writer and director for Melbourne’s Student Youth Network (SYN). I saw it at a silly hour of the morning while under-slept…
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With the exception of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, I have remained ignorant of young adult literature. I spent my formative years developing a collection of Buffy serial novels more substantial than nerd-mecca Minotaur’s. But I knew I should read The Hunger Games before the film was released. I’ve had enough conversations about Rowling…
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I love Hollywood films. I don’t love Hollywood romances. At some point, the tale of love became subject not only to an inevitable conclusion, but the journey stopped veering away from one strict path. It’s not knowing that you’re going to land in New York, it’s knowing that you’ll stop in Thailand, Abu Dhabi and…
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It’s not that I don’t know how I feel about Charlize Theron’s Mavis in Young Adult, it’s that I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. The cinema-going audience for the film seems to be divided; there are those who loathe the character and applaud Diablo Cody for putting such an abrasive figure on screen,…
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TRIGGER WARNING! The catch-cry of this column is ‘finding the fun in fail’, but there’s one kind of film-fail (and life-fail) which is never fun. Rape. Not funny when people misappropriate the term to say their facebook was ‘fraped’, not funny when it’s the (bizarrely) critically acclaimed American remake of The Girl With the Dragon…
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