Category: Geek Alert

All Rise: X&HT Saw The Dark Knight Rises

Right-wing radio host and all-round screw top Rush Limbaugh thinks that the new Batman film has an explicit anti-Republican message. His reasoning? The villain of the piece is called Bane, and Presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his fortune through a company called Bain Capital. It's just all so clear and simple.

We shouldn't laugh too loudly at Limbaugh, easy as it might be. In some ways he's on the money. The Dark Knight Rises has plenty to say about power, corruption and lies. But as with all of Christopher Nolan's films, things are never as straight-forward as they appear.

The spoilers after this point are numerous and mighty. Be warned.

Continue reading All Rise: X&HT Saw The Dark Knight Rises

Introducing The Band: Against The Auteur Theory

When you start making film, you come to realise very quickly (or at least you do if you have the faintest scrap of self-awareness) that the auteur theory is bullshit. The very idea of a film being “by” one person is simply untrue.

Continue reading Introducing The Band: Against The Auteur Theory

Gods And Monsters – X&HT Saw Avengers Assemble

Superheroes are mythology. They stand above us, their concerns otherworldly, epic. The fate of worlds rests on their shoulders. They have little time for us, the people they pledge to protect. We get in the way. We’re cannon fodder. However much they claim to care, superheroes pledge their fealty to larger concepts than we can embody. They owe allegiance (and often claim ownership) to flags, cities, whole worlds. The people that give life to those ideals are messy little details, and boy does it ever get annoying just when you’re about to deliver the coup de grace to Dr. Villain and all of a sudden there’s a bus full of schoolkids that’s about to drop off a cliff.

And heaven help any mortal that a superhero chooses as a companion. A life of peril and an early, messy death awaits. The flimsy protection of a secret identity is no help once the mask inevitably comes off. I could reel off a loooong list of companions, wives and lovers that have lost their lives while their super-powered paramours have wept a single, perfect tear and moved on to the next battle.

And goddamit, Avengers Assemble does nothing to break that poisonous cycle.

 

(Are there spoilers after the cut? Are there EVER, True Believer!)

Continue reading Gods And Monsters – X&HT Saw Avengers Assemble

Locked And Loaded: X&HT Saw Lockout

If you had to pin me down, knees on my shoulders, threaten to flob in my mouth, and get me to confess to the kind of film I like more than any other, of course I would thrash and scream, and dissemble, and throw out some bullpucky about French crime movies of the early sixties, about Tarkovsky, Joderowsky and Kurismaki, but sooner or later, probably at the point where you start tickling me, I’d have to fess up and say it’s cheap, fast and dirty early eighties SF that really does it for me.

 

And that, Readership, is why I loved Lockout.

 

(as ever, ‘ware spoilers.)

Continue reading Locked And Loaded: X&HT Saw Lockout

Out Of The Woods: X&HT Saw The Cabin In The Woods

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck then you have a fair idea of what you have in your pond. But, as any horror fan knows, appearances can be deceptive. And when it comes to the latest from Joss Whedon, who knows a thing or two about messing with your expectations, it’s best to keep your eyes and mind open. Because The Cabin In The Woods may look an awful lot like a horror film, but it’s no duck.

Oh, baby, are there ever spoilers after the jump. Spoilers the like of which you have never seen. Unless you’ve seen the film. In which case, on you go.

Continue reading Out Of The Woods: X&HT Saw The Cabin In The Woods