Funny Games
by One third of a brilliant film, this thriller begins by creating stifling tension. A wealthy family arrive at their holiday home, then two youths invade and their model manners and speech provide a stark and disjointing contrast to their increasingly violent actions. The motivations and intentions of the youths remain unknown. As they act without emotion, their unexplained and extreme politeness adds to the terror. The tension is then ruined as the director attempts to make a political point about violence in cinema, and once the film becomes a farce, empathy for the characters is lost. The ease with which director Michael Haneke creates a top-quality thriller then destroys it is infuriating. But it has created debate, which was perhaps the point, and means the film is worth seeing just to make up your own mind.
Tagged: movie thriller
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Also by XAVIER TOBY
Based on the Booker Prize Winning novel by J.M. Coetzee, John Malkovich is superb as David Lurie, a poetry professor without much of a moral compass. He is dismissed from his university in South Africa for taking advantage of a student, and moves to the country to live with his daughter, where the crimes she suffers through forces him to analyse his own mistakes. Disgrace is a wonderfully layered film, filled with complex characters and almost requires repeated viewing to fully appreciate the many issues covered. Despite the lack of action the piece never drags. At its worst, film is disposable and boring. At its best, film informs, inspires debate and forces each viewer to question their own moral code. This is film at its best.
Sarah Watt’s My Year Without Sex trailer
An Australian film that focuses on the hardships suffered by a typical lower-class family. I can feel you cringe, but there’s no need. This isn’t another clanger that relies on clichés and lame jokes, that portrays average Australians as simple and backward. Here are intelligent, warm, loving people struggling with a series of hardships with individuality, honesty and strength. Read more
A few years ago, a few German high school students went a bit nuts. The students had been adamant that fascism could never again take hold in Germany. So the teacher started a social experiment to prove that it could, and the students got a little caught up in it, to say the least. In reality, the whole thing was shut down before it got too out of control. This film is a fictionalised version of that out of control experiment and does an excellent job of showing, in a contemporary setting, just how easily fascism can develop support and discriminate against those involved, with even the teacher caught up by the amount of power he has over the students.
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Tomer Hanuka’s post-apocalyptic visions are imbued with a real sense of pathos. His characters seem at once emboldened and vulnerable, wrestling demons cloaked in shades of blue, red and green.
The Sound of Animals Fighting again unleash their experimental blend of progressive electronic hardcore rock. Known only by their animal names — Nightingale, Walrus, Lynx, and Skunk — and wearing masks for their rare live appearances, TSOAF have released two albums. Their latest, The Ocean and The Sun, offers an intense mix of genres, as delicate Brazilian-inflected melodies careen into shattering guitar workouts.
Israeli computer scientists recently created a computer program that changes photographs of people’s faces into more attractive images based on an algorithm that determines ideal distances between lips and chins, foreheads and eyes, and distances between eyes.
Typography for a good cause? Designers can help make the world a better place by just purchasing one of these strictly limited posters. Animalphabet is a typographic project and a collaboration between an impressive list of 26 artists, including the mighty Geoff Mcfetridge. Read more
How many times can we play the same song in different settings? Hmmm, I don’t know. But it is a hell of a song, from a hell of a band, as that uniquely English oddity, Jules Holland would no doubt concur.
Can this be true? Florent, the legendary eatery of New York’s Meat Packing District, is about to become the next victim of sky-rocketing Manhattan leases. Luckily we still have one more month to be nostalgic at Florent. I’m going (with a whole bunch of friends) this weekend. Read more
Daft Punk eat your heart out! This striking looking watch from Tokyo Flash packs enough LED punch to blind innocent bystanders.
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Japanese designers Keiichi Muramatsu and Noriko Seki founded the Tokyo-based fashion label, Everlasting Sprout, in 2005, based on their mutual interest in knit design. Each intricate creation in their Spring/Summer 2009 range took up to a week for them to construct. Read more
Chris Ware is my favorite comic book artist. If there’s a new Chris Ware book out, I buy it, no questions asked. He writes the most somber, sad stories about the simplest of people, but they’re written and illustrated with such beauty and elegance. All of the text and graphic design is done by hand. It’s absolutely mind blowing. Read more
While I am as impressed as anyone with an artist’s ability to render accurate and lifelike human figures, I’m more often compelled aesthetically by looser and more stylized images such as Camilla Engman’s. The wide-set eyes, bulbous bodies, and skewed proportions of the people and animals in Engman’s paintings lend them a certain expressiveness and melancholy. Read more
James Blagden’s neon fantasies
New York illustrator James Blagden’s work is so wonderfully trippy, I feel like I need to wear shades and a top hat when looking at them just to do them justice. Read more
Produced by In The Yellow, this six and half inch tall vinyl toy by Luke Chueh is limited to just one hundred pieces and comes in clear colorway with silver eyes.
A free Lost At E Minor iPhone app is coming soon. To be among the first to download it, just leave your details and we’ll notify you as soon as it’s available. Win? It’s free. And it’s fun. You win, we win. Snap.
This beautifully soft, handmade and dyed scarf is by the New York-based designer, Ryan Sullivan. They can be purchased through the Lost At E Minor store. Read more
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Jamie said | 7 August, 2008
This is a great movie and I highly recommend it. I haven’t seen the original, but it hasn’t been that easy to find around here.