Remember the 2014 movie Locke, featuring only Tom Hardy on screen, making many phone calls from his car while driving through nocturnal London? There is a similarly single-minded movie out now, called The Guilty (or Den skyldige as its original title), about a cop who has to staff a police emergency call center in Denmark. That is of course the perfect situation for yet another feature with one character on screen and all the others phoning in. To be fair, Asger Holm (played by Jakob Cedergren) has a few short face-to-face conversations with the other cops at the call center, but soon, he moves into another, empty room in order to tackle the problem he is confronted with. Continue reading
The Rear-View Mirror: Spaced (1999)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
Oh boy. How do you do justice to a year like 1999, wchich produced films such as The Matrix, Being John Malkovich and Magnolia? That gave us the HBO gateway drug The Sopranos as well as a The West Wing, whose idealism would be much needed these days? Let alone games such as System Shock 2 and Planescape: Torment, milestones of the immersive sim and of choice and consequence in video game storytelling? I can’t pick the film, series, book or game that was most meaningful, but I will pick one that has been wrongly overshadowed by its creators’ careers since.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #16: 22 July by Paul Greengrass
In the November episode of the podcast, Mege and Matt are returning to the island of Utøya to take a look at Paul Greengrass’ filmic take on the massacre. How does Greengrass’ film compare to Erik Poppe’s interpretation (which we discussed last month)? What does it bring to the table? And can it do justice to the events that happened on Utøya on 22 July 2011? We also hear of a near-mythical face-to-face encounter in the Virtual Reality version of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and of the German documentary The Cleaners, which tells of the content moderators scouring social media for inappropriate content and the price their work exacts.
The Rear-View Mirror: CSI Crime Scene Investigation (2000)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
Today, my dearly beloveds, let’s talk about guilty pleasures. I know you have them because I have them. In a way, it’s the emotional continuation of reading under the covers when you’re a kid, flashlight in hand, way until after midnight. And already I’ve talked myself into a corner because now I have to reveal one of my guilty pleasures while you can keep silent about yours. Here goes, then: one of my guilty pleasures was, and still is, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the original one set in Las Vegas. Would you believe that it ran from 2000 to 2015? Its finale is only three years old. And yes, I watched every single sodding episode, until the bitter, bitter end. It wasn’t easy. I’m not proud of it. The guilt had outweighed the pleasure years ago. Continue reading
Press X to ride into the sunset
If you have any interest in video gaming whatsoever, you can’t have missed the release of Rockstar Games’ oater epic Red Dead Redemption 2. From the game’s almost Deakinsian visuals via its insane level of detail (yes, your horse’s testicles contract in cold weather!) to, sadly, the reports of the studio’s insane crunch culture that’s deleterious to mental and physical health as well as relationships, RDR2 (which, I admit, sounds too much like a Star Wars robot to be a very helpful abbreviation) has been everywhere – including my PS4’s hard disk. I’ve not yet had much time to explore the dying Old West alongside the Van der Linde gang, but it’s already clear that this is an exceptional game. Exceptional in scope and ambition, surely – but what is most surprising to me is that this is also an exceptionally wilful game. If it wants me to like it, it’s going about it in a very strange way.
The Rear-View Mirror: The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
There are few directors who can look back at as illustrious a filmography as the Coen Brothers. From the early neo-noir of Blood Simple, the gangster’s paradise of Miller’s Crossing, the surreal Hollywood of Barton Fink, via Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou to more recent films such as No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis: though Joel and Ethan Coen clearly have a style, but they’ve never rested on their laurels. While they’ve had a couple of clunkers, I’m more interested in one of their films that hasn’t really received as much attention as I think it deserves.
Indignation, Inflammation, Consternation
The maddening thing with most of Michael Moore’s documentaries is that at some point, he hurts his own line of argument, whether it’s an unnecessary digression or a small mistake. Moore’s oeuvre is certainly not there for comfort viewing, but I always feel restless watching something new of his because he seems to veer off at some point into the undergrowth. Remember how he quoted wrongly from the hull of a Lockheed bomber plane in Fahrenheit 9/11? He starts to build up his argument with footage, witness accounts and pictures that seem too good to be true, and then he commits a blunder that makes the movie lose steam – not all of it, but the story he wants to tell gets weaker, and the movie has a hard time recovering from it. Continue reading
