Kikuji Kawada and the current mood [Read more…]
Archives for December 2016
The Wailing
The Wailing is an expansive and often excruciating horror film from South Korea. It is the work of the director Na Hong-jin, whose 2009 debut feature, the action thriller The Chaser, made a huge impression not least for its almost staggering flouting of genre convention. The Wailing (2016), about demonic possession, is similarly uncompromising. [Read more…]
Igor Posner, Tabletop and Glass
Centra Coronalis
by Anthony Hassett (1 of 3)
For three months, and in a confusion of names now vanished, our rotting vessels made slow headway through the strange aberrant splendors of the sea. Finally, in a state of madness, we ran our ships on shore, and so embedded them forever in sand.
The Lure
As folkloric Polish musical sex-comedy horror movies go, The Lure (2015) is pretty interesting. The first feature directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska, the film follows two mermaid sisters onto land, where they look for love, feast on human flesh and find work singing and stripping at a nightclub that might have come from an early David Lynch movie or a vintage-’80s music video [Read more…]
David Bowie, 2016 Man Of The Year
Madonna’s Moving Woman Of The Year Speech
Evolution
Reviewed by
The opening shots of Evolution (2015), the long-awaited new feature from Lucile Hadzihalilovic, show a sumptuous underwater environment. (Her last full-length film, the eerie and provocative Innocence, came out in 2004.) The sea is so clear one might be tempted to breathe it in; the colors of the undulating forms of plant and animal life are psychedelic and virtually tactile. A young boy swimming in these waters is startled by the sight of another boy, drowned, a garishly red starfish covering his navel. [Read more…]
East Village, 6 a.m.
Anselm Kiefer’s Walhalla Warns Of The Nightmare Of Nationalism
at White Cube Bermondsey, London
Audio commentary by Rachel Reid Wilkie
Rachel Reid Wilkie examines Anselm Kiefer’s exceptional exhibition, Walhalla. The five audio tracks below address the five main rooms of Kiefer’s sprawling underworld. Press play and imaginatively amble through the halls of this dark yet deeply affecting show. [Read more…]
Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Nectar
Short Cinema:
Lucile Hadzihalilovic – Nectar (2014)
(No dialogue)
An Envisioned Aftermath: Four Years Into A State of DTs
In 2012 Justice David Souter anticipated an “invasion of ignorance” which a mere four years on, at the close of 2016, bares its unsightly teeth. RIOT MATERIAL, lacking all the foresight of the good judge, holds out its own prognosticatory lens and aims it four years further. That lens, naturally, peers through art, and though art has the timeless ability to show the way forward, it can equally enlighten as to which way we should not go.
Below is one scenario of a nation, 2020, gone prophetically grate.
Many thanks to the great artist Roger Ballen for this apocalyptic short, Outland.
Mad Max: Fury Road
There is a moment, in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), when Max (Tom Hardy) washes blood off his face. This is unsurprising, since he has just engaged in one of many fights, but two points are worthy of note. First, the blood is not his. Second, he washes it off not with water but with mother’s milk, siphoned from a gas tanker. And there, in one image, you have George Miller’s film—wild and unrelenting, but also possessed of the outlandish poetry, laced with hints of humor, that rises to the surface when the world is all churned up. [Read more…]
An Envisioned Demise, Delivered
Justice David Souter foresees this day in history, 19 December 2016; the portentous American Electoral College votes are in.
Patti Smith Accepts Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize
Bone Tomahawk
Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis
In Bone Tomahawk (2015), an old-timer, an invalid and a gunslinger set out across the blistering desert to rescue three innocents from a band of savage cannibals. Their mission seems beyond futile, but don’t count them out too soon: Their leader is Kurt Russell.
Yet Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count. As a result, he has given us a horror movie whose monsters are withheld until the tail end of its 132 minutes, and an action movie whose longest section involves mostly walking and talking. [Read more…]
The Moment Worth Struggling Toward
An Interview with Erin Currier
CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: There seems to be an explicit call to action in much of your work, or at the very least the demand that one take note of some supreme injustice in the land or amongst peoples. Yet what I appreciate about your work is that, more than it being mere critique or some one-dimensional, stop-action capture, it instead offers a way forward, and in my mind that way forward is dependably the right way forward. I’m thinking of, as an example, a new work of yours titled American Women (Dismantling the Border). Can you speak more to this idea of there being a constructive framework or, rather, this inherently optimistic baseline level of production which seems not only to shape but lay a distinctive stamp across your entire arc of expression? [Read more…]
Bowie Meets Burroughs
London, 1974
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: Have you ever met Warhol?
DAVID BOWIE: Yes, about two years ago I was invited up at the Factory. We got in the lift and went up. When it opened there was a brick wall in front of us. We rapped on the wall and they didn’t believe who we were. So we went back down and back up again till they finally opened the wall and everybody was peering around at each other. That was shortly after the gun incident. [Read more…]
“Outside Influence” Hacks At Heartland’s Face
Russian hackers strike twice, then twice more in what officials describe as an orchestrated campaign. Incoming American president said to be in receipt of “goods.” [Read more…]
Baskin
One of the great pleasures of international horror films is uncovering what is considered scary in other countries. Even a quick glance at some of the most memorable titles of recent years highlights how diverse these offerings can be: Sweden’s sublime vampire tale Let The Right One In; South Korea’s psychological chiller A Tale of Two Sisters; France’s visceral Martyrs; and Serbia’s controversial A Serbian Film. But if we dig a little deeper, we find the same threads woven into the entire horror landscape. We fear the unknown, the dark, the grotesque, but most of all we fear pain and death. Our fears are primal and universal; horror regularly serves as the great unifier in a way most genres can’t match.
It should come as no surprise then, that much of what we see in Baskin (2015), the first feature length offering from Turkish director Can Evrenol, feels familiar. [Read more…]