A blog on Newcastle Arts and Culture, Cinema and Life.
We Need to Talk about Kevin is a long and unflinching extreme close-up of the day-to-day tragedy of one woman’s life, interspersed with dreamy sequences of memory; some of them hazy and happy, some of them painful and sharp. Kevin is unmistakeably Eva’s film, as director Lynne Ramsay intricately weaves together a series of powerful [...]
I do so enjoy my little jaunts to the Laing Art Gallery. Perhaps as, more often than not, the place is fairly deserted and I can mooch, wander and peruse to my heart’s content without hoards of chin-pinching arty types blocking my view with their scatty-looking, unkempt heads. Probably in an attempt to attract a [...]
Attention all lovers of the black stuff! No, not heroin, you deviants, coffee. Put the bland, frothy monstrosity in your hand down and listen up. If, like me, you’re sick to death of the many Costa-Bucks and Prêt-a-Nero’s that dominate our city and long for an affordable taste of a whole world of coffee blends [...]
Mervyn Peake spent his days reading children’s poetry and prose, musing on the fantastical characters and surreal scenarios therein, and drawing the images they conjured in his mind. When the feeling took him, he also wrote novels and short stories of his own. AND he got paid for it. Does a better job exist? I [...]
I put off watching Melancholia for almost two weeks. The controversy, hype and decent dose of critical acclaim that goes along with this film left me feeling felt fairly daunted by the prospect of watching, never mind writing about, this film. Luckily, I don’t think of anything I write as criticism anyway, just a chaotically [...]
I thought about downloading the soundtrack to Tyrannosaur today, but I’m still too apprehensive about the bell-jar state of quiet despair I felt yesterday after watching it. I don’t believe despair is what Tyrannosaur actually sets out to encourage in its audience, rather, it’s a film that asks us to look at the people around [...]
The idea of swanning around a commercial art fair, pretending to have enough money to buy works of art I couldn’t afford in my wildest dreams didn’t really appeal to me at first. It seemed too much like going into a designer clothes shop and trying on expensive outfits I would never own; tedious and [...]
From the first moments of Drive, the rhythmic heartbeat of the city can be heard in the swelling and subsiding beat of the soundtrack. This heartbeat is shared by the films protagonist ‘Driver’, whose skills in negotiating the hundred-thousand streets that make up the expansive urban mass of LA make him the 21st century’s ideal [...]
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