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The Melting Heart At The Centre Of By The Sea (2015)

ROLAND: Have a nice day. VANESSA: I won't ROLAND: I know. Love you. (DOOR CLOSES) VANESSA: (SOFTLY) I know. The main benefit of loving a maligned film from ten years ago is finding a cheap copy of the DVD on Ebay. Paying £3.49 plus shipping to own a disc, whose main titles consist of a static image of a writing desk facing a window, displaying a grainy sea just in the distance, is its own kind of beauty. I've peered through the wall to find what I always wanted to find: hazy, erotic angst staged just out of my reach. By The Sea (2015) is a tricky film to discuss, with its marital baggage and the general opinion that this was just a vanity project that every actor turned director has to make at some point. The contradictory arguments of critics have been frustrating to pore over, with this film being described as both an uncomfortable confessional and a witholding bore . This romantic drama that takes place mostly in a hotel room follows Vanessa and Roland as they attempt to...
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Emerald Fennell's Pop Pulp

'Pop culture was in art / now art's in pop culture / in me' - Lady Gaga, Applause  'When it comes to character in general, I don't think any of us are nice. I just don't know anyone nice. Not anyone I know well. I don't think I'm nice.' - Emerald Fennell, Vanity Fair Emerald Fennell is trying to kill you. She is coming to your home to wrench all that you love from your quivering hands, to mash it amongst her sick, perfect teeth. She is unsuitable, lacks tact, stood astride the Yorkshire moors with a lighter in one hand and petrol in another, here to burn everything around her, melting culture into nothing. The classics will never be the same again. Emerald Fennell is a mean director who has come to ruin everything. Film criticism has never been more personalised and more reliant on the sway of internet discourse than it is right now. At the same time, there is a real struggle to place modern cinema within an artistic context. Our grasp of genre and s...
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After The Hunt and The Limpness of Discourse

There is a moment early on in Luca Guadagnino's After The Hunt where Maggie, a vocal and enthusiastic philosophy student, and Frederik, a wry and airy therapist, share a kiss. Our four main characters are saying their goodbyes after a slightly drunken salon held in the home of Alma (and Frederik, her husband), and in attempting to kiss each other goodbye, Maggie and Frederik briefly lock lips. No one comments amongst the chatter. Frederik looks slightly taken aback and Maggie asks if he's okay. It was an accident, after all. No fuss is made of it. Barely a beat later, Alma and Hank, a swaggering mess of a man (and also a professor), kiss as well, like muscle memory. Neither look apologetic. This is blatantly their dynamic and no one has anything to say about it. This one moment, the physicality, the ease of it, tells you everything you need to know about these people, and how their inability to confront what is directly in front of them will cause everything to implode. Often,...
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Edward D. Wood Jr. as Three Fears

Fear #1 - No matter how much I scream, no one will ever really hear me Every act is a communication and in genre cinema, the filmmaker is confined to strict parameters, where they are encouraged to frolic but not transgress. My stance, considering how much I have engaged with Ed Wood's work and criticisms of it, is that what caused audiences to sneer and mock his malformed creations was how close they were to resembling a 'real' movie. Wood did not intend to be avant-garde. He was no Kenneth Anger. He knew what a movie was and moulded one together through the disparate parts he had to hand and liberated the rest from the movies that raised him. My favourite entries in Wood's filmography are the horror pieces: Plan 9 From Outer Space , Bride Of The Monster , Revenge Of The Dead , Final Curtain , Meatcleaver Massacre . Hell, I even like Necromania , his horror-porn flick about a man who can't satisfy his wife and enlists the help of some satanic women with vague but d...
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Paul Schrader's Lost Highway, Or The Tragedy of Renee and Tara

I close my eyes to conjure up something But it's just a faint taste in my mouth - Dum Dum Girls, Coming Down  The reappraisal economy, as Jacob Lambert in an article for The Week puts it, is a recent phenomenon that has made it incredibly difficult to distinguish between a genuine admiration for an unfairly maligned piece of work and fodder for the dreaded think-piece machine, which seems to exist to garner clicks from polarising headlines. What is the function of trying to find clarity and meaning in work that has been firmly established as terrible, especially when the people who made it  turn out to have caused significant harm to others ?  The Canyons (2013) is a hard film to like.  It has a consistent yellow and green tinge, like stagnant pool water left to stew on the hottest day of the year. Everything is over-lit and cheap looking, empty and un-erotic . It's dry, garish and much too close to the sun. The dust settled on the cinema seats is hot to the tou...
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