When I saw Killing Them Softly on the line up at the Sydney Film Festival I confess I did a wide berth. I was like “oh god – ANOTHER one?” about this film. I know there is nothing fresh in cinema (supposedly) and I know Lars von Triers Melancholia is about the death and drudgery […]
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Mo Yan Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
posted by lisathatcher
For those of you who think you can bet on this competition, I say give up now and promise me you will never try again. Mo Yan of China has won the 20102 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mo Yan Born: 1955, Gaomi, China Residence at the time of the award: China Prize motivation: “who with hallucinatory realism merges […]
Mother Küsters goes to Heaven – Fassbinder and the the question of what comes after exploitation.
posted by lisathatcher
Mother Küsters goes to Heaven (1975) is another of those chilling Fassbinders. Chilling, not just because of the subject matter, but also because it stars Armin Meier who will kill himself over his love for Fassbinder in three years after this film is made and about whom Fassbinder will make In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Typical of Fassbinder it […]
Creel Pone #7 – Vocals and Electronic noise.
posted by lisathatcher
It was the 1960’s that brought electronic music to the masses. Suddenly anyone could have a listen – add to that, its prevalence in cinema, and this type of music actually started to attract fans. However, it was in the paper, “A Sketch of a new Esthetic of Music” written by Ferruccio Busoni in 1907 that […]
Shadow of a Doubt – Hitchcock offers us a little Freud.
posted by lisathatcher
Shadow of a doubt is an early Hitchcock piece of masterful film making (1943) primarily around the theme of doubles, or twos, a theme Hitchcock would re visit many times over in future films. In this film no one is singular, everyone comes in a pair. Two detectives, sisters and brothers husbands and wives, uncles and nieces, two […]
Tasogare: Twilight. The light between day and night. Music as pure beauty.
posted by lisathatcher
I was lucky enough to attend a Keith Fullerton Whitman concert earlier this year (let’s just say I’m a HUGE fan) and while I was there I picked up a stack of discs at the door as I am want to do at these sorts of thing. One of the amazing discs I happened to […]
Peter Blamey – Forage: the sound of Kafkas Burrow.
posted by lisathatcher
The short blurb on the back of the beautiful Avant Whatever disc by Peter Blamey, Forage has this to say: On these recordings, eight salvaged computer motherboards and tangled bunches of exposed copper wire form a feedback network with the aid of some small amplifiers Moving the wire by hand makes and/or breaks any number of possible circuits, which produces and /or changes the sounds heard […]
Toc Sine – Drawings: Music defining the act of creation.
posted by lisathatcher
Despite what we think, the hurly-burly swirl that is our lives today is a choice. We talk about and act as though we are overwhelmed as life and the world come crashing in on us, but the truth is, we can turn off the internet, we can turn off our phone, we can pick up a book […]
8 Femmes – Francois Ozon alludes to anything and everything.
posted by lisathatcher
I’m not the only film viewer to see a nod to Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror as well as the more obvious ode to Technicolor, musicals, and of course to the Georges Cukor’s The Women. IN fact I would have to say this film shines in paradoy more than it does in the watching. I enjoyed […]
Pearls Before Swine – An Evening with Orson Welles. (Sydney Fringe Festival)
posted by lisathatcher
I started at the top and worked my way down. Blake Erickson must be an enormous Orson Welles fan. Either that or he looks so much like him and was obviously mistaken for the ghost of Orson Welles so many times, he decided to just run with it and be him for and hour or […]
Lisa Thatcher 