E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

It is perhaps no surprise that most ( not all, thankfully ) film critics have praised Tarantino's latest (9th) film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... as a masterwork - I have seen it even called Shakespearean - a term that comes from a scene in the movie; but he is more a Jacobean Middleton. Tarantino's late career has been focused on revenge - one of the primary staples of drama and melodrama in all English literature; it is also, of course, the staple of Nicholas Cage's late career, so it is not an inherently perfect one. Violence is to Saint Quentin what bars are to San Quentin - the raison d'etre. I cannot think of another director - not even Peckinpah or de Palma, Hitchcock or Scorsese - so cocked and aimed in one direction - that of setting up and paying off scenes and situations so that 'all hell breaks loose' and terrible violence ensues. Tarantino has argued - often publicly and coarsely - for an art for art's sake separation between reel violen...

DANGER - SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Logan , the new film by James Mangold , and the tenth outing for the Wolverine character from the Marvel Universe, as played by Hugh Jackman , is receiving a lot of critical praise. Released March 1, the film has been called "the Citizen Kane " of comic book films, and compared favourably to the previous benchmark for quality in this sub-genre, The Dark Knight trilogy, by Christopher Nolan . It shares with that trilogy a gritty realism, a downbeat tone, and serious actors at the top of their game. It is however not an urban picture, but, as every critic has noted, a road movie/Western in its DNA. The cliché is to cite Shane , which the picture does itself, as the blueprint, but this is a red herring, since the actual Western it most resembles is The Searchers - let alone In Cold Blood or T2 . Mangold has co-written the film, at a time of Western darkness (Brexit, the rise of Trump ) and the film opens on a landscape torn from Beckett by ...

In what is either a True Detective style creepy sign, or very lo-fi viral marketing, someone has scrawled the name Lana on the pavement today outside my flat in chalk, amid some occult symbols. Meanwhile, the second album from Ms Lana Del Rey , titled Ultraviolence , in a bald reference to A Clockwork Orange (she had already exhausted that other hip transgressing novel Lolita ) is upon us. This is not a review - I am still taking in the deadly nightshade that is this aural intoxication - but more of a nod of assent. Del Rey is a persona - so what? so was Oscar Wilde - and she gives good dark mood.  Her interview in today's Guardian is perhaps more nihilistic than even Detective Rust, though - she claims not to want to be alive, and not to enjoy her enormous success or performing live.  With ennui like that, who needs fiends?  A common criticism is that her soporific melodies are attached to lyrics that are obsessively one-note: that basically they are torch songs a...

Last night I watched a young woman be bound and gagged provocatively, then suffocated to death, after her boyfriend was stabbed to a bloody pulp with long scissors, by a serial killer obsessed with "making his own pornography".  No, this wasn't some sick Internet site, nor was it a DVD or movie for adults.  It was a BBC 2 TV show, on Monday night, at 9 pm, with strong violence and language from the start. This after several weeks of hand wringing about banning violent and degrading porn sites, as it may have led to the escalating sadism of a child killer in Britain recently convicted. The Fall , a highly-rated, expertly filmed and acted five part thriller series, starring X-Files hero Gillian Anderson , is by far the most unsettling terrestrial TV I have ever seen, in how it fetishes the abuse and slow murder of young attractive women, in a context that involves scared children, and very horrific images and concepts.  It also graphically shows how to stalk and break in...

James A. George, our Film Critic, on the most controversial film of the year The controversy surrounding Django Unchained is far from simple, but allow me to give brief context. The African Holocaust/the enslavement of around forty million American-born African descendants took place from 1555 (often denied by America as actually 1619), through to December 1865, when it was legally abolished.   There is nothing funny about America’s history with slavery, and perhaps Tarantino has jumped the gun. Other than the series Roots , and perhaps Daughters of the Dust , film has not particularly explored the harsh reality of what happened. Can we trivialise the issue with cathartic violence, visual stylisation and humour? Maybe a more appropriate question, is why have such issues come to the forefront because of a period-piece Western by the ever-creative Tarantino? What is offensive is the negligence concerning the treatment of the African-American community and the lack of repara...

Apparently, as we all know, the Mayan calendar tediously predicts the end of the world this Friday - or, rather, tediously, the media of the West has inundated us with stories and films about this for the last few years.  The end is rather an anti-climax.  Except, a horrific massacre of children in America reminds us that doom is not farcical, but horrifically potential, in all our lives as individuals, if not as whole communities; after all, America is in mourning but it has survived this onslaught.  Calls for gun control are worthy but a little naive, though gun control is an essential step for America as it seeks to become a mature and civilised nation - naive, because American culture, and by extension, the cultures of Britain, Canada, Australia, and Europe - are exceptionally violent.  As Frankie Goes To Hollywood said about thirty years ago, "sex and violence are the new gods."  Not quite new.  About as new as the Mayans, probably.  However, the ...

As Judith Butler showed us, and as the assassination attempt in Arizona reminds us, speech acts - especially political commentary in the public sphere - can be violent - and lead to more violent acts.  The sheriff in the case was quick to draw the conclusion that incendiary rhetoric was potentially to blame, and it cannot be ignored (nor has it been) that Palin 's website had stamped a gun target over the district of the shot congresswoman Giffords (who is doing as well as can be expected at time of writing).  At times like these, one wants to draw comfort from the hope that good can come from evil deeds - that perhaps this massacre will dampen the powder keg, and   spoil the Tea Party. But, as was seen recently in Pakistan, assasination of liberal and brave speakers can simply be a herald of more anarchy to come.  At stake here is, at least, this: the world is becoming increasingly intolerant of difference; fundamental positions are hardening; deafness is the ne...