The Complicatist : Songs About Money
The economics of rhythm and melody…..
Arts
Personal Archaeology
The Politicisation of Remembering —Judge Dredd and Horror Stories
Pedro Does Vertigo
Pedro Almodovar’s fresh take on the Hitchcock classic about sex, obsession and second chances
Classics : The Hunger Games (2008)
When life is a war game, you need friends to survive
The Complicatist : Sleigh Bells
Even buzz bands make only tiny little buzzes
Nature’s Boy
The films of Terrence Malick, from Badlands to Tree of Life
Classics : Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958)
Life (and love) is a dream shared, in Philippa Pearce’s classic novel
The Complicatist: Alan Lomax
A biography of the man responsible for much of the folk, blues and subsequent pop music traditions we know today
Life As A Death Sentence
The understated horror of Never Let Me Go
Classics : Madeline (1939)
Ludwig Bemelmans had a few childhood scars of his own
The Complicatist : The sounds of summer…and Bert Jansch, R.I.P
Laneways beats the Big Day Out, hands down
Classics : Lady and the Tramp (1955) and Benji (1974)
How Disney (and others) teach children that living in a nice suburban home beats living free in the city
Touching the Void
In Melancholia Lars von Trier hives off serenely into the cosmos
Milestone Movies : Cave of Forgotten Dreams ( 2010)
This time, Werner Herzog’s process of turning obsession into art begins with art
The Complicatist : Retromania ( yet again)
We’re all busy making plans for the past
Imagining War
The ethical and stylistic issues in using real-life war zones as a basis for contemporary fiction
Why The Long Face ?
Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse, and the controversy about slow cinema
The Complicatist: Love and Mining Disasters
The Complicatist : Love and Mining Disasters
Literature of Resistance, as Literal Resistance
The Seven-Author Novel Seaton Point
Classics : The Graveyard Book (2009)
Neil Gaiman’s brand of horror lite is aimed at parents, as much as kids
Cartoon Alley : Tintin in Wellywood
In anticipation of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of Unicorn due December 2011
Taxi Driver at 35
In the 1970s, New York (and Martin Scorsese) were a lot sleazier and scarier…
Milestone Movies : Nanook of the North (1922)
The birth of documentaries as real life fictions…
The Complicatist : Thinking About Modest Mouse
Desperation has its funnier moments
Cartoon Alley : Manifestos for the Present
Grasping the ‘Contemporary’ in Contemporary Fiction
Cartoon Alley : Tim Bollinger (Including Little Eye)
Tim Bollinger is a Wellington cartoonist with a thirty-year career drawing and writing comics.
Classics : A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Madeleine L’Engle’s nutty politico-religious parable for children still has its admirers
Love Amid The Ruins
Auckland singer songwriter Hollie Fulbrook (aka Tiny Ruins) makes her debut
Milestone Movies : The Silent House (2010)
Horror, in one 79 minute long take
The Complicatist : Tyler the Creator, Tegan and Sara and Lars von Trier
Where to draw the line on when enough’s enough