Category Archives: Movies

Movies

Cockneys Vs. Zombies (2012)

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Cockneys Vs. Zombies

Cockneys Vs. Zombies

Directed by: Matthias Hoene

Written by: James Moran

Recommended? Sure

Trigger Warning (for the movie, not the review): Violence, some sexist characters, and abysmally one-dimensional black characters

So there’s a movie called Cockneys Vs. Zombies. To use a British expression, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Cockneys (working-class people from the East End of London) end up fighting against a zombie infestation. It’s a comedy. You’re either going to watch it based on the title or you’re not.

But if somehow you’re fence-sitting on the issue, then let me just say: it kept me laughing.

One thing that draws me — and lots of people, I’d argue — to zombie movies is that after the zombie apocalypse, law and ethics are entirely disparate from one another. But Cockneys does us one better and protagonizes the lawless from the very beginning. Our bumbling heroes are off on a bank heist when the zombie swarms take over London. The other heroes are the residents of an old folks home, who are cartoonishly badass.
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Movies

Transcendence (2014)

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transcedence

Transcendence

Director: Wally Pfister

Writer: Jack Paglen

Recommended? maybe, maybe not

I don’t know, maybe I just have a low bar for films. All the reviewers say this movie is crap. That it’s plodding and Johnny Depp isn’t peppy. That it doesn’t explore its heavy subject matter in-depth enough, or that it’s hypocritical that the movie has an anti-technology message yet uses the latest in CGI special effects.

That last critique kind of stuck with me, and I realized… maybe part of why this film is being panned is because people don’t want to think about what it has to say. After all, cries against the “hypocrisy” of the anti-technology crowd are pretty much the mewing of defensive fools who are desperate to discredit the obvious truth that technology can be alienating and destructive.
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Movies

The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

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The Purge: Anarchy

The Purge: Anarchy

Director: James DeMonaco

Writer: James DeMonaco

Recommended: Surprisingly enough, yes.

Bechdel Test: Pass, right off the bat

Trigger Warnings (for the film, not necessarily the review): Rape threats, intense weird classist violence

“Anarchist” was a pejorative for a long-ass time before people started calling themselves anarchists. So while I’m pretty convinced the definition of anarchy is “a society without systemic oppression” and not “when everyone runs around killing one another,” I kind of get why some people still hold onto the latter understanding of it.

That was what I told myself to steel myself to watch a film about lawless violence that had “anarchy” in the title.

Maybe I didn’t need to. The Purge: Anarchy is, well, more or less an anarchist film.
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Movies

Goodbye World (2013)

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goodbye world

Goodbye World

Director: Denis Hennelly

Writers: Denis Hennelly and Sarah Adina Smith

Recommended? Yes

Bechdel Test? I think fail, somewhat surprisingly

There ain’t no justice, just us.

That’s always been one of my favorite anarcho-cliches. And it’s one of the central themes of this low-key apocalypse romantic drama.

Yes, that’s right. It’s an apocalypse movie about thirty-something mostly-white all-hetero couple drama. And I kind of loved it.

For a long time I’ve been saying the problem with movies is they try to be like OMG it’s the biggest deal ever and everything is explosions! and so I’ve been advocating for a post-apoc rom-com. This isn’t very post the apocalypse and it’s not much com in its rom, but I still kind of feel like I got what I was hoping for.
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Movies

The Purge (2013)

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The Purge

The Purge

Director: James DeMonaco

Writer: James DeMonaco

Recommended? you could do worse

Bechdel Test: Pass

I saw a trailer for this film awhile back, long before I convinced myself to watch it. In the year 2022 unemployment, poverty, and crime are at record lows—all because for one night a year, from 7pm to 7am, every crime is legal. (And by “every crime” the filmmakers really just mean murder.)

I’m an anarchist. My entire political understanding is wrapped up in the idea that without law and government, we’d actually all get along alright. I wasn’t expecting to like The Purge.

But the filmmakers actually took the themes of the movie in interesting directions.

First of all, let’s talk about class war. The protagonists are bootstrapping war-profiteers, basically: the husband sells security systems to rich people for the Purge. “Ten years ago we couldn’t pay our bills, and now we’re thinking about buying a boat,” he says at some point early in the film. The family puts out a symbolic display of blue flowers, showing their support for the Purge, before retreating into their secure home.
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Movies

The Wild Hunt (2009)

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The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt (2009)

Directed by: Alexandre Franchi

Written by: Alexandre Franchi and Mark Antony Krupa

Recommended? A hesitant yes.

Bechdel Test: Fail

The Wild Hunt is a Canadian drama-thriller that tells the story of a LARP-turned-Stanford-Prison-Experiment gone dreadfully wrong. A non-gamer crashes his brother’s Live-Action Role-Playing (LARP) game to “rescue” his girlfriend, and the situation spirals into a Shakespearean tragedy reminiscent of grotesque, gut-wrenching emo music. The movie is dark. Dark, dark, dark. Did I mention it’s dark? When you look up its IMDB movie keywords, the third is “attempted rape.” Consider that a major trigger warning.

All that aside, I’ve watched this movie three times in the past three months. I’m attracted to The Wild Hunt‘s affecting cinematography, its exploration of an unsettling human nature, and, of course, its rad LARP gameworld.
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Movies

Knights of Badassdom (2013)

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Knights of Badassdom

Knights of Badassdom

Director: Joe Lynch

Writers: Kevin Dreyfuss and Matt Wall

Recommended? Not really, no.

Bechdel Test: See below.

It’s never any fun when your culture is represented by outsiders. Geeks know this as much as anyone—we’re much maligned, us people who favor strange costumes and make-believe. So like plenty of geeks, I’ve been waiting around for Knights of Badassdom for awhile now—finally, a film for us, by us. In fact, I’ve been waiting several years now. (There was a whole kerfluffle between the director and the studio that set it back a number of years and left us with a cut that is not what the director intended.)

But, well, if this is what geeks have to say about geek culture… then this is not our proudest day.

At the beginning of the film, a group of LARPers (Live Action Roleplayers) have their games ruined by a bunch of camo-wearing rednecks with paintball guns. Oh, the jocks… the geek’s natural enemy. I’m sympathetic to the LARPer’s plight.
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Movies

Adult World (2013)

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Adult World

Adult World

Director: Scott Coffey

Writer: Andy Cochran
Recommended? Meh
Bechdel Test: Pass

Oh look, a suburban privileged girl graduates with $90,000 in debt and dreams of being a famous poet. She can’t get a job anywhere, so she very begrudgingly settles for working at a porn store and the authenticity parade begins.

She runs away from home and stays with a squatter transgender prostitute (with a heart of gold! Imagine that! At least she doesn’t die. God what a low bar I’m working with for transgender representation). After awhile she moves into a place of her own. Her roommate is an impassioned-but-obviously-privileged Occupy rebel who says things like “the movement needs you, Amy” and frames the acceptance letter she gets of publication in Anarchist Quarterly.

Oh, and the concept of young women obsessed with self-harm is trivialized and played for laughs (I was not surprised when I discovered the movie was written by a man).
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Movies

Dredd (2012)

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Dredd (2012)

Dredd

95 minutes

Director: Pete Travis

Recommended? No.

Problematic: Protagonizing the police; protagonizing fascism; villainizing drug users; villainizing sex workers; misunderstandings of class and crime; etc.

Bechdel Test: Pass.

When it comes down to it, this is a film about some white cop who runs around a projects building killing poor people because some of them might be dealing drugs (drugs that honestly look really fun and aren’t presented as having any negative side effects). It’s one of those non-stop-action movies that’s light on complexity but high on moralizing. The protagonists have body armor and high-tech gizmos and the opponents are impoverished. It’s somewhat entertaining, has strange moments of beauty, and tries but fails to be anything but a feature-length accolade of how great the police are.

It’s hard to imagine that this film was written by and for anything other than suburban, middle- and upper-class Americans.

The character Judge Dredd comes the UK comic series 2000AD and is intended to be a black-comedy satire of authoritariansm. This film adaptation, however, seems to entirely miss the point. And, according to the screenwriter Alex Garland, intentionally so: it was written as he understood the comic as a ten-year old boy. So there you go. Unfortunately, while I’m all for black-comedy and satire, this film is direct proof as to why those things are dangerous when they go over people’s heads.
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Movies

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

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The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

146 minutes

Director: Francis Lawrence

Recommended? Yes

Problems: Racial, mostly to do with casting white actors to play roles that were written as POC

Bechdel Test: Pass

So, firstly, this is good movie. It’s got great acting, great writing, works as a YA film without condescending to kids OR adults, and it’s a damn good adaptation of a really good book. Incidentally, this review will contain no major direct spoilers, but it will kind of assume you’ve seen the first movie, or read the first book. If you haven’t, you might want to get on that.

Just to get it out of the way, fuck the whitewashing of characters in this whole series. Jennifer Lawrence is terrific as Katniss, but the fact that the casting call was limited to white actors is egregious, and the fact that the cast in the movie is, overall, whiter than the cast in the book, just sucks.

Apart from that, though, this is a really solid movie, and is consistent with the book (by Suzanne Collins) in terms of putting forward a revolutionary storyline. It picks up a short time after the first one left off, with Katniss Everdeen tentatively safe after having won the Hunger Games. She learns of how she embarrassed the Capitol of Panem in the process, thus unintentionally becoming a symbol of resistance for the already discontented people of what is usually described in summaries and reviews as a “futuristic dystopia” but might better be referred to as a “fascist state,” since there’s nothing particularly unrealistic or speculative about the levels or means of oppression it employs. More on that in a moment. In an effort to destroy her and her fellow victor, Peeta, as revolutionary symbols, President Snow arranges a Hunger Games in which Peeta and Katniss will fight again, this time against an assortment of hardened killers and experts, and hopefully be killed.
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