August, 2010

I’ve got a strong stomach, a dark sense of humour and an interest in bizarre and provocative films – but the gunk I saw last night in director Bruce LaBruce’s pointlessly gratuitous gay zombie smut fest LA Zombie went well beyond the pale. I wrote a fairly detailed account of the illegal screening I attended [...]

Introducing the Finished in 5 film review! “I love it how you’ve turned laziness into a virtue.” — Jason Whittaker, Crikey Deputy Editor The premise: a film review written and “edited” – if you can call it that – in less than 5 minutes. No ifs or buts. No coming back to fine tune the [...]

In my interview with Australian key art designer Jeremy Saunders, published on Cinetology this time last year, I observed that nowadays film posters are a more peripheral advertising tool than ever before. The rise of online trailers and viral campaigns has steadily reduced their prominence, although, as Saunders pointed out, key art is called key [...]

To mark the Australian theatrical release of writer/director Taika Waititi’s acclaimed New Zealand coming of age comedy, Boy, Cinetology give readers the chance to win one ten double passes the see the film, valid nation-wide from August 26. Here’s the official synopsis: The year is 1984, and on the rural East Coast of New Zealand [...]

Author John Marsden’s Australian invasion novel Tomorrow, When the War Began has been gobbled up like corn chips and adored by teens and young adults since it hit the shelves in the early 90’s. The book generated record sales, six sequels, endless speculation about the nationality of the invaders (Marsden never named names) and now [...]

Roman Polanski’s name has recently been scattered across the press for reasons entirely unrelated to filmmaking. His new thriller The Ghost Writer – which stars Ewan McGregor as the eponymous literary hack who embarks upon his first foray into political novelizing and realizes a bunch of sleep deprived nights later that it wasn’t such a [...]

Remember Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre appearance with David Letterman on The Late Show last year? Of course you do. Nobody who saw that interview is likely to forget it. Phoenix rocked up with black shades and half metre thick facial hair, looking stoned out of his mind and a lot like Dr. John’s long lost brother. [...]

So this is what layabout factory workers do when they’re waiting for redundancy pay-outs: talk trash, grouse about the man, sink stubbies, belt each other around and occasionally whip out their willies. All that transpires in the opening scene of TV-cum-film writer/director Mark Fitzpatrick’s bleak Aussie blue collar drama The Nothing Men, and it’s downhill [...]

Introducing the Finished in 5 film review! The premise: a film review written and “edited” – if you can call it that – in less than 5 minutes. No ifs or buts. No coming back to fine tune the review later. The rules: no notetaking allowed while watching the film. Simply typing up notes for [...]

Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) director Richard Wolstencroft has announced he will host a screening of director Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie porn flick LA Zombie, which was effectively banned last month when the Office of Film and Literature Classification slapped it with a refused classification rating. The film was subsequently removed from the program of [...]

Now I don’t want to lower the highfalutin tone I’ve taken great pains to refine here at Cinetology – over the last week alone there has been nary a poo or fart joke, not a single one – but this nugget of amusement simply needs to be shared. A friend of mine alerted me a [...]

That’s one helluva title to live up to, but director Mat Whitecross does so with gut-busting liver-breaking lung-smashing chutzpah in this warts-n-all, pills-n-booze biopic of singer and lyricist Ian Dury, who rose to fame as a petulant Punk icon in the late 70s. Dury is brought to life with a balls-grabbing high voltage performance from [...]

To mark the theatrical release of Roman Polanski’s new film Ghost Writer, starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, Cinetology gives Melbourne readers the chance to win one of 10 in-seaon double passes valid nationwide from August 12. Here’s the official synopsis: When a successful British ghost-writer, THE GHOST, agrees to complete the memoirs of former [...]

Introducing the Finished in 5 film review! The premise: a film review written and “edited” – if you can call it that – in less than 5 minutes. No ifs or buts. No coming back to fine tune the review later. The rules: no notetaking allowed while watching the film. Simply typing up notes for [...]

A grim South Korean drama from director Chan-ok Park, Paju is the kind of slow-moving film in which audiences invest considerable time with a small number of characters as they experience the most climactic moments in their lives, only to emerge from the experience understanding little about who they are and what makes them tick. [...]

Cinetology generated a huge response to the story broken on this blog last Friday about a row that erupted between organisers of the Melbourne International Film Festival and the makers of the Iraq-set drama Son of Babylon, who unsuccessfully demanded their film be removed from the festival program as a protest against its financial ties [...]

A creepy stony-eyed performance from Casey Affleck as a cool-headed Texan serial killer forms the cold heart of director Michael Winterbottom’s intriguing adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp novel. West Texas deputy sheriff Lou Ford (Affleck) is the kind of emotionally fickle sicko who can brutally murder a person one moment then sit down to [...]