Author: Declan Tan

Brighton Rock (2010) Review

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First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //

Director Rowan Joffe
Country UK

The Surprise Film at previous London Film Festivals has ensured its hot ticket status, with big films making it worthy of the hype. In 2007 they gave us the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the bleak Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men. In 2008 it was the treat of Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler. And last year it was Capitalism: A Love Story. All right. That was a bit of step down but it wasn’t awful, just disappointing.

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Picco (2010) Review

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First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //

Director Philip Koch
Country Germany

When you watch Picco you get the feeling that former-critic and one-time film
student Philip Koch knows his stuff. In his feature debut follow-up to the award-
winning short Lumen, Koch skilfully blends the theory and artful subtlety that
seems to have informed his Nouvelle Vagary from criticism to filmmaking.

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The Kids Are All Right (2010) Review

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First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //

Director Lisa Cholodenko
Country United States

The Kids Are All Right is a film that, like its two main characters, gets stuck in its meandering second half. And although it seems a sincere and even genuine slice of family life at first, Cholodenko’s latest directorial effort stumbles into a disappointing conclusion.

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Somewhere (2010) Review

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First published on Snipe //

“Let’s open with one of those long, audience-testing shots, yeah, yeah, keep him driving around. Make about ten laps then we’ll cut.”

I imagine this is how Sofia Coppola speaks and I imagine this is how she sets up her anchored camera, after watching some ‘70s european art house cinema and listening to some French indie pop, before mumbling instructions to her Ray-Ban-wearing crew. She silently pats herself on the back with a studied expression of seriousness.

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In Our Name (2010) Review

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First published on Little White Lies (December 10 2010) //

Brian Welsh’s second feature, starring those recognisable but unnamable faces from a spectrum of Britain’s most loved/hated evening TV programmes, even manages all the feel and finish of some of those primetime weekday dramas, though it’s a trait that both works for and diminishes this particular low-budget production.

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Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) Review

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First published on Little White Lies (March 12 2010) //

Pretension is a subject seemingly dear to Banksy. It’s all over his work, from his mordant stencils which inspired a boisterous surge in street art popularity, to his grand socio-political satires plastered across the most daring of locations, Banksy takes the clichéd and turgid and shrewdly spins it on its head.

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Route 36: The World’s First Cocaine Bar

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First published in DotDotDash (Issue 4, Winter 2010; Australia) //

“Take it out of the bag”, one of them whispers, as a small mountain of Bolivian marching powder unfolds from the wrap. Forming peaks where it piles on the surface, the small patch of black bin liner is emptied into the soft light of the room. They lean in; throats dry with a fiendish desire, pushing pure uncut white to and fro with an out-of-date health insurance card from some place far, far behind them now. Racked up with two fat lines sat side-by-side along the blackened edges of a bootlegged copy of Appetite For Destruction, some stranger nearby leans in and assuredly urges: “Don’t use the straw, use this”, as he carefully hands over a softened and tightly rolled 10 Boliviano note. The newcomers eye their bounty, savour a last intake breath as they lurch down, and begin judiciously disappearing it up their snouts, chattering and grunting between disjointed monologues that they might later call conversation.

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Surveying The Ruins of War Cinema

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First published on Little White Lies (March 31 2010) //

The seemingly well-timed Best Picture Oscar for The Hurt Locker could either demonstrate film’s genuine power or its promotion of a skewed vision where, as Robert Fisk notes, “the sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page – or so we hoped – on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime.”

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