Clik here to view.
'Research as Art 2013' at The Royal Institution
Blood Cells - Nafiseh BadieiPut yourself in the shoes of a particle physicist. You've discovered something genuinely new, something that changes the way we perceive the universe and you want people to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Philomena' (2013) directed by Stephen Frears
Nuns make great baddies. A scowling, pinched face peering out from the billowing black mass of their habits screams volumes about oppressive, cranked-up sexual-religious misery without a word being...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Saving Mr Banks' (2013) directed by John Lee Hancock
As Mary Poppins famously sang: "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down". So it's appropriate that Saving Mr Banks is a sickly sweet sugary film, but it's not a spoonful that slides down, more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
One World Media Festival: Competition
Jane BussmannJust a quick heads up about a film festival I'm attending in the next few weeks. Tickets are free to all events but the last night is for competition winners along. So I have 3 pairs up...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'I Wish' / 奇跡 (2011) directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
I love a film that stops and smells the roses. It's a hallmark of a confident, artistically minded director with the confidence to slow down and focus on atmosphere. I Wish is almost entirely devoted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Gravity' (2013) directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Fuck outer space. Seriously. Up until I sat down to this film I was envious as hell of astronauts; brave men and women who get to spend their days bobbing around, conducting cutting edge research...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Barts Pathology Museum Autumn Seminar, 23rd October 2013
The skull of John Bellingham, unofficial mascot of St BartsThat Barts Pathology Museum makes me feel so relaxed might be cause for concern. This is after all a museum of malady, misery and malformity...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Unperforming {Finissage}' at 55 Gracechurch Street, 24th October 2013
There comes a time when galleries begin to feel all a bit samey. Hard wood floors, plate glass window, blindingly white walls are getting kind of dull. Working within something designated as an 'art'...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Wake in Fright' (1971) directed by Ted Kotcheff
As mini-genres go, 'going bonkers in the Australian outback' is fruitful cinematic territory. Peter Weir is top dog here, the back-to-back Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave invoking a disturbing...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Future Cinema presents Ghostbusters' at the Troxy, 31st October 2013
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Ghostbuster. I dreamed of screaming through the exotic streets of Manhattan in Ecto-1, proton pack strapped to my back, trap in hand, ready to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'The Howling featuring Fag Junky' at the House of Wolf, 1st November 2013
Watching a Fag Junky set is like eating a load of super-cheap, ultra-sugary sweets. You know it's not good for you, you know you'll regret it, yet you recklessly jam the stuff into your gob. Fag...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'How to Survive a Plague' (2012) directed by David France ★★★★
In the 1980s, Greenwich Village was hit by a plague: AIDS. A plague feels like something that only happens in history books; the word conjuring images of miserable peasants wheeling carts stacked with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug Fan Event, 4th November 2013
I felt like a right lemon sitting in the middle of a crowd of squealing, jubilant Hobbit fans. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I particularly dislike Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptations, but lately...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Parkland' (2013) directed by Peter Landesman ★★★
When John F Kennedy's head exploded the world changed forever. One man shoots another - the wrinkle is that the victim was President of the United States. The awful simplicity of the murder seems to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Don Jon' (2013) directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt ★★★★
Joseph Gordon-Levitt does an awful lot of wanking in Don Jon. Not five minutes of the film pass without an image of his face, pale-lit in the glowing laptop twilight, jaw slightly ajar, eyes glassy,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Experimentations - An MA Art and Science Group Exhibition' at Central Saint...
A couple of weeks ago I visited the Royal Institution to attend their Research as Art exhibition. This exhibition was the end product of scientists working at Swansea University being encouraged to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Ram Samocha: Drawing Surface' at arebyte gallery, 8th November 2013
I immediately thought "They look like arseholes" the moment I walked into the gallery. It's a thought so strong that that once it lodged in your mind I couldn't shake it. As I pondered the puckered,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Bono & Geldof are Cunts' by Jane Bussmann at UCL, 9th November 2013
She's right you know. They are cunts. Bono and Geldof would be cunts even if they'd never wrapped their arms around the big-eyed and bony starving people of Africa. They suffer from Messiah syndrome;...
View ArticleClik here to view.
'Agnetha Sjögren: The Story' at Curious Duke Gallery
My AngelSometimes it feels like artists don't know how to have fun. Gallery after gallery is stuffed full of painfully serious works about the nature of loneliness, symbolic acts of torture and your...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lang Lang at the Royal Albert Hall, 17th November 2013
You can fit what I know about classical music on the back of a napkin. Don't get me wrong I enjoy it, but I know next to nothing about the intricacies of what I'm listening to. At its worst its...
View Article