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Showing posts from May, 2014

Seeing (The) Double

Ayoade et al. 's adaptation of  The Double  is set in what one might describe as a futuristic post-near-apocalypse version of the 1980s, as though something had gone terribly wrong in that decade and the world had frozen in dim dilapidation, indefinitely served by the same clunky, temperamental technology and entertained by the same particularly fuzzy sci-fi TV shows and bleak electro-pop. Along with some satisfyingly jarring images, a tense and (mostly) suitably restrained script, a sound-track which unsubtly but cleverly gives the whole the feel of an oncoming train, and some proficiently well-meaning-but-chronically-anxious fumbling on the part of Jesse Eisenberg , it does almost as good a job as the book of conjuring up a sense of claustrophobic loneliness and paranoid anticipation of disaster, as the protagonist finds his life usurped by a doppelgänger -- a man physically identical but temperamentally antipodal to himself, with all the self-assurance, social nous and ruth

Another heart melted by Frozen...

Disney's  Frozen  is a powerful allegory about mental illness and the propensity of sufferers to shut down to the outside world ... No, wait, it's a parable about puberty and coming of age, and the temporary distance and awkwardness that it generates between family members ... Oh, or is it about the challenges of bringing up exceptionally gifted children, and the loneliness of mental superiority? ... Of course, it's really  a corrective on the damaging fairytale notions of romantic love ... It's a polemic against reductive and oppressive notions of womanhood, transforming the 2-dimensional Disney Princess into an aspirational fully-rounded smart, feisty and flawed character ... It's a celebration of sexual liberation ... A metaphor for coming out as gay ... An admonitory yarn about climate change ... A sympathetic observation on the discomforts of Raynaud's disease ... In short, it is a very human, very simple, very beautiful (IMO) story which most people c