Art visual np2

By Lesedi Tidd * PLEASURE blogger “Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you” The Coen Bros. are weird. Not David Lynch weird, but still weird. It’s as if they approach their projects with a self-serving ambivalence which, more often than not, manages to appeal to the (or rather, ‘an’) audience.  A Serious Man  seems to exemplify that very idea. For an everyday audience the movie may be inaccessible; it is ambitious in the way that Coen Bros. jaunts often are (i.e. somewhat), but the darkly intelligent and absurdist humour which holds the film together is bound to go over the heads of the average moviegoer. This isn’t by any means a bad thing, as it draws on a twisted Woody Allen-esque pastiche of Jewish wit and neuroticism, but it’s bound to present a hurdle to some viewers and, at times, even utterly alienate the audience. I suppose however, that it’s par for the course when the movie is supposed to be a modernized reinterpretation of the Book of Job. It begins w...

BY LESEDI TIDD* Cover of Walter Kirn's novel, on which the film is based. Up In The Air follows American Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney; a near-nomadic, outsourced downsizer (oh the times we live in!) who travels all across the lower 48 states doing the dirty work of serving employees severance packages while glazing over the shame of termination, all with the charm and charisma of the average, garden-variety, talking snake. It is 2009, the recession has hit and business has never been better; Ryan loves his job. Charming and sophisticated, he is a man unfettered who comforts himself in his ability to not only diffuse the worst of situations, but to walk away from them entirely. Enter Alex (Vera Farmiga), a beautifully seasoned, condescendingly intelligent, career-oriented woman; a love interest so convenient it's almost masturbatory. She herself is caught up in a web of cross country flight paths and can barely bring herself to be tethered by anything at all. They int...

BY LESEDI TIDD* Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell Fans of the sci-fi genre usually further subdivide their genre into two parts: Hard sci-fi, which focuses on scientific accuracy as it usually doesn’t venture too far outside of the earth’s sphere, and, you guessed it, Soft sci-fi, which usually explores the fantastic theoretical aspects of the genre to elicit a sense of wonder in its audience. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Of course it does. The aforementioned standard is usually good enough for the average moviegoer but all it takes is about a few mouse clicks to be proven very wrong. (View www.tvtropes.com’s 'Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness' article, or Kheper’s scale  and you’ll get the idea on just how ridiculously complicated it all gets.) Whether or not sci-fi’s categorization, classification, alien abduction and subsequent dissection are actually necessary, the genre is, for the most part, a matter of taste or a matter of one’s particular flavour of autistic obsession. It doe...