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Keywords: Film Reviews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Agnostic preachers fight the devil

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 25 November 2010

    The Exorcist upheld an essentially fundamentalist, even romantic vision of religious experience. Its central character was an agnostic Jesuit whose encounters with demonic forces restore his faith. The Last Exorcism substitutes for the jaded Jesuit a troubled Middle American preacher.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Harry Potter's dark days

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 18 November 2010
    1 Comment

    The youths take fearful strides into adulthood, embracing responsibility through necessity, unprotected by parents, teachers or mentors. Like many fictional 'chosen ones', Harry Potter is an allegorical Christ figure.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teen depression nightmare

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 11 November 2010
    1 Comment

    Brent's father was recently killed in a car accident. Brent, on his L-plates, was driving the car at the time. He has declined into a drugged and depressed daze. The ordeal he soon undergoes awakens a renewed will to live.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sex, songs and cigarettes

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 04 November 2010

    The Troubled Artist — for whom self-destruction is a necessary by-product of creation — is a cliché whose ubiquity risks robbing it of tragedy. Gainsbourg is portrayed as a swaggering louche, drinking and chain-smoking his way amid a murky and surreal Parisian backdrop.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    No clear villains in Facebook tragedy

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 October 2010

    Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly displeased with the film. The decay of his friendship with co-founder Eduardo Savarin during the creation of a site predicated on accumulating 'friends' is the film's greatest irony, and greatest tragedy. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Career criminal's uneasy redemption

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 21 October 2010

    Doug experiences for the first time guilt and empathy for one of his victims, as Claire confides in him the trauma of her kidnapping. It awakens in him a desire to be redeemed from his previous life. But redemption must be earned.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What to do when trapped underground

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 14 October 2010

    The other people in Paul's life exist only as disembodied voices from a mobile phone, set adrift in the box in which he is trapped. This may be taken as an allegory for modern communication, where handheld electronic devices are the primary conduit to networks of interaction and intimacy. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When kids turn evil

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 07 October 2010
    2 Comments

    Lacking the wisdom of experience and anything resembling a positive adult role model, Owen is guided by a yearning for companionship and a budding adolescent libido. These are very human impulses, but no substitute for wise adult guidance or a fully formed moral compass.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stockbrokers with souls

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 30 September 2010
    1 Comment

    The financial crisis threatens to engulf them. But Money Never Sleeps is less interested in financial wheeling and dealing than the ways in which the lunges and plunges of the market impact upon the characters' lives and relationships.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Confessions of a football feral

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 September 2010
    9 Comments

    I am a Magpies supporter, although I've always liked to think I'm not one of those Magpies supporters: the mythical 'ferals' that give every non-Magpies supporter slagging rights — no, I'm not one of them. Recently though, I had cause to wonder.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Damaged men, desperate deeds

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 16 September 2010
    4 Comments

    The kidnappers' scheme involves humiliating and sometimes physically bullying the young woman as she lays handcuffed to a bed. This makes for nasty, uncomfortable viewing. Surprisingly, love and betrayal emerge as key, poignant themes.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Not just war as teens fight back

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 September 2010
    3 Comments

    The characters voice implicit moral concerns about the right to kill in self-defense, and rationalise why it might be right to take up arms against the invaders. When Ellie is confronted by a mural depicting an encounterbetween Captain Cook and a group of Aboriginal Australians, she ismomentarily arrested.

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