A return to stimulation...

Hello, Readers welcome to this weeks critical analysis. This week was the most banal I've had in years I won't bore you with the details, I'll just say that because of this it was necessary to imbibe a vast plethora of media, as a result I have a meaty review for you. I hope you enjoy it.

"Breathless(Ddongpari)," is the first film of director, "Yang Ik-Joon", who also plays the lead "Sang-Hoon" an incredibly violent and unapologetic debt collector. I wanted to take a moment to convey just how violent this movie is, the beatings are savage and seem to take an eternity, you almost want to scream at the screen for him to stop as his switches arms to continue pummeling. That is the point in this film the violence is not glamorous it's base and savage. Korean cinema genre seems to specialize in the archetype of anti-hero. The Korean films  "Old Boy" and "The Man From Nowhere" are other excellent examples of main characters we cannot sympathize with, but still feel for. Sang-Hoon doesn't change as person during the course of this film he stays the violent thug he was at the beginning. I applaud the directors decision to dodge the cliche, of prodigal son. I enjoyed this film and you will too readers, if you can get past the violence.

I have read everything that ,Vancouver based author William Gibson, has ever written and I have been eagerly anticipating the release of  "Zero History," his newest novel, for sometime now. Gibson's work focus's mainly on technology and culture and how people adapt to living in between creating vibrant sub and counter culture's. This book is definitely of that genre and is set in the same world as "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" a near mirror version of our own. I, like many other Gibson fans prefer his early works of "Cyberpunk". During my reading of the book I noticed that certain words were used to evoke the presence of various cultural ideas: "Steampunk", "Tesla" "Banksy" and "Oligarch" this felt backwards to me these terms should have been less talismans for summoning the images and instead be inferred from the actual content. However this may have been intentional as advertising is an important concept within the story, so then I suppose we're just left with a stylistic qualm. It really did remind me of a salesman dressed in a loud sports coat gesticulating wildly while talking at machine gun pace, all smoke, no mirrors. I'd say give it a read, but you will be disappointed if you're expecting a return to the "Cyberpunk" nirvana of Gibson's early work.

I've seen some strange films in my time and "Rubber" is definitely one of them. At face value it seems to be about an inexplicably animate tire coming to terms with life, obsession and destructive psychokinetic powers This is not how ever what this movie is about. This movie is about the act of viewing a performance so familiar to all of us: suspension of disbelief. This film is in many respects closer to a high art film however unlike high art which tends to take a complex subject and reduce it to a simpler form it instead opted for the better option of taking the concept and explaining it simply in a way we can understand and immediately grasp.  That of B-horror movie. I'm not certain the movie was completely successful in what it was trying to convey, but at least it wasn't elitist and inaccessible. I liked this film, it's interesting and novel.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of the critical Canadian see you next week.