POP-splat

by IAN MARTIN

This is the story of a cynically ironic bulldozer (traveling at high speed), a road called South Africa, and an ingredient called inevitable. The setting is the morgue. The architecture is a maze. The characters along the road are squashed flat, ironed out, bloody and tacky, with not a quality to redeem them! It is done relentlessly, and if not gleefully, then with a sentiment very close to it.

The characters are totally out of control. Everybody thinks they have the answers. Poor Horowitz is a lone voice that nobody hears. Typically. None have a shred of human dignity left in them. They are all in it for themselves - loose cannons on a trip to hell. A law unto themselves. An anarchy that seeks only one conclusion: death. This is the dark underbelly of the peculiarly South African psyche. Mechanistically bred by apartheid it now runs rampant in the ‘new' South Africa.

Read More...

Burn After Reading

The Coens have become masters at interfacing disparate realities - never more so than in this film: the little ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘I want’ egos at different stages of disillusionment. This is the mechanism that drives American (if not Western) society, the monster that they were sold, which they bought, and depending on their age or situation, bites back with incomprehensible vengeance.

While there is a large cast, there is seldom ever more than two actors on screen at any given time. . .

Read More...