Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.
By Rose Taylor-Meade
SIX the Musical reimagines King Henry VIII's six wives as a modern pop group, retelling their story within the context of contemporary dating and relationships as they frivolously compete with one another to be the leading lady. The show is written in such a way it is a clever fusion of a pop concert and musical theatre, with the music and queens themselves based on real pop artists.
There is a…
GEOMARKR: A video-essay about GeoGuessr
By Trevor Pronoso
GeoGuessr by way of renowned ethnographic filmmaker Chris Marker, a peculiar pairing for those familiar with the browser video game and even more perplexing for the few cinephiles that recognise Marker primarily as an insightful and poetic 'tour guide' for all the countless places he's visited and filmed with his camera with the intent of finally equalising and coalescing the cultural diversities of the globe into one language that is 'cinema', or…
CRACCUM (Completely Restrained And Confined, Cinematic Unending Madness): Filcks to Partake During the Break
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Civil War
Alex Garland
2024
By Trevor Pronoso
Stasis, zero-sum, objectivity of the image…
Garland presents an image of America so ahistorical, so filled with stereotypes and deliberately shallow approximations of politically extremist/neutral parties within its deliberately dumbed-down diegesis of a divided nation. If you’ve seen the map outline of the several seceding states and alliances released by A24, you’re meant to doubt the alliance…
NZIFF 2024 Craccum Coverage
Grand Tour
By Madeline Smith
Reading the Letterboxd reviews of Grand Tour, I see a lot of accusations that the film’s use of narration puts too much emphasis on “telling, not showing”. It reminds me of Denis Villeneuve’s recent quote about how he ‘hates’ dialogue. As with that quote, the anti-narration argument here comes from an idea that these elements are ‘uncinematic’, that they distract from the purity of visual storytelling. Both arguments call for a…
