If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
The Game first published by Little White Lies, as entry 108 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column Coming hard upon the huge success of Se7en (1995), although in fact conceived before it, David Fincher’s The Game presents itself as a mystery to be solved. We know this because the opening credits sequence shows a grid of…
Impetigore (Perempuan Tanah Jahanam) first published by VODzilla.co “Are you Rahayu?” asks the creepy man who for days has been passing – and ogling – Maya (Tara Basro) at the toll booth where she makes her meagre living. “Are you from Harjosari Village in Mandiraja?… Is your father’s name Ki Donowongso?” These questions about 25-year-old…
The Pool first published by VODzilla.co “Nothing could be worse,” says Day (Theeradej Wonguapan). While asleep floating on an inflatable mattress on his birthday – normally a time of celebration – diabetic Day has become trapped in a large, ladder-less six-metre-deep pool whose water has been mostly drained, with his dog Lucky chained by the…
Mr. Vampire (Jiāngshī Xiānshēng) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 107 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column There is a scene some way into Ricky Lau’s Mr. Vampire (Jiāngshī Xiānshēng) where Taoist priest Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying) is invited to a ‘Western tea’ by the wealthy businessman Master Yam (Huang Ha). Unfamiliar with Western…
The Beach House first published by VODzilla.co “The thing we liked about coming here is it was so comfortable. The same weather, the same rooms, the same furniture. They’re frozen in time. Jane loved it so much. We hadn’t been here so long, I just – I wanted her to have one last special time….
Make Up first published by Little White Lies When, in the opening sequence of writer/director Claire Oakley’s feature debut Make Up, Ruth (Molly Windsor) arrives in Cornwall to be and work with her boyfriend of three years Tom (Joseph Quinn) at a seaside holiday park, she is alarmed on her first night there by the…
The New Kids first published by Little White Lies, as entry 106 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “You’re gonna make it, kids. You’ve gotta be strong.” This is Colonel ‘Mac’ MacWilliams (Tom Atkins) in the opening sequence of The New Kids, giving his teenaged children Loren (Shannon Presby) and Abby (Lori Loughlin) a pep talk…
Fanny Lye Deliver’d first published by VODzilla.co Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) was set during the English Civil War, and the field of its title yielded a crop of eccentric notions about the national identity at the country’s contested margins. The events of Fanny Lye Deliver’d, written, directed and scored by Thomas Clay…
After Midnight (aka Something Else) first published by Little White Lies, as entry 105 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column A wide shot shows a grassy grove with leafless trees on either side, as the soundtrack plays discordant synth tones and the sounds of a detuned radio. A woman in a dress, Abby (Brea Grant), staggers…
Parasite (Gisaengchoong) first published by VODzilla.co Parasite (Gisaengchoong) opens with a street-level view, partially obstructed by socks hanging from the ceiling, through the upper window of a semi-basement apartment, before the camera tilts down to twenty-something Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) inside, trying to get reception on his mobile phone. From the moment that Ki-woo declares,…
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers (Hoshikuzu kyôdai no densetsu) first published by VODzilla.co While some of the details may have been embellished over the intervening years, the story goes that, back in 1985, 22-year-old Makoto Tezuka ran into musician and TV celebrity Haruo Chikada. It would turn out that each had something the other…