 | Back in the 80s, with ‘yuppie’ consumer culture on the rise, a movie called Arthur hit the circuit. In the movie, Arthur Bach is a billionaire who drinks away his spare time till he finds true love in the arms of a “pauper” and turns his life around. Starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli, it wasn’t a deconstruction of anything really. The subtext buried in there somewhere beneath what the movie’s poster called “the most fun money can buy” is ...read more |
The Rich Are People Too
Friday, July 8th, 2011 by Nas Hoosen
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My Hunter’s Heart
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | I once had the displeasure of interviewing Zakes Mda. I’ll leave your gossip glands thirsty by not telling which aspects of his personality I found incapable of seduction. But during the conversation, we crested the question that hangs like flies around the carcass of African literature: “representation”. As a scholar of literary theory, when I hear the word representation, I take after Goebbels and reach for my revolver. ...read more |
Green Lantern
Friday, July 1st, 2011 by Nas Hoosen
 | We’re in the grip of a comic book-movie onslaught. They put us through Thor, Captain America’s coming up and The Avengers is slated for 2012. Over at Marvel Studios, they’re feverishly mining their lesser known comic back-catalogue for movie pitches and laughing all the way to the bank. The process has only begun at Warner Bros where they are looking beyond Batman to keep shareholders happy. Which brings us to Green Lantern, starring likeably buff Ryan Reynolds, as the arrogant ...read more |
The Bang Bang Club
Monday, June 27th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | The accent is always the first marker of something amiss; that we’re not in our world, but in the twilight zone of American fantasy. Blockbuster cinema has never been able to get the South African accent right. Let’s not rehearse any number of critiques against DiCaprio in Blood Diamond. The chief instigator of linguistic butchery in The Bang Bang Club is undoubtedly Taylor Kitsch who plays photographer Kevin Carter. To him, the South African accent is the equivalent of Benicio ...read more |
Jock of the Bushveld 3D
Monday, June 20th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | Let’s have a moment’s silence: a funereal minute to consecrate the passing of that younger, more innocent era when it was sufficient to ask the question “what the fuck is this world coming to?” Now those syllables are left like ashes in our mouths. We have to freight in the past tense to acknowledge our debts and failures, and ask instead with a resignatory sigh, “what the fuck has this world come to?” Okay, perhaps more than a subtle blush ...read more |
Our Daily Poison
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 by Dela Gwala
 | “Ice cream will give you cancer.” A prophecy foretold by a washed-out, bulk-repellent 15 year old kid, a Men’s Health reader. It was a scrap of disease mongering, liberated from articles promising sex, that he’ll never have. It was a health risk omen: an accidental truth that would later be confirmed by a dark-haired French woman. In Notre Poison Quotidien (Our Daily Poison), Marie-Monique Robin puts down her fork and questions the authority of those lab coats who decide what ...read more |
G-Spotting
Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 by Johann M Smith
 | Of all the claptrap written and filmed about the infamous and elusive G-Spot, this documentary really hits the, uh, nail on the head, so to speak. It unravels the history, hype and controversy around this anatomical pleasure centre and also offers a step by step, detailed guide on how to find it. ...read more |
David Wants to Fly
Monday, June 13th, 2011 by Rob Scher
 | David Skieving is your typical fan-boy. A mounted poster of Eraserhead stares down on this recent film school graduate, as he innocently quips, “I wanted to make dark films like my idol, David Lynch. But I was lacking the darkness.” When an opportunity appears to hear his hero speak at a conference regarding the ‘source of creativity’, the young Berliner jumps at the chance, in the process he finds abundant darkness. ...read more |
Porselynkas
Saturday, June 11th, 2011 by Leila Bloch
 | Long before the onslaught of Fokofpoliskaar and Jack Parow, Porselynkas was a poetic and altogether more theatrical equivalent to the Voelvry movement (otherwise known as “Boere Woodstock” – a counter culture music festival cum tour party). The participants, living according to the I’m-poor-but-passionate ideology, were effectively redefining Afrikanerdom in Stellenbosch. They valued radical individualism and manifestos, and attached themselves to terms like “punk”. ...read more |
Glitterboys and Ganglands
Friday, June 10th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | Strangely, gangsterism intrudes very rarely in Lauren Beukes’ take on transexuality and tranvestism on the Cape Flats. You’d imagine that persecution of anything remotely anti-status quo would be the rule of law in the ganglands – masculinity has a very marked code out there, thriving through the violence of gang culture. But these supposed intrusions are not very present in her documentary, Glitterboys and Ganglands. ...read more |
