Films with a sinister, all-powerful, self-aware computer threatening to obliterate the human race have almost become a genre unto themselves. There was the creepy HAL trying to scuttle the Jupiter mission in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Skynet triggering the apocalypse in The Terminator, Colossus threatening nuclear annihilation in Colossus: The Forbin Project and the female-voiced computer taunting Shia Labeouf in
Read moreThis week on Built For Speed we speak to Gus Macmillan from Blue Grassy Knoll about the band’s orchestral adaptation of their musical score for Buster Keaton’s The General. It’s also classic album time and this month we head back to 2003 and play some tracks from Ryan Adams’ Rock’n’roll. Once again there’s a deluge of films in our cinema
Read moreThis week on Built For Speed we speak to Gus Macmillan from the band Blue Grassy Knoll about their orchestral score for the Buster Keaton film The General which will be screened at the Melbourne Recital Centre on July 24th. We also take a look at the two current films featuring the talents of Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel,
Read moreLike last year’s The Other Son, Japanese film Like Father Like Son explores the heartbreaking situation in which two sets of parents discover that that there children were switched at birth and in this case that the son they have raised for six years is not theirs. While this film is about two families it focuses on Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama)
Read moreHow many times have we heard the deep mellifluous burr of a movie trailer voice-over artist exclaiming “This year” or “In a world”? The owner of that voice was more likely than not American vocal legend Don La Fontaine who recorded thousands of voice-overs for film trailers and TV commercials before his death in 2008. The vacuum he left in
Read moreNoah begins with a potted history of the Old Testament that is strikingly reminiscent of the opening scenes in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. That sequence sets the tone for the film, as this interpretation of the story of Noah, the Ark and the flood that wiped out humanity, plays like a Tolkien action-fantasy.
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