The Flaming Lips - Evil Will Prevail

Quincy Jones - Killer Joe

Godzilla Got a Nintendo GameBoy for His 70th Birthday!! by Brett Marcus Cook

Quincy Jones - Ai No Corrida // Razzamatazz

Joker: Folie à Deux

A sequel that doesn't just refuse its place in the ever-expanding comic book movie pantheon, but actively works to sabotage and undermine such an enterprise altogether. In that sense Joker: Folie à Deux can sit proudly alongside other, hectoring second episodes like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Gremlins 2: The New Batch instead. All three films are, after all, the result of the entity formerly known as Warner Bros. demanding a second visit to well-trodden turf. Folie has (similarly) been received as disappointing, if not actually upsetting and outright frustrating, for its obstinate desire to not give the audience the Clown Prince of Crime they so desperately desire. The film very obviously having next-to-no interest in assuming the role of gritty predecessor for a series of period Gotham City spin-offs. Despite this incalcitrant outlook there are a few, brief allusions to DC's wider world of criminality, but they are all so abashed or plain out-of-focus that they might as well have been clipped away in the edit bay. It's as if the piece itself cannot bare the studio notes that have, presumably, been foisted upon it. 

A promise of the kind of gauche, multipurpose continuity that the various Marvel universes have staked their future on does intrude very late in these proceedings but it's all so blurred and indistinct, occurring way in the background while Lawrence Sher's camera stays locked in on Joaquin Phoenix's gasping, drowning performance as Arthur Fleck. That thing that audiences say they want is present then but the execution is deliberately aggravating and disappointing, framed as a wrinkle casually unfolding on the periphery. Wouldn't you rather focus in on the character that the filmmakers actually want to tell you about? Hasn't Phoenix's all-consuming act sated your need to see this heavily merchandised monster revert to trick flower type? With Folie, writer-director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have delivered a follow-up that isn't just ambivalent about its billion dollar ancestor, it's angry about it. Put out that the incredible marketplace success that the previous film enjoyed demands another instalment; appalled that a substantial amount of the film's audience saw in Joker an insurrectionist façade that could be applied to social movements from the shallower end of the political waters. 

Phillips' solution then is to underline the foibles and flaws inherent to his interpretation of this character: Fleck is physically meek and easily dominated; his grasp on reality is slippery and prone to fantastical delusion; and perhaps most crucially, he lacks the healthy, psychological scaffolding required to make good on his dearest make-believe. All of which very deliberately works against the expected assumption of a cackling super-identity for this jailed psychiatric patient. The captive audience of an ongoing court trial, as well as the introduction of Lady Gaga as Lee, a shade of Harley Quinn, would seem to suggest an opportunity for mass, cathartic slaughter but the pieces, by design, never quite click into place. Lee isn't the elasticated sidekick we're otherwise used to, she's a troubled rich kid holidaying in her idea of somebody else's mania. She's a fan. In love with the branding rather than the person that is actually stood before her. When Lee's fantasies are not being served she eagerly pouts and recriminates, damning Arthur for his failure to measure up to the persona that she has herself concocted. For his part, the wrinkled and emaciated Fleck doesn't fantasise about orchestrating the kind of orgiastic violence his beloved would seem to prefer. Instead he dreams about himself and her as brightly coloured subjects in a gently mocking variety show. Happiness as a Saturday night television broadcast. Unlike his would-be partner, who at first seems to be a particularly vivid agent of Fleck's imagination, when left to his own devices Arthur is quite happy to sit there medicated, soaking in Technicolor musicals. 

Joaquin Phoenix - True Love Will Find You in the End

The Cure - Alone

Savage Street Vigilante by Simon Mallette St-Pierre

Prince - Trust

The Invisible Man

James Whale's The Invisible Man is a delinquent's delight, a film completely disinterested in anything other than the chaos perpetrated by a mad man who cannot be seen. Played by Claude Rains, Dr. Jack Griffin has toiled in secret, discovering a way to make his body disappear. This boon thanks, in part, to an Indian drug with uncommonly powerful bleaching abilities. These experiments have rendered him permanently transparent, with an antidote for this affliction just beyond the good doctor's scientific grasp. Although griffin's stuffier former colleagues talk up the psychosis associated with the miracle drug that forms the basis of his studies, there's ample evidence here that simply being beyond any conventional sense of redress have allowed this man to completely unravel. 

Whether wrapped in gauze or animating a pair of stolen trousers, Griffin can be heard ranting and raving like a lunatic. Rains' voice is a thundering, ever-present instrument that squats over the soundtrack and overenunciates every syllable available to it. His booming sentences register as a series of jabs and swipes; a tongue that clatters like a machinegun aimed at anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing space with him. What makes Griffin's mania even more entertaining though is the overt cloddishness of his victims: the citizens of the town he terrorises are slow-witted and screeching; the police who attempt to trap him are similarly clumsy and doltish. These dragnets offer absolutely zero amusement when measured against an amoral spectre who is perfectly happy to crater the heads of choking policeman. Even Griffin's contemporaries pale in comparison. So-called equals, such as William Harrigan's Dr. Kemp, can do nothing but tremble at the ungodly terror that is able to breeze in and out of their homes. 

The Specials - Ghost Town (Extended Version)

Hookjaw by John McCrea

Caribou - Honey

Arachnophobia

Not satisfied with the alien malevolence implied by the sneering confidence of your average house spider, director Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia, written by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick, imposes a hierarchical, hive-based structure upon these creepy crawlies. For, you see, somewhere in Venezuela, deep in the core of a table-top mountain, there exists a tree that is home to dozens of species of undiscovered butterfly and a generalissimo spider that can pump out its own, subordinate colony. Setting aside the kind of farcical war on drugs-era alarm that a South American import could, slowly and methodically, infiltrate small town America, Arachnophobia is still unusually strict about how it separates its villain, in this instance a terrifyingly fertile prehistoric spider, and its many rosy-cheeked victims. The spiderling scions sent out from the collapsing barn of Jeff Daniels' newly rehoused GP are not only pure, prowling evil but seem to be laser-target at the elderly. 

These adventurous and resoundingly unsympathetic arthropods knit themselves into an older lady's lamp, or they trample their way into the abundant snacks of an aging mortician, then lie in wait to deliver their deadly venom. The elimination of the more doddery inhabitants of this picturesque, Californian village coincides with the arrival of Daniels' Dr. Jennings and, perhaps more crucially, his snubbing by a mummified practitioner who had promised this San Francisco import the inheritance of his medical beat. This would seem to be a persistent source of comedic exasperation for Jennings, but this doesn't quit pan out. Although a Doctor Death label is briefly proposed by his cagier neighbours, it fades into the background once secondary characters like the late Julian Sands' softly spoken entomologist or John Goodman's bug exterminator begin gobbling up everybody's attention. Although handsomely photographed by Mikael Salomon, Arachnophobia is a touch too genteel to really dazzle. Like many of its Amblin stablemates, the film is a high concept in desperate need of the neurotic mania that a director like Steven Spielberg (or Joe Dante) is able to, effortlessly, access. 

Bert Jansch - Needle of Death

The Monster by Mizmaru Kawahara

MF DOOM - ?

The Invasion

Even without the knowledge that director Oliver Hirschbiegel's original cut of The Invasion was deemed too dull by producer Joel Silver (then taken back to the drawing board by new writers Lana and Lilly Wachowski, as well as reshoot director James McTeigue), the finished product betrays an obvious feeling of bifurcation. Once a rolling start is packed away to be returned to later, introductory scenes are icy and tinged with misanthropy, as if preparing to detail a microscopic invasion using the syntax of a self-satisfied political thriller. Despite the dryness of the acronyms firing around, Nicole Kidman's prescription dispensing psychiatrist is shot to be luminous; cinematographer Rainer Klausmann arranging the frame around the light and heat rolling off this star. In the non-harried pieces of the film that can (presumably) be attributable to Hirschbiegel, Kidman betrays the blonde, Hitchcockian glamour of a Tippi Hedren or a Kim Novak. Later, when the film has defaulted to a checkpoint sprint with dozens of drone people hanging off a speeding sedan, Kidman is green and frazzled. Sunken deeply into a diet of Mountain Dew and pearlescent poppers as she struggles to stay awake. The Invasion then is trapped between these two clashing wavelengths: one frequency tuned to the buttoned-up description of a planet plunging into somnambulism. The other a much trashier take on human paranoia that allows Kidman's Dr. Carol to subject neighbourhood children to alarming head trauma or mow down advancing supermarket employees while her perspective slips in and out of focus. Neither element feels entertaining enough to really stake a claim on this film though. Instead, the two incompatible tones work against each other, undermining this strangely pod positive piece. 

VIQ - I See

Electronic Visions - Forest Language