Moon Monkey

Escape from LA (1996) I really like John Carpenter stuff, Escape From New York , The Thing classics, but Escape From LA , well not so much, or maybe I remember Escape From New York too fondly. Escape from LA is a quite preposterous story about a crazy conservative president of the United States of America, which is why it is more relevant than ever. It saw the return of Snake Plisskin (Kurt Russell) to our screens helping to retrieve a weapon capable of destroying the world, as we know it. This president sees America as a place of moral superiority in the world, no sex without marriage, no red meat, no smoking, no freedom of religion. An earthquake has seen LA separated from mainland USA, which suits the new president well as he now uses this as an island to send all immoral Americans to imprisonment (not quite building a wall but still). The prisoners run the island of LA, their head honcho is Cuervo Jones (badly modeled on Che Guevara) who being the charmer that he is, persu...

The Angel's Share (2012)

Four friends on a community service program hatch a plan to get themselves out of financial difficulty in this comedy drama from director Ken Loach. The film begins with a hilarious scenes of a drunken man at a train station being told over the speaker system to get away from the edge of the platform. Next thing he finds himself in the dock and is sentenced to do community payback work. Turning up on the wrong day he is conscripted, along with several of his fellows to repainting and old building. One of the young men he is working with is Robbie who has his own problems. With a girlfriend and baby on the way he also has to constantly avoid getting into fights with other Glasgow gangs, a life that he has been born into. Following a trip to a whisky distillery he develops an aptitude for recognizing whiskies from smell and taste. Learning that there is an incredibly rare and expensive cask due for auction Robbie and his new found friends decide to travel north to see if they can...

Capernaum (2018) by Nadine Labaki

The film opens with a courtroom scene in which a young boy is suing his parents for the crime of giving birth to him. We also learn that the boy, Zain, has a previous conviction himself for stabbing somebody. What follows is then a retelling of what led the child to this point, handcuffed and standing in court facing his parents. The harsh conditions of his family life, living in a small apartment building with his sisters, forced to go out shoplifting and picking up prescription drugs illegally to later sell on. It is a brutalising experience for the child who watches the atrocities around him with a resigned scowl. His only real companion is his sister, eleven year old Sahar. In one example of the horrific situation they are in, caught between religious fundamentalism, war, and parents who are either oblivious or unable to alleviate their suffering, Zain must help his sister by stealing sanitary products to hide the fact she is now menstruating. In a final straw, she is sold to ano...

Twitter

Tweets by m00nmonkey

Report Abuse

Powered by Blogger