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All articles by Leonora Pinto
20 July 2010
Ghost stories. They have haunted many genres – horror-slash-supernatural, comedy, romance, fantasy. They have been told to us by friends and parents around campfires, or during blackouts, with “Ooooo” sound effects and torch-lighting. They have been around almost as long as we have been writing stories. (The ancient Epic of Gilgamesh – one of the earliest ever pieces of literature – is...
10 February 2010
What if you had a passion for doing something you were terrible at? Would you make it your life’s work regardless, or would you shove The Dream down under a pile of Get Real? Most people would do the latter. "When I grow up I want to..." says everybody, but hardly anybody actually grows up to do what they completed that sentence with; most people don't join the circus, become an astronaut...
18 September 2009
“Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around”. The last words of Carl Panzram, uttered to his executioner-to-be, are a chilling insight into one of history’s most prolific serial killers. However, even more disturbing are the memoirs that he penned in prison, and handed through the bars of his isolation cell to then newbie prison guard Henry Lesser (his...
23 July 2009
This story is about many things. It is about a miscarriage of justice. It is about relationships. It is about a crime mystery. It is about what society expects of us. It is about national identity. And, yes, it is about two people named Arthur and George. At its core, however, it is about judgement. Elbert Hubbard once said, “Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the...
11 June 2009
For every one of us, there will come the day when we sit at life’s table only to find lemons on our platter; tastier morsels of our youth – love, the feeling of immortality, the presence of a future – mere memories on our tongue, stains on our teeth.
What each one chooses to do with those lemons – refuse to see them, chuck them away in disgust, suck on them resignedly, share them with others...
29 April 2009
Perfume – The Story of a Murderer shouldn’t work. For so many reasons, it shouldn’t work. Reason #1. Character Formation-101 tells you that your lead should either be someone your audience can relate to, root for or like. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume is none of those things. He doesn’t even fulfil the criteria for the villain of the piece – he’s not inherently evil even...
26 March 2009
Revolutionary Road brings Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet together once more and they make you wonder why it took so long after Titanic to have them share the screen again. Nobody who’s seen Winslet in the likes of Iris or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and DiCaprio in, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape or The Aviator, needs to be told anything about the incredible talents of these two...
23 February 2009
Statutory warning: This is not a film for those who like their movies all tied up in neat little bows of resolution. ‘Doubt’ lives up to its name admirably, leaving you with one long loose thread of just that. Most people will come away thinking they know the answer, but they will come across others with the opposite view, who also think they know the answer. Yet, neither side will be absolutely...
11 February 2009
The thing that strikes you about Harvey Milk is not what an extraordinary man he was, but what an ordinary man he was. While history has written him into its pages as ‘The first openly gay man to be elected into Public Office in the United States’ and as a ‘Martyr for gay rights’, he is portrayed rather more realistically in the biopic Milk. As painted by director, Gus Van Sant and embodied by...
21 January 2009
Sweden’s much-acclaimed, much-talked-about and much-shockingly-left-out-of-the-Best-Foreign-Film-Oscar-nominations – ‘Let The Right One In’ – has been genrefied as a “horror”. It has also been called a “vampire film”. But while it has its bloodcurdling and bloodsucking moments – all the more chilling because they creep up on you like a black cat at midnight – it is really neither of those things...