Reclaiming the ‘wife beater’ as feminist symbol of empowerment
Fashion: Unzipping the history of female undergarments
Though typically seen as a sign of muscular machismo thanks to Marlon Brando’s Streetcar and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, the working-class white tank top was the product of the female emancipation movement and a quest for less restricted movement.
Chappie reboots best bits of Blade Runner, Robocop
Droidful!
A hacked version of Robocop, Chappie takes place in the not-too-distant future, when violent crime has gone viral and police resources are too stretched to contain the chaos.
By Katherine Monk
Infused with ambient paranoia, apocalyptic imagery and an overall sense of social collapse, Neil Blomkamp’s movies operate in a familiar science-fiction setting, but they feel significantly different from Hollywood spectacle. Where the likes of Lucas and Spielberg find ways of affirming all-American value systems through hero-centric stories, Blomkamp doesn’t seem at all interested in themes of god and country. If anything, the South African filmmaker (who makes his home in Vancouver) focuses on the opposite: He ignores the grand rhetoric of the visible and the valued in an effort to hear the slang of the common folk. In his brilliantly bleak feature debut, District 9, Blomkamp re-invented the alien invasion theme by weaving it into Apartheid metaphor, ...
