Hi, it's Ben. I like films (among many other things), and here are some places you can find me talking about them. I'm a podcaster, film critic/writer, and general swiss army man. Currently based in Singapore but you might find me lost in other countries. Open for writing collaborations/commissions, sidequest projects, and, honestly, almost anything you could think of.
Deep Cut is a director-focused film podcast featuring deep-dive discussions about international, art-house, and independent cinema. I co-host with my friends Wilson and Eli.
“MURPH! MUUUURPH!” Join us on a journey through the wormhole along with filmmaker Isadora Neves Marques as we discuss Christopher Nolan’s intergalactic adventure, Interstellar . Is love calculable? How does this compare to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey? When does Nolan…
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The Kinetoscope is a newsletter following my personal journey discovering and thinking about cinema.
I’ve struggled in the past with making sense of experimental film. Do they offer a pure sensory experience or something intellectually argumentative? As someone who usually looks for an emotional experience in the cinema, formally experimental cinema, especially the likes of which I’m writing about here, is not…
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I built and currently run filmbulletin.sg which aggregates film listings. Easily find showtimes and film screenings outside your regular cinema all in one place.
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Yearning is loops and spirals, loops and spirals, endlessly involving, but when it does invariably end, does love begin?
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"In a time of apparent magic..." This is the title card that opens The Odyssey and as much as it is the best Nolan-esque movie ever made, and it is very well made, that word "apparent" says so much…
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It's Nolan's best movie. It's the Nolanest: sad dads, survivor's guilt, competence porn, etc etc. It's also his most emotional movie and it only took him adapting one of our oldest stories to find…
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Very peculiar movie from Kurosawa, which means I liked it. I love a character like Nimura whose main trait seems to be that... he's dumb? It's so odd, with strange plot developments, but still feels…
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Takes a story with immense grief and pairs it with a really relaxed rhythm, great characterisation, mature storytelling, and for some reason, 2 Mad Max Fury Road references, peak knows peak?
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Might be able to find world peace if everyone had to wear a badge for fucking enquiries Good! Ofc we should all listen to you Penelope Cruz. I'd also dial it back with some of the score, the talking…
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can't believe no one told me this was doppelganger cinema Iwai has a way of smashing the past and the present into each other in sublime ways
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thinking of how i can smoothly incorporate "vex" into my daily vernacular an ending that is possibly narratively surprising, but emotionally not, you already knew
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Entirely well-considered, nuanced and complex without being moralistic. It's very engaging despite the lack of direct plot drive because it is thematically complex; my mind was firing on all…
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utterly strange, off-kilter, then veering straight into the transcendent and human. goes from weirdly funny one moment to utterly soul-crushing the next, which makes all the sense: life's a joke and…
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Largely like the concept but there's a much more honed version of this (not necessarily shorter, but probably) to achieve its ends. Maybe an experiment that's largely experimental such that the…
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It's pretty much the first act of Spielberg's AI taken to dull extremes. There's a kid-robot Nobody Knows movie here that could've been kinda interesting, but instead we keep following a married…
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Maybe I've outgrown this kinda movie but I found myself getting pretty bored of it mid way through. The emotional thrust/plot is barely serviceable and its really just itching to be a Street Fighter…
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Maybe trying too hard to be sophisticated and "restrained" horror when it should have just gone dumb mode and tilted into slasher of some sort. Probably needed more (fun) characters to make it work…
Palimpsest: The Story of a Name
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I sometimes think that language is maybe the most essential and important piece of human technology, it steers us towards meaning formation, it gives shape to our lives, it encodes our sensory inputs…
Public Conversations is a site-specific podcast experiment, capturing the intersection of a
time, a place, and the people that move through it.
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