Friday 30 September 2011

Broken Lines ★★☆☆☆


"a Kitchen sink drama that’s sadly as dull as dishwater"

Immersed deep within the multicultural surroundings of North London’s Finsbury Park, this intrinsically British drama attempts to evoke the gritty realism that has become a staple of our modern national cinema.

When the death of his father demands he returns to his childhood roots, Jake (Dan Fredenburgh) is reminded of his Jewish heritage and finally must confront the demons he ran away from so many years ago. Jake’s soon to be wed to Zoe (Olivia Williams), a caring and supportive fiancée but his recent family tragedy has started to reveal the cracks of their seemingly perfect relationship. Jake’s midlife crisis becomes the catalyst for a lurid affair with B (Doraly Rosa) a disenfranchised waitress working in a working men’s cafe round the corner from his father’s old shop. B however, has her own domestic troubles, with her life little more than a mundane series of events, consisting of nothing more than her humdrum job and caring for her recently paralysed husband Chester (Paul Bettany), a former boxer who now relies on her support but who finds it difficult to accept his dependency. All four characters are thrust unwillingly into a downward spiral of deceit and betrayal with little chance of salvation for anyone involved.

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Instant Reaction: 2/5
Retrospective Score: 2.5/5
Total:  4.5/10

The Green Wave ★★★★☆


" a poetic, yet insightful expose of a repressive regime "

Breaking away from the traditional mould normally associated with documentary filmmaking, director Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave’s (2010) unconventional approach to the genre is more akin to fictitious storytelling, resulting in a powerfully engrossing and uniquely presented account of Iran’s Green Revolution.

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La Piscine ★★★☆☆



" there’s an almost voyeuristic feeling which comes from watching these strikingly beautiful actors stroll around in their swimsuits"

There are shades of vintage Chabrol in Jacques Deray’s 1969 psychological drama La Piscine, a tense but leisurely film starring French heartthrob Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet. Digitally restored, Deray’s thriller is once again set to be released on the big screen.

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Friday 23 September 2011

The Tapes ★★★☆☆


"As a short, sharp dose of nerve tingling excitement, The Tapes works a treat"

Shot on a meagre budget of £10,000, The Tapes (2011) is the debut feature from director Lee Alliston and Scott Bates and stars Mark Miller, Alliston and Mandy Lee Berger. Following the well-trodden found-footage path, this intrinsically British take is a surprisingly accomplished attempt at injecting some much needed vigour into a now flailing genre.

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Thursday 22 September 2011

Soul Surfer ★☆☆☆☆


"Soul Surfer's disturbingly simplistic and sanctimonious direction dilutes the genuinely interesting, real-life events into little more than Christian propaganda"

Sean McNamara's Soul Surfer (2011) stars Anna Sophia Robb as real-life surfer Bethany Hamilton, brought into the world by two beach bum parents (played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt) and inheriting their passion for the sport. Bethany is described as a child with "salt water in her veins", but when a devastating Great White Shark attack (resulting in the loss of her left arm) threatens to destroy her dreams of becoming a pro, she has to rely on her faith to see her through.

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Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times ★★★☆☆


" Page One is not so much an educational voyage into a dying medium, but rather an experience to be savoured"

There's something rather ironic about reviewing a documentary examining the decline of print media on an online movie blog. However, despite the global reach of the internet threatening to turn newspapers into a redundant medium, Andrew Rossi's Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (2011) creates a compelling argument to those ready to tighten the noose around the fragile neck of one of the most respected papers of recent American history.

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Tuesday 20 September 2011

Mark Kermode Interview

"We’re all fighting a rear guard action against the homogenisation of massive, stupid, Hollywood blockbusters"


Out­spo­ken movie con­nois­seur Mark Ker­mode is per­haps the most well-known film critic cur­rently work­ing in the UK. This month sees the release of his sec­ond book, The Good, The Bad And The Mul­ti­plex, in which Mark spends a great deal of time dis­cussing one of his biggest gripes about the West­ern film mar­ket – our seem­ingly insa­tiable need to remake every suc­cess­ful for­eign lan­guage film released.


subtitledonline.com caught up with Mark to dis­cuss his views on the cur­rent cli­mate of the UK film indus­try, espe­cially the for­eign lan­guage film mar­ket…

Read the full interview here....

Monday 19 September 2011

Attack the Block ★★★★☆

" Attack the Block manages to become one of those incredibly rare cinematic beasts that's both genuinely fun and emotionally engrossing"


Attack the Block (2011) is Joe Cornish's (of Adam & Joe fame) debut feature film - a hoodies versus aliens monster movie blessed with an encyclopaedic knowledge of 80s science fiction. As equally scary as it is hilarious, this lovingly created, playful action/comedy hybrid hides a much more intelligent story behind its façade of colloquial slang and adolescent humour.

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Friday 16 September 2011

10 Must See Films at This Year's London Film Festival



That wonderful time of the year is almost upon us. We are only a matter of weeks away until all eyes and the film industry spotlight will be directed squarely on London as the BFI 55th London Film Festival rolls into town. The schedule, which was released last week, confirms that along with the glamour that some of Hollywoods finest will bring to the capital, we will also be treated to some fantastic independent offerings. Here’s my list of Ten films to Catch at this year’s festival…

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Thursday 15 September 2011

Tomboy ★★★★☆

Released this Friday, Tomboy, is director Celine Sciamma's delightful follow up to Water Lillies. Below is my review from The Edinburgh International Film Festival. This has to be one of my personal favorites this year and celebrate I've also embeded a short film by Sciamma for your viewing pleasure.


Tomboy

Celine Sci­amma won much noto­ri­ety with her debut fea­ture Water Lilies, a female com­ing of age drama which stood as another exam­ple of French cinema’s glo­ri­ously joy­ful abil­ity to cap­ture the raw emo­tional energy which sur­rounds ado­les­cence.
Tomboy very much car­ries on from where Water Lilies left off, deal­ing with female inse­cu­ri­ties. This time our cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist is Laure (Zoe Heran), a 10-year-old girl with issues of gen­der con­fu­sion. When her fam­ily moves to a town just out­side Paris, Laure, with her indis­tin­guish­able dress sense and short hair, takes this oppor­tu­nity to recre­ate her­self not just with a new iden­tity but a whole new sex.
On her first encounter with one of the neigh­bour­hood kids, she announces her­self as Michael in what is just the start of a lie which nat­u­rally spi­rals out of con­trol. It’s not a dif­fi­cult thing to believe as this glo­ri­fied tomboy, in her grey vest and uni­sex hoodie, has yet to enter puberty and could eas­ily pass as either an effem­i­nate boy or manly young girl. Even Lisa, a young inse­cure girl from the same apart­ment block, is con­vinced, and devel­ops a crush for Michael, which Laure has no qualms in rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing.
She goes to great lengths to hide her true sex­u­al­ity from her new found friends, from rop­ing her younger sis­ter into this game of deceit all the way to run­ning into the for­est every time she needs to uri­nate. As the stakes esca­late, she even goes as far as destroy­ing her bathing suit to cre­ate a more mas­cu­line pair of speedos, whilst fash­ion­ing a crude makeshift penis out of play­dough to fin­ish of the look.
How­ever, as she falls deeper into this new arti­fi­cial per­sona, cracks start to appear within her frag­ile facade. Sud­denly, the real­i­sa­tion dawns that once these glo­ri­ously fun filled sum­mer hol­i­days come to an end and the school term com­mences, it’ll become almost impos­si­ble for her true iden­tity to be shielded from her new group of friends, some of which, Lisa included, may not take so kindly to such a gross degree of deceit…
Sciamma’s min­i­mal direc­tion in this insight­ful explo­ration of the mys­ti­fy­ing awk­ward­ness of child­hood allows the per­for­mances of her strik­ingly assured young cast to tell the story with great effect. Zoe Heran and Mal­onn Lev­ana, as the two sis­ters, have the type of nat­u­ral­is­tic, immac­u­lately con­structed on screen rela­tion­ship that should by rights be impos­si­ble to recre­ate by those so young. Heran’s appear­ance as our epony­mous tomboy is excep­tional, pulling of this uni­sex role with great aplomb and never seem­ing uncom­fort­able with the mature sub­ject mat­ter or com­plex issues asked of her. Despite the min­i­mal use of dia­logue, she con­fi­dently uses body lan­guage to cap­ture the inter­nal con­flict of her char­ac­ters self-imposed dilemma, whilst simul­ta­ne­ously her strik­ingly expres­sive eyes main­tain a level of inno­cent charm that both con­veys her con­fused men­tal state whilst also dri­ving the nar­ra­tive for­ward.
This sub­tly nat­ural obser­va­tion of the dif­fi­cul­ties which envelop the seem­ingly all impor­tant search for accep­tance amongst pre-teens is a lov­ingly crafted, con­fi­dent and refresh­ingly unique film, which per­fectly encap­su­lates its sub­ject mat­ter in what can only be described as a joy­fully pure and lov­ingly sweet tale which deserves to be seen by a much larger audi­ence.

Instant Score: 4
Retrospective Score: 4.5
Total: 8.5

Pauline - a short movie by Celine Sciamma

Bombay Beach ★★☆☆☆


"Bombay Beach unfortunately culminates into a film which - despite its sensual elegance - is nothing more than an overblown ballet of personal misery"

Israeli director Alma Har'el has used her background in music video production (she directed videos for Beirut's Elephant Gun and Postcards from Italy) to add a surrealist edge to her documentary Bombay Beach (2011), a dreamlike portrait of human endurance in all its varying guises.

Bombay Beach focuses on a small American community inhabiting the remains of a once prosperous holiday town, which is now nothing more than a trace memory of better times. This thoughtful voyage into the core of human behaviour allows each of Bombay Beach's townsfolk the opportunity to share their entrancing back-stories and unique ability to survive amidst what is little more that an isolated dust bowl.

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Monday 12 September 2011

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ★★★★★


" this year’s most accomplished thriller"

Riding on a wave of critical acclaim amassed at The Venice Film Festival, Tomas Alfredson’s (Let the Right One In) inventive adaptation of John Le Carre’s 1974 spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is almost upon us.

Set shortly after the infamous Watergate scandal, this intriguing tale of deception takes place during a period of escalated fear in Cold War Britain. Veteran MI6 agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is forced from semi-retirement when a botched mission in Budapest and the death of Control (the head of the agency, colloquially known as the Circus) leads to suspicions that all is not quite right within this highly surreptitious government organisation. He’s assigned to a mission of the upmost importance; to uncover the identity of the mole working at the very top level of the Circus, who’s been feeding vital information of the highest secrecy to the KGB for years, jeopardising not only the furtive work of these government agents but the security of the whole country. Smiley and the small team he’s assembled to solve this vitally important matter of national interest soon begin to delve deeper into a well of espionage and deceit, what at first begins as a tense but calculated investigation, soon transpires into a minefield of betrayal and as the stakes begin to elevate so too does the degree of risk at hand.

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Instant Score: 4.5
Retrospective Score: 5
Total: 9.5

I Killed My Mother ★★★☆☆


" an accomplished piece of film which is affluent in both style and substance"

To coincide with the DVD release of his sophomore effort Heartbeats (2010) comes the re-issue of Xavier Dolan's breakthrough film I Killed My Mother (2009) a deeply personal story of teen angst and the explosive relationship between a son and his overbearing mother, starring Anne Dorval, Dolan himself, François Arnaud and Suzanne Clément.

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Heartbeats ★★★☆☆


"a film you’ll desperately want to fall in love with"

French-Canadian writer, actor and director Xavier Dolan took the festival circuit by storm back in 2009 with I Killed My Mother (also re-released on DVD today). This promising debut quickly stapled his name onto every up-and-coming director list around. Heartbeats (2010) is Dolan's sophomore effort and once again thrust this prolific young man centre stage, as once again he stars both in front and behind the camera.

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8 Million Ways to Die ★★☆☆☆


" one of the few remaining dinosaurs of the exploitative history of 1970s and 80s action films"

Directed by Hal Ashby, written by Oliver Stone and starring the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) should equate in a thrilling, yet touching tale of a cop gone rogue, but instead feels more like an extended late night version of Magnum, P.I. Bridges plays Matt Scudder, an alcoholic cop who loses his badge after shooting a man who went berserk with a baseball bat during a routine narcotics raid.

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My Best Enemy ★★☆☆☆


"an absurd experimental attempt to create a farcical comedy against a backdrop of mass genocide and war crimes"

Wolfgang Murnberger dares to inject a vein of humour into an otherwise harrowing genre, with My Best Enemy attempting to create a Holocaust drama with a more upbeat tempo than we’ve become accustomed to.

My Best Enemy opens with a plane crash where the only remaining survivors are two previous best friends, Rudi Smekal, a Nazi officer and Victor Kaufmann, a Jewish concentration camp prisoner. The story then flashes back to their lives in Vienna just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

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Thursday 8 September 2011

Incendies ★★★★★



"a triumph in modern storytelling"

French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has created one of this year’s most powerful dramas by perfectly intertwining a tragedy of Greek proportions with a social commentary about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Opening with a dreamlike pan across an unnamed Middle East country, noticeably accompanied by a powerfully emotive, yet seemingly indecorous Radiohead song (You and Whose Army?), Incendies makes you aware from the outset that what you’re about to embark on is an incredibly stylish and emotionally draining piece of cinema. The action is swiftly transferred to modern day Canada where we intrude upon the reading of Nawal Marwan’s (Lubna Azabal) will to her two siblings, twins by the names of Simon (Maxim Gaudette) and Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin). It becomes instantly apparent that the relationship this brother and sister had with their mother was complicated at best, but nowhere near as convoluted as the immensely irregular task they have inherited. Two envelopes are produced, one given to each twin. One is addressed to ‘the son’ and the other to ‘the father’. Up until this moment neither sibling had any idea they had another brother, and so starts a captivating exploration into the murky past of their recently departed mother and a enlightening journey through the annals of their family history. Each time a part of the puzzle is solved, a whole new revelation presents itself, before finally leading to an emotionally devastating conclusion that neither child could possibly have imagined.

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Wednesday 7 September 2011

Visitor to a Museum ★★★★★



Visitor to a Museum was screened at the BFI, Lon­don as part of their KOS­MOS sea­son, the sec­ond instal­ment of their Russ­ian cin­ema sea­son KINO.


Com­par­isons with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker are near impos­si­ble to avoid when review­ing Vis­i­tor To A Museum. From its night­mare vision of mankind sur­viv­ing amongst the cat­a­strophic con­se­quences of a nuclear acci­dent, and its cen­tral pro­tag­o­nists weary search to find sal­va­tion within an unreach­able ter­ri­tory (or the mere fact that direc­tor Kon­stan­tin Lopushan­sky assisted Tarkovsky on his sec­ond foray into sci­ence fic­tion), the two films share many qualities…except one, Vis­i­tor To A Museum has never gained the world­wide noto­ri­ety of Stalker, an acco­lade its dystopian para­ble depict­ing the fall of com­mu­nism undoubt­edly deserves.


A nameless ‘tourist’ arrives in a devastated town, intent on undertaking an infamous journey to an ancient museum, now lost to the harsh ecological disaster which has ravaged this land. This mysterious building is only accessible at low tide, with many having perished whilst pursuing this pilgrimage, yet the intellectual treasures it houses have become almost legendary and regarded by many to outweigh the peril involved.

The tourist checks in at a local guest house, an ex weather station, where he waits for the opportune moment to beginning his perilous expedition to this mythical monument of human progress. Nearby, this former meteorological station is a community of nuclear fallout victims who are regarded as little more than infected cockroaches by the locals, crawling up from beneath the rubble and desecrating this once prosperous area with their hideous appearances. These uneducated and malformed masses are prone to religious hysteria and irrational fears of the powers that be, whilst their subservient behaviour and limited intellect has resulted in many of them being chosen by the few ‘healthy’ survivors as servants for their materialistic needs.

The tourist is not as judgemental as the townsfolk and attempts to embrace these lowly peasants as equals. He’s a man haunted by guilt, not for his own actions but by those of all mankind; however, he remains devout in the belief that humanity will lift itself from this self-made pit of despair and achieve redemption through the power of science and learning. His faith in the redemptive qualities of mankind and acceptance of the area’s ‘savages’ has made him something of a messiah to these deformed children of the apocalypse, with his planned journey becoming more and more significant by the day…

Once you see beyond the film’s recognisable use of sepia tones and soft lighting to present this futuristic world, as well as the familiar device of a mysterious ‘building’ in which our protagonist must venture to for answers (coupled with most of the film’s action being filmed in once prosperous factories of the Soviet Union), there is much more at the heart of Visitor To A Museum than mere similarities with Tarkovsky’s seminal sci-fi film, Stalker.

The film’s heavy-handed but meticulously detailed approach in creating this ecologically devastated world builds a unique atmosphere, which feels incredibly fresh and inventive when compared with the increasingly formulaic approach of modern science fiction films, which often spend more time imitating others than crafting their own dystopian world.

Visitor To A Museum relies heavily on its score to achieve the distinctive mood of despair that consumes its world; combining natural and artificial sounds to create an unavoidable soundtrack which amplifies the film’s numerous haunting qualities and general feeling of anxiety. Successfully amalgamating orchestrated strings with harsh electronic rhythms, this unsympathetic splicing of earthy noises with artificial, computerised reverberations seems to fit perfectly with the film’s barren landscape, a world where mankind’s meddling has overpowered nature and destroyed the purity and grace of its once flourishing land.

Made during Perestroika (a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, its literal meaning is ‘restructuring’, referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system), when Soviet economic and belief systems were showing signs of failing, Lopushansky’s film has perfectly depicted the sentiments of a country undergoing a time of great instability. This obsession with scientific advancement within the USSR was probably most prominent during the Space Race (a series of events which led to a cultural obsession with all things astronomical and an abundance of great sci-fi films), yet, ironically, Visitor To A Museum has little in the way of space exploration and its desolate landscape doesn’t house any ravenous alien species. Instead, we are presented with an unrecognisable world savaged by our own greed and neglect, for in Visitor To A Museum we are in fact the ‘aliens’ and, indeed, the ones who should be feared.

The film has often been referred to as an unabashed Christian allegory for a post Chernobyl future, where man has created their own hell through an unstoppable pursuit of power and knowledge. During the Cold War, science and material culture had replaced religion, but, as the economy began to crumble, people fled back to their old beliefs, an issue represented within the film by the horrendous way in which the locals disregard these infected casualties and their spiritual beliefs. Yet, when the USSR finally collapsed, there was a surge of church building, a sure sign of where this newly placed trust in science and communism dispersed to. The film’s ‘visitor’ initially embodies the quest for power once evident in the Cold War era of the USSR, but when his journey becomes eclipsed by spiritualism, the tone of the film, much like in Russia during the Brezhnev era, noticeably shifts to a more pious, godly atmosphere, which twists and moulds the action into an all together different but no less enjoyable film.

Visitor To A Museum takes the horrors of Chernobyl, the inevitable Soviet implosion and the economic failings of mass production within Russia and creates an apocalyptic setting, far more devastating than anything created before, or indeed after its release. The amplifying of these social issues help the film create a nightmarish vision of the future that, at the time, was a genuinely real concern; however, considering our current environmental predicament and economic crisis, this cautionary tale is just as appropriate now. Truly a remarkable portrait of society at its weakest.


Julia's Eyes ★★★☆☆


Cowardly boys, letting a lady go first.....

The most terrifying and effective psychological horrors don’t rely on shocking scenes of gratuitous violence to traumatise their viewers but rather more subtle techniques to get under their skin. Take films such as The Exorcist or Eyes Without a Face, both genuinely frightening but through a powerful reliance on ambience and mood rather than blood and guts. Mixing a bleak and dissonant score with a collection of dark and claustrophobic framed shots can create an atmosphere of foreboding doom, cultivating in a level of heightened fear in the auditorium that becomes almost palpable. Indeed it’s often what you don’t see that’s the scariest, leaving your imagination to conjure up your greatest fears and constructing something far more horrific and personal than any film director could possibly conceive.  With this in mind surely a Guillermo Del Toro produced thriller with a focal character who suffers from a degenerative eye disorder (gradually rendering her blind as the movie progresses) must have all the ingredients needed to freak-out even the most hardened fans of the genre?

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Raindance Film Festival Programme Release



This morning, the Raindance Film Festival - Europe's leading independent film festival - released the programme for its 19th incarnation. Priding itself on championing the ‘little guy’, this year's festival entries have been whittled down from the 3000 submissions to a more manageable collection of 98 features (all UK premieres) and 137 shorts.

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Monday 5 September 2011

Jane Eyre ★★★☆☆


The roar of thunder combines dramatically with the clattering of lightning, ominously illuminating the bleak rolling landscape of a desolate region of the British countryside. The Camera soars above a young petrified girl, ostensibly stalking her before swooping in for the kill. She flees in desperation towards a nearby house, yet nature seems to conspire against her, with rain battering against her weary face and mud restricting her movement, as if the earth were about to eat her up. This terrified young girl is our titular heroine Jane Eyre, yet, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d entered the wrong film, as this recent adaptation of Bronte’s seminal novel amplifies the gothic nature of her literary classic beyond the usual boundaries of a period drama.

Thursday 1 September 2011

Fright Night 3D ★★★☆☆



Craig Gillespie's Fright Night (2011) follows the recent Hollywood fascination for re-imaginings with this remake of Tom Holland's original 1985 cult favourite. Starring Colin Farrell as a libidinous vampire, David Tennant (best know to UK audiences as the former Doctor Who) and Anton Yelchin, this stereoscopic reboot attempts to add a little more bite to the originals lurid tale of suburban horror.

Those tired of the recent flurry of paranormal romances involving the brooding hunky vampires of recent teen fiction inspired movies should take note; Fright Night aims to take these mythological devils back to their malevolent roots, reminding audiences of exactly why vampires are not meant to be messed with!

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Panic Button ★★★☆☆



This film screened at Film4's Fright Fest

UK director Chris Crow follows up his debut feature Devil's Bridge (2010) with Panic Button (2011), which screened at this year's Film4 FrightFest. When four strangers meet for the first time at an airport, they all seem very familiar with each other. Having each won a free trip to New York through their membership to the Facebook-inspired 'All2gethr.com', revelations begin to emerge about the details they’ve garnered from the profiles of their fellow competition winners.

Soon after boarding the opulent private jet that will transport them to their destination the onboard entertainment begins in the shape of a quiz based on the group’s online habits. The initial alcohol fuelled atmosphere of unbridled excitement soon starts to turn sour as what seems like a little bit of fun to while away the hours soon evolves into something much more sinister.

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