Beneficial Shock!, Issue 11 – Winning and Losing

Beneficial Shock! is a new bi-annual magazine for film lovers and design enthusiasts, with accompanying screen based motion features that will champion progressive thinking from contemporary illustrators, graphic designers and photographers. Rather than your standard film magazine full of reviews, celebrity news and press images, Beneficial Shock! aims to use illustration, visual documentation and design in humorous and irreverent ways to expressively interpret film related content.

In short, film is just the beginning.

In each thematic issue we will explore a chosen topic, looking at its relationship to film in surprising and often unconventional ways.

In this issue:

WINNING AND LOSING

“Call it”.
So instructs bob-cutted, psychopathic hitman Anton Chigurh to those unfortunate enough to cross his path in the Coen Brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men. A sadistic game used to offer a semblance of hope to his victims, Chigurh views the coin toss not as random luck, but as an inevitable meeting point of choice and destiny. It represents a twisted code of moral accountability, where he acts as a blunt instrument of a cold, indifferent universe, stripping his victims of control over their mortality and leaving the outcome in the hands of fate.
It’s this more philosophical area of fate that is explored in our latest issue, as we lurch this way and that, accompanying winners and losers from across the cinematic spectrum; from politicians and gamers to boxers and soldiers, outcasts, hustlers and humble office workers… all riding the rollercoaster of kismet hoping for more ups than downs.

Cover art by Daniel Gomez Vega

Featuring words and images by: Vanya Botvvinky, Bianca Buo, Graham Corcoran, Olivier Heiligers, Emile Holmwood, Tom Jellett, Danny Jenkins, Haley Jiang, Kalla, Matt Lee, Lynda Nguyen Tran, Beck O’Hara, Chi Park, Nadia Schlosser, Emanuel Santos, Stuart Walster, Andrew Waugh, Yifei Xiang, Lydia Beardmore, Neil Fox , Georgina Guthrie, Barney Nuttall, Rhys Peregrine, Thomas M. Puhr, Callum Reid, Andy Ryan, Gabriel Solomons, Zac Stephens, Madeleine Storer and Cris Warren