Features
In this new series our team will recommend interesting articles they found on the web on a weekly basis. Read and enjoy! Feel free to place your favorite articles of the week in the comments!
Being a film lover should be one of the more unique experiences you have in life. As audience members, we should be able to watch, enjoy and talk about movies without the fear of being scrutinized. So, when I see the average film fan (mostly on reddit the internet) being berated for saying something like “Fury Road was just okay,” or “I really don’t like Christopher Nolan’s movies,” it’s pretty disheartening.
As 2015 comes to a close, the promises of 2016 in film leave excitement fizzling like the fireworks of New Year amongst Quentin Tarantino fans. We have been treated to an influx of releases ripe from the mind of the divisive director over the past few years, with Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained providing much controversy and dividing many opinions, but it is The Hateful Eight that is now beginning to incite anticipation about its January release. But, as this excitement grows towards the end of Tarantino’s twenty-fourth year in the filmmaking business, the success he enjoys now has progressed in an initially unexpected way.
With the recent blockbuster release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens I have heard nothing but praise for the new protagonists and how they (or the adorable BB-8 Droid) are the best thing to happen to the revamped series. Before I rant, let me say how much I loved the new heroes.
Let’s start with a brief history of musical cinema. When Al Jonson’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer became both a critical and commercial success, it ushered in the wave of “talkies”: films with audio.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
From the entire team of Film Inquiry: a very merry Christmas! We hope your holidays will be wonderful and filled with great movies (an, of course, food)!
Christmastime. Is Here. ‘Tis the season of light and gift-giving, but also of nostalgia and tired holiday classics (I imagine that this is the one time of year many of you find the need to break out the VCR).
Christmas films are a part of our cinematic language, and nothing feels better than hanging out with loved ones, drinking cocoa while watching It’s a Wonderful Life, or saying your favorite lines from A Christmas Story (“You’ll shoot your Eye out!”). As great as these films are chances are you won’t pop in a copy of Scrooge on a hot Saturday afternoon in August.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men is a unique genre mash-up that contains elements of western, horror, drama, and crime films. The film follows the interwoven arcs of several characters in West Texas in the early 1980s. While hunting, Lleyelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes across millions of dollars at the bloody scene of a drug deal gone awry.
A few weeks back the Film Inquiry team vented their rage at the films we felt have undeservedly found a home in the good graces of both critics and audiences. This week, as we gear up for the good nature and cheer of the holidays, we thought we would go the other way and make cases for those films which though finding little love upon their theatrical releases, have managed to make themselves comfy in the warmth of our hearts. It doesn’t matter that critics, audiences and the film culture at large more or less forgot about these films the week after they were released, we know that everyone else is just making a terrible misassessment of work that is of undeniable quality.
Being an actor is hard – and most people should notice this. Spend a few moments trying to learn that exchange of dialogue from that movie you watched the other day, and you’ll quickly realize that regurgitating lines while maneuvering your face in a way that matches what you’re supposed to be feeling is like trying to rub your stomach and pat your head simultaneously (although I can do that flawlessly.) Good acting should capture your soul.
A central attribute to a film’s success or failure is the performances of its stars as certain characters. Now, while it is usually the adult actors or the adult actresses who are the stand-out stars in a feature film, there are also roles where it is the child that puts a new perspective on the approach to and execution of acting. Like adults, the child stars can adapt from supporting roles to leading.
Despite his iconic status as James Bond’s most celebrated foe, Ernst Blofeld has a chequered history in the 007 franchise. It seems as though no one really quite knew what to do with him. The fluctuating, inconstant persona gifted to him by so many various actors was not helped by a legal skirmish in the wings that flared up seemingly every six months.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is focused on the year 1955.