2010s
45 Years is unquestionably well-written and well-acted, to such a high degree that is literally impossible to argue otherwise. To say that Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay give two of the most emotionally effective performances of their long and illustrious careers is equivalent to saying that the sky is blue and the world is round; it is so plainly obvious, arguing in its favour seems like a waste of time, as the greatness is clearly there for all to see. Emotionally engaging from the opening minutes On paper, the film feels like the opposite of director Andrew Haigh’s previous film Weekend; that film was about two men who meet and fall in love over the course of (you guessed it) a weekend, after a one night stand turns into something deeper.
Paper Towns is an adaptation of John Green’s book of the same name. You may already have read or watched his highly successful The Fault In Our Stars, and have come back for more. Why wouldn’t you, he’s John Green?
Although not without empathy, it is hard to argue against the statement that teenagers are some of the most self-centred people alive. I know this from being a particularly self-centred teenager, who at thirteen regularly made statements of self-loathing in order to gouge sympathy and attention from my peers. It was an attention seeking phase that I mercifully grew out of very quickly, but I can at least be forgiven for it for being young and stupid.
One problem with modern society at the moment seems to be an obsession with nostalgia, which is being milked by marketing companies. This has bled into the hipster movement and has lead to the larger debate of analogue vs digital as digital technologies develop. It is now bleeding into every aspect of pop culture, and it is one which can be seen in film.
Absolutely Anything is a comedy co-written and directed by Terry Jones, he of illustrious Monty Python fame. It stars Simon Pegg and a host of other recognisable British talent and comics. In addition to this, Jones’ fellow Pythons offer their vocal talents, as does the late, great Robin Williams.
Well, this was inevitable. After the huge success of Despicable Me 1 & 2, (both films generating a combined total of over 1.5 billion dollars at the US domestic box office) further expansion of the Despicable Me franchise was bound to happen.
Director Noah Baumbach has become synonymous with “hipster cinema”- which in his case, means character studies of self-obsessed, over-privileged big city dwellers, who he tends to love, even if audience members are more likely to find their company unwelcoming. Yet he is a far more complicated director than that; weirdly, in his most recent movies, he’s been rationing out the abrasive commentary of the hipster community (the raging members of Generation X and the fresh-faced millennials) with something approaching empathetic humanism. His previous film, While We’re Young, was the most empathetic portrayal of hipster culture we are ever likely to see in modern cinema – something even the sharp left turn into trademark Baumbach cynicism in the film’s third act couldn’t overwrite.
Unfortunately, in March of this year, we lost the great documentary film-maker Albert Maysles. With his brother David (who died in 1988), they made some quite important and influential documentaries such as Grey Gardens, Salesman and Gimme Shelter. Their style was using direct cinema; following a subject and shooting a ton of footage without any agenda or plotline planned and creating a documentary in post production.
Here is an interesting thought: Al Pacino is having something of a career renaissance. His last three major roles, including this year’s Manglehorn, are as far away from the go-to gangster’s early movies as can be.
Even though he’s often stereotyped as solely a director of inferior British gangster films, based on his first two releases Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Guy Ritchie is actually more of an experimental director than you may initially realise. Even though his early films were successful and enjoyable guilty pleasures, Ritchie had something of an insatiable need to be taken seriously, looking towards the European arthouse for inspiration. His third feature Swept Away, starring his then wife Madonna, was a remake of a satirical 1974 Italian film not widely known to international audiences.
A great director can elevate a movie that is nothing short of trash cinema into something masterful. Throughout his career, Orson Welles repeatedly chose projects (most notably Touch of Evil) as a challenge to see whether he could make a good movie out of source material that was far closer to the gutter than the stars. A cursory glance at some of the best directors of all time, from Welles and Alfred Hitchc*ck to David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh more recently, reads like a list of directors who enjoy cinema at its silliest, yet are such technically skilled filmmakers with a clear love for genre filmmaking that their movies are only ever laughable in a knowing way.
Entourage is an extremely puzzling film. Keeping in mind that the TV show giving rise to the film is superficial in nature, I don’t mean puzzling in the way you’d describe an Alain Renais film as puzzling. No, it is the reasons and decisions around everything to do with the film that I don’t quite understand.
I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl. I’m not even a teenager anymore, and chances are if you’re in the UK and tried to see The Diary of a Teenage Girl, you won’t be either. Thanks, BBFC.
Fantastic Four is a film that people wanted to hate from the start. First, there was the controversial casting of Michael B. Jordan as the traditionally white character Johnny Storm; shortly following this was the discovery that Victor Von Doom was a computer hacker instead of a brilliant inventor; finally, there was the casting itself, which involved younger characters just finishing high school, whereas most adaptations of the story present the Fantastic Four as adults.
If it were not for Paul Thomas Anderson, there is a (very) good chance I wouldn’t be interested in writing about movies. It is because of his films that I take time to write for this humble little website. When I was a high school senior in 2009, my interest in movies inflated dramatically, and I watched a movie just about every night.