2010s
Although many are still reeling from the aftershocks of the Sony hacking scandal, the growth of the cybercrime era had actually reached red alert long before the North Koreans. It is quite frightening to imagine how a person could be as deadly as a nuclear weapon with just one click of a keyboard, and it remains a problem unresolved by international governments. As always, Hollywood’s part on this is to jump on the bandwagon, establishing a new genre of its own with collective bits of movie magic in order to turn in easy money for film studios.
When the Oscar nominations rolled in on Thursday, perhaps the biggest surprise – other than the snubs for Selma – were the six nods including Best Picture and Best Actor for American Sniper, a movie which few expected to be in the running after getting no attention from the Golden Globes or BAFTAs. There was an even bigger surprise a few days later, when it was announced that the film drew in a stunning $89 million in its opening weekend, which is more than most of last year’s summer blockbusters. The Iraq War drama snuck up on the awards race out of nowhere, and shattered January box office records beyond all expectation.
What We Do In The Shadows is a mockumentary that expertly takes the piss out of the currently very glamorous pop culture status of the historic monster, the vampire. It initially features four vampires who live together in a flat in Wellington, New Zealand. All have arrived there for different reasons:
The discussion on the best knockout films of all-time continues. If you missed my review on Million Dollar Baby in December, it served as the start of this discussion. This includes films based on boxing, wrestling, martial arts, MMA, etc.
Biopics are difficult to get right, especially if you’re covering the life story of somebody whose life story is already well known. How do you make it entertaining to an audience familiar with the backstory, yet still entertaining to a new audience who aren’t? Mike Leigh’s latest directorial effort Mr.
2014 should really be known as “The Year of the Biopic.” There have been films this past year that were based on many world-reknown icons, from Martin Luther King to Stephen Hawking to pop singer James Brown. And somewhere in the midst of all those comes the story of Alan Turing, a British mathematician that almost single-handedly won World War II.
Peter Jackson’s first Lord of the Rings trilogy is potentially one of the finest trilogies ever made. Each film in the series, from Fellowship of the Ring to Return of the King, are all solid masterpieces, containing beautiful cinematography, fine character acting, and iconic soundtracks by Howard Shore. The Hobbit series, on the other hand, is much more inconsistent.
In an era when Hollywood is running out of ideas more than any other previous point in its century-long history, the big studios’ desire to unnecessarily remake everything grows even more unwelcome. It’s not that good remakes can’t be made (after all, The Departed, The Fly and a Fistful of Dollars all exist), but modern audiences are so skeptical of remakes that they tend to stay away in droves. The remakes only seem to happen presumably so that the studios can maintain the copyright to the originals and continue to make heaps of money.
Pretty much every big screen reboot of a beloved childhood TV show has been terrible. Yet for people with a certain nostalgia for it, they will end up loving it regardless of quality. I never watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was growing up, which is why I can recognize that the recent Michael Bay-produced reboot is terrible, but a worrying amount of people I’m friends with can’t see it as anything other than an extension of what they loved when they were younger.
“If it’s in a word, or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of The Babadook”. The mainstream horror genre is in a bad state at the moment. In the wake of the success of Paranormal Activity, Hollywood studios are taking advantage of the huge financial potential of the genre, and the fact that you can spend very little money on a horror film and make a huge profit off of teenage audiences.
The only thing missing from Dreamworks’ new film Penguins of Madagascar is sanity. But we don’t go to watch a film about characters set in the Madagascar universe expecting logic. So when an octopus yells at his harmoniously compliant servants:
The Theory of Everything is the story of Stephen Hawking, reflecting his life from his early 20’s until decades later after he had become a world icon. It is at times overly romanticized, and tends to overlook certain elements of Hawking’s disease in order to instead focus on the obvious triumphs of his life. It is still a worthy film, though, and this is mostly due to Eddie Redmayne’s fantastic performance.
Every year when Oscar season rolls around I become an increasingly cynical person. I stop enjoying the movies I’m watching and instead start to tick off the list of tropes I see in a game I like to call “Oscar-bait Bingo.” In the coming months, cinema screens worldwide will be treated to my two least favorite Oscar-baiting sub-genres:
It seems to happen far too often: A new, original comedy premieres, to mostly good reviews, and so the studio decides to seize on the original’s success and create a sequel. And the sequel is not nearly as good as the first.
As much as I love movies, I’m completely against the franchise bandwagon. Every time I hear about a movie I love having a successful opening weekend at the box office I get a sense of impending dread that they are going to ruin my memories of it with a plethora of inferior sequels. Even though I grew up on the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises, both the books and the films, I’m not feeling nostalgia so much as cynicism whenever a prequel is announced or released.