2015
It’s been at least two years now since I first saw Daniel Radcliffe on The Graham Norton Show, sporting the unattractive hair extensions that would define his character, Igor’s, look. Admittedly, I have been excited for Victor Frankenstein since I first heard of its production. A Frankenstein ‘re-imagining’, told from Igor’s point of view, and one starring both Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy?
Is it selfish for adults to demand more from children’s entertainment? Adults have access to a wealth of different mediums of entertainment to enjoy, so should we crave animated films, mostly intended for a younger audience, to cater towards adult audiences? Indicators of these include dealing with deeper and darker themes, adult-only jokes/pop culture references and generally being an entertaining film that doesn’t go for the lowest common denominator.
What a relief Creed is. With a current cinematic landscape dominated by remakes, reboots and sequels, the initial idea of Creed just sounded so unnecessary. A pseudo-combination of a Rocky reboot that is a sequel whilst also working as a remake just felt like something we really didn’t need.
In the very North of England, settled into the cinematic hillside of the North Pennines, there lives a family of sheep farmers. Amongst the snow, the wind, and the dying local farm industry, this small family battles every day to rear the perfect sheep and to pursue the life they have always dreamed of. Meet the Hutchinsons – the stars of quirky documentary Addicted to Sheep.
Even if my opinions may come across like those of a film snob at times, one who will do all in his power to avoid anything audiences may actually enjoy. I am not a film critic, but a film fan who sometimes happens to write scathing reviews. I don’t think every movie should aspire to be high art, but I do think cinema as a medium should be either entertaining or emotionally involving dramatically, with any pretensions towards being regarded as art being secondary concerns to filmmakers.
As the Western world is finally starting to make significant strides towards sexual orientation equality, it is easy to forget that in most of the rest of the world homosexuals are less than accepted in their respective societies. LGBT people in such countries face discrimination, social exile and physical beatings as punishment for their existence, and as such have largely been forced to stay closeted. But Love is one of those things that is hard to keep hidden, and as one wise man once said about Life, Love too often “finds a way”.
It’s difficult to know where to start when describing Alan Bennett to people who haven’t grown up in the UK. Imagine, if you will, an everyday man, one with a down on his luck and pessimistic sort of look about him. He has a recognisable Northern accent, and a dreary one at that.
The 2010 Chilean mining incident was an enormous event that had the rare ability to unite most of the world to help the victims. The event gained massive media coverage and resulted in books, interviews, TV specials, etc. So, of course, a movie revival was inevitable.
Despite a reputation as an open minded viewer willing to watch cinema of all genres, I have a confession to make: I struggle with Westerns, with many widely acclaimed masterpieces leaving me cold for no easily discernible reason. As much as I love Sergio Leone and many recently made “revisionist Westerns”, how the cornerstones of the genre (the majority of which are directed by John Ford) earned their classic status is unfathomable to me.
Comedy is a tricky thing; it’s hyper-subjective and typically draws from dark elements to create laughter. The search for one’s own comedy is thus, in a sense, the result of grappling some of the least desirable aspects of the human experience and wrangling it into something with a punchline. This is why the cliché of the “sad clown” is so prevalent and continues to be perpetuated to this day, such as with Marc Maron’s self-loathing diatribes and the tag posthumously attributed to Robin Williams.
In What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy two sons are brought together by a shared legacy, the legacy mentioned in the title. Both are the sons of high-ranking Nazi officers.
Most directors have a recognisable style that characterises their movies, giving them a distinctive visual stamp that claims it as wholly theirs. Todd Haynes is an unusual director in that his style differs from movie to movie, fully committing to replicating different genres and bygone fashions to the extent that he has no distinctive visual style that claims any movie as distinctively his. With Carol, he has made a period drama not entirely dissimilar from his early film, 2002’s Far From Heaven.
Although initially derided as nothing more than a rip-off of similar dystopian novels (and their subsequent film adaptations) The Running Man and Battle Royale, author Suzanne Collins saw her book series become increasingly popular due to how it tied in with the contemporary societal fear of graphic violence co-existing with inane entertainment. Collins devised the idea for her original 2008 novel whilst at home channel-surfing, with the image of a bleak reality showcased by war reports on news channels making an uneasy bedfellow with the artificial reality of TV talent competitions. A dystopian fantasy that now closely resembles our reality As the adaptation of the final chapters in Collins’ trilogy closer Mockingjay Part 2 makes its way to the big screen, it is less than a week after the world was left horrified by images of terrorism in Paris.
More so than not, it seems that movies based on actual events have a tendency to romanticize their stories. Or, in the hopes of emotionally prodding their audience, they present an overly sappy version of those events. Thankfully, Spotlight doesn’t fall victim to either of these two trends.
Knight of Cups is the first film I’ve ever seen where over a third of the audience left the theatre during the film. Without any context, I understand why this film would drive people to leave the movie. The film is an artistic montage, never stopping to deliver any linear narrative or dialogue scenes, continuing its visual poetry.