retrospective
When I was seven years old, one of my best friends told me about a movie called Legally Blonde. “I think you would really like it,” she excitedly announced to me after school one day. “The main character is a girly girl who’s also really smart.
There’s a warm feeling that engulfs you when viewing an old Hollywood musical. Usually, it’s a wave of nostalgia as soon as the opening credits start to roll. When silver screen icons like Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Ginger Rogers or Fred Astaire show up on your screen to entertain the masses for a few hours, you’re guaranteed an entertaining, yet competent, movie experience.
‘So Bad They’re Good’ movies are a thing now. Movie list websites are awash with them. Troll 2 is often the high-watermark, and it appears that most of these no-budget horrors tend to be of American origin.
About midway through Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature 1962 film debut of Ivan’s Childhood, in the midst of a Russian battlefield field torn asunder during World II, a cross is backlit by a setting sun. The cross is obscured in shadow and yet its beauty remains. A spiritual man, Tarkovsky was never afraid to ask questions about spiritual matters.
The new Criterion Collection release of A Touch of Zen includes director King Hu’s own notes on the film. In these notes, Hu discusses a conversation he had with a Zen Buddhist who told him that Zen must be understood not through verbal explanation, but through an enlightening experience. Despite his renown as a director of wuxia films, Hu was neither a Buddhist nor a martial artist; but, he believed that capturing an experience of Zen would make for a strong film.
Every year, ten movies are bestowed the honor of becoming nominated by the Academy. Many of these films will have already had various successes throughout the year – festivals, box office and other prestigious awards. Yet, only one ends the night being declared the best of the best.
As soon as Justus D. Barnes fired point-blank at the audience in Edwin S. Porter’s influential The Great Train Robbery, the idea of violence to control an audience was introduced.
When it comes to cinema, it is truly the best and the worst of times. An unstable economy and the rampant rise of piracy have forced studios to rehash old films and hammer original ideas into the ground just to try and make money, with many mainstream movies now catering towards the profitable Chinese market to make those big bucks that the US haven’t been producing lately. Whilst it’s a dire situation, this new social media age has been a huge step forward in retaining and reviving film history.
I first watched Party Monster a couple of years ago, when once-infamous club promoter Michael Alig was released from prison, where he served 17 years for brutally murdering his drug dealer. The 2003 biopic, based on James St James’ memoir, “Disco Bloodbath”, flew under the radar during its initial release. But the film’s subject, “Club Kids” of ’90s Manhattan, once commanded TV screens across the country.
The opening sequence of Ousmane Sembene’s Faat Kiné shows us the complexity of urban motion in a place where modernity and traditionalism are still somewhat at odds. We see groups of women in traditional Senegalese dress walking through the city of Dakar. Then, the camera pulls further and further away from them until we can see can see a whole city block.
Back in 1993, Steven Soderbergh just came off the disappointment that was his ambitious yet unloved second feature, Kafka. He turned his attention to a property best described as a sure-thing, a money grab, if you will; writer A. E.
In this part of Positive Psychology & Film, Laurie Agard interprets Life Is Beautiful, the inspiring and gut-wrenching Italian war film.
Carrie is a movie inspired by one of Stephen King’s first novels, a dark story mixed with dramatic notes, where all the uncertainties and fears of adolescence, such as the problem of being different in a society that does not forgive, are transformed into anger and the desire for revenge. The movie was directed by Brian De Palma in 1976, but I believe it is a timeless story; indeed there have been many remakes, the last one in 2013 by Kimberly Peirce, setting it in a modern context. De Palma’s film, which can be considered a cult classic, shows the daily life of teenagers at an American high school and explores the theme of bullying deeply, adding some gory scenes towards the end.
Hey, it’s Space Jam Week! Among totems of ’90s nostalgia, few remain as prominent and present in 2016 as Space Jam. The film was Warner Brother’s attempt to turn Michael Jordan’s cultural capital cinematic, as well as the first use of their iconic stable of cartoon characters in a feature since the compilation films of the ’80s.
Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a fictional transcendence of classic Greek mythos through the ubiquity of the motion picture camera. As the film’s title suggests, this is Greek philosopher Homer’s The Odyssey told on the grandest of scales and sparing no expense that 20th Century cinema had to offer.