Tag: FIlm

June 6, 2013

Mud

The best thing about Mud is that it feels so real and yet it maybe never happened at all. Jeff Nichols broke big, relatively, with the release last year of Take Shelter – a film about a paranoid schizophrenic with apocalyptic delusions – but his literal debut, Shotgun Stories was a small, gritty, rural-set drama that was barely seen by anybody. They seem a disparate pair at first and Mud, his third film and something of a modern-day fairytale, seemed on synopsis to take him out in a third different direction but in execution it actually unites the oeuvre of this esoteric auteur. Delusions, dynasties and the deep-south are all smashed together in this sublime, smile-evoking story.
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June 6, 2013

Stoker

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It seems as if Twenty-Thirteen is to be the year of Korea, more specifically it is a year in which more moviegoers than ever will be exposed to the singular style of South Korean cinema: Spike Lee will remake SK gateway film Oldboy, Bong Joon-Ho will release the blockbuster Snowpiercer, etc. This South Korean season premieres with Park Chan Wook’s English language debut, Stoker; a film that, on first appearances, seems ill-suited to his strengths. The set-up is essentially stolen from a soap-opera – A handsome millionaire dies under suspicious circumstances and days later his younger brother moves into his manor, seducing the man’s still grieving wife and daughter – but the execution is as stunning and strange as one might expect from the man, just nowhere near as good.

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May 19, 2013

The Hunt

Pedophilia and the related abuses of children are thought of by most people, by ‘the public’, as a clear-cut issue even in this day and age of moral relativism and ambiguity. If you were to say that someone was ‘evil’ for being a homosexual than the public would label you hateful – a label I would not contest – but say the same about a pedophile and you will likely be met by uncomfortable nods and murmurs of agreement, even from those who lean deep to the left. The Hunt, in its way, disagrees with this simplicity; seeming to state that there is more at play in these cases then a mere moral judgement can convey. It presents pedophilia as a matter of perspective.

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May 16, 2013

Trailer Trash – The Congress Arrested Development About Time, Gravity

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There is something of a theme to this edition of Trailer Trash: auteur-driven, indie-scale science fiction films that you might not be excited for but surely should be. There is though one obvious exception to this rule that I included because, well I had too; besides the existence of a new season of said show is strange enough to me that seeing the trailer almost felt like a glimpse into an alternate reality. Onwards.

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May 9, 2013

Star Trek Into Darkness

startrekThe response to this film is going to be divisive, it will likely split the blockbuster film audience into two camps: those who are fans of Star Trek and those who thank god they aren’t. The latter will likely like it like they did the first film four years ago, but they’re response won’t be a passionate one; the Trekkies however will have a strong reaction to the events that unfold over the film’s two hours and given the history of fandoms with films in the past I daresay it will be a negative one. Personally I’ve never seen a single second of the series and so for this opening day session I sat myself in the section of the cinema free from all nineties-inspired novelty T-shirts and replica rayguns, surrounding myself instead with people who shovel popcorn and gesticulate at the screen during action scenes. I wasn’t expecting the world, just a journey to a strange new one that would wile away the morning in that cinema-magic way.

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April 28, 2013

Upstream Color

The slight budgeted but densely scripted sci-fi film Primer was praised for the truthful physics, potent technicality and unadulterated complexity with which it treated its core treatise of time travel. Having heard this hype Primer was a film that I quickly became excited for and while I eventually respected the result it turns out that those traits are not what I most look for in a movie and so the picture was one that I could never quite care for like so many fans do. For me it was an amazing visualization of a chapter in some cool textbook more than it was a living, breathing movie. Now, nine odd years later, comes the follow-up, the second feature from Primer auteur Shane Carruth; the intriguingly titled Upstream Color. Given our history my hopes for it were lower, and maybe that helped, but boy did I love the result; a film as frenetic and feeling as it is funly frustrating to figure out.

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April 16, 2013

Trailer Trash – Mistaken For Strangers Way, Way Back Behind the Candelabra

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Here, today, are three trailers that made me very happy; hilarious and heartfelt little pieces of film-making on their own right whose success bodes well for the features they are attached to. Given what a bad morning it is otherwise – Boston Marathon Massacre news, etc. – I figured it was best to share them. They are three very different films: a music-mockumentary, a feel good family comedy and a made for TV biopic but hopefully one of them puts a smile on your face like they did mine (Yeah, I can be that saccharine).

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April 15, 2013

The Company You Keep

The Company You Keep is yet another political history lesson from Robert Redford; a man who has tried so hard to master the things, though thus far without much success. Redford’s last three directorial attempts have all fallen into the same category and been hit with the same comments and criticisms: he gets the great casts – boy does he get the cast, the poster for Company has to list the names vertically so that they fit – his shooting style is strong, if a little stolid, and the script from Lem Dobbs is a sharp recreation of riveting real events but even with such strong ingredients the movie ultimately ends up as form and flavorless, as nothing much of anything, and I don’t really know why.

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April 14, 2013

To the Wonder

Everything that people make fun of film director Terrence Malick for is taken to its most extreme in his latest picture To the Wonder, which is quite literally just pretentiously narrated shots of pretty scenery for, thankfully, only a little under two hours (length the one trope that the film doesn’t tick). It evokes in a way the image of the cliche ‘European’  movie that people who don’t see anything with subtitles seem to have, though that’s nothing to do with the fact that only around ten percent of the words spoken are in English. For these reasons it’s funny to watch, but only at first; just like how for others, namely the cinematography, it is on occasional beautiful to watch but the novelty of this wears out at much the same speed leaving the rest of the running time largely a labour to sit through, staring at the screen through glazed over eyes.

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April 4, 2013

Trance

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The problem with the proliferation of these puzzle box movies post-Inception is that we now know all too well how to watch them: we know what to look for, we know which lines are mere context and which are massive clues ( though of course the former can still change the meaning of the latter into something fresh). Trance is a twisty movie that will at times outrun you with its revelations, then hide behind a corner waiting to jump out with some sort of sucker punch, as all good entries in the genre should but it is tripped up by this very fact. We know too quickly where the film is going to hit us once the fight begins and so the impact of each blow is blunted despite the brutality with which they are thrown by stylist Danny Boyle.

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