Stoner movies aren’t really the best education on weed culture, I’ll be honest with you. If you learnt everything about toking up from watching comedies like Pineapple Express (2008) and This is the End (2013), you know that men like to get really high. They roll up joints and blunts, take plenty of hits on bongs and bowls, and order in family-size pizzas.
This just gets convoluted to an extreme after a while. Let’s just say the obvious, Superman is Jesus even though he’s suppose to represent the American dream from an immigrant perspective. Batman is the personification of order surrounded by chaos.
Even though I may make it look like any idiot can do it, writing reviews is far from easy. The hardest things to review aren’t the plot-heavy science fiction movies or the obscure art house efforts with impenetrable plots like you would imagine – the most difficult movies to review are the films that are just plain boring. I watched Child 44 two days ago, where I made up 100% of the audience for that screening – in the two days since, I have found myself struggling to remember quite a lot of it.
It’s difficult to truly think of others. I’m not saying there is some sort of innate apathy, but there is always a divide between ourselves and the people we should help. We can donate thousands upon thousands of whatever currency, but I can’t imagine, in full capacity, what they suffer.
There are those people who turn their noses up at the romantic comedy. They see it as a silly kind of film designed to entertain a delusional audience. I am not one of those people.
No matter how good their circumstances are, many young people wish they were born in a different time, in a different place, belonging to a different generation they believe they fit in with more. This is almost definitely due to the influence of pop-culture; the 80’s weren’t exactly the best time to live in, yet show a John Hughes movie to any impressionable teenager and they will almost definitely long to have lived in that time period. While We’re Young, the best film to date from director Noah Baumbach, takes a unique look at this theme in the space of one of the best movie montages in recent memory – whereas the young, hipster types long to live in an area of vinyls, VHS tapes and typewriters, the ageing are trying to stay relevant to today, filling their lives with useless technology in order to stay relevant in an ever changing society.
Every week Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Avengers:
The New Hollywood – The End of an Era By the late 1970’s, the film industry had undergone a renaissance. The New Hollywood movement made it so the directors were the “auteurs” of their films, and artistic freedom reigned over modern movies. Unfortunately, all great things must come to an end, and the demise of The New Hollywood movement was on the horizon.
I sat down to watch independent, experimental film How the Sky Will Melt by Matthew Wade the other night with my fiance. Other than bragging about my fiance, I’m including him in the article because he is so very not like me. His favourite movies are comedies, he laughs at fart jokes, and I’m not sure he’s ever seen a David Lynch movie.
From a world where Jack Black is relatively normal and James Marsden looks like Satan, comes the preposterously titled The D Train. Dan Landsman (Black) yearns to be popular despite his best years being behind him. Knowing this, he seeks former school mate Oliver Lawless (Marsden), who has gained some minor fame by appearing in a Banana Boat ad.
I first saw Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the early 2000s; it was a VHS copy playing on a big old JVC television that had a similar depth to a Toyota Aygo. I have since seen Saving Private Ryan a large number of times, but my reaction to its first 25 minutes remains unchanged, a reaction of shock, recoil and deep admiration for the people who executed this excellent, transformative piece of filmmaking. My knowledge of WW2 was minimal at this time, but I roughly knew the basics.
Maps To The Stars is about the aspects of Hollywood that, as a film fan, I‘d rather not think about. Written by the acerbic Bruce Wagner, it is about the cynicism of the industry, about the actors who are motivated by vanity and the money-minded executives who exploit them. These people’s heads have been long removed from their shoulders, their molly-coddled lives are run by other people as they incessantly try and top up their serotonin through drink, drugs, sex and bastardised spiritualism with increasingly less success.
It wouldn’t be correct to describe this as anything other than full-on violence pornography. But it’s awesome. A martial arts instructor is jailed after accidentally killing a man.
This film has been screened at several film festivals. It may have passed by you without your notice. Let’s remedy that, shall we?
Every week Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: The Age of Adaline, Little Boy, The Water Diviner and Adult Beginners.
