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.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is Silent Films from the 1920’s that are worth seeking out.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Me Before You, Popstar:
One annoying trend nowadays is for people to mix their genuine reactions to a film with the hype and varied opinions of others, judging it not on its content, but what you thought it was going to be. Quentin Tarantino flipped heads last year with The Hateful Eight, a considerably slower but angrier entry into his filmography, which caused anger amongst many filmgoers who were expecting another Spaghetti Western tribute that mixed modern music and quick-paced action. This highlights the problem with auteur theory and the reliance of marketing in the current movie climate, where many movie marketeers either must spoil an entire film within the trailer to gain the audience’s confidence to go see it or mismarket a film because they’re unsure on how to sell a unique/niche product to a broad audience.
As a wise man once said “time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ / into the future.” It’s pretty gross to think about, but the seminal event in all of our lives, Space Jam, turns 20 this year. Seems like just yesterday that Michael Jordan rescued Bugs, Daffy and the gang from a lifetime of cosmic-slavery, but here we are.
Have we all let the farting corpse premise sink into our bones enough to not get distracted? Remember, a movie is not its pitch or its three-line synopsis or even its trailer. The conversation about Swiss Army Man seems to be getting stuck on these points, and as eye-catching as they are, it’s leaving us in danger of settling for knee-jerk reactions instead of giving the movie an honest chance.
Within the last couple of years, the Western seems to have made a semi-comeback. Recent notable titles include John Maclean’s directorial debut Slow West, the horror-thriller Bone Tomahawk, and Quentin Tarantino’s claustrophobic and violent The Hateful Eight. And, in just a few months, a remake of The Magnificent Seven will be released, a film adaptation which has attracted the likes of Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Vincent D’Onofrio and more (which is hopefully an indication that it is at least halfway decent).
The subject of mental illness and disorders are interesting, educational, and sometimes sensitive topics in film. From watching movies like Girl, Interrupted, The Road Within and The Machinist, audiences learn a great deal about very real and problematic issues surrounding sufferers, however, can it be said that these representations are portrayed correctly? The film industry is guilty of depicting disorders such as hysteria as an illness that only women suffer from, and autism is far too often painted as a superpower, not to mention the unclear representation of schizophrenia, which causes audiences to confuse the illness with dissociative identity disorder.
When talking about exposé-style documentarians, or documentarians in general, you can’t ignore Alex Gibney. Ever since 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, he’s been as prolific as he is popular, sparking public interest in everything from the U.
Director Ang Lee returns with his first film in four years, following up the critically and commercially successful Life of Pi with another book adaptation boasting some noteworthy use of technology. Lee has carved out a unique place for himself as an auteur, not looking back longingly to the days of film but exploring and pushing modern digital techniques to enhance character-based filmmaking. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk sees him combining 3D, 4K resolution, and a very high 120fps frame rate to make the film look as close to natural human sight as possible.
Chantal Akerman is a unique director whose minimalist compositions have earned her a reputation as one of cinema’s foremost screen artists. Best known for her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman’s body of non-fiction work stands out with deliberately punctuated documentaries, giving the term “fly on the wall” new meaning. While Akerman’s body of work is varied, her vision of melding reality and fantasy are sometimes indistinguishable, and this omnibus of her work shines a light on an omniscient eye for capturing the world around us.
Shane Black’s The Nice Guys couldn’t come at a better time. Actually, strike that. If it had come out just a few months later after the slog of the summer movie season of blockbuster remakes, sequels, reboots, and rehashes had polluted our minds, then perhaps it would be received all the more with acclaim.
The winner of 2015’s Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, From Afar creeps into theaters with some serious credentials. It wouldn’t have come this far if it didn’t, as the story of a complicated relationship between a middle-aged man and a young gang member in Caracas doesn’t exactly scream marketability. If first-time feature director Lorenzo Vigas had been peddling it on his own, it likely wouldn’t have made it out of the festival circuit, no matter how good it was.
A common stereotype in film is that women don’t work and have no career. What can we learn from the films in which women’s careers are at the forefront?
We know that the hemp plant has been used in production of products since at least the 1600s. Up until the 1930s, marijuana was legal, used, and widely accepted. In the 1930s, with the onset of the great depression and American paranoia, “reefer madness” propaganda started to sprout up, as a huge anti-marijuana prohibition came underway.
