I have a sneaking suspicion that every actor wants to be in a western, but box office results prove that audiences don’t want to see all those westerns. Sure, slinging on a holster and leaning against a fence looks cool, as one of the promotional photos for The Magnificent Seven proves, but without some sort of twist, people are not buying tickets. True Grit (2010) and Django Unchained are perhaps the only pure westerns to crack $100 million at the U.
I’m very happy to announce that we get to give away a super awesome prize pack! Valued at AU$140, you can win an in-season double pass to The Man Who Knew Infinity starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons (opening in cinemas Australia-wide on May 5), as well as six DVDs: I’m Not There, Love & Mercy, Nowhere Boy, Slumdog Millionaire, The Motorcycle Diaries and The World’s Fastest Indian.
It has been five weeks since Batman Vs. Superman debuted at cinemas worldwide to a gargantuan opening weekend, followed immediately by toxic word of mouth that has caused the film to fade into irrelevancy even as it is still playing in theatres. The fact it could have potentially derailed Warner Bros.
As the title indicates, I have epilepsy. If you ran into me on the street, it’s not something you’d be able to tell about me by looking. That’s not how epilepsy works, generally.
Not much is given away in the trailer for The Wait, the first feature from Italian director Piero Messina. A mother connects with her son’s girlfriend before he is due home, and Sicily is given a quality that can be interpreted as either dreamlike or feverish depending on the individual moment. The extra bit of information I’ll give away is that the film takes place over Easter weekend, which adds some hefty religious symbolism to the idea of waiting.
Many of us find escape in our imagination. Fantasy allows our mind to slip away into worlds that differ in ways both big and small from the one in which we most commonly reside. In the 1999 film American Beauty, fantasy takes hold of many of the characters within the story and offers escape to those who lean into it.
His face adorns posters and t-shirts across the world and, whilst there aren’t many who can likely claim to have seen his films, there aren’t many who haven’t heard his name. James Dean, like Marilyn Monroe, has elevated to the status of cultural icon in much the same way that Kurt Cobain has in the music world. The poster boy for teenage disillusionment, Dean had an experimental approach to life that ran way ahead of his time.
The overbearing mother is like a cartoon to me, something I’ve seen portrayals of but never experienced in real life. My own mother barely comments on my steadfast single life and accepts both what I wish to tell her and what I choose to play close to the vest. It’s always been that way and hence is comfortingly familiar, which I assume is exactly how those on the opposite end of the mother-daughter spectrum describe their relationship like, too.
If you don’t keep up, the filmography of Québécois director Xavier Dolan could expand into an intimidating mass. He released five films between 2009 and 2014 and already has two more in the pipeline, additionally serving as writer, editor, actor, and costume designer for several of the projects. That output, along with other extraneous facts, like his young age, has drawn headlines that sadly take attention away from what is an expressive filmography.
Film is the art of light. Paradoxically, light is that is the ultimate source required for life to exist, and is the greatest substance to cause horrific calamities. Fire was both a blessing and a curse for ancient civilizations to understand and attempt to harness, but it was quite often their undoing.
As someone who literally knows nothing about the character Doctor Strange, I was not expecting a bald Tilda Swinton to punch Benedict Cumberbatch out of his body in this trailer. It was the first time anything about this project reached out and made me interested, so, good job teaser, you served your purpose. I’m certainly not the only one in the dark about this less-than-prominent superhero, whose name is not as self-explanatory as Ant-Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy.
“The horror genre gets (us) in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives (us) this chance to … reflect on who we are and look at the … uglier side that we don’t always look at, and have fun with that very thing.” —Drew Goddard (IMDb) I may be a little late to the party (by about four or five years) but for those of you who have not yet seen Drew Goddard (writer and director) and Joss Whedon’s (writer and producer) The Cabin In The Woods be forewarned, this article contains spoilers.
Every Tuesday Film Inquiry publishes the movies that are opening in cinemas! This week: Elvis & Nixon, The Meddler, The Huntsman:
In this episode of The Power of Film, I had the pleasure of speaking with Eugene Sun Park, who is a producer and experimental filmmaker in Chicago. We got to chat about the Chicago film industry (and how it differs from Hollywood), his production company Full Spectrum Features and supporting filmmakers of all kinds, the film he’s producing and currently crowdfunding, Signature Move, as well as the awkward, awkward moment at the Oscars where Chris Rock brought out three stereotypical Asian American kids, and no one thought to maybe scrap that, beforehand. Upcoming film:
Rarely is a filmmaker as entrenched in infamy as John Waters. Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1946, the king of counterculture became known in the 1970s for his creative collaborations with the equally infamous Divine and his gang of Dreamlanders. He began work as a director with a series of experimental short films including Hag In A Black Leather Jacket (1964) and the Andy Warhol-inspired Roman Candles (1966).