Features
Chilean Filmmaker Pablo Larraín never mentioned the word Trilogy when he embarked on creating Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012), however, these three films do act as part of a whole: Larraín’s vision regarding Pinochet’s military coup of 1973 and the ensuing dictatorship. Tony Manero and Post Mortem are both grim parables of folks stuck in a moral stupor, wandering the streets of a Chile that no longer knows itself, that silently witnesses the arrest and disappearance of hundreds of people every day, violence and torture a common thing and a convenient shroud for the crimes of civilians.
What I love about Martin Scorsese is that he is a filmmaker who loves movies. Over the years his personality has taken on new dimensions as a film historian as well as a director. The movies he’s restored through his non-profit Film Foundation company has brought tons of movies that would have either gone unseen, or deteriorated without his restoration projects.
There is a difference between stark realism and good storytelling. Cinema is open to different perceptions. We, as aware audiences, ought to give more importance to the integrity of presenting the story and not its factual correctness.
There had been many films about outer space before 1968, but it was in that year that Stanley Kubrick lit the fuse leading to a powder keg that would explode 9 years later. The influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey is arguably the most influential film ever made.
Today, I’m presenting a pretty awesome mobile app, and it’s called Movie On Me. Social media has made the world a lot smaller – I have online friends in India, the U.S.
Every month, the team of Film Inquiry is posed a film-related question. This month, we were wondering about film pet peeves. Do we have any?
It’s rare that we see such a rich fertile imagination in cinema. Hayao Miyazaki didn’t create movies but fantastically textured worlds that were so unique and yet so specific to his sensibilities. Miyazaki films can’t be categorized, and that’s what makes him such a distinctive auteur.
In this internet savvy age, successfully avoiding spoilers for movies and TV shows is a talent we all wish we had. All it takes is a brief glance at Twitter after an opening day or a TV air-date to find that what you’ve been waiting to watch for ages has been spoiled before you’ve even been granted a chance to watch it. Yet these overly enthusiastic tweeters aren’t exactly the biggest threat to my enjoyment of a film, even if they do deserve a slap across the face for making me enjoy it far less; the biggest threat is the trailers for the films themselves, which increasingly spoil crucial elements of a movie before it even opens.
Oh man, hasn’t August been the craziest month? For many of us, school and uni started again, people got back from their summer holidays and had to get back to their jobs, and for me – I spent almost two weeks away from home for work (and vacation – gotta make the most of those job trips!).
Since the market is so flooded with remakes and reboots it can be difficult to sift through the titles to find original material. Sometimes a film can take on new life with a modern makeover. Brian DePalama’s Scarface is a good example.
Have you ever noticed that many films are released to theaters around the same time as another with a very similar theme? They are called Twin Films, or “films with the same, or very similar, plot produced and/or released at the same time in two different studios.” I often thought it was lazy; that filmmakers are running out of ideas, so they’re all trying to out-do one another with the better story.
Guardians of the Galaxy broke records this year when its soundtrack reached number one, making it the first soundtrack in history to reach number one with no new songs on the album. This got me thinking about great soundtracks and the use of popular music versus composition. There’s a time and a place for both, and sometimes a time for none.
There is a certain point where our love of literature meets our love of cinema. It happens when a screenplay is so well-written, so insightful, that we can quote from it as we would from any well-respected book. Words that make us think, ponder the world around us, criticize the society we live in, analyze the direction our lives are headed towards, or simply inspire us to take action.
I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t lured me into watching a movie or two: the old “Based On A True Story” tagline. The Conjuring, a recent horror release that is based on the true story, involves possessed dolls and physical apparitions and it’s not necessarily something everyone would believe to be true, so how factual can the story be?
Don’t have the time to watch a full-length movie? Think Blade Runner drags and you never really got through it? Well, the guys over at 1A4Studio have created 1-minute-long versions of a ton of movies, so that you can spare your time for better things (wait, better things than watching movies?
