Features
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?
For as long as movies have existed, there have been a slew of gimmicks to lure audiences in. Audiences were drawn into 3D movies as early as the 1920s, and gimmick color effects existed even earlier. Some directors have even taken more clever approaches.
This week, the suicide of Robin Williams shook the entire world to its core. Robin Williams, famous for his stand-up comedy and acting in numerous films, touched many people’s lives and hearts. The team of Film Inquiry too, was greatly saddened by the magnificent actor’s death, and we would like to pay our tribute to him by all sharing some of our fondest memories of him and his work, and the impact he had on us.
Hello fellow cinephiles! It’s been a while since our last Cinephile’s Lounge! It’s my fault:
For the next 30 days, Amazon own my soul. This isn’t the first time – in fact, whenever I subscribe to a new movie streaming service, I have a habit of trying to watch everything I want in that 30 day window so I cancel before I start having to pay. There are plenty of good reasons to stay subscribed to a website (and I’m not saying you shouldn’t), and there are a plethora of good streaming services available, but if you’re on a tight budget taking advantage of a free trial is the only option.
Author’s note: I set out to write a very simple article looking back on Tarantino’s work and I wound up on a truly head-spinning journey into the mad world of Quentin Tarantino’s film universe. I believe I’ve come out of the rabbit hole more informed and slightly dazed, but with some interesting things to say.