comedy
We currently live in an age where the classic rom-com has become taboo. Jerry Maguire and When Harry Met Sally have been traded out for Trainwreck and now Sleeping with Other People. The problem with this new modern movement is that the emotional heart of the original 80s and 90s films are mostly lost.
Low budget productions always have to come to terms to the fact they are not going to be able to offer proper cinematic spectacle on a minuscule budget. A Dozen Summers instead opts to be as deliberately amateurish as possible, giving it the distinctive feeling of a movie that the twelve year old protagonists would not only wish to make, but would be capable of making. It feels aimless, rambling at even a brief 82 minutes (eight of which are dedicated to elongated end credits), but proves near impossible to dislike despite all of its clear faults.
In Britain we have only just heard of Amy Schumer. But even having seen none of her work and only the rare interview I knew I would love this lady, and when I spotted Trainwreck on the horizon I got very excited. Then, I backtracked.
Although not without empathy, it is hard to argue against the statement that teenagers are some of the most self-centred people alive. I know this from being a particularly self-centred teenager, who at thirteen regularly made statements of self-loathing in order to gouge sympathy and attention from my peers. It was an attention seeking phase that I mercifully grew out of very quickly, but I can at least be forgiven for it for being young and stupid.
Absolutely Anything is a comedy co-written and directed by Terry Jones, he of illustrious Monty Python fame. It stars Simon Pegg and a host of other recognisable British talent and comics. In addition to this, Jones’ fellow Pythons offer their vocal talents, as does the late, great Robin Williams.
Well, this was inevitable. After the huge success of Despicable Me 1 & 2, (both films generating a combined total of over 1.5 billion dollars at the US domestic box office) further expansion of the Despicable Me franchise was bound to happen.
Director Noah Baumbach has become synonymous with “hipster cinema”- which in his case, means character studies of self-obsessed, over-privileged big city dwellers, who he tends to love, even if audience members are more likely to find their company unwelcoming. Yet he is a far more complicated director than that; weirdly, in his most recent movies, he’s been rationing out the abrasive commentary of the hipster community (the raging members of Generation X and the fresh-faced millennials) with something approaching empathetic humanism. His previous film, While We’re Young, was the most empathetic portrayal of hipster culture we are ever likely to see in modern cinema – something even the sharp left turn into trademark Baumbach cynicism in the film’s third act couldn’t overwrite.
Even though he’s often stereotyped as solely a director of inferior British gangster films, based on his first two releases Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Guy Ritchie is actually more of an experimental director than you may initially realise. Even though his early films were successful and enjoyable guilty pleasures, Ritchie had something of an insatiable need to be taken seriously, looking towards the European arthouse for inspiration. His third feature Swept Away, starring his then wife Madonna, was a remake of a satirical 1974 Italian film not widely known to international audiences.
Entourage is an extremely puzzling film. Keeping in mind that the TV show giving rise to the film is superficial in nature, I don’t mean puzzling in the way you’d describe an Alain Renais film as puzzling. No, it is the reasons and decisions around everything to do with the film that I don’t quite understand.
If it were not for Paul Thomas Anderson, there is a (very) good chance I wouldn’t be interested in writing about movies. It is because of his films that I take time to write for this humble little website. When I was a high school senior in 2009, my interest in movies inflated dramatically, and I watched a movie just about every night.
Design studio Art & Graft have injected a welcome sense of humour into 1150 Canyon Road, a dark and stylish crime animation. The London-based animation team, led by creative director Mike Moloney, have done a stunning job of throwing together a narrative and several brilliant characters in just two and a half minutes and a single shot. Combining the paranoid, ’80s crime caper themes of L.
The arcade was video games’ greatest legacy. In a simpler time, before gaming consoles became mobile and placed within the home, the arcade was at the heart of the world’s most ultimate video gaming experience. As an impact, the popularity of the arcade video games snowballed into the animated characters that we now see onscreen – among them the likes of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.
Le Havre (2011) is a still, quiet and dryly hilarious film. It has many of the qualities of a Japanese master like Mizoguchi, but if he had emigrated to a small French port and had been forced to make working class comedies. It focuses on a shoe shiner called Marcel Marx whose wife contracts a seemingly terminal disease.
For as long as there have been films, there have been coming of age movies and there have been high school movies. These types of film, these genres, have become so overdone, that it becomes hard for a single film to really stand out. Dope does.
The marketing team for Paul Feig’s most recent film, Spy, should really reconsider their occupation: this was one of my first thoughts as the credits for the film rolled and I began to head for the exit. The trailers and posters for the film made it seem like little more than Paulina Blart: