drama
Director John Carney’s most beloved films are all about the idea of “authentic” music, with protagonists who are either singer-songwriters or bands all struggling to make a living when soulless pop is all that is keeping the music industry alive. His previous film Begin Again was about a struggling singer and a washed-up music producer making a concept album that laughed in the face of pop music’s obsession with inauthenticity. The characters were celebrated in the film, despite making an album of beige-sounding Starbucks music that seemed to ignore that rock’n’roll is so exciting because of its lack of authenticity.
On Belle’s original release, I was intrigued by the film but felt no real urge to watch it. It almost seemed to sell itself on the back of its unusual story: a biracial woman born to aristocracy during the time of the slave trade.
Superhero films are seemingly a dime a dozen lately. Though only the beginning of May, we have already seen the release of Deadpool, Batman v. Superman:
You may be wondering why you are reading a review for a film initially slated for release in 2014, after its première at the Los Angeles film festival, in the here and now of 2016. It tells us a lot about contemporary cinema and the struggle independent films face in finding distribution that this well-made film has waited two years for a wider release when there have been countless lesser films clogging our screens in the intervening time. It has been with the recent support of Ava DuVernay’s company ARRAY that Echo Park has found a cinematic release in LA and New York as well as an international release through Netflix and, if you are looking for something different to the sometimes saccharine cuteness of US indie romances, I would encourage you to seek this film out.
The story of Freckles, written and directed by Denise Papas Meechan, opens with Lizzie introducing herself by voicing her strong hatred she has for the “ugly orange dots” that she refers to as her “star map to loneliness”. This is a story of a woman who has a disturbingly distorted view of herself. Despite her mother telling her that the freckles are “kisses from God”, Lizzie sees them as a curse.
People often tend to demarcate their lives by coordinating them with macro-narratives. For instance, the segment of your life that took place during the George W. Bush administration, or the Vietnam war.
It’s been quite some time since my last volume of Words vs. Moving Pictures, in which I discussed Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and compared it to the 1962 film. Since then, it has taken me a long time to try to find another book and subsequent movie adaptation that would be worthy of discussion.
Despite The Falling Snow is a film by novelist and filmmaker Shamim Sharif. The film is based on her book of the same name and plays out over two time periods. In 1950’s Moscow Katya is a spy for the Americans and is encouraged to marry and steal secrets from the young politician Alex.
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.
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.
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).
Even in world cinema, the stories we see on screen are largely those depicting the lives and crises of the most well-off members of each respective society – showing situations that still can largely be referred to as “first world problems” without a sense of ironic bite. It is why a film like Dheepan is so urgently needed in the current, self-centred socio-political climate. It firmly puts us in the shoes of characters whose stories are never told in cinema:
Legend is a word that is batted around pretty easily these days, but one person who is fully deserving of that title is Robert De Niro. One of the most celebrated actors of his generation, the New York born actor has ascended Hollywood’s ranks and is now considered by many to be on par with the likes of Marlon Brando. With seven Academy Awards nominations (two wins), as well as being nominated for eight Golden Globes (one win) and six BAFTAS, De Niro is held in high regard by the industry and public alike, in spite of some questionable career decisions in recent years.
With only four movies to his name so far, and with features ranging in genre from coming-of-age dramas (Mud) to quasi-science fiction (Take Shelter), Jeff Nichols’ films have at least one thing in common (other than that they all star Michael Shannon): they are all intimate productions, both in style and in their focus on the tight-knit relationships around us. Often set in the American South where Nichols himself grew up, his films deal with familial struggles and upsets in usually uneventful communities.