G.B.F. – “gay best friend” – is essentially a queer Mean Girls. Like that film, it exists in an exaggerated candy-coloured high school reality, our world emphatically underlined with a pink highlighter. It’s defined by rigid cliques spouting made-up slang, ruled over by picture-perfect teenage girls. The story centres on how a gay teenager’s inadvertent…
A truly excellent long movie is a wonderful thing. Some of my favourite films time stretch over more than three hours – Once Upon a Time in America, Lawrence of Arabia, Short Cuts – with the runtimes allowing for extensive character development (much like television). More significantly, long movies have the opportunity to create –…
My fondness for episodic television reviews – both writing and reading them – has waned sharply over the last year or so. The appeal of this form of criticism is undeniable: liked an episode of television? Hated an episode of television? Jump online and read what <insert critic x> thinks of it! Share your thoughts…
The story of a 52 year old Chilean man, Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), obsessed with Saturday Night Fever competing in a television show’s Tony Manero-lookalike competition seems perfectly pitched for a light-hearted comedy. A farce featuring oblivious characters trying their best, failing, but learning something important in the process. Tony Manero is not that film.…
Darren Aronofsky has apparently been obsessed with Noah since he was a teenager. Watching Noah, that makes a lot of sense – this is the sort of movie a teenager concocts in religion class, half-listening to Biblical tales while thumbing a post-apocalyptic fantasy novel. The film has more in common with the film adaptations of…
I liked Tim Winton’s The Turning more than most critics. Looking back at my review now, I don’t think I succeeded in explaining why it appealed to me; it’s an assumption underlying my write-up, but I don’t think I made it clear. In part, it’s based in my fondness for Winton’s original anthology, which I’d…
Just one review for today: Captain America: The Winter Soldier over at Cheated Hearts. A good film, but one that disappointingly suggests it’s going to reinvigorate the increasingly tired Marvel formula before embracing it wholesale. Worth watching, but nothing special.
Steven Spielberg’s telemovie debut, Duel wields its raw simplicity like a weapon. Often, it’s the brute force of a cudgel, as in the bestial roar emanating from the mysterious, menacing truck that looms in the rearview of David Mann (Dennis Weaver) – his surname a nod to the archetypal nature of the story. The truck…
In an era where blockbuster movies direct their immense budgets towards overcoming the restrictions of cinema, The Lego Movie succeeds by embracing its limitations. Those limitations are found in its animation; computer-generated, sure, but constructed from Lego blocks in their millions. Directors/screenwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller get a lot of mileage out of their…
Lars von Trier identifies Barry Lyndon as an influence on his 1993 experimental film, Dogville; his choice to break his film up into chapters was inspired by Kubrick’s film, as was his use of a detached, ironical narrator (John Hurt). The films have other similarities – a three hour runtime and a protagonist (Ryan O’Neal…
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