The other bands on this list use their music for various allegorical and symbolic reasons, but Scott Pilgrim and Sex Bob-omb actually have to fight evil with the power of their rocking. Scott and his friends are called into an alternate video game dimension of their own Canadian hipster reality to fight the super-powered ex-boyfriends of his new girlfriend …
Disney is more famous for their animated feature films. As a corporation who is completely orientated by family entertainment, it’s no surprise that they have an invested history in live action family focused feature films. This list was such a joy to compose because it brought back a lot of forgotten gems from my childhood. One thing that made it …
Within the science-fiction genre, various conceptualizations of time-travel have been offered by the cinema. Indebted to 19th century literature, with H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) undeniably the most inspirational of the lot, time-travel has drawn interest in the cinema not only for the narrative possibilities it affords, but for its …
I consider myself a child of the 80s, at least the tail end of the 80s. So Bobcat Goldthwait was always, to me, Zed. He was the loud, high-pitched, borderline psychotic recruit in the Police Academy films. Like those films, his act ran on much too long, and I dismissed Goldthwait once I grew out of my childhood admiration for the terrible …
“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” It was the title of Mad Men’s pilot episode, and a perfectly apt description of what it can feel like to try to understand its characters fully, to view them not as they portray themselves to the world, but authentically. Everyone on Mad Men is wearing a mask. Everyone is hiding behind perfectly constructed walls they have built and fortified to keep the real world from getting in, and to keep their true selves from getting out. Everyone is playing a part they are writing themselves, the part of their ideal self, the part they hope will get them through another day intact. Leading into the first part of the show’s final season, it seems only right to try to clear away some of the smoke and figure out if we can see these people for who they truly are going into this final run of episodes.
But seeing these people as they really are is tough stuff, and if we try to look at them head on, we are bound to miss the truth for their most captivating fiction. So below, we will take a look at each of the major Mad Men players through the lens of what drink best represents them and their place in the world.
Ivan Reitman could easily be described as a “sneaky good” director. With a long and prolific career in comedy filmmaking, there are a number of times a film has come along that I never realized Reitman directed. Such is the case with Draft Day, his upcoming NFL picture that I only discovered Reitman directed by chance. Ivan Reitman’s films aren’t all classics by any means, there are many of his efforts which are mediocre to say the least, but there is no doubt he had his share of comedy classics early in his career. There is a trifecta early in his time as a director, which would make any comedic director envious. Reitman’s career may have grown stagnant in recent years, however, they can never take away what made him a “sneaky” legend.
Before becoming a film director, Darren Aronofsky trained as a field biologist in Kenya. He declared that field studies changed the way he perceived the world, and he took his newfound interest in the environment with him as he backpacked through Europe and the Middle East. A few years later he found himself studying anthropology and filmmaking at the prestigious Harvard University. He continued his studies in filmmaking and won several awards for his thesis film.
Soon later, Aronofsky’s first two films, Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), were released. Both films were especially low budget, with Pi being shot in black and white. They are characterized by extremely short takes, montage, split-screens, and close-ups. Both films are psychologically harrowing with Pi focusing on an obsessive mathematician, and Requiem for a Dream focusing on several characters plights of addiction. Both films are quite grainy and dark and attempt to express the inner conflicts of the characters at hand.
The undisputable king of quirk, director Wes Anderson is quite the icon and for many, an auteur of the filmmaking world. The status he has achieved over the period of just ten years at the helm of only eight feature films is remarkable. If you’ve ever seen a Wes Anderson film, you’ll know exactly when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. If you’re new to his oeuvre, be prepared to witness something unlike anything you’ve seen in a screwball comedy before. His work is unmistakably distinctive and as much as it is obvious in style it leaves me tongue tied for an adequate or definitive description.
Filmmaking documentaries are insightful and essayist, complex and fascinating. Filmmaking documentaries bring three key ideas into light; making a film about a film, showing a film within a film, and a film about film itself. The documentary format is perfect for demonstrating the realities of the filmmaking process, exploring the industry of film, and showing the rare moments that can give such depth to the material discussed. To hone in on this sort of genre as the short DVD extras features that now accompany most feature films, is cutting short the progressive works of those significant pieces that came before the DVD regulars and those that have since developed out of these ideas. The scope of this documentary sub-genre is as diverse as the sub-genre of say zombie narratives within the horror genre. My pick of the top ten filmmaking documentaries are as much of a mixed bag as them come, all impressive in their content and more often than intended, brave in their motives. If this little collection doesn’t inspire the idea that filmmaking is more complex and impressive than you might expect, nothing will.
When The Amazing Spider-Man was released back in 2012, it had somewhat of a mixed reception. The opinion of critics was that it was a bold new step for the franchise, whilst some fans felt that it was a bit too soon after Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy to be essentially ‘rebooting’ the web-slinging superhero. Fast forward to 2014, and we’re just months away from the second film in the new-look series, unsurprisingly titled The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But with so many great films already hitting the silver screen this year, does the new Spidey movie stand a chance? And, more importantly, has it already shot itself in the foot before even hitting theaters?