Transcendence Written by Jack Paglen Directed by Wally Pfister United Kingdom, China, and USA, 2014 It’s been more than a decade since Johnny Depp moved from being a bundle of quirky nerves in the body of a heartthrob to a full-fledged movie star, and it may be the worst thing that happened to his career. …
Christopher Nolan has earned carte blanche by dint of not just vision and execution but depth; he always buries material under the surface. Are you watching closely?
The difficulty in counting down films so clearly influenced by Kubrick is that there are certain directors who are just tailor-made for it. So, you start to run into situations like this section of the list, where two directors have two films and two other directors had a film mentioned in the last section. But …
Man of Steel can best be described as inconsistent and certainly a missed opportunity. Now, with news of the mutated sequel coming in every week, it seems a good time to really explore these flaws.
Fiction always has a habit of overlapping, whether intentionally or not, since storytelling is built on only a few choice templates. Your plot can include three headed aliens in an intergalactic pissing contest with ghost humans, or simply be a gritty fable about the perils of alcoholism and social stigma, it doesn’t matter. The plot …
Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture. One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and …
Drako Oho Zahar Zahar is an enigma of sorts, having survived two comas, two nervous breakdowns and two suicide attempts, emerging on the other side with his life intact yet his mind forever shattered into uncollected fragments. This documentary’s ostensibly crude title, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, refers to the destructive effect Drako’s comas have had on his memory. Each day he awakens, vaguely aware of who he is, where he is, though uncertain of what may have come before.
Man of Steel Written by David S. Goyer Directed by Zack Snyder USA, 2013 Come back, Superman Returns; all is forgiven. Upon its release, Bryan Singer’s take on the most iconic comic-book hero of all time was rightly criticized for being poorly cast, too beholden to the Christopher Reeve era and prone to bouts of distracting …
Memento Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher Nolan 2000, USA There’s something to be said about neglecting to watch the classics, excuses to be made. A sense of urgency compels you to sit down and watch, if nothing else, so that you will be able to discuss a seminal work with confidence. This sense …
Welcome to Strange Interpretations, a new column on Sound on Sight, positioned somewhere between thought provoking symbolic truth seeking and experimental novelty. Each week, a well known motion picture will be put on the operating table in the asylum’s film studies theatre and dissected to prove that a bizarre hidden meaning exists, running underneath the narrative arteries…sort of like the thing from The Thing.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Directed by Gore Verbinski Written by Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert Starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Geoffrey Rush Captain Jack Sparrow is the worst thing that ever happened to Johnny Depp’s career. The prevailing wisdom is that the constantly …
For lovers of comic book superheroes, the one that made the best crossover into mainstream film would arguably be Superman. Ok, so if you love your comic book characters, you’ll probably like most of the superhero movies that have been made over the years, but whereas even the latest trilogy of Batman movies appeal to …
2012 will probably go down as one of the best years in cinema of this current decade. This was the hardest year for me to make a top ten list because there were too many great films that came out, especially in the fall. In fact every film on my top ten list was a …
#10: The Cabin in the Woods (107 points) Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard Directed by Drew Goddard USA, 2012 Like Scream, it’s a self-aware slasher film, but where Scream was happy simply to turn the genre’s bloody glove inside out and examine the stitching, The Cabin in the Woods has more complicated ambitions. If Scream is …
25: The Dark Knight Rises Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan 2012, USA The Dark Knight Rises feels as if it was made up of two equal halves, with the most critical moment of the film breaking the movie in half, almost literally. While the second half may have …
2012 wasn’t a bad year for movies. It was actually a great year. The problem is, the movies we were most anticipating, specifically the Hollywood blockbusters like Prometheus and The Hobbit, didn’t live up to our expectations. With that said I still managed to make a list of 50 films I loved. Maybe I just …
At the end of each month, the Sound On Sight staff will band together to write an article about their favourite scenes in films released. We were a little busy in early July so we decided to combine that list with our picks from August. Here are our favourite scenes from the months of July …
Every thirty days, I like to post a list of my favorite films I’ve recently watched. Here are the best films I’ve seen throughout the month of September. This list is based on movies theatrically released here in Canada, and I do not include what I have seen at film festivals. **** 1: Beasts of …
In a July 28 post, (www.popoptiq.com/will-we-ever-see-a-classic-superhero-movie/), my Sound on Sight colleague Deepayan Sengupta pondered the admittedly arguable premise that, for all their entertainment and box office value, the superhero movie has yet to provide a true cinematic classic. Back in March, I came at a vaguely similar idea but from a different angle (www.popoptiq.com/how-serious-can-a-comic-book-movie-be-discuss/). I …
Marvel Films are sitting pretty at the moment. Their co-productions, dating back from 1998 with Blade to The Amazing Spiderman, the current reincarnation of the web-slinging hero, have dominated box-offices worldwide and reintroduced comic book superheroes to a new generation. In June 2012, Warner Bros. announced their intention to release a film based on DC Comics’ premier superhero …
The Dark Knight Rises Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan Directed by Christopher Nolan USA, 2012 In retrospect, it may have been impossible. 2008’s The Dark Knight managed to be the greatest comic-book adaptation of all time by, essentially, cheating. It stripped the genre of its most outlandish acts of superheroism, and imbued its …
The Dark Knight Rises Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan USA, 2012 Christopher Nolan doesn’t half-ass things. Unlike a lot of summer-movie directors, he knows how to deliver a true spectacle. His dedication to telling a complete story about one of pop culture’s most beloved superheroes is remarkable. This determination …
With The Dark Knight Rises opening this week, it’s only appropriate to look back at the series’ first two entries as well as previous incarnations of the Batman. Compiling a top ten list of best scenes from a character that has spanned decades would appear a fruitless effort. With a wealth of rich images, performances, …