Amy Schumer already cemented her place on my year’s favorite entertainment list when she managed to loosely remake 12 Angry Men for the fourth episode of Inside Amy Schumer, but not satisfied with owning television, Schumer decides to revive the romantic comedy for 2015. Lazy writing has cursed the genre for much of the last few decades and studios have responded in kind by not pursuing that market with the gusto they used to.
New Projects is a weekly round up of movies and TV shows recently announced and currently in development for the near future. Who’s that bad remake? (Shut your mouth!) New Line Cinema has reportedly acquired the rights to the Shaft franchise and intends to remake the ’70s blaxploitation classic yet again, following the 2000 remake …
Rather than the political surveillance looked at in Brazil, corporate surveillance is the primary focus, though the film’s weak digs at both that and the impersonal nature of our online modern age lack any of the bite of the earlier film. Exploration of the latter idea certainly isn’t helped by the writing of Bainsley, a character lacking in any agency of her own. Thierry is victim to an uncomfortable amount of fetishistic objectification, present even outside of the few scenes in which it contextually makes a little sense. Kim Griest’s well-rounded, independent heroine is just one of the ways in which Brazil still has punch today as a key science fiction work; The Zero Theorem, an effort that never excels, is a light shove at best.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already: a low-level cog in a comically large bureaucratic environment in a grotesque-looking “future” dystopia struggles in the face of obsolescence and oblivion. The character in question is fundamentally good, but incredibly weedy, their resolve and spirit having been ground to stumps by the world around them.
In addition to still-life model at MoMA and dance leader at Ebertfest, Tilda Swinton has now added “Redditeer” to her resume. She was on hand Monday for an AMA to promote Snowpiercer and put on her signature arty charm, earning a few nicknames (T-Swinny), declaring her love of Alt-J and revealing she’s actually a clone …
South Korean filmmaker, Joon-ho Bong, has never been afraid of mixing genres. In his latest and most challenging film to date, Snowpiercer, Bong mixes action, sci-fi and satire to create a delightfully twisted prison break story. Snowpiercer owes much of its effectiveness to an ingenious script that uses 3 discrete acts to effortlessly shift its …
Only Lovers Left Alive Directed by Jim Jarmusch Written by Jim Jarmusch UK, 2013 Inspired by Mark Twain’s Extracts from Adam’s Diary, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive beautifully explores love and living after immortality siphoned away any semblance of life. Beautifully shot and wonderfully performed, the film eschews the more bombastic side of vampiric …
Though writer Pat Rushin scripted and conceived the story of The Zero Theorem, one can be forgiven for assuming Terry Gilliam came up with the narrative himself, being that it comes across as the work of someone who either saw every film Gilliam’s ever made or just happened to direct them. Indeed, The Zero Theorem sees Gilliam very much in his storytelling and thematic comfort zones, though sadly to diminishing returns. It openly scrounges scraps from earlier efforts, especially Brazil, but has little idea how to develop its ever so slightly different ideas beyond thin sketches.
More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.
In 1983, the final Monty Python film, The Meaning Of Life, was released with a rather ambitious title and intent to discover, well, the meaning of life. Thirty years later, and Terry Gilliam returns to these enterprising realms with his new film The Zero Theorem, a codex volcanic in enthusiasm yet insipid at its core. Terry does good press: he barks an intriguing sound bite, citing that his latest ode to chaos is an “impossible look at nothing,” which is certain to prick the interest of existentialists everywhere.
Riffing on Terek Puckett’s terrific list of director/actor collaborations, I wanted to look at some of those equally impressive leading ladies who served as muses for their directors. I strived to look for collaborations that may not have been as obviously canonical, but whose effects on cinema were no less compelling. Categorizing a film’s lead …
After a late day three (the Q&A didn’t get out until about midnight), many of the attendees to Ebertfest, myself included, were a bit on the sluggish side this morning. The first screening was set for 11am, which hardly seems early on paper, but for anyone catching up with friends at the festival or, in …
After the surprising thematic unity of day two of Ebertfest (the four films screened explored similar topics), with day three’s picks Roger Ebert seemed more interested in exploring contradictions. The day began with director Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, a Norwegian film that follows a recovering drug addict, Anders, over the course of his day. …
[vsw id=”sfy0_vhfb-s” source=”youtube” width=”640″ height=”400″ autoplay=”no”] 5) Melody’s Echo Chamber “Crystallized” Directed by Zabia Jabbar First on the list this week is the latest from Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker and French singer Melody Prochet. This video features a heavy use of disorienting edits which suits the lofi-esque track really well. The deadpan performances provided by Melody help …
Acting and directing categories during awards seasons are always the hardest to determine. Who to choose and what for film is a constant battle, not to mention who deserves to be nominated. Between the veteran nominees (Clooney, Streep, Scorcese) to newbies in the awards season (Fassbender, Refn and Oldman (!)), let’s see who deserves a …
We Need to Talk about Kevin Written by Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear (novel by Lionel Shriver) Directed by Lynna Ramsay UK & USA, 2011 Hidden at the back of our mind is the darkness that roams the labyrinth. The minotaur becomes the unspeakable evil, the figure with the body of a man and the …
Telluride 2011, Day 4 Tilda Swinton is the ideal Telluride guest. She’s just famous enough to provide the fest with a bit of an exclusive sheen, but she has more than enough credibility as an artist to suit the fest’s reputation of catering to people who are serious about film. At the public tribute and …
I Am Love / Io Sono L’amore Directed by Luca Guadagnino The poster for Luca Guadagnino’s film shows a regal Tilda Swinton in an eye-catching red dress surrounded by her sober-looking family. In another version, the frock has undergone a cheeky digital makeover to a shocking pink that matches the movie’s bold, declaratory title. The …