This essay explores how the characters in In the Mood for Love (Kar-Wai Wong, 2000) progress in the context of the time and space Wong has created. The essay will specifically examine how both main characters’ significant yet subtle character progression is demonstrated in the mise-en-scene and editing of In the Mood for Love rather than the limiting narrative conventions […]
Posts
High Flying Bird (2019)
Soderberg’s latest experimentation with the iPhone focuses on a struggling idealistic player agent during an NBA “lockout”. You may wonder how so small a camera manages to capture or at least replicate the drama of fast-paced sporting action, particularly the pinnacle grandstand moment of that ole rags to riches sports tale. Without spoiling anything, let me tell you […]
Hold The Dark (2018)
With Hold The Dark Director Jeremy Saulnier and Writer/Actor Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room) leave little to the imagination in terms of violence while leaving just enough to the imagination in terms of plot, affording us the opportunity to discover a wider story. Ostensibly a tale of revenge akin to Blue Ruin yet much darker and colder, the […]
Confessions of an M. Night apologist
The critics tell me to stop. Family and friends tell me to stop. Even my own better judgement and sense of reason tells me to stop. But addiction can’t be reasoned with. I’m chasing the high I’ve been chasing since I was a teenager. It started with The Usual Suspects, that pure uncut feeling of being taken in. My memory […]
There Will Be Blood – The family angle
There Will Be Blood starts with Daniel Plainview alone, battling and struggling in his quest for Silver. This sequence is one of the few devices which allow us to sympathise with an arch monster of a protagonist. Though we may not condone them, Daniel’s misdeeds are, to an extent, relative to the suffering we believe he must have […]
Rampage (2018)
The creators of Rampage (the film) should be ashamed of themselves! As everyone knows in the original game the monsters were originally humans who were turned into a giant gorilla, lizard and wolf by a vitamin, a radioactive lake and a food additive respectively. However in the 2018 film, we’re supposed to just except that they were […]
Glass (2019)
What happens when a criminal mastermind, an indestructible hero and a man with 24 distinct personalities are captured and locked in a facility together? What happens when the director who gave us ‘The Sixth Sense’ is on the verge of his own cinematic universe? The answer to both is very little. Glassis largely a talkfest of ‘on […]
Close (2019)
Not your typical jingoistic Hollywood action movie but lacking some key ingredients. A believable performance by Noomi Rapace and some strong action set pieces are let down by a lack of subtext* and a frustrating co-star. The relatively short running time is both a blessing and a curse in that it remains palatable yet doesn’t provide […]
Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)
With Velvet Buzzsaw, Dan Gilroy succeeds in simultaneously subverting melodrama and slasher film as devious and deluded characters are slowly consumed by the art around which their world revolves. While installations, paintings and ghastly portraits pervade both scene and story, Gilroy’s double helix of character arcs, drawn from a clique for whom Art is a […]
Fear of dehumanisation (Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
This essay will explore how Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956) and Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) tap into the viewer’s fears of dehumanisation. The essay will focus on the films within the social contexts of which they were originally viewed and will explore how Invasion of the Body Snatchersengages with the audience’s anxieties about social, political […]
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