Director and Screenwriter Mike Flanagan’s film Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling 2013 novel of the same name sees a middle-aged Danny (son of Jack) Torrance seeking to start a new life in a new town yet being drawn into battling a troupe of steam-addicted, child-killing near immortals by a young girl rich […]
Analysis
Dragged Across Concrete (2018)
Director: S. Craig Zahler Starring: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles After three feature films we can now safely say that S. Craig Zahler’s ‘Zahlerness’ is not a fluke. An uncompromising and unapologetic vision reveals the stamp of an auteur throughout Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017) and Dragged Across Concrete (2018). Zahler himself is a multidisciplinarian who has written, directed […]
Burning (2018)
On the face of it, Burning may be a hard sell. A two and a half hour slow burning mystery which leaves more loose ends than it ties up is not going to be everybody’s jar of kimchi. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story called Barn Burning the film follows seeming loner and aspiring young novelist Jong-su (Ah-in […]
Creed II
I’m not ashamed to admit I welled up at the end of Creed 2. Though I’ll caveat this with the fact that I was sleep deprived and at high altitude as this was during an international ‘red eye’ flight. I cannot attest to the voracity of the Wittertainment*-described phenomenon of AALS (Altitude Adjusted Lacrimosity Syndrome) but perhaps […]
They Look Like People (2015)
The rise of ‘Buddy Horror’ There is a sub-genre of Horror which IMDB calls “Alien Infiltration” and a cursory keyword search of ‘the database’ suggests it is a potentially rich yet largely untapped theme. Notable entrants include Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and its various remakes as well as the much loved yet now quite dated John […]
Narrative Ambiguity
“Show don’t tell” is a well worn instruction in literary teaching and “Dramatise, don’t surmonize” is a version of the instruction, which has been issued to aspiring filmmakers who wish to convey a moral message. but some films choose to neither show nor tell but rather to allow an audience to drawn their own conclusions. Let’s call […]
In The Mood For Love (2000) – Subjective space and time
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 […]
Screenotes 