Ticket giveaway for preview screening.
kubrick’s creed
femme fatales x murderous machines = kubrick + failure of men,
calculates markobeney
calculates markobeney
babel
angustse is speaking in tongues
the weird and the surreal
angustse explains why luis buñuel matters (even though you don’t know who he is)
Many of you have seen Salvador Dali’s painting Persistence of Memory (the melting clocks) or Rene Magritte’s Treachery of Images (‘This is not a pipe’). Both were key artists in the Surrealist movement, characterised by the dream-like and unexpected juxtapositions of imagery. These perplexing works may be the exact justification for some of you to condemn ‘modern art’ (a broad but rather useful generalisation): calculated to shock but absolutely meaningless. But much of the entertainment nowadays is ‘odd’ or ‘illogical’ and yet we clearly enjoy it. The commonplace of ‘weirdness’, I believe, is due to one man.
a climate of love
It’s Valentine’s Day, the time when you shower your significant other with roses, chocolates and similar gifts, all in the name of some commercialisable quality they call love. You might be thinking of what to do on the day. I would like to recommend you see Climates, an arthouse breakup film. Believe me, I have no personal vendetta against you or your relationship. The film is simply worth watching, maybe even a personal lesson of what you’re in for.
This is More Than Just a Title
Whenever I used to watch films, my mind used to wander during the opening credits. If it were possible, I would skip through them. It seemed to me that their purpose was merely self-promotion: to show off the filmmakers’ and actors’ names to the accompaniment of uninteresting music and dull images. But now I think differently.
Dreamgirls
Three girls are hired at a talent show to be backup singers, then they get their own act, then they see that maybe fame isn’t as amazing as they thought or maybe it is. It seems to me that dream rhymes with Supreme? Also that Deena (the lead singer played by Beyoncé) sounds a lot like Diana? It’s just a hunch but perhaps Diana Ross based her career in The Supremes around this play. Dreamgirls is an adaptation of a very famous stage musical. This becomes quite obvious watching the film as here lie its failings. The performances are generally fine and sometimes good, but the cowardice of the adaptation is clear to see. It faces a dilemma that all adaptations of beloved material do. How much faith to the adored original and how much genuine adaptation to what is right for cinema? Th
is is particularly hard when adapting stage material because the two art forms are deceptively similar yet completely different. Dreamgirls makes some stabs in the right direction, that is, making a film and ignoring all of the sentimental whiners, but sadly it is made by a few of those very whiners. It rarely feels like anything other than a camera focused on a realistic looking stage. The constraints of the adaptation are so screamingly evident yet so sadly ignored. The camera moves very little, set design is distinctly uninspired and we are simply hoisted from scene to scene with precious little imagination.apocalypto
When Mel Gibson declared back in 2004 that his next project was to be Apocalypto, it seemed an oddball choice. It is ironic that he experienced his own professional apocalypse through his anti-Semitic remarks back in July, making it seem that the film was destined to be a flop. Nonetheless, Gibson has risen from the ashes to make his latest epic, which seems to be doing well in the box office.
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