Category Archives: Film
Film
Veronica Mars: how crowdfunding could change Hollywood
The unthinkable has happened. Veronica Mars: The Movie is a go. Though movie rumours have been rampant since the series ended six years ago, the possibility was remote. Warner Brothers, the studio that owns the rights to the series, couldn’t see an audience, and there was … Read more
Film
Cloud hopping
David Mitchell’s Booker-shortlisted 2004 novel Cloud Atlas is one of my all-time favourite books; it’s also a novel that tends to divide people. When I forced my book club to read it back in 2009, the response (to my everlasting heartbreak) was universally negative. Earlier this year, … Read more
Column: Film and TV, Film
The Acting Talents of Kristen Stewart
The form of the meme goes like this: Random Internet jokester inserts random image along with superimposed text that reads: ‘Still more facial expressions than Kristen Stewart’. Add extra humour points if the image is an inanimate object or an entity without a face, say, an octopus. … Read more
Film, Reviews
Moral baroque: the full and messy world of Margaret
Margaret is an important and beautiful movie which, after years of legal wrangling, never really made it to our cinema screens. Most of the trouble, supposedly, was in trying to get an edit of the film on which director Kenneth Lonergan and its producers could agree – … Read more
Film, Reviews
Wild, whimsical thing: Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s not an original thought to find child actors distasteful. Those treacly little creatures who over-enunciate lines too often break the fantastic illusion of reality that films try to conjure. Even in hammy, saccharine musicals like Mary Poppins or Anchors Aweigh, or heavy-handed dramas like Jerry McGuire, … Read more
Film
Human intimacy, or the lack thereof: Shame
Directed by Steve McQueen (no, not the dead actor), Shame is a film that could only have been conceived of in the last few years. Its subject is human intimacy, or rather the lack thereof in an age of ever-expanding technological immediacy. Brandon, played by Michael Fassbender, … Read more
Film
High-stakes verité: Andrew Haigh’s Weekend
There’s a scene early in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend in which Russell (Tom Cullen), a handsome, semi-closeted gay man, patrols the local indoor swimming pool where he works. He plods around the pool perimeter and then looks on pensively from the lifeguard’s chair while a younger guy playfully … Read more
Film
What do you want to do for the rest of your life? Miranda July’s The Future
In her various incarnations as screenwriter, fiction writer and artist, Miranda July has demonstrated a preoccupation with the less-trodden paths of human connection. Take her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which saw a middle-aged man kick off a sexual relationship with two … Read more
Film
What do you want to do for the rest of your life? Miranda July’s The Future
In her various incarnations as screenwriter, fiction writer and artist, Miranda July has demonstrated a preoccupation with the less-trodden paths of human connection. Take her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which saw a middle-aged man kick off a sexual relationship with two … Read more
Film
Subvert Normality: Three of my favourite teen rebellion films
From the iconic Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to the disquieting Christiane F. (1981) or Tony Richardson’s tremendously austere Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), there is certainly no shortage of filmic portrayals concerning the latent indignation of wayward youth. These films – visually rich, compelling … Read more
