Author: marielcalloway
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Steady Hands. No Fast Pans. Don’t Use the Zoom. “Nightcrawler” Review
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Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler wants to be noir in the same way that Lou Bloom wants to be a cinematic auteur, clinging with tight desperation to an idea that can never fully come to fruition. Instead it lurks in shadows and creates a quiet, pensive beauty grown from a horror that…
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Paradise Bound: Interstellar and the Quest for Dimensional Transcendence
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In the beginning, God created Adam. Then, because Adam was lonely, God made Eve. When Eve fell, she led Adam to fall with her and God expelled them both from the garden of Eden. In the 17th Century, English poet John Milton provided his own take on the story of Adam and…
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Gone Girl: Media Gaze and the Feminine Spectacle
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[Spoilers Within] In David Fincher’s Gone Girl, the media is a character in and of itself. It acts with considerable agency, guiding our thoughts and perceptions, casting autonomous judgement with an unquestioned air of authority. From an early point, the film wisely encourages us to ask “Whose story is this?”…
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Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop.
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Jaume Collet-Serra’s new film Non-stop unfolds with the elegance and suspense of a classic Hitchcock film in our modern era. Through clever storytelling and progression of events, Non-stop takes us aboard an exciting ride and refreshingly puts our paranoia on edge to keep us guessing until the end.
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Fear and Gloating in Rhode Island
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It starts with a doll. Wide glassy eyes, grinning eerily into the camera. We listen to the story of a mere child’s play object, a symbol of displaced love, affection, and desire that becomes twisted and corrupted into an object of deceit, jealously and malice by dark spirits. In a…
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Sailing to “Elysium”
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Elysium, the newest film from Neill Blomkamp, the creator of District 9 once again forces us into a world where the unspoken social undercurrents of our modern world are thrust into light. The post-apartheid era of District 9 gives way to a stark, segregationist landscape reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.…
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Lost in Transmission
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The shame in Steve McQueen’s 2011 film is never clearly stated, but nonetheless finds plenty of opportunities to present itself. Perhaps we see it in the film’s opening scenes, when a married woman feels a flush of guilt upon considering an affair with another man. Or maybe it comes later,…
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Post-Earth, Post-Feeling
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All sentiments aside about the film’s director, After Earth exists as an elegant and pensive examination of the power of human emotion. While it fails to elicit the proper excitement and suspense often required of its chosen genre, the poignant tale of a young boy transforming into his own hero…
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Ghosts in the Broken Machine
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How does the mind filter what is real from what is unreal? How does it separate events perceived in an unreal environment from a real one? For most of us, fortunately this isn’t an issue. From initial consciousness the mind has been wired with a series of logical codes that…
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Baz Luhrmann’s Gilded Dreams — “The Great Gatsby” Review
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The Great Gatsby unfolds upon the screen like a cross between two of Baz Luhrmann’s earlier films — the sparkly romance of Romeo + Juliet met with the hypnotic bacchanalia of Moulin Rouge. In typical Lurhmann tradition, the stories contain familiar themes: tragic lovers, missed connections, and societal and/or economic…