writing. photography. film criticism

Category: Movies (Page 2 of 3)

Ghosts in the Broken Machine

machinist

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 allow us to infer and draw proper conclusions given certain information. But not all of us are so fortunate.

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Baz Luhrmann’s Gilded Dreams — “The Great Gatsby” Review

Gatsby

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 obstacles that prevent such love from blossoming. The visual spectacle is captivating, excelling at what Luhrmann does best — elevating his viewer to that shimmery cinematic plane where lights, color, sound and love are so bright and loud and real that it seems no strip of canvas could contain them. This is the magic that is The Great Gatsby.

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Waking from “Oblivion” — A Review

Oblivion

Oblivion is the result of too much story and not enough canvas. Think of a house with a tiny frame, or a painting wadded up into a crumpled ball. The story — trust me, it’s in there somewhere — is a compelling work of creative fiction that both reveals and represses human nightmares of technological development. A speculative creation of a sweeping, gothic variety, Oblivion is too ambitious and in its efforts to say too much all at once, its message becomes lost in a frenzied shout of sound and fury.

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Uncanny Visions

davidteddy

How do writers anticipate future technology? There is no clear cut rule, and like many visionaries we are wrong more often than we are right (hover boards by 2015). However, there are two guiding questions that tend to form the boundaries of creative space in which to develop fictional societies and depict imagined worlds — Where will technology go? But more importantly, where will technology refuse to go?

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Repeating History: Why “Argo” Won Best Picture

argo

When I was little, I used to watch the same movies over and over again. At one point during my eleventh consecutive viewing of The Lion King, I asked myself why. What was the point of watching a story when I already knew the ending? At first I thought that it might be because I hoped that I could influence the outcome — somehow guide the characters away from pitfalls and lead them to triumph. Perhaps on some level that is why I’ve become a writer, but it’s not the answer to the question. Instead, the real answer likely has more to do with the way that our minds engage with stories and what we expect from them in the moment. The best stories are rarely about the what, but the how, and it is precisely the how of how Argo crafted a historical event into a binding suspense thriller that won it the Oscar for Best Picture.

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Identity Crisis

So yes, like most everyone else last week I did see the amazing premiere of The Dark Knight Rises and no, this will not be a post on that movie just yet. Expect one eventually, but not now. I prefer to hold off posting on new films until I can have a physical copy in my possession, and I loved that movie too much to settle for a grainy camrip for stills and analyses.

So instead I decided to take a look at another film I was reminded of while watching Christian Bale go about his metropolitan adventures in Armani suits — Mary Harron’s 2000 film, American Psycho.

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Intelligent Design: Biopunk and the Utopian Body

intime

Whenever I’m asked about my chosen genre, I tend to say drama and “occasionally” science fiction. But I realize, I find myself only grudgingly admitting to writing sci-fi only because my true genre is speculative fiction. Speculative fiction (another SF, as a friend an I have often discussed) tends toward the scientific side simply because it is a recent trend that the rapid exponential development of technology has enabled humanity to fulfill its dreams while simultaneously facing its fears. But in actuality, SF can cover all genres. It’s all about the “What If?” that every writer chases.

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Planned Obsolescence

BRdrawing

It’s been reported that some kind of remake and/or prequel is in the works for Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk film Blade Runner. As a fan of both the film and the original novel I find this somewhat troubling but also rather amusing. It seems that no other story has had such a complicated history with the freedom of creative expression, and now it seems they want to open this can of worms yet again.

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Science, Magic, and God from a Machine

prestlight

I’m having trouble with my ending. Many writers do, and for me it is a sign of having started more scripts than I’ve dared to see through to the end. So much more can depend on a film’s ending than its beginning. Think of M. Night Shyamalan—who would remember The Sixth Sense in the same way without its twist ending? Likewise with The Village, albeit more negatively. One of the hardest devices for any writer to avoid is the dreaded, yet oh so tempting Deus Ex Machina.

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No Time Like the Present: Memory and Self in Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”

memento

Apologies for the long hiatus without warning. Thesis Crunch. Let’s get back to the movies.

I embarrassed myself yesterday in an event that will not be recounted here, but for a while I could not stop thinking about it. Even an hour after the fact I was chiding myself for what happened until I finally just told myself that the event was only a memory now and that nothing could change it. Every once in a while I have these mind-boggling moments (I think Philip K. Dick is to blame with all his talk of memory implants) where I recognize that the only thing that I can be certain of is the moment I am currently experiencing. This is probably a personal mind-boggle for me; we all have our quirks. But for the first time I began to doubt even the present, because the present as we are able to conceive of it is based on memory. At that point I began thinking about the concept memory itself, which leads me to my favorite film on the subject, Christopher Nolan’s Memento.

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