Greetings readers! I am going to post a quick blog-related post to remind my readers that CinemaAxis.com has started its coverage of the Hot Docs film festival – a festival based in Toronto that focuses on documentaries. In this month’s State of the Blog post, I mentioned that I was lucky enough to review three of these documentaries. In fact, I was offered two additional films, so I ended up with five documentaries to review. Below I will tell you the films that I got to see, the day the review will be posted on CinemaAxis, and a short synopsis of the flick to whet your appetite. Here we go!
Month: April 2016
Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is a Coming-of-Age Farce with Genuine Heart
Wisconsin Film Festival Opening Night
New Zealand director Taika Waititi has created a magnificently funny coming-of-age film in Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Most known for the HBO series Flight of the Conchords and the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Waititi has also directed more standard narrative-based films like Boy and Eagle vs. Shark. Hunt for the Wilderpeople falls in this category, as it tells the story of an orphan named Ricky being introduced to a new foster family on the edge of the New Zealand bush.
Mike Flanagan’s Disciplined Style Makes the Seemingly Simple “Hush” an Outstanding Slasher
Slasher flicks structured around a home invasion are nothing new, but in Hush, Mike Flanagan has managed to craft something quite original through a collection of limitations on the characters and story. By maneuvering around these limitations and using them to his advantage, Flanagan imbues novelty into this oft-tired subgenre and keeps our attention frozen on the screen as a horrible scenario unfolds: a psychopathic killer with no need for ulterior motivations discovers that his next quarry is deaf.
“The End of the Tour” Gives Us a Great David Foster Wallace, and a Solid Conversation
On September 12th, 2008, novelist David Foster Wallace committed suicide. Most famous for his seminal novel Infinite Jest, Wallace’s death reverberated throughout the literary community. Fellow writer David Lipsky reels at this news, as Lipsky had interviewed Wallace for Rolling Stone over a period of twelve days at the end of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest. James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour begins here, with Lipsky unearthing the shelved tapes from these interviews in an effort to revisit “the best conversation [he’s] ever had”.
State of the Blog – April 2016
As expected, Plot and Theme ended up just short of 50K views, at around 47700. That’s okay, and there’s a good chance that by the time I officially hit one full year of posts (on April 27th). I also wrote much less in March than I wanted to, but a lot of my writing effort was for cover letters and other such non-fun things. Regardless, I am looking forward to growing readership and interaction more, and one of the ways I am going to do that is include a closing to each of my posts where I directly ask questions and make comments, so keep your eyes for this sight stylistic change in my posts.