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TIFF 2017: Creatura Dada
Check out my quick review of Creatura Dada at Cinema Axis.
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“It” Spoils Potent Storytelling with Commercialized Horror
It appears to be one of the most crowd-pleasing horror films in recent memory. But a crowd-pleasing horror film is something of a contradiction in terms. If everyone finds it to their liking, then how unnerving, scary, or boundary-pushing can it possibly be? I’m not saying that every horror film has to have people throwing up in the theaters like The Exorcist or scared out of their wits, but there is something wrong with a horror film feeling so conventional and comfortable.
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TIFF 2017: The Tesla World Light
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TIFF 2017: Tulipani: Love, Honour, and a Bicycle
I really liked this one. Check out my glowing review of Tulipani: Love, Honour, and a Bicycle at Cinema Axis.
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TIFF 2017: What Will People Say
Check out What Will People Say at Cinema Axis.
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State of the Blog – September 2017
Move to a new state, start a new job, and your movie blogging suffers. July was something of a testament to that, but I still got to see some cool movies. August was brutal, with only a couple of worthwhile releases, both of which I missed (but hope to get to soon). Anyway, Life Things™ are starting to get sorted, September will certainly be better than August with regards to releases, and thanks to my laziness, there’s a plethora of good content on the way.
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TIFF 2017: Threads
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Patreon Pick #1: Marin Ade’s “Toni Erdmann” (2016)
Writer-Director Marin Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Germany’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2016 Oscars, is a profoundly strange and wonderful film. It wanders between awkward comedy, heartfelt drama, and outright farce with a complete control of its own voice and tone. It’s an impressive and weird movie, and even though it stretches to nearly three hours in length, it never bogs down or loses focus on the central relationship between Ines and her father Winfried.
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“A Clockwork Orange” and the Scary Defense of Free Will
In A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick means to make you uncomfortable. The magic of the film is that it can show terrible things and then making us care about the mind of the man responsible for them. Kubrick accomplishes this titanic task through three main techniques, each of which will be detailed in this piece: heightened stylization, a uniquely likeable non-hero in Alex, and the unification of every aspect of the film into a potent thematic statement: Free Will is sacrosanct. These aspects make A Clockwork Orange an undeniable classic film, as important today for what it reveals about humanity as it was in 1971.
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State of the Blog – August 2017
The minimally observant among you have probably noticed that Plot and Theme has been pretty dark over the last couple of weeks. The explanation is simple: I have just uprooted from the Midwest (Wisconsin) back down to the Grand Old South (North Carolina), and the recent past has thoroughly involved all things box-related. Now, the new home is up-and-running, only about 25% still in boxes, and I can start to wildly attempt to catch up on my review, essays, and other pieces here. Fortunately/unfortunately, August new releases look proper terrible, so I should have plenty of time.
Film Criticism and Fiction Writing by Derek Jacobs
