“George Lucas’s passion project has wriggled its way through almost every form of modern art and culture.”
Category: Film & TV
[Essay] In Suspense of the Real: Cronenberg, Gilliam and Lynch — Louis Armand
“Concerned with the status of the ‘Real,’ these films are necessarily both self-reflexive and projective, folding the transcendental loop back on itself – from a dialectics of the ‘fable’ to the entropic spiral of the ‘image'”.
[Review] Embers by Claire Carré — Mike Miley
“His name is not Prospero, but The Tempest is certainly what Carré is going for here. “
[Essay] Human ambition and nature in Werner Herzog — Jake Sanders
“Herzog’s trademark sense of humour is never more apparent than when he explores humanity’s clashes with the natural world.”
[Essay] Satirising Genre: The Graduate as Rom-Com — Dan Norman
“The film’s final ten minutes combine so many rom-com tropes it feels like outright parody—despite being made decades before the high watermark of the genre.”
[Essay] Why radio is not an exhausted form — Mariana Des Forges
“Auditory storytelling deprives the brain of the passive satisfaction of ‘being shown.’”
[Essay] The Hunger Games: Earning the Two-Parter — Lucas Hill-Paul
“Double feature franchise films seem doomed to ridicule from both cynics and critics.”
[Essay] Infidelity and Ennui in Mad Men and The Ice Storm — Jake Sanders
“The sense of growth and resolution that attracted Lee to the idea of adapting The Ice Storm for the screen is conspicuously absent from Mad Men.”
[Essay] Marooned Between Dreams and Reality: Surrealist Satire on Film — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“Surrealism’s preoccupation with the subconscious, and the gulf between dreams and reality, is writ large in Barton Fink’s implied insomnia.”
[Essay] Counter-Casting in Road to Perdition — Dan Norman
“Four of the five biggest roles are cast against type, which is surely more than mere coincidence.”
[Essay] Not a Horror: How Marketing Ruined Crimson Peak — Lucas Hill-Paul
“We have been conditioned by modern horror to expect certain breeds of scares.”
[Essay] Characterisation in Battle Royale — Dan Norman
“No character is wasted or put on screen to simply be a throwaway body.”
[Essay] Power, Possession and Monstrous Femininity — Victoria Griffin
“While the narrative ostensibly turns on a tale of demons, it symbolically reveals a social commentary on the state of female empowerment.”
[Essay] Based on a True Story: The Biopic Today — Lucas Hill-Paul
“This violence is key to biopics of this nature, with Everest and Straight Outta Compton portraying the brutality of the events in blunt and honest fashion.”
[Essay] Little Miss Sunshine: Dysfunctional Families on Screen — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“I confess. I was charmed.”
[Essay] Floyd Mayweather: The Willing ‘Bastard’ of Boxing — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“His unmarked face, a benefit of his unparalleled defence, became the symbol of the audience’s disdain.”
[Essay] Robert Redford in The Candidate: the Politics of Image and the Image of Politics — Jacob Bernard-Banton
“McKay trades on authenticity, but his campaign is like any other: laboured over with painstaking precision, a machine.”
[Essay] 45 Years: Deciphering Film Quality — Eliza Slawther
“The film causes a strange paradox: it makes for utterly awful viewing that is apparently all a part of the experience.”