The relationship between brothers, or siblings in general, is a difficult thing to capture in words. I come from a family with three brothers. Brotherly bonds have all the masculine tensions and complications of a father-son dynamic, but with subtler power hierarchies. In other words, you’ve got the manly competitiveness and bravado and culturally-formed inability to articulate feelings with a less clear master and student rapport. It’s also not explored as much by the psychologically curious such as Sigmund Freud. It doesn’t get a whole lot of attention. But that only makes it more interesting when movies look closely at how brothers function with and against each other, when the subject is handled with skill and depth.
I write a lot about how movies are, among other things, a visual medium, and so have a tendency to revel in offering visual treats for audiences that are sometimes unaccompanied or unenhanced by any dialogue or music. This dates all the way back to the days when movies did not have sound at all, and were paired only with a live orchestra to fill the silences and add to the visual narratives being played out on the screen. So naturally, animals have been obvious heroes of cinema since its inception.
Adaptation is a lofty task. In most cases, screenwriters are attempting to take the complexities of hundreds of pages of prose and turn them into a couple of hours of action and dialogue for us to witness people act out. Directors, in turn, often try to capture the tones and meanings behind the source material that has inspired the film. This is not only a big undertaking, the scale of adapting an especially beloved novel or comic or play must be daunting in itself, but it’s a delicate thing. People tend to be finicky when it comes to adaptations. Be too straightforward with it, and people will be bored, finding the movie version redundant if it does nothing to add to the book. But be too bold in your interpretation, straying from the source material or simply using it as a jumping off point for your own artistic intentions, and everyone loses their minds.
Most often, the effect movies have on people are either temporary, lasting as little time as the length of the movie itself, or if they are more enduring, affect us in a way that we’re not entirely aware of. We see how movies and TV can have subtle impacts on the gradual shifts in cultural attitudes towards groups and issues after many years. It’s harder to identify precisely how movies have changed who we are as people, or what we believe and what values we hold dear. Part of this is because most movies deal with these things indirectly, in varied layers of abstraction, and so finding specific linkages between these abstract concepts and precise details of our lives is a nearly impossible feat.
Zach Braff’s Kickstarter campaign has been scrutinized from nearly every angle by now, with people seeming to be evenly divided between those who think he’s a rich scumbag exploiting his fans into paying for a whimsical new project and those who think he’s found a game-changing way to help finance movies without having to cater to cumbersome studio demands with the added bonus of making a group of fans feel even more involved in a movie’s production. Of course, there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around, following the generally positive response to a similar campaign by Rob Thomas and the Veronica Mars people. I don’t doubt that much of it is personal animus towards Braff himself, which would be totally fair if more people would just be up front about it.
Every summer seems to feature more and more huge movies, which is awesome. I’m not one of those uptight cinephiles lamenting the end of cinema because a movie like Iron Man 3 gets a ton of attention. I think there’s room for all of it. It takes all kinds of films to make a good and vibrant cinematic landscape. And sometimes some of the most surprisingly high quality movies are the blockbusters that we expect to be exciting but actually have some brains and heart behind them. There’s nothing that says this can’t be just as respectable as something else produced on a fraction of the budget.
No one seems to be able to agree on anything about The Great Gatsby. The movie, that is. The book incites all sorts of debate every time some English major finds an excuse to bring it up, but the movie is the first one of this year where people are scrambling to find a way to talk about that makes them sound like they’ve got it figured out.
What should one expect of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby as it hits theatres today? It has seen a series of trailers that have undoubtedly divided audiences, from what I’ve been able to gather anyway. I’ve heard responses that state outright that it looks like it could be the best movie or the worst movie of the year. My view is that every trailer released for it so far has been damn good, but this by no means indicates the film itself will actually live up to the standard set by the spirit of those previews.
Although it’s now the commonly accepted opinion that the quality of Clint Eastwood’s movies isn’t what it once was, there was a period when he was possibly the best director in the business. It’s not just that his movies were excellent in so many ways and felt fresh in times where many regular moviegoers felt like they were watching the same kind of movie over and over again, but he’s been hugely influential in establishing an aesthetic for films perceived as serious. He grew into an absolute master of understated tone and completely stripped down aesthetic, fostering a kind of minimalism that served as a welcome contrast to the excess and bluster of the blockbuster moviemaking scene that only seemed to be growing in spectacle as time progressed.
I watched Scarface for the first time recently. I am of course referring to the 1983 Brian De Palma/Al Pacino version, not the old Howard Hawks flick. When people talk about Scarface, they mostly talk about a few things: say hello to my little friend, huge shootouts, mountains of cocaine, flared collars, constant f-words littered throughout, and Al Pacino’s career-defining performance as iconic character Tony Montana. It’s a film with one of the biggest fanbases of all time, and is followed by an immense reputation.
