Celebrity is annoying. It’s annoying because it’s a part of our culture that is all but unavoidable, and especially for those of us with an interest in movies and television and pop culture, the world of celebrity causes an abundance of mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s a substantively vacuous world of dull material excess, a shameless public display of personal spectacle that is as phony as it is pathetic. On the other, it’s a world of intriguing power, allowing freedoms that the select few in our society get to enjoy, and is at least partly desirable for all of us if we’re truly honest, even though each one of us knows if we ever got really famous we’d of course use that power in good and interesting ways. It’s why most people, if they thought long and hard about it, would change places in an instant with a person like Ryan Gosling.
The combination of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's comedic strengths with Nicole Holofcener's graceful style and James Gandolfini's quiet charm makes Enough Said a sad, sweet, and beautiful story of love at middle age.
The previous two feature movies by director Steve McQueen showed he was a filmmaker with unique abilities and tastes. Hunger and Shame were completely different in their settings and subjects, yet stylistically they shared enough features to clearly show the hand of an artist with a certain confidence in both his skills and the audience’s capacity to comprehend and appreciate a different kind of cinema. 12 Years a Slave is an undeniable step forward for McQueen, and yet the aesthetic touches and rhythmic choices make it feel very much like a progression in a single career.
There are many who seem to enjoy discussions centered upon earnest lamentations regarding the death of cinema, the decline in influence of the big picture studios, the dwindling audiences numbers, and so on and so forth. Despite how fun that sounds, I prefer to focus on the trends of democratization that film is continuing to exhibit. The one growing movie release trend that I’m finding the most personal benefit in these days is the practice by some smaller studios of releasing films on multiple platforms simultaneously, so that those of us unable to see independent cinema in an actual theater can still see these titles in our homes in the form of Video on Demand.
There are literally too many potentially great movies playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival for a single person to see them all over the course of the festival’s eleven-day run. The lineup for TIFF 2013 is one of its strongest yet, and for those of us fortunate enough to attend, it all but guarantees a fantastic two weeks of cinema, and for the rest of the movie watching public, it indicates good things for the upcoming fall and winter film seasons. In some cases, movies being screened at TIFF are set for release just weeks later in September, so the headstart festival audiences will have is not all that noteworthy. Others—such as You’re Next, for instance, which premiered at TIFF two years ago and finally saw a theatrical run this summer—may not be seen for some time.
The easiest 5 reasons I could come up with for how in god’s name One Direction: This Is Us turned me from a skeptic into a belieber believer would be: Harry, Niall, Louis, Liam, and Zayn. That would be both far too easy and obvious, and also too simplistic—I do want to be clear that I absolutely could do that because these guys are genuinely adorbs. I didn’t want to like them as much as I did, and I didn’t want to admit that I liked them as much as I did, and yet here I am.
Being surprised by a movie is one of the unique joys that cinema can offer, a feeling that is nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere. Every time we watch a movie we’re investing something, usually a healthy (or unhealthy) portion of time and money, and the hope is that we’ll have a return on this investment in the form of being entertained, feeling feelings, and receiving inspiration. With this comes expectations that we tend to wish will be fulfilled, which is often where genre comes into play: the anticipation that because we’re seeing a science fiction or western or horror movie, a certain set of familiar concepts and sensibilities will come across.
The comedic “double act” is a concept that has been around for at least a century, first gaining popularity in the vaudeville halls at the turn of the last century, and continuing to be implemented through the comedy generations right up to the present. It’s a ploy often used on the presumption that two opposing forces, when forced to collide, can in the best cases result in explosive, uproarious comedy. We’ve seen the likes of comedy duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Brooks and Reiner, and Wilder and Pryor team up to produce memorable acts and classic movies. The gimmick has spilled over the borders of pure comedy to inform a genre specific to the medium of film in the years since—that of the buddy cop genre.
What’s in a movie character name? In some cases, it can be quite a lot. It’s a common practice for writers to assign character names that are allusions to previous works of film or literature, signaling some kind of connection between their work and the work they aspire to be like, and all in all being generally pretentious and pedantic. I can get into this if it’s done well and serves a respectable purpose. The character names I enjoy the most, though, are the ones that are more than anything a pleasant combination of sounds, with the actual sense of the name playing a secondary role of importance.
While nostalgia may inform a certain amount of taste and affection we have for movies from our childhood, some really do stand the test of time. The Shawshank Redemption is perhaps the best example of a film that was shown over and over and over on TV in the 90s, resulting in a popularity that keeps it perennially at the top of the IMDb ratings list. Others, like Hook, show their age, and it’s more than just a few wrinkled spots (for the record, I’m still a fan, though I begrudgingly admit I am in the minority). I find it hard to go back and try to objectively evaluate something I loved as a kid. It can be tinged by nostalgia, but also by disappointment in the loss of magic or innocence, or by a cynicism that dictates if you liked something as a kid, liking it as an adult shows a lack of maturity.
