Archive for the ‘surreal’ Category
Author: James
Soul searching
There’s much to enjoy and ponder in this meta-take on what it means to be a person.
Seriously, they couldn’t have found a better actor (in much the same way as was the case with Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999)) than Paul Giamatti to play himself to near perfection in Sophie Barthes’s sharp and ever-so-slightly twisted take on ‘soul storage’.
Author: Colin
Fink’s a lot
Saturday afternoon, nothing worth watching on telly, so what better than to slip a silver disc into the player and enjoy an hour or two of cinematic wonder. That’s what I thought, anyway. The chosen movie (Barton Fink (1991)) divided the camp somewhat. I found it a thought-provoking, gorgeous piece of cinema. The Divine P (my good lady) thought it was ‘a bloody weird movie’. She has a point, although were I to use her critique, it wouldn’t occupy a lot of space.
Author: James
Looking for America
Writer-director Emanuele Crialese (Respiro (2002), Once We Were Strangers (1997)) sets his tale of immigrants’ dreams in Sicily at the beginning of the 20th century – the (at times brutal) immigrant experience is portrayed, stretching from a dirt-poor Sicilian hamlet to Ellis Island, the ‘Golden Door’ to the United States.
Author: Jeremy
More than a simulacrum
Why would you want to go and see a film which, for a Hollywood movie, is so down on itself and life? A film that begins depressingly and refuses to change mood is obviously not going to attract a large audience – the Brits wallowing in post-Empire angst and driven by a new type of working-class director were past masters at kitchen-sink misery nearly 50 years ago, and people wonder why the British film industry disappeared for nearly two decades soon after.
Author: James
A respectful pause
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ – Harold Pinter.
Picturenose would take this opportunity to pay tribute to Harold Pinter, perhaps the most influential dramatist of the 20th century, who died on Christmas Eve 2008, aged 78. Pinter, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, numbered among that rarest breed of auteurs, those whose names have entered the lexicon – according to the online OED, ‘Pinteresque’ is defined as ‘resembling or characteristic of [Pinter's] plays…typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality and long pauses’.
Author: Colin
Always intense…
You will kindly bear with me here when I explain that it’s taken me quite some time to review this, one of my favourite films ever. You see, it’s kind of because I can’t explain why I like it. It’s one of those films that don’t seem to really mean anything, it has no message for mankind or anything so lofty and virtuous, and has special effects that make Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) look like a total CGI-fest.
Author: James
[photopress:Waiter_1.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Prepare to meet your maker…
Reality’s not what it used to be – ‘meta’ reality, namely the displacement of characters/director/author/viewers in cinematic narrative, has been done before – John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness (1995) played the game for scares, with its central character slowly realizing that he is the doomed hero in a Lovecraftian nightmare that is being written by someone else, and then there was Philippe de Broca’s Le Magnifique (1973) starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jacqueline Bisset, which played the concept squarely (and succesfully) for laughs.
Author: James
Mysterious ways
Flemish shorts director and writer Dimitri Karakatsanis takes his first stint at the helm of a feature with this elegaic study of coping with loss.
Following her young son’s tragic death in a car crash that she survived, Elena (Steffi Peeters) is kidnapped from hospital by a mysterious stranger, David, who appears to have heightened powers of perception – able to ‘feel’ Elena’s grief, he takes her for a long cross-country trek in an old camper van, picking up another troubled soul, Moeder (Marijke Pinoy), en route. It’s certainly the path less-travelled by, and the journey’s outcome is very far from certain…
Author: James
Stay
Staying power
Marc Forster’s Vanilla Sky-esque vision of what dreams may come, Stay, is worth coming back to. Forster is very much the man of the moment – the German-born director has given the world critically acclaimed hits such as Monster’s Ball (2001) (Halle Berry’s gong-grabber, oo-er missus), Finding Neverland (2004), Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and, best of all, he’s at the helm of the next Bond, Quantum of Solace, due for release in November 2008. Much as I’d like to discuss (at length) the life-affirming joy that is the prospect of a new 007 flick, we were talking about Stay, weren’t we? Oh well, duty calls…
- Colin: Mike: the Matrix was utter toss. Don’t go there. Anyhow, I’m right with you on Aliens –...
- Colin: James: Why not do ten more and see if you can avoid putting the god-awful travesty that is Independence Day in...
- CD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (it’s about an alien who is Jesus…but better than ET) Soylent Green...
- James: Hello Chris, and welcome to Picturenose!
Many thanks for your comment – I thought, in fact, that... - James: Colin, good points, both on Westworld (which should really have been included, I know, I know) and otters.