Post-modernism, as a movement, is based on many different elements, but one of its key features relates to looking forward whilst looking back. As such, and across every medium of art, from literature to theatre, painting to cinema, post-modernism retains an awareness of the past, and examines how the past can be reshuffled into something … Continue reading
2013 was the year of excess – the year Hollywood was drawn to decadence, impossible wealth and suspect morals. First there was Korine’s surreal and artistic Spring Breakers, then, Sofia Coppola’s vapid, but comically chilling The Bling Ring, and finally Baz Luhrmann’s misguided and overblown on the Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby. The final … Continue reading
McQueen’s films are occasionally difficult to watch; taking an unflinching and quasi-documentary approach to their lurid, bordering on body-horror styled subject matter. Considering the director’s relative newcomer status, McQueen’s first two movies – 2008’s Hunger and 2011’s Shame – garnered a huge amount of critical acclaim, with viewers praising McQueen’s measured directing and his mature … Continue reading
It’s interesting that two of the most talked about films of 2013 – Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers – share a lot of the same themes; youthful hedonistic excess, the need for instant gratification, a sense of disassociated responsibility and a detachment from reality. And of course, crime. Whereas Coppola’s … Continue reading
Francis Ford Coppola has made some of the greatest movies of all time, and remains one of the world’s most influential filmmakers. The Conversation, The Godfather and it’s sequel, and Apocalypse Now were all seminal, cinema-altering movies which went some way to defining the American New Wave. Sadly, Coppola never really adapted once the Hollywood … Continue reading
After spending years attempting, and ultimately deciding against – the making of a Holocaust movie, Kubrick stumbled into another dark corner of human history and found the Vietnam war, by adapting Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers into a movie. The result – 1987’s Full Metal Jacket – was Kubrick’s penultimate film, and it’s a strange film … Continue reading
Some Films and Stuff 