Ever since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, the discourse surrounding the Darren Aronofsky-directed The Whale has been successfully constrained to become a conversation about Brendan Fraser’s performance as the film’s protagonist, Charlie… which is a bit of a blessing in disguise – or more appropriately, a blessing under a tonne of makeup and prosthetics.
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By his own admission, A good chunk of Steven Spielberg’s directorial work has always been analogous to his real-life experiences. A keen observer will immediately find repeating patterns in stories he ends up attracted to, from E.T. to War of the Worlds and beyond. He’s been consistently coming back to revisit themes of broken families, absentee parents etc., especially visible in those rare movies he had a hand in writing, such us Close Encounters of the Third Kind or A.I.
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Damien Chazelle’s directorial output thus far has squarely put him in the realm of populist auteurs – filmmakers who challenge the audience without necessarily challenging the form, and always within the boundaries of widely accepted good taste. His work does not have the grit and prowess of what The Movie Brats did in the 70s or what the Indiewood crowd managed in the 90s.
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Following fifteen years in hibernation, Todd Field came back with Tár, a Cate Blanchett-starring juggernaut posed to either sweep at the Oscars or at least to make enough commotion to remind the public at large what cinema can be about. Among other things.
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New year, new endeavors! We have successfully launched into the maw of 2023 over at Uncut Gems Podcast and here’s a round-up of everything we recorded over the past month!
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Do you ever wonder if you are losing your wits? Do you think it’s much more often than it used to be when you forget someone’s name and then you go on Google to look up dementia symptoms and find all the links are purple? Because that’s more or less where I am now, or at least how I feel about the Oscar nominations.
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As the joke goes, people who are really excited about technology, AI, and who surround themselves with smart gadgets most likely do not work in tech, or at least if they do work in tech, they do not have anything to do with cyber-security. On the other hand, people who do work in tech and who are aware of how these convenient technologies can enable others to negatively impact their lives don’t install Ring doorbells and smart fridges, and they elect not to bug their own houses with Alexa-enabled technologies. They may decide to have a printer, but they might choose to keep a weapon nearby in case it makes a suspicious noise.
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It is honestly fascinating to observe how Avatar: The Way of Water is ploughing relentlessly through the vast expanses of the worldwide box office, now on course to eclipse a whopping target of two billion dollars, all in the space of just about a month since its much-anticipated release. But equally, this unstoppable juggernaut is already slowly evaporating from our consciousness.
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Charlotte Wells’ debut feature Aftersun opens with a piece of homemade footage of a young girl interviewing her father. She distracts him from whatever it is he is doing by prodding him about his age, because from the point of view of an eleven-year-old, being in your thirties is effectively equivalent to being a biologically functional fossil. The two have good fun, exchange laughs and then the picture freezes, which is where we realize we have not been watching the home video footage per se, but rather we have been looking at a screen where someone else is playing said footage. And we might just make out this person’s reflection in the TV screen.
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It’s January and as everyone on Film Twitter will know, it’s the time of getting that nice email from Letterboxd with a beautiful summary of the movies you watched in the previous year, the star-ratings you dished out, the stars you championed, the list you prepared etc., a.k.a. The Year in Review. Consequently, what you will end up seeing on your social media timelines is a veritable slew of stats coming from your friends, followers and complete strangers, some brandishing their ludicrous-plus numbers of movies they consumed in 2022, some casually gloating over their perfect Gaussian distribution of star-ratings and others seeking their status conferred upon them by the society at large due to their impeccable taste in cinema.
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Flasz On Film 