remembering the films that the audience forgot
“I didn’t read reviews earlier in my career, but I read them now as I’m older. I read them all.”
— Steven Spielberg
The Wackness: The year is 1994 and our hero, Luke Shapiro, has just graduated from high school. He isn't one of the cool kids (he might be the most popular of the unpopular kids or the least popular of the popular ones), but they all know him because he’s their pot dealer. He also deals to this psychiatrist who happens to be the step dad of this chick he has a huge crush on...
Read MoreCes’t Pas Moi, Je Le Jure! translates to It’s Not Me, I Swear! The French-Canadian film takes place in 1968. Leon is a 10-year-old boy with some issues. He’s like Dennis the Menace times 100. Not only does he have a fertile imagination and is kinda suicidal. He seems to have no moral compass when it comes to his actions. Especially when his unhappy mother decides to move to Greece - causing him to act out even more.
Read MoreTaika Waititi was nominated for an academy award for his short film Two Cars, One Night back in 2003 and more recently his film JoJo Rabbit picked up a number of Oscar noms and Waititi got a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. But lets go back to his first full-length feature, Eagle Vs Shark. And what a wonderful debut it was.
Read MoreSienna Miller is the Lindsey Lohan/Paris Hilton-type celebrity actress (Katya) and Steve Buscemi is the political reporter assigned - unhappily - to interview her. That is all you need to know going into Interview. The rest is for you to discover. And what you’ll discover is a really good film with two great performances - especially the one delivered by Sienna Miller.
Read MoreWithnail & I is a British comedy about two unemployed actors living in a filthy apartment in 1969 London who decide to get away from it all and spend some time in the countryside. But things don't go as planned when the living conditions turn out to be no better than what they were dealing with in their London flat.
Read MoreThe Squid And The Whale is about a family breaking up in Brooklyn, New York in 1986 - and right when the film begins we see what side everyone is going to be on: The opening scene is of the family playing tennis with the dad and the older son on one side of the net and the mother on the other side with the younger boy. These are the two teams and this divide is just made more evident when the parents split up and the kids are forced to split their time between them.
Read MoreWhile photography is pretty singularly a visual medium and books are a medium very much completely reliant on the words - film is an art form that spans mediums. The words are just as important a component to the success of a film (I mean artistic success - not commercial) as is how the film looks and what it does visually, both large and small (people who talk about film tend to sometimes forget that a low-budget film, or one that forgoes large sets and special effects, is still making a visual statement).
Read MoreWe are an audience that has seen it all. We know the conventions of genres and the way things generally play out from having been exposed to decades of films and film making. We are a generation that knows it and has no problem telling people that we know it. So, what do film makers do for audiences like that? Well, they show us that they know it also.
Read MoreFilms get lost in the shuffle for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there just isn't any publicity so no one even knows it exists. Sometimes the initial critical reviews are negative (right or wrong), and then there are films like Observe and Report.
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