art
Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
White Noise is 'thrillingly original'
t seems like no time at all since Adam Driver was playing the embodiment of cocky youth in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young (2014). But one of the great things about Baumbach's films is that as he gets older, his angst-ridden characters get older, too: with each new project he shines a light on the worries of another age bracket. In his brutal 2019 divorce drama, Marriage Story, Driver played a director who wasn't a hip young flavour-of-the-month any more. And now, in Baumbach's latest brilliant comedy, which opened the Venice Film Festival, Driver is middle-age incarnate: a university professor with thinning hair, a thickening waistband, and a looming awareness that he might be closer to death than birth. The role suits him so beautifully that awards nominations should be heading his way.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Mary Poppins Returns
How do you make a sequel to one of the most beloved live-action children’s films ever? For several decades, the answer was: you don’t. Mary Poppins was released in 1964, but even though the source novel’s author PL Travers wrote seven further books about the Banks family’s magical nanny, no one attempted to follow a film that was, to use Mary’s own phrase, practically perfect in every way.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The Jurassic Park film that was never made
The structure is so ancient that it feels almost prehistoric. Some people take a trip to a remote island, they see some dinosaurs, and then the dinosaurs try to have them for lunch. It’s what happened in Jurassic Park in 1993, and by the time the first sequel came out in 1997, the screenplay was already poking fun at how formulaic it was. “‘Ooh, aah’, that’s how it always starts,” says Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. “Then later there’s running and screaming.” How right he was. But this self-knowledge didn’t stop the makers of Jurassic Park III (2001) and Jurassic World (2015) sticking to the formula, and it wasn’t until the second half of this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom that the series found somewhere else to go.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Destroyer
Karyn Kusama’s moody Los Angeles cop thriller, Destroyer, is destined to be remembered as the film in which one of Hollywood’s most famously glamorous and elegant superstars, Nicole Kidman, demonstrated just how unglamorous and inelegant she could be. Kidman plays LAPD detective Erin Bell, a name which makes her sound like a Disney character, when she is actually the exact opposite. A gaunt, alcoholic wreck who tends to sleep either in a bar or in her car, Erin has papery, liver-spotted skin; cracked lips; bags over as well as under her eyes; and a mop of greying hair that would probably digest any comb that went near it. Whenever she trudges towards her colleagues, they swear under their breath and back away, mainly because she has become such an embarrassing liability, but partly, you assume, because of the stench that clings to her black leather jacket.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Vice
Adam McKay made his name by directing Anchorman, Step Brothers, and other comedies in which Will Ferrell swears loudly and damages things, but he has since become one of the US’s most serious film-makers. Not serious in the sense of being ponderous or obscure, I hasten to add, but serious in his engagement with complex current affairs. The big change came with 2015’s The Big Short, an Oscar-winning docudrama which attempted to explain the machinations behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis, while attempting to get some laughs. McKay’s follow-up is Vice, a film which asks how US politics reached today’s surreal state. Its two-word answer: Dick Cheney.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Five stars for ‘important and humane film’ Girl
Lara, the 15-year-old heroine of Girl, has just enrolled in a prestigious ballet school, an environment where everything that’s challenging about being a teenager becomes 10 times more difficult: the awareness that your body is developing in ways you might not like; the sense that there is an in-crowd that you can’t quite penetrate; the fear that you aren’t good enough, however hard you try; the irritation with well-meaning family members who don’t understand you. What magnifies these insecurities further is that Lara is a transitioning transgender girl, counting the days until she can have gender reassignment surgery, so she is even more self-conscious about her physique than her classmates are.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Does The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part match the original?
Perhaps no sequel could ever have reached the giddy heights attained by The Lego Movie. Written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the best cartoon of 2014 was such a magnificently animated and dazzlingly inventive delight that there was probably only one way its follow-up could go. But it is still depressing to see The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part falling so far short of its glorious predecessor.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris: The fairy-tale myth that endures
In Paul Gallico's 1958 novel Flowers for Mrs Harris, there is a couture dress called Temptation. It is black velvet: the long skirt covered in jet beads, the b odice a pale froth of chiffon, tulle and lace. It is number 89 in a show held within the hallowed halls of the House of Dior. Among the usual attendees – "ladies and honourables from England… baronesses from Germany, principessas from Italy, new-rich wives of French industrialists, veteran-rich wives of South American millionaires, buyers from New York" – there sits a London cleaner, enthralled by every emerging look. It is Temptation, though, that steals her heart. "She was lost, dazzled, blinded, overwhelmed by the beauty of the creation. This was IT!!"
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Berlin Film Festival review: The Souvenir
Honor Swinton Byrne has set herself a high standard with her first film; delivering unforgettability in her debut, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. But 21-year-old Swinton Byrne (yes, she’s the daughter of Tilda Swinton) did not spend years working up to the moment; she hasn’t trained as an actress.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Lords of Chaos: The grisly film that has caused outrage
Jonas Akerlund’s new film, Lords of Chaos, is a rock’n’roll biopic, with all the wigs and gigs that that implies. But it is also a grisly, stranger-than-fiction comedy drama about murder, suicide, self-harm, devil worship, and a spate of arson attacks that scandalised a nation. Chronicling the outrageous crimes committed by a few Norwegian black metal bands and their hangers-on in the early 1990s, the film probably won’t appeal to lovers of Bohemian Rhapsody – and there have even been calls from some church groups for the film to be banned.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The Aftermath: ‘A mildly engaging trifle’
The characters in The Aftermath face intriguing dilemmas. Four months after the end of World War Two, Rachael Morgan (Keira Knightley) arrives in Hamburg to join her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British military officer. How will they deal with the Germans, the vanquished enemy whose bombing of London killed their young son? Will they repair their marriage, now as chilly as the snowy landscape in which her train arrives? Will she fall into bed with the handsome German widower, Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), an architect whose grand house the British have requisitioned for the Morgans’ use?
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Captain Marvel
A slow-motion explosion in a barren landscape sends Brie Larson flying to the ground, blue blood running from her nose. There’s a glimpse of Annette Bening holding a gun. Larson’s character, who has not yet become Captain Marvel, wakes from this memory in the form of a dream, but her real life is even stranger. She actually has an inner glow, bright light shining out from her hands. That opening sets up the film’s otherworldliness, its personal mystery – what is happening in that memory? – and above all, its action.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
