art

Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.

Small Axe: ‘The most exhilarating director working today’
t’s rare when a political film can make you want to get up and dance, but that happens over and over in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series. These five standalone films are connected only by a broad subject, the West Indian community in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s, and by McQueen’s uncommon artistry. Most are fact-based recent histories, full of social commentary about racial justice more relevant now than ever. And as few movies do, they take us viscerally into the action, into the middle of dance parties, street protests and the lives of ordinary but memorable people. They draw on McQueen’s strengths, from his beginnings as a visual artist, to making films of unblinking realism including Hunger and 12 Years a Slave. With Small Axe, he stands as the most exhilarating director working today.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
Pixar’s Soul is ‘a gorgeous muddle’
These days, Pixar is no longer synonymous with the finest in American animation; other studios turn out more entertaining and more technically impressive cartoons on a regular basis. But when it comes to mind-expanding concepts and existential enquiries, Pixar is still in a league of its own. Competitors may content themselves with rebooting The Addams Family or Scooby Doo. Pixar examines emotion (Inside Out), creativity (Ratatouille) and play (Toy Story). More often than not, its films are concerned with how we can lead meaningful lives – but their latest cartoon is the first to make that philosophical theme explicit. Directed by Pete Docter, and co-directed and co-written by Kemp Powers, Soul ponders nothing less than the purpose of existence itself. It isn’t as profound as it was clearly intended to be, and its breezy depiction of bustling city life can’t help but feel anachronistic in the middle of a pandemic. But still, which other studio would dare to attempt what Soul is going for?
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
How Nashville captured the turbulence of 1970s America
Nashville, Tennessee is a storied city. It’s home to the Grand Ole Opry, the major ‘you’ve made it, kid’ live venue for country stars, and is widely thought of as the major incubator of country music in the United States. It was 45 years ago when Robert Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury cast their eye on the city as a backdrop to their 1975 film of the same name. Within an expansive near three-hour running time, they combined a realistic – if heightened – vision of the country music capital with their thoughts on a turbulent political era in the US, sewing their impressions of the star-spangled, hairsprayed, patriotic heartland into a ragged tapestry, and one that was beginning to fray at its edges.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Rebecca review: ‘A pallid adaptation’
Daphne du Maurier wrote the novel Rebecca inspired by jealousy and insecurity, but it all turned out great in the end. Several years before, she had discovered letters to her husband from his beautiful former fiancée, who had taken her own life. How could she compete with a ghost? Du Maurier channelled that anxiety into her 1938 bestseller about a mousy young woman, a never-named narrator who marries Maxim de Winter. His impossibly glamourous first wife, Rebecca, had died in an unexplained shipwreck. The second Mrs de Winter becomes the ill-prepared mistress of Maxim’s great estate of Manderley, where her timidity is no match for the villainous housekeeper Mrs Danvers or the lingering spectre of Rebecca. The Gothic plot is enough to make the novel work, but the themes of self-doubt and a marriage fraught with secrets are what make it endure, and such a rich source for adaptation.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
African Apocalypse: The real ‘heart of darkness’
In a year that has sharpened the focus on how Britain’s Imperialist legacy is remembered, the arrival of African Apocalypse seems rather prescient. The documentary – fronted by British-Nigerian poet-activist Femi Nylander and directed by Rob Lemkin – is a nonfiction retelling of the real-life barbarity inflicted on the people of Niger, in West Africa, by a French army captain called Paul Voulet. Taking cues from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness, Nylander travelled to the African country to retrace Voulet’s steps for the film and give voice to those still living with the collateral damage of his campaign.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review: ‘Chadwick Boseman soars’
When Chadwick Boseman first appears on screen in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it feels like a stab in the heart. Boseman’s death in August from colon cancer at the age of 43 still seems that shocking. It’s a sign of his artistry that before long we can put that real-life tragedy aside and see him as Levee, the troubled young musician at the centre of this exciting, trenchant film version of the August Wilson play.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Why The Godfather Part III has been unfairly demonised
The final part of the Godfather trilogy is considered such an artistic disaster that you'd think Francis Ford Coppola had forgotten how to make a film in the 16 years that followed The Godfather Part II (1974). Part III's most famous dialogue – Al Pacino as the aging Mafia don Michael Corleone snarls, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" – has become an easy laugh line.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
Why Hollywood gets the Irish so wrong
Like everyone else in Ireland, last month I watched the newly-launched trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme with my jaw on the floor as a parade of diddly-eye Irish clichés not seen since the dark days of Walt Disney’s 1959 leprechaun fantasy Darby O'Gill and The Little People was crammed into two-and-a-half minutes. Like the diaspora of Irish people living all over the world, my toes curled as dollops of synthetic paddywhackery followed broad cultural stereotype followed borderline national insult. Like anyone who has ever visited Ireland on holiday, or met an Irish person, I rubbed my ears in disbelief as our melodious native accent was mangled beyond recognition once again by an actor playing "Irish".
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
News of the World is 'a beautifully old-fashioned Western'
Lovely is not the first word you'd usually associate with a Western, but it suits News of the World, a film with tenderness at its core despite its adventures and action. Tom Hanks gives a heartfelt but unsentimental performance as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Confederate veteran of the US Civil War. He reluctantly takes a 10-year-old girl across Texas to her aunt and uncle, after she had been captured and raised for six years by a Kiowa tribe that murdered her parents.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Wonder Woman 1984 'fills you with wonder'
There used to be a time when you could follow a Hollywood blockbuster even if you hadn't memorised all the prequels, sequels and characters' family trees. You could see it as a child without being traumatised, or as an adult without being patronised, and it had the good grace to admit that it was primarily a piece of big-budget mainstream entertainment, rather than a Freudian epic about fate and intergalactic devastation. There have been recent examples, I know, but the time when those family-friendly blockbusters were made most regularly was the 1980s. That's why Wonder Woman 1984 is so ingenious. It's set in the 80s, and it includes all the shoulder pads, perms, synth-heavy pop songs and Cold War paranoia which that dateline implies. But what's remarkable is how close it is to being a 1980s blockbuster itself. A funny, sweet-natured, brightly-coloured standalone adventure, it is so reminiscent of the likes of Raiders of The Lost Ark and Ghostbusters in its jokes, its plotting, its locations and its general atmosphere that it fills you with the same warm feelings that they did – one of those feelings being wonder.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
Why The Empire Strikes Back is overrated
It’s 40 years this month since The Empire Strikes Back was released, and for most of that time the second film in the Star Wars series has been enshrined as the best: the darkest, the most complex, the most mature. Directed by Irvin Kershner, it’s the Star Wars episode with the highest score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (94%) and from viewers on Imdb (8.7), and the one that is said to elevate the saga as a whole. “It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times when the film was re-released in 1997, “that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.”
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
The painful truths about motherhood exposed
"He'll bulldoze your life, destroy your relationships, and when he's got you completely to himself: he'll destroy you. It's what he does," says a wizened older lady to another woman, who, in a strange series of events, has had a baby literally drop into her arms.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks