A Little Something About Rashomon: A Matter of Perspective
Rashomon is a 1950 film directed by Akira Kurosawa which, after being screened at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and winning the Golden Lion, catapulted Kurosawa and Japanese cinema as a whole into international recognition. In Rashomon, a samurai’s body is found in the woods, and a bandit is captured and arrested for the murder. […]
Scotland on Screen: 5 of the Best Films from Scotland
Scotland. A fairly small country in the grand scheme of things, just over 5 million in population and at about 80,000 km2 is similar in size to the Czech Republic or South Carolina. Its film industry is similarly fairly small, but Scotland has still been the scene of a good amount of great cinema. Whether […]
Review: A Better Tomorrow II (John Woo, 1987)
I once read an article about the prevalence of male intimacy and bonding in John Woo’s Hong Kong work, and now it’s all I can see when I watch these films. There’s just a real tactility and tenderness underpinning the interactions between all four male protagonists of A Better Tomorrow II, with Chow Yun-Fat’s character […]
Paris, Texas: The Image Tells The Story
(contains spoilers for Paris, Texas) Now available in video essay form, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLt5Q6UqNZc Synopsis Paris, Texas is a 1984 drama directed by Wim Wenders, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year. I briefly mentioned this before, on a post about my Criterion Collection. It’s the story of a man named Travis, played by Harry […]
Why Think About Film?
Sometimes I want to sit and watch a film and just enjoy it for its story or the spectacle of it, but often I enjoy digging in deeper and trying to explore what I’ve seen. I think the reason this is so rewarding is that what we see on screen is the culmination of a […]
Book Review: Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts, by Michael Lucken
“The work that becomes a model becomes a masterpiece and symbolically reigns over other works” (p. 39) Blurb from publisher website: “The idea that Japanese art is produced through rote copy and imitation is an eighteenth-century colonial construct, with roots in Romantic ideals of originality. Offering a much-needed corrective to this critique, Michael Lucken demonstrates […]
An Interesting Film Theory #1: Media-Philosophy and Materialism
As part of various film classes, I’ve had to learn about a number of different theories for analysing and discussing aspects of film. I find some of them more interesting than others, and I thought it would be enjoyable to briefly examine some of them here, one by one, with cinematic examples. First, is the […]
Harvey: Comedy Through Anticipation and Pay-Off
I was re-watching Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950) recently, a film starring James Stewart as a pleasant middle-aged man whose best friend happens to be an imaginary rabbit named Harvey. The film is very funny, with great performances especially from James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, and Josephine Hull as his exasperated and image-conscious sister Veta. […]
Cinematic Joy: 10 Films That Help You Feel Better About…Anything!
Cinema has the capacity to explore a wide variety of subjects, and make us feel many different things. Many of my favourite films deal with the darker side of humanity, with grief and loss and conflict, but I won’t be talking about those today. Today, I want to focus on those films that I always […]
The Best of 2019 (Kind of…)
It’s obviously a bit late for this, but I wanted to post it for posterity anyway. I made a video version of this earlier in the year here. This is my list of the 10 best films I watched for the first time in 2019, regardless of the year of their original release, and presented […]