art

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

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
Frenzy at 50: The most violent film Hitchcock ever made
child of the Victorian age, Alfred Hitchcock was always fascinated by stories of the elusive Jack the Ripper and other supposedly "gentlemanly" murderers who lived in plain sight but stalked their victims from the shadows.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Will Hollywood ever show us the ‘real India’?
In a minor scene in the new film The White Tiger, released today on Netflix, rich-kid businessman Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) exclaims to his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), "you know the real India". The two of them are at a Delhi dhaba – a local quick-stop restaurant, one of hundreds spread over north India – tucking into what looks like a simple meal. Balram possibly eats an even sparser version of this food every day. But Ashok is just back from the US, American-Indian wife in tow, and giddy at the promise of what this market of over a billion people holds for his new business ideas. To him, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that is his home country.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The timeless appeal of one-man-and-his-dog stories
In the 1991 film adaptation of Jack London’s classic novel White Fang, there's a scene where Ethan Hawke's Jack Conroy, a city boy trying to strike it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896, inadvertently causes the sled being pulled by the dogs of his guides to topple over. He's brought too many books with him on the journey to Yukon Valley and the weight has offset the balance of the transport.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Malcolm & Marie is a 'vibrant, perceptive film'
n one long night in the relationship of a film director and his girlfriend, John David Washington and Zendaya talk, shout, argue, insult, attack, counter-attack, kiss, make-up, then argue all over again. The ghosts of many other bad-relationship dramas hover over Malcolm & Marie, including Scenes From a Marriage, Marriage Story and especially Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whose black-and-white look and one-night time frame are echoed in this new film. But writer and director Sam Levinson, who also created the audacious and enthralling HBO series Euphoria, gives the familiar story a makeover with dynamic, sensitive performances from its hugely talented stars, and a story that broadens to include race and the new Hollywood. The two-character film was devised and made during the pandemic, but needs no special pleading for its circumstances. Levinson turns his small-scale approach into an asset that only enhances the film's intensity.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
The buried ship found on an English estate
They began at first light. The strongest of the king's guard, sinews straining, rough ropes chafing, hauled the heavy oak ship from the river on to the shore. And then, with the rising sun slowly burning off the chill morning mist, they heaved the vessel over the plain and to the foot of the hill. The crowds on the slope watched silently as they inched it up to the summit and the graveyard reserved for royal descendants of the one-eyed god. When the craft had been manoeuvred into the trench prepared for it, mourners laid the grave goods in the burial chamber in its centre. Then a mound was raised over it. And there the ship lay, moored fast in the East Anglian earth but journeying through time until, 13 centuries later on the eve of World War Two, a man called Basil Brown discovered it.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Luca is 'personal and charming'
If you don't live in Italy, and you don't have a holiday booked there, then watching Luca might be the next best thing. The new Disney-Pixar film is set in and around an idealised Riviera village, a rustic paradise of trattorias, vineyards, and crumbling town squares with fountains in the middle. In fact, celebrating the Italian dolce vita could well be the cartoon's main purpose. A gelato-sweet coming-of-age fantasy, Luca is inspired in part by The Little Mermaid, but mostly by the childhood of its director, Enrico Casarosa, an animation veteran who makes his debut as a feature director here. Instead of aiming for the metaphysical profundity of Pixar's last offering, Soul, or the mythological sprawl of Disney's recent action-epic, Raya and the Last Dragon, Casarosa has crafted a modest and gentle yarn about a few good-natured people in a small area, and their enviably simple way of life. His cartoon is aimed at the heart – and the tastebuds – rather than the brain. And it's no less of a delight for that.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Is Melancholia the greatest film about depression ever made?
In cinema, the bar for what passes as mental-health representation has always been low. Whether depression or something more serious, mental illness has typically been portrayed in a way that is either exploitative, stigmatising or both: most reprehensibly, perhaps, it is still often used as a catalyst for violence, such as in Todd Phillips' recent Joker (2019). But, amid all these problematic portrayals, arguably no film has been more profoundly compassionate in its depiction of a mental crisis than Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks