You ever just wake up one morning and decide to embark on a journey of watching every Elvis movie that ever came out? Well, that happened to me the other day, and guess what, you’re coming along on this ride.
Continue reading Jenna Does Elvis #1 – Love Me Tender (1956) / Loving You (1957)
Nightcrawler (2014)
Written & Directed by Dan Gilroy
117 min.
I don’t even know where to start with this one. On so many basic levels, it’s just flat out bad—Nightcrawler is what I would call a full-blooded B movie. How exactly it’s been getting rave reviews, I can’t say I particularly understand. I assume we’re just so desperately hungry for movies that aren’t based off comic books or teen romance novels that most of us will just take whatever we can get.
Yet, as I left the theater, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something deliberate about the heavy-handed execution of the whole thing. What if these aspects that seemed like missteps were really just deliberate choices made in order to hammer the point of the film home? After all, there did seem to be a very specific point to Nightcrawler: to shine a light on the dangers of unchecked, amoral startups in an economy saturated with entrepreneurial go-getters.
Frank (2014)
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Written by Jon Ronson & Peter Straughan
95 min.
Spoiler-free.
Sometimes all you need to see is a still from a movie and you know it’s worth watching. That’s how I felt about Frank—the imagery looked so unique that I knew I’d have to give it a shot. I mean come on, Michael Fassbender running around in a papier-mâché head making off-kilter electronic music? Say no more, I’m there.
Funny enough, the concept is not actually unique to the film. The giant mask frontman character is actually based off musician and comedian Chris Sievey, aka Frank Sidebottom, cult hero of 1980s Britain. Frank Sidebottom’s weird brand of humor seems to have inspired many—there’ evens a statue of him in his hometown of Timperley– not to mention the film’s co-writer, Jon Ronson, who was part of Sidebottom’s band for a time.
Under The Skin (2013)
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Screenplay by Jonathan Glazer & Walter Campbell
Based on a novel by Michel Faber
108 min.
Spoilers ahead.
While waiting in line for the bathroom, I couldn’t help but overhear two women talking about the movie we had all just come from.
“Totally pointless. What was that even about?”
“Nothing.”
I guess on the surface I can see how this film could seem pointless. I mean, I get it—long silences, abstract cinematography, and alien invaders just don’t really do it for some people. However, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the reason they didn’t understand the movie was because they weren’t looking in the right place; this isn’t actually a movie about an “alien seductress [that] preys upon the population of Scotland” as its IMDB tagline says, it’s a movie about women and their place in modern society.
Continue reading Under The Skin: The Year Of The Surreal Continues
If there’s one thing I love, it’s being lost, scared, and perplexed.
Okay, not really, but I do love me some surrealist movies. Any movie that forces me to constantly pay attention, actively find connections, and really work at interpreting pictures, sound, and dialogue is typically a good time for me.
A good surrealist movie always has a point. Sometimes the point is that it doesn’t have a point, but that can be enjoyable too—so long as it’s not just random nonsense, or completely abstract bullshit.
I went to see a talk with David Lynch at BAM a couple months back and he actually brought up this exact point, to my delight. He was responding to a question on why exactly he refuses to give any solid interpretation of his work. His answer was that he thought it was important for art to be analyzed from all angles—to give one ‘definitive’ interpretation is to stifle all other paths of growth. He went on to say that if the director’s intent is presented well then it will open up to deeper interpretation from other sources, meanings that even the author themselves may not have realized.
A good film is absolutely that, and a good surrealist film takes it a step further—its constant twists and turns eventually culminate to a beautiful larger picture.
This year has been a pretty good one for new surrealist movies—we’re only half way through and I’ve already seen four new ones in theaters! Even better, I absolutely loved all of them: