If you have been following any movie news, you know that 12 Years a Slave, the new Steven McQueen film starring Chiwetel Ejiofer, Michael Fassbender and Lupita N’yongo, is tearing up the festival circuit, inspire all sorts of praise and talk of Oscars. It’s been interesting to see a film made by someone of a dark hue winning raves, but there’s another facet to the conversation surrounding the film that has been confounding me. It all started when Brad Pitt made a comment during a press conference about Americans not asking about why there aren’t more films about slavery and eventually saying that it took an outsider to be able to tell this tale.
Review originally published at Awards Circuit during the Sundance Film Festival.
Kill Your Darlings is a perfect example of how one can tell a familiar story in a unique, fascinating way. Many are familiar with the Beats generation, but the way debut director Johnathan Krokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn see it you haven’t seen the definitive version of the tale till you see their film. Kill Your Darlings is a fascinating sojourn into the origin story of the Beats, kind of like The Avengers: Beats Edition set in the backdrop of the suffocating rigidity of 1944 Columbia University with a sharp script filled with an incredible social commentary. In short, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far at Sundance.
Hello everyone, did you have enjoyable weekend? It’s been a pretty busy one for me as film school has really started to pick up. In an effort to catalog my time there (and satisfy a class requirement), I’m gonna be posting interesting things under the tag Film School Files. And what better way to start then by talking about the project I participated in this weekend. Loyola Marymount hosts something called 10:1 Film Rush for the incoming grad students, where we are put into crews, given three words to choose from, and 10 hours the following day to shoot, edit, and screen the movie.
Review originally published during the SXSW Film Festival at Awards Circuit.
A Teacher, much like other films deal that with taboo subject matter, has the unenviable task of balancing the melodramatic aspects of the story as well as a need to justify every character’s motivations. And try though it may, it never seems to elevate itself from the basics of the story and the script moves from point A to point B without much in the way of shock. However, the tale is elevated by some incredibly nuanced acting from Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain and just enough visual panache to keep the audience satisfied.
Though I love summer, it must be said that this year, summer felt like it was a million years long, with the films falling off in quality precipitously the longer the summer went on. Which is why I am happy that the fall movie season is upon us and if word out of Telluride is anything to go by, this is shaping up to be a doozy. So I decided to take a gander at the fall film slate and see what excited me. So without further ado, here all the fall films I’m most excited for and the empirical reasons why.
Did you all happen to be on the interwebs today and see the news about Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver and John Turturro are joining the cast of Ridley Scott’s Moses? If you are unfamiliar with this film Christian Bale is going to be playing the titular Moses and Joel Edgerton will be playing Ramses. Weaver and Turturro will be playing the parents of the pharaoh Ramses (Edgerton) and Paul is in negotiations to play Joshua, who leads the people onto the promised land. Now when you see the actors selected, you totally envision ancient Egypt right?