Wednesday, July 22, 2015

It Follows Movie Review


It’s long been a sort of tradition in the slasher sub-genre of horror films that those who choose to have sex are doomed to succumb to a horrific death. It was enough of a trope that Wes Craven’s post-modern slasher film Scream listed it as a surefire way for any of its characters to seal their fate. It’s no coincidence then, that It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, uses sex as the precise mechanism by which its characters attract the attention of the slow-moving, but undeterred creature that wants to take their lives.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Inside Out Movie Review

Pixar’s latest execution of brilliance is Inside Out. It’s getting more than its fair share of praise and accolades, most of which is justified. Is it their best film since Up, as many have deemed it? Probably, but then we’re really only talking about a stretch of two films in that time, both of which were very good even if they aren’t up to the excellent standard Pixar is renowned for. This feat of genuine creativity and acrobatic storytelling concerns the machinations (both literal and figurative) of Riley, who winds up being a secondary character in the story of her own mind. She is subordinate to, and to some extent controlled by the anthropomorphic representations of emotions in her head.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

American Sniper Movie Review

A Navy SEAL sniper sits on the roof of a building in Iraq. In the street below is an American military convoy. His job is to shepherd those soldiers to safety by keeping a lookout for potential threats. In the city war zone that has been evacuated, any military-age male must be regarded as a threat. First he scopes a man talking on a cell phone. The man steps inside, not knowing how close he came to losing his life. Next a woman and a boy, not more than eleven or twelve years old, arrive on the street. She hands the boy a rocket-propelled grenade. The voice on the other end of the soldier’s com can’t confirm visually. The call is entirely his. Men who engage in war are fair targets. What do you do about a child who is about to kill your comrades?

Everything I Saw in the First Half of 2015

In the first six months of 2015 I managed to watch 82 feature films, but only
79 different ones because three were repeated within the six month period.
I saw eighteen of those features in the cinema, but since February 10 I've
seen only five in the cinema.
Including the three repeats within the six month period, twenty-two of the
features films I watched were films I'd seen before.
I also watched twenty-five short films, seventeen of which I saw in the
cinema, most of those as part of the Oscar-nominated short films programs.
There were also nineteen TV episodes.

As for the writing part of all this, I posted only 32 new reviews in that time,
which is way down from last year. I do, however, have seventeen written for
larger projects coming in the future.

How'd I Do? 93rd Academy Awards Nominations Edition

I got 36 out of 43 in the top eight categories. That's 83.7%. Getting 19/20 in the acting categories made up for the fact that I went on...