Tag: Drama
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Minority Report: Spielberg and the freedom of choice
The first time I saw Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report I was in my teens and part of an English class taught by Mr. King. Mr. King was arguably my first mentor, a teacher who taught for pleasure and who drew satisfaction from seeing his students evolve as people, not just students. He would often push […]
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Eat Drink Man Woman: Ang Lee’s hidden gem
Few filmmakers have shown the range Ang Lee has over the span of the last thirty years. Think about it, the same man who is responsible for Hulk gave us Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, among many others. In fact, the Taiwanese director rose […]
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Birdman: How Iñárritu adapted Raymond Carver’s prose
Upon its release in 2014, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) was met simultaneously with critical acclaim and popular confusion. Audiences seemed to feel belittled and made fun of by a movie that focused on what one of the characters refers to as the “cultural genocide” of filmmaking – caped superheroes […]
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The real-life tragedy of John Huston’s Misfits
Few movies can reflect and predict – without knowing, of course – the real-life tragedy of the people involved in their making as accurately as John Huston’s off-beat and fatalistic film from 1961, The Misfits, starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach. Huston’s film is drenched in the tragic fate […]
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Letters from Iwo Jima: How Clint Eastwood deconstructs the enemy
When American Sniper was released in 2014 and went on to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time, many people were quick to dismiss Clint Eastwood’s movie as a needless glorification of American imperialism and gun culture, associating the American icon with jingoistic ideology – when in fact, the film was a […]
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The dog-eat-dog mentality of David Mamet
Long before becoming a deranged FOX News personality, David Mamet was arguably one of the most unique voices of the American stage. His plays defined a certain kind of dog-eat-dog mentality that permeated the rising capitalism of the late 1970s and early 80s, with hits like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow as well as […]
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The troubled spirituality of Krzysztof Kieślowski
If there is one filmmaker that speaks to me on a spiritual level – who is able to connect with my thoughts, frustrations, passions and speak to my deepest fears and regrets – it is Krzysztof Kieślowski, who with his premature death in 1996 left an insurmountable void in the cinematic landscape. Kieślowski’s movies were […]
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The blue-collar swagger of Bruce Willis
When at his peak, Bruce Willis was the guy we all knew from somewhere busting people’s heads, sarcastically shrugging his shoulders and smoking a billion cigarettes with that trademark grin of his, the one that suggested his characters were mostly losers with a good heart, losers who, if given the chance, would take one last […]
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Mamma Roma: Pasolini’s tribute to motherhood
Few artists were able to stir the crowd the way Pier Paolo Pasolini did. The Italian artist from Bologna – who, when asked what people should label him (poet? filmmaker? novelist? revolutionary?), simply replied ‘writer’ as in the one who was put on this earth to chronicle the lives of others, the less fortunate ones, […]
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Holy Smoke: The power dynamics of Jane Campion
Given the overwhelming success of Jane Campion’s latest movie, The Power of the Dog, which through its world-wide Netflix release managed to find its way into the mainstream and earn 12 Oscar nominations, I decided to look back on what is arguably Campion’s least known work, Holy Smoke; a real oddity in a director’s filmography […]
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