Tag: War
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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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Street of Shame: Japan’s Answer to Italian Neorealism
When Roberto Rossellini decided to direct a film about children and the Italian resistance movement in war-torn, Nazi-occupied Rome in 1945, nobody could have predicted the lasting impact on cinema and legacy of Rome Open City (1945). What Italian neorealism did was give a voice to those that did not have it. Its entire philosophy…
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Jarhead: Generation Masturbation
There is a scene in Sam Mendes’ Jarhead from 2005, where a helicopter flies over a group of US Marines busy digging into the hard, oil-covered desert earth, blasting through a set of speakers Break On Through (to the Other Side) by The Doors. Our protagonist, Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) looks up and says, irritated: ”That’s Vietnam music, man. Can’t…
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One Shot
Recently I’ve had the immense pleasure of experiencing a movie all over again. Sometimes you watch a movie and you’re not fully capable of grasping its essence, so you move on, you categorize it, you label it or worse yet, you rate it on a scale from 1 to 5 or from 1 to 10…
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Satan’s Dance
Trauma: what’s the best way of capturing it without the use of words? Shaky cameras, a shell shock ringing and black and white flashbacks don’t work anymore. What Saving Private Ryan achieved for the very first time is now being rehashed in almost every single Hollywood blockbuster that is out there not to make a point but to cash…
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Brother and Sister
Some of the greatest heartbreakers and tearjerkers in film history belong to the animation genre. Animation, a genre that was always meant to be targeted at younger audiences, has now become another way of delivering very emotional and thematically powerful subject matters to the big screen. Once upon a time, Walt Disney developed the idea of…
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The Sad Story
After World War II, cinema changed forever. Audiences developed a different kind of sensibility, and suddenly the stories that were being told, usually touched upon very depressive themes rather than melodramatic ones. European cinema, particularly Italian cinema, managed to completely change the way we react and perceive film as an art form. Italian Neorealism was…
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Light and its Enemy
Today’s topic: Tarkovsky and his representation of life. We often watch movies and TV shows for the heck of it. We do it because we like to, we like action, we like plot, we like to have fun. It’s obvious. But rarely do we watch something just to really “watch it”. Analyzing films can be…
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Stanley’s Bastards
Today’s topic: the controversial Kubrick. Whenever you wonder about the great figures of cinema, there is always one name that keeps coming up in many different departments; from directing and writing credits, to sound and visual effects, to cinematography and camera work. The name is always the same: Stanley Kubrick. His contribution to film is…
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Wide Eyes, Wild Places
Today’s topic: Nature. Nope, it’s not a biology lesson, I’m well aware of it. What I mean by the word ‘nature’ is the key role that nature, in this case the tall Elephant grass and the impenetrable jungle, play in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. A lot of you, when you hear the words…
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