Nothing else to say
It is rather difficult trying to put into words my feelings on the films of Yorgos Lanthimos.
Granted, I have now only seen four of his films, which started with 2018’s The Favourite. I then went back to discover The Lobster (2015), which is possibly my personal favorite to date. Then came 2023’s Poor Things, which, despite having a wonderful performance by Emma Stone, was way too much for me (a reincarnated woman with a childlike mind discovering sex is just…no).
Recently, there was news that a company named Particle6 had created the world’s first AI actress, and that certain agencies were looking into hiring her.
The idea of this actress (named Tilly Norwood) has understandably upset most of Hollywood. I read one actress said one of the main reasons this won’’t work is because Tilly lacks one of the most crucial tools an actor needs: past experiences to draw from. This is one of the main ingredients that makes Dwayne Johnson’s performance in The Smashing Machine so remarkable.
Barely two minutes into the newest Paul Thomas Anderson film, I jotted down one word:
“Timely?”
Nearly a month ago, I caught up with an old romantic fantasy called Somewhere in Time from 1980.
As I have always been a fan of time travel, I managed to overlook the questionable approach to that phenomenon because the leads (Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour) had such palpable chemistry and the John Barry score was enjoyably hypnotic.
There are a lot of things I would tell my younger self to have done differently, but one for sure is to have read more Stephen King novels. Actually, any of his novels.
Perhaps the main culprit was that I was imitated by the page count of the books (especially IT). You can disagree with him on Twitter all you want, but your just being silly if you think he is a bad writer (and this coming from someone who has yet to read one of his books).
Throughout my four years of being on my High School Speech team: there was one unwritten rule that seemed to be the most concrete (when it comes to written speeches): Never write a speech about speech team.
True, one should write what one knows, but there were so many speeches about speech team (especially in the Original Comedy event, which I was mainly in) that it was a cliche even before I entered High School. What I never mentioned was how the idea came from having just seen the Spike Jonze film Adaptation.
As someone who has yet to visit New York City (still near the top of my bucket list), I in no way feel I can say what director in the history of cinema has best captured the city.
A few names do come to mind: Martin Scorcese, Nora Ephron, Sidney Lumet, and Woody Allen (despite his troubled personal life). Then of course there is Spike Lee. While he has not entirely relied on New York for all of his films, his best ones (namely Do the Right Thing in 1989) have helped shape parts of the city that never sleeps in our movie going psyche.
Movie titles can indeed be a slippery slope.
On one side, you have movies like the recent KPop Demon Hunters, a title that tells you directly what it is about yet can scare people away from its subject matter (for the record, I loved that film and can’t stop listening to the soundtrack.) Then you have a movie titled Weapons, which, while singular and simplistic, is about so much more.
This is one of the best premises for a film I can remember. In a normal town, a child narrator explains that, at 2:17 AM, all but one of the kids of an Elementary classroom woke up, ran into the night, never to return. That is as far as I can go, because …well, you will thank me later.
It must be annoying to be a film star and have fans who are foolhardy to ask you to “do” a character of theirs for them. I imagine if anyone were brave enough to ask that to Daniel Day-Lewis, and he were willing, he would say something like “Come back in a year”.
It was Marlon Brando who became the original cinematic method actor, paving the way for the likes of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Charlize Theron, and Jeremy Strong, just to name a few. Yet Daniel Day-Lewis is almost another breed. The behind the scene stories of him are ghastly: being carried around in between takes of My Left Foot (where his character had cerebral palsy), making his own canoe during The Last of the Mohicans, and even denying specific medical treatment during Gangs of New York because the meds were not around during the time of the film.
Whether it was at the age of 10 when I discovered the idea of zombies through the OG Resident Evil games (and later, the atrocious movies), my brief obsession with The Walking Dead (I stopped watching not long after Carl was killed off), or only recently catching up with the 28 days films, I have come to one solid conclusion: I would not last long in a zombie apocalypse.
There are too many factors to consider, but the main reason is that without the meds I normally take, I’m a goner. Nevertheless, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has been lodged in our society’s psyche since the days of George A. Romero. Now, director Danny Boyle (along with Alex Garland as a script writer) have come back to the universe they created in 2002, with 28 Years Later, the third in the series (both were absent for 28 Weeks Later).
Nothing else to say