It was 1987 when our pizza-devouring, ass-kicking teenaged mutant ninja turtles and rat-surrogate-father splinter first kowabunga’d their way onto our screens. Since then we’ve witnessed many iterations of our beloved scaly heroes, but the odour of 80s cinematic lawlessness thrums through our amphibians cold-blooded veins irrelevant of the decade. But rehashing material dog-eared with melancholy is never an easy task. As with any other remake, directing a good new Turtles film boiled down to retaining the magic of the original, whilst simultaneously making it modern enough to resonate with a contemporary audience.
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Summer 2023. Audiences are flocking to cinemas to see the eagerly anticipated blockbuster, Barbie. The film begins and we open on a horizon. Cut to children playing with dolls in a desert landscape, only to find something that will change their lives forever, a monolithic Barbie doll.
Now to many, this might have seemed like a strange but interesting way to open one of the biggest films of the year, not realising that director Greta Gerwig is in fact paying homage to one of the most famous opening sequences in cinematic history, ‘The Dawn of Man’ scene from 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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On Saturday, 2nd September, the UK’s National Cinema Day achieved a remarkable milestone by generating nearly £4.65 million in box office revenue from almost 1.56 million admissions, representing a significant 6% increase compared to the previous year’s edition.
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Burrowed within the leather-bound embrace of the humble cinema seat, there are few positions any human being seems capable of comfortably enacting; mostly consisting of fairly intuitive postures, bipedal bottom against furniture bottom and bipedal back against furniture back. You can only imagine my surprise then, when A24’s recently released horror flick Talk to Me expanded my apparently limited knowledge of the spectacular diversity of seating positions.
Halfway through my spine was flush across the bottom seat, legs jettisoned out and fingers steepled over my eyes. At particularly gruesome moments I pretzeled myself over the empty arm to my left, somehow still stretching for my friend’s hand despite my awkward angle. To be a horror fan brings with it the flirtations of mild masochism both inherent in being spectator, and in surfing through hours and hours of mediocre content. Discovering a film that elicits horror so tangible it has you physically squirming in your seat is then, for lack of a better terms, a rarity and a pleasure.
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During its third and final act, Nolan shows J. Robert Oppenheimer in the midst of McCarthy-esque security hearings whereby a tormented genius’ integrity is stripped away by a society he worked to save, reminding me somewhat of Alan Turing.
While Turing’s death came from a cyanide-infused apple, coincidentally or not, Oppenheimer’s first scene shows the titular character trying but failing to kill his lecturer with, yes, a cyanide-infused apple.
Like Turing’s death, Oppenheimer tells the story of humanity biting into the forbidden fruit of nuclear power as its brazen characters march toward an event horizon, unsure of the consequences and unwilling to reconsider. Oppenheimer is a flawed masterpiece: a dizzying, gratifying, and at times cumbersome historical document that asks complex moral questions and gives few answers.
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Upon first hearing about the Barbie movie, anybody above the age of thirteen likely met the news with an eye roll, a sigh or perhaps even an exasperated comment about the decline in original content being produced by the film industry (the latter, possibly, having escaped my own mouth).
But then, you find out it’s going to be directed by Greta Gerwig. Best known for being the writer and director of the 2019 remake of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women and her Golden Globe winning coming-of-age comedy Ladybird, Gerwig is renowned for making films which, at the very least, are classed as being feministic. To hear she was directing the Barbie movie felt almost as shocking as discovering Vladimir Putin was starring in the next season of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
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Elemental review : “Pixar continues to do what Pixar does best with their first out and out rom-com”
Pixar’s latest movie hit the big screens recently, amid talk of the incredibly successful studio’s apparent recent downturn in form, and less than impressive box office returns. Every Pixar movie since a certain animated Spider-Man hit our screens, has been struggling to carve out its own corner of a market that it used to dominate with its fellow Disney animated releases.
Now their new releases are often labelled as ‘simplistic’, ‘lacking vision’, or ‘by the book’, especially when animated movie makers continue to push the envelope with movies like the aforementioned Spider-Man movies, Puss-in-Boots most recent release, and by the looks of it, Seth Rogen’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie that is due to hit cinemas later this year. Like the live-action movie world, Pixar, regardless of its stable of legendary characters and stories, has entered a world where people, especially critics, want new, they want fresh, they want you to push the boundaries.
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Being perfectly honest, HBO’s latest series The Idol is a massive mess. That’s not to say it’s devoid of any merit, there are elements of true talent hidden within, but in just a 5 episode run The Idol ultimately has no idea what it’s doing, what it wants to say and how to say it. It is literally and figuratively a ‘trainwreck’. You hate seeing it and it’s awful, but you can’t help but keep looking back as you drive past. It’s a morbid curiosity that kept me coming back and honestly I wish I didn’t.
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The Fedora, the whip, that iconic John Williams theme……Indiana Jones movies have seared their way into our cinematic consciences over the past 40 years, a beautiful reminder that movies can be entertaining without a tsunami of special effects.
Even with the amazing advances in the special effects industry, nothing can ever quite beat a well-choreographed action set piece, a daring stunt, or a giant boulder cannoning towards the screen that is so clearly not made of pixels!
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In honour of Pride Month, we are thrilled to present an interview with Liam O’Connor-Genereaux, a talented and passionate filmmaker who has embarked on an extraordinary journey with his low-budget film, The Butterfly Queen.
Join us as we dive into a candid conversation that highlights both Liam’s creative aspirations and the vibrant spirit of Pride.
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