2013 was the year of excess – the year Hollywood was drawn to decadence, impossible wealth and suspect morals. First there was Korine’s surreal and artistic Spring Breakers, then, Sofia Coppola’s vapid, but comically chilling The Bling Ring, and finally Baz Luhrmann’s misguided and overblown on the Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby. The final … Continue reading
McQueen’s films are occasionally difficult to watch; taking an unflinching and quasi-documentary approach to their lurid, bordering on body-horror styled subject matter. Considering the director’s relative newcomer status, McQueen’s first two movies – 2008’s Hunger and 2011’s Shame – garnered a huge amount of critical acclaim, with viewers praising McQueen’s measured directing and his mature … Continue reading
It’s interesting that two of the most talked about films of 2013 – Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers – share a lot of the same themes; youthful hedonistic excess, the need for instant gratification, a sense of disassociated responsibility and a detachment from reality. And of course, crime. Whereas Coppola’s … Continue reading
After spending years attempting, and ultimately deciding against – the making of a Holocaust movie, Kubrick stumbled into another dark corner of human history and found the Vietnam war, by adapting Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers into a movie. The result – 1987’s Full Metal Jacket – was Kubrick’s penultimate film, and it’s a strange film … Continue reading
Eyes Wide Shut received a lot of attention upon its release. Kubrick’s bizarre sex odyssey was separated from the rest of his filmography by a 12 year gap – the director hadn’t made a movie since Full Metal Jacket in 1987, and critics were keen to see what had brought the reclusive Kubrick out of hibernation. This focus was further … Continue reading
There have been many classic movies about the Vietnam war – The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket – but it is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, the first of the Vietnam movies, which remains the definitive film of the era. It was the first American movie to deal with the war, made when … Continue reading
A Clockwork Orange has an infamous history. Anthony Burgess wrote the original novel back in 1962, over a three week period in order to beat a terminal brain-tumour which never quite lived up to it’s promise. The novel was unusual – a dystopian fiction detailing the life of a rapist and murderer and told in … Continue reading
