art

Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.

How Nashville captured the turbulence of 1970s America
Nashville, Tennessee is a storied city. It’s home to the Grand Ole Opry, the major ‘you’ve made it, kid’ live venue for country stars, and is widely thought of as the major incubator of country music in the United States. It was 45 years ago when Robert Altman and screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury cast their eye on the city as a backdrop to their 1975 film of the same name. Within an expansive near three-hour running time, they combined a realistic – if heightened – vision of the country music capital with their thoughts on a turbulent political era in the US, sewing their impressions of the star-spangled, hairsprayed, patriotic heartland into a ragged tapestry, and one that was beginning to fray at its edges.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Rebecca review: ‘A pallid adaptation’
Daphne du Maurier wrote the novel Rebecca inspired by jealousy and insecurity, but it all turned out great in the end. Several years before, she had discovered letters to her husband from his beautiful former fiancée, who had taken her own life. How could she compete with a ghost? Du Maurier channelled that anxiety into her 1938 bestseller about a mousy young woman, a never-named narrator who marries Maxim de Winter. His impossibly glamourous first wife, Rebecca, had died in an unexplained shipwreck. The second Mrs de Winter becomes the ill-prepared mistress of Maxim’s great estate of Manderley, where her timidity is no match for the villainous housekeeper Mrs Danvers or the lingering spectre of Rebecca. The Gothic plot is enough to make the novel work, but the themes of self-doubt and a marriage fraught with secrets are what make it endure, and such a rich source for adaptation.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
African Apocalypse: The real ‘heart of darkness’
In a year that has sharpened the focus on how Britain’s Imperialist legacy is remembered, the arrival of African Apocalypse seems rather prescient. The documentary – fronted by British-Nigerian poet-activist Femi Nylander and directed by Rob Lemkin – is a nonfiction retelling of the real-life barbarity inflicted on the people of Niger, in West Africa, by a French army captain called Paul Voulet. Taking cues from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness, Nylander travelled to the African country to retrace Voulet’s steps for the film and give voice to those still living with the collateral damage of his campaign.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom review: ‘Chadwick Boseman soars’
When Chadwick Boseman first appears on screen in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it feels like a stab in the heart. Boseman’s death in August from colon cancer at the age of 43 still seems that shocking. It’s a sign of his artistry that before long we can put that real-life tragedy aside and see him as Levee, the troubled young musician at the centre of this exciting, trenchant film version of the August Wilson play.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Why The Godfather Part III has been unfairly demonised
The final part of the Godfather trilogy is considered such an artistic disaster that you'd think Francis Ford Coppola had forgotten how to make a film in the 16 years that followed The Godfather Part II (1974). Part III's most famous dialogue – Al Pacino as the aging Mafia don Michael Corleone snarls, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in" – has become an easy laugh line.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
Why Hollywood gets the Irish so wrong
Like everyone else in Ireland, last month I watched the newly-launched trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme with my jaw on the floor as a parade of diddly-eye Irish clichés not seen since the dark days of Walt Disney’s 1959 leprechaun fantasy Darby O'Gill and The Little People was crammed into two-and-a-half minutes. Like the diaspora of Irish people living all over the world, my toes curled as dollops of synthetic paddywhackery followed broad cultural stereotype followed borderline national insult. Like anyone who has ever visited Ireland on holiday, or met an Irish person, I rubbed my ears in disbelief as our melodious native accent was mangled beyond recognition once again by an actor playing "Irish".
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
News of the World is 'a beautifully old-fashioned Western'
Lovely is not the first word you'd usually associate with a Western, but it suits News of the World, a film with tenderness at its core despite its adventures and action. Tom Hanks gives a heartfelt but unsentimental performance as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Confederate veteran of the US Civil War. He reluctantly takes a 10-year-old girl across Texas to her aunt and uncle, after she had been captured and raised for six years by a Kiowa tribe that murdered her parents.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Wonder Woman 1984 'fills you with wonder'
There used to be a time when you could follow a Hollywood blockbuster even if you hadn't memorised all the prequels, sequels and characters' family trees. You could see it as a child without being traumatised, or as an adult without being patronised, and it had the good grace to admit that it was primarily a piece of big-budget mainstream entertainment, rather than a Freudian epic about fate and intergalactic devastation. There have been recent examples, I know, but the time when those family-friendly blockbusters were made most regularly was the 1980s. That's why Wonder Woman 1984 is so ingenious. It's set in the 80s, and it includes all the shoulder pads, perms, synth-heavy pop songs and Cold War paranoia which that dateline implies. But what's remarkable is how close it is to being a 1980s blockbuster itself. A funny, sweet-natured, brightly-coloured standalone adventure, it is so reminiscent of the likes of Raiders of The Lost Ark and Ghostbusters in its jokes, its plotting, its locations and its general atmosphere that it fills you with the same warm feelings that they did – one of those feelings being wonder.
By Mejra3 years ago in Geeks
Why The Empire Strikes Back is overrated
It’s 40 years this month since The Empire Strikes Back was released, and for most of that time the second film in the Star Wars series has been enshrined as the best: the darkest, the most complex, the most mature. Directed by Irvin Kershner, it’s the Star Wars episode with the highest score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (94%) and from viewers on Imdb (8.7), and the one that is said to elevate the saga as a whole. “It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times when the film was re-released in 1997, “that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.”
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
The painful truths about motherhood exposed
"He'll bulldoze your life, destroy your relationships, and when he's got you completely to himself: he'll destroy you. It's what he does," says a wizened older lady to another woman, who, in a strange series of events, has had a baby literally drop into her arms.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Frenzy at 50: The most violent film Hitchcock ever made
child of the Victorian age, Alfred Hitchcock was always fascinated by stories of the elusive Jack the Ripper and other supposedly "gentlemanly" murderers who lived in plain sight but stalked their victims from the shadows.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Will Hollywood ever show us the ‘real India’?
In a minor scene in the new film The White Tiger, released today on Netflix, rich-kid businessman Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) exclaims to his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), "you know the real India". The two of them are at a Delhi dhaba – a local quick-stop restaurant, one of hundreds spread over north India – tucking into what looks like a simple meal. Balram possibly eats an even sparser version of this food every day. But Ashok is just back from the US, American-Indian wife in tow, and giddy at the promise of what this market of over a billion people holds for his new business ideas. To him, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that is his home country.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks