There are a litany of ways to take in Stalker, from simply admiring the atmosphere it creates to character analysis to digging through its larger philosophical point, and this write-up is more a collection of thoughts I had during a recent viewing than actual in-depth analysis. So, with that in mind…
If I had to boil my interpretation down to a concise thought (which is hard here), it’s that the point of the revolving plots are to illustrate how human life is spent in a constant push/pull between self-interest and selflessness; no matter how far back or how far into the future we go, it’s the nature of who we are. And as we see again and again throughout the film, whichever impulse we act on will affect our own life as much as the lives of those after us.
The era that There Will Be Blood is set during is such a romanticized period of time in this country. The turn of the century was when you could move out west, buy land, and really “make yourself.” I’m sure that there were people who pursued that nobly, but I bet for a large swath their attitude was less about independence and freedom, and more about profit.
Looking at 1999 with the benefit of hindsight, it seems symbolic that Woodstock should die the year that Coachella was born, setting new foundations on which the modern festival circuit would be built.
“Detroit” is not a beautiful film. It’s rough, it’s violent, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s also absolutely necessary.
A tale of isolation and wilderness survival might work well in a novel (Michael Punke penned the book upon which The Revenant is based) but it’s difficult at best to translate into cinematic form, and The Revenant sat in production limbo for nearly a decade before the script found its way to screenwriter Mark Smith. Even after Alejandro Iñárritu signed on to direct in 2011, it took another three years for filming to begin. Was it worth the wait? Unquestionably.
“Well this is embarrassing,” someone half-groans behind me in the theater a few weeks ago as a trailer for the documentary “Welcome to Leith” plays.
Over thirty years ago, George Miller used money he saved while working as an emergency doctor to fund his directorial debut, a violent Australian action film titled “Mad Max.” Shot for next to nothing, the film went on to set box office records, launching two legendary sequels that catapulted Mel Gibson to international stardom and influenced decades of post-apocalyptic media. How did Miller follow up such a gritty, highly-regarded trilogy? By producing and co-writing the acclaimed family films Babe and Happy Feet, as well as their sequels.
[Please review the introduction in Part I for context] …Graphic violence and brutality are not at all the only means that horror filmmakers use to manipulate the spectator’s senses. On the contrary, an equally popular trend takes the complete opposite road: A cinema of the unknown. In this mode, the film leaves much up to the viewer’s imagination; rather than show you the monster or killer slicing up their victims, the content is only implied, and the spectator’s own mind fills in the gaps.
During my senior year of college, I took an advanced course in Film Theory. It was the sort of class most people imagine film students taking: lots of extremely obscure films, scholarly discussion of the various philosophical, psychological, and social impacts of films, and so on. For the course final I wanted to see if I could get away with writing a fifteen page research paper on what’s generally regarded as the most juvenile genre of filmmaking, and the antithesis of everything we watched in class: Horror films.
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