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Menampilkan postingan dari Maret, 2018

Review: Ready Player One

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Often the most interesting thing about a movie is the thing they don't want you paying attention to. When you're setting up an extreme scenario that you want to play around with, usually the easy thing to do is to set up an environment where that scenario seems reasonable; there's a reason why crime rules the streets in every Death Wish movie. So to have everyone constantly logged into a virtual world in Ready Player One , the real world has to be a crapsack. But why? Movies have always struggled to make virtual worlds interesting. Movies themselves are a virtual world we willingly enter; add another layer to that and you run the risk of the audience feeling too far removed from the story. Inception made it work by having the layers of removal be part of the story; The Matrix set the bar impossibly high by making the virtual world the only place where the characters could be fully human. And here? It's important because that's where all the cool stuff is. The ori...

Review: Mary Magdalene

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Mary Magdalene  is a quiet and sensitive film about a radical woman. Lacking the violent bombast of most biblical filmic narratives, and refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, it's a film that may perplex or underwhelm impatient audiences. But it's interesting precisely because of this quietness, and for the way it allows its central character, Mary (Rooney Mara, etherial and serious), a spiritual journey that's valid and plausible, whether or not you can believe in the mumbling Jesus  as the son of God or merely a gifted guru ahead of his times. This is a film that arguably allows both possibilities to exist side by side. We first meet Mary as an empathic young woman living in a small fishing village where she doesn’t fit in with her traditional male-dominated Jewish family. She doesn’t want to marry or bear children and yearns for something intangible. Her independences leaves her open to accusations of demon possession and there are moments of real danger ...

Review: Tomb Raider

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Tomb Raider is an old-fashioned film, and not just because a large chunk of it takes place in a thousand year-old crypt: there’s next to nothing going on in this largely unambitious action-adventure that you couldn’t see in a movie twenty (forty?) years ago. Well, maybe one thing: at a time when the idea that simply taking another culture’s relics is a little dubious, the new Tomb Raider goes out of its way to present grave-robbing in a socially acceptable light. This time around the ones actually robbing the tomb are the bad guys, the tomb is Japanese (relatively safe to pillage culturally speaking) and it's also pretty much a death trap the Japanese didn’t want anywhere near their country anyway. So with that safely taken care of, we’re free to enjoy the tomb-raiding clichés – of which there are many, and this gleefully includes all of them – under the steady leadership of Alicia Vikander, who as Lara Croft delivers a performance that gives just the right amoun...

Some rushed love for Female Film Critics

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It's International Women's Day. You can go elsewhere to find reams of appalling statistics and analysis telling us just how far we've got to go before there are equal opportunities for women behind the camera and in front of it. This inequality extends, of course, to women film critics, commentators and scholars. I'm not here to talk about that. Me, I'm struggling to stay in the game.  Freelance film writing is poorly paid, sporadic, and takes far longer to do properly than most people realise. Like most journalism, it's a struggling profession (if film reviewing ever was a profession) and most of us, men and women, do it for the love of it. I reckon I spend 20 hours a month watching films for a one-hour unpaid podcast, Hell is for Hyphenates . It's a fun gig, I enjoy working with my hilarious co-host, Lee Zachariah, and it stretches me to watch both old and new films. I know how lucky I am to be able to afford keep writing about film while I'm working ...