a blog about a lot of things

Sing Street: A Review It’s hard to resist comparisons to Once with John Carney’s new film. They’re both set in Dublin and have romance and creating music as central themes. But really that’s where the similarities stop. Once is a film with a limited focus telling a story of two people over a few days. It’s an excellent film because of this limited scope which is then aided by the low budget, home style camera work. Sing Street is much broader in focus. The central story is pretty simple: boy creates band to impress a girl. But there’s a lot more going on in this film. Set against a backdrop of his parent’s crumbling marriage the film also touches on sibling comradery, difficulty with changing schools, the transformative power of music and the limits of possibility in a small city. The film itself is halfway between a gritty kitchen-sink drama and a fantasy story where dreams come true. It doesn’t sound like there should even be a possible middle ground between those realms...

Sausage Party: A Review Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have now collaborated on Superbad, Pineapple Express and This is the End . Every single one of these films can be a strong contender for one of the best films of the year they were released in and Sausage Party keeps this tradition going (only The Interview, while still decent, doesn’t hit the high level of the other films they’ve written). At some point if this output and quality continues, critics are going to mark this duo as a new wave of comedy. Comedy films are underrated to the point where it’s become a stereotype of awards ceremonies that the comedy role won’t win any awards. In Sausage Party (and Neighbours 2: Sorority Rising, the other film the duo wrote this year) there’s been a secondary theme of addressing more serious issues. This can have the potential to derail all the fun of the film, as in Sausage Party, the serious theme being addressed is religion but the writers never allow the film to get away fr...

Jungle Book: A review Many children count The Jungle Book as a childhood favourite, myself included. So my expectations for this film were perhaps unrealistically high, especially as the 1967 film was also one of my favourite films (we had the VHS copy). It’s perhaps impossible to expect any film to hold up against such idealistic standards of nostalgia and The Jungle Book indeed does not match my nostalgic aspirations. It far surpasses them. This is not a film that is grounded in the past and limited by its source material. The movie is instead revelatory in every sense. The movie is revelatory while being faithful to both Kipling’s original and to a lesser extent, the 1967 film. There is definitely a slight feeling of classic spirit about the film which is inevitable in a story which we all know. One of the most striking themes about the film, which I never really got in the original film, was of how much Mowgli is stuck between two worlds. It’s pretty much the central...

With Woody Allen films, at least in recent times, the viewer either gets a movie that’s instantly forgettable ( Magic in the Moonlight, Irrational Man) or instant classics ( Midnight in Paris, Blue Jasmine). Café Society breaks the trend by falling between these two categories by being neither a classic nor unmemorable. Drenched in nostalgia like many of Allen’s best films the movie never really seems to come off as a film instead of incredibly well-crafted idea and so at times it’s possible to lose interest. The movie is theoretically about emotion and passionate love but surprisingly (considering the director) never really manages to find the right chord that makes it seem like this passion is felt. Jesse Eisenberg is the latest actor who seems to be playing the onscreen role of a young Woody Allen and easily nails the role. His scene with the prostitute may be the best Woody Allen scene not actually starring the man himself. The film is separated into two main arcs ...

Selection Day: A Review Aravind Adiga has a reputation as a chronicler of the ambition of the Indian masses to bridge the gap of inequality. In this, his third novel, the scope is once again on the effort of members of the lower classes trying to make it into the exclusive world of privilege but this time the author goes about it by focusing on modern India’s great love: cricket.  Few things are more representative of the aspirations of the Indian masses than the dream to be a cricketer. IPL success stories capture the entire nation's attention and this allows the writer to detail another familiar Indian character, the entrepreneur who sees brilliant opportunities everywhere. The cricketers are Radha and his younger brother Manju, both exceedingly talented and continuously bullied by their father, who has made a contract with God that his son’s will be the best and second best batsmen in the wold. They make a less divine contract with Anand Metha who sponsors them ...

Richard Linklater’s films always make the viewer conscious of time, whether it’s the years represented in Boyhood or the hours that go by in Before Sunrise. Everybody Wants Some details the weekend before the start of semester for a group of college baseball players. Linklater has stated that he considers the film to be the spiritual sequel to Boyhood but in tone and style it definitely reminds one of Linklater’s 1993 comedic masterpiece Dazed and Confused. The film is quite light on plot but overall follows freshman pitcher Jake as he interacts with his teammates and navigates his first college weekend. It’s extremely heavy on the conversation and as expected for the director (possibly the best writer of dialogue in current cinema?) the characters go over ideas of varying magnitude which seem to be relevant on a universal level. Sure, the characters aren’t discussing the biggest ideas in the world but the philosophies somehow seem to be profound. There’s no real story...

With films that are shot in one take the majority of focus tends to be on this fact and the difficulty of achieving such a feat. This is understandable as the difficulty of achieving this has made the production of any one-shot film an impossibility till the fairly recent past and the development of digital movie cameras. In 2002, critically acclaimed releases such as Russian Ark and Irreversible were released and while there was sufficient regard for the technical aspect of the films being shot in one-take it was only until Birdman ( edited to seem as one take, not actually one take) in 2014 that it could really be said the one-shot entered the realm of regular film criticism. The posters and trailer for Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria regularly reference the fact that this film was shot in one take. It remains an impressive feat even if they do tell us a lot. Filmed in a couple of hours in the Kreuzberg and Mitte neighbourhoods of Berlin during the early hours of the mornin...