a blog about a lot of things

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...

White teeth White Teeth is a novel that, like London (the city it describes), has very many different aspects and stories to it which make up the whole. The book tells the story of multiple generations of two families, the families of Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones who met as soldiers during the Second World War. There is more to White Teeth than just a story of family though. It addresses racial issues such as the relevance of race and the idea of identity and being English. The book also touches on the topics of religious fundamentalism and scientific progress; dealing with the eventual clash between them. Immigrant life in London is a familiar topic detailed in such diverse books as Brick Lane by Monica Ali, The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi and Youth by J.M. Coetzee. The general trend in these books has all been their serious portrayal. Smith gives us a humorous take on immigrant life which is a fresh perspective. The first family who fo...