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Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
The Big Sleep: The most baffling film ever made
The Big Sleep was released 75 years ago, and its plot has been puzzling viewers ever since. There is no disputing that Howard Hawks's Los Angeles-set noir classic is one of the most entertaining of all US films, thanks to its firecracker dialogue, brutal action, sultry atmosphere, and the volcanic sexual chemistry between its stars, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. But there's also no disputing that it's hard to know what exactly is going on. When The Big Sleep came out in 1946, the New York Times's Bosley Crowther pronounced it "a web of utter bafflement... in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused". All these decades later, the film's judgemental Wikipedia entry tuts that it "is impossible to follow", and is celebrated by "movie-star aficionados" only because "they consider the Bogart-Bacall appearances more important than a well-told story". Take that, movie-star aficionados!
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Diana biopic Spencer wobbles between the bold and the bad
You may feel that you've had enough of Princess Diana's story on the big and small screens, what with Naomi Watts taking the role in Oliver Hirschbiegel's awful Diana in 2013, and then Emma Corrin playing her in the most recent season of The Crown, with the mantel set to be passed in Elizabeth Debicki in the next run. But, to give it its due, Pablo Larraín's Spencer marks the only time the People's Princess has been shown delivering a lecture on Anne Boleyn to an old coat that she has just stolen off a scarecrow, and then having a chat with the ghost of Boleyn herself shortly afterwards. The Chilean director doesn't go in for conventional biopics, as anyone who has seen Jackie (starring Natalie Portman) or Neruda will know. And here again he has gone for a surreal portrait of his iconic subject. The snag is that his experimental art house spirit keeps bumping up against the naffness and the familiarity of British films set in stately homes, so his psychodrama ends up being both ground-breaking and rib-tickling.
By Copperchaleu3 years ago in Geeks
Why Berlanga is Spain's greatest film director
There's some debate over how it happened. It might have been after the screening of The Executioner, which satirised capital punishment in Spain, at the Venice Film Festival in September 1963 – or it might have been after Welcome, Mr Marshall! (1953) lampooned Spanish hopes for a slice of the US money destined to rebuild Europe after World War Two. In any case, one of the ministers of Spain's then dictatorship reported the latest irritation from the director Luis García Berlanga with the words: "Of course, Berlanga is a communist." To which the dictator Francisco Franco replied, "No, he's something worse: he's a bad Spaniard."
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
No Time To Die: The women who have shaped Bond
magine if in Dr No, the first James Bond film in a franchise that has spanned nearly 60 years, the title character had been the lead villain's pet monkey rather than the villain himself. Or everyone had talked in the style of Chicago hitmen instead of using the dialogue from Ian Fleming's seminal spy novels. Both these twists made it into iterations of the screenplay during Dr No's development, and had it not been for Johanna Harwood, a woman whose impact on Bond was vast and yet is seldom credited, 007's 1962 debut could have looked very different.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
The Last Duel: Cinema's 11 best showdowns
The duel in The Last Duel is a long time coming. Ridley Scott's Medieval drama has been underway for two hours before Matt Damon and Adam Driver get on their horses, grab their lances, and gallop towards each other – and by then we know their characters, we know why they're ready and willing to fight to the death, and we know what's at stake in the wider world of 14th-Century France. In other words, Scott has laid all the groundwork necessary for a classic big-screen showdown.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Why twisted erotic thriller Crash still stuns, 25 years on
On Monday 3 June 1996, any Londoner who picked up a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper on their way home from the office would have paused when they reached the headline: "A movie beyond the bounds of depravity".
By Copperchaleu3 years ago in Geeks
How The Velvet Underground film reclaims the past
There's a brief moment in Todd Haynes' new documentary The Velvet Underground where a handheld 16mm camera swings woozily around a downtown New York hangout of the mid-1960s. The band themselves, black-clad and ineffably cool, bang away at a rendition of their song Heroin while a swirling wall of psychedelic lights are projected over them, rendering them half-invisible.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Spencer and the ever-transfixing mystery of Princess Diana Share using Email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook
"A fable from a true tragedy," reads a title card in the dawning moments of Pablo Larraín's Spencer (2021): an early signpost, perhaps, of the fantastical twists and turns to come. This may ostensibly be a film about Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, née Spencer, but it is not, by any measure of conventional wisdom, the sort of period biopic generally en vogue in Hollywood cinema.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
