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Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
Star Trek: Picard: Why Trekkies are the greatest fans of all
Fans of Star Trek, or 'Trekkies', are notorious for their zeal. (I count myself among the most rabid of them. Although I’ve only ever dressed up as Spock, once.) In a sense, Trekkies were the original geek superfans, turning up en masse for conventions and meetings, and hotly debating minutiae of the scripts of the original Gene Roddenberry series (1966-9) as if they were far more pressing than reality itself. As Kevin Lyons of the British Film Institute, says in his history of trekking, “Star Trek was the first of the media-led fandoms, the ‘mother fandom’ from which all similar followings sprang.”
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Two stars for comic-book movie Birds of Prey
This is a first: a Hollywood superhero movie written and directed by women, featuring a multi-racial female cast, with no male sidekicks or love interests, and a theme about learning to live without a man. It’s groundbreaking, it’s long overdue, and it’s bound to inspire a generation of girls. But does any of that mean that the film in question is any good? The best way to answer that is to glance at its title, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. If you think that title is fabulous – or, indeed, fantabulous – you may well think the same about the film. But if you think it is exhaustingly laboured and twee, you should probably watch something else.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Robert Pattinson: ‘Twilight was an arthouse movie!’
The Lighthouse is a delirious, black-and-white horror drama about two 19th-Century lighthouse-keepers fending off seagulls, mermaids and their own rum-fuelled madness on a tiny island off the coast of New England. To put it another way, it is a typical Robert Pattinson film. Just over a decade ago, the British actor shot to superstardom by playing a sparkly-skinned, lantern-jawed vampire in the Twilight series. Before that, he set young hearts a-flutter as Hufflepuff hunk Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Oscars 2020: Parasite’s groundbreaking win
No, they didn’t mix up the envelopes. At Sunday’s Academy Awards, Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean black comedy Parasite became the first non-English-language film in the Oscars’ 92-year history to win the overall best picture prize. Bong had already won the prize for best screenplay and best director, and Parasite was the inaugural winner of the best international film prize, the category’s name having been changed from ‘best film in a foreign language’. But it was this groundbreaking grand finale that put the ceremony into cinema’s record books. Not only will 2020 be known as one of those infrequent but not unheard-of years in which the best picture Oscar went to the actual best picture, but it will also be known as the year when the Academy admitted that subtitled films are not intrinsically inferior to ones that aren’t. Film critics and fans were united in celebration on social media, and the mood in the Dolby Theatre appeared to be just as jubilant. To put it mildly, last year’s best picture win for Green Book didn’t get the same reaction.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
From Sonic the Hedgehog to Star Wars, are fans too entitled?
In the spring of 2019, director Jeff Fowler announced that the titular character of his new film, the live-action adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog, would be totally redesigned in the wake of fan backlash to its debut trailer. “Thank you for the support. And the criticism,” he tweeted. “The message is loud and clear... you aren’t happy with the design and you want changes. It's going to happen.” And it did.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
A new frontier in Bollywood
Change is afoot in Bollywood. Early this year, Indian screens were hit by trailers of the latest blockbuster, ripe with lavish costumes, songs and dances, and a love story. Matinee idol Ayushmann Khurrana stars in it. And yet, the new film Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Be Extra Cautious of Marriage) is different – Khurrana plays a man in love with another man.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Can beauty pageants ever be empowering?
eauty pageants have long been a contested part of our culture: some see them as a hangover from a far more patriarchal era, while others defend them for helping women of all ages to feel more confident and to know their self-worth. It’s a debate raised in new film, Misbehaviour.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
How Pretty Woman erased sex from its story
A middle-aged businessman pays a much-younger prostitute to be his live-in lover for a week. It’s a sordid premise for a feel-good romantic comedy, but that didn’t stop Pretty Woman being one of the biggest hits of 1990. And now, 30 years later, the film is still so cherished that a musical adaptation opened in London’s West End, after a successful run on Broadway (now closed due to the Coronavirus crisis). How did the film’s director, Garry Marshall, get away with it? How did he make such a tasteless exploitation fantasy seem almost wholesome? Well, casting a star with the incandescent beauty and charm of Julia Roberts was undoubtedly a factor. But another factor was casting a co-star, Richard Gere, who behaved as if that beauty and charm meant nothing to him.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Why cinemas will bounce back from the Coronavirus
Theatres are closing around the world. Jobs are being culled. No one knows when projectors will be fired up again. Cinema is far from unique in being an industry under threat in the time of Covid-19. But there is a particular irony in the fact that many of us have turned to streaming platforms to deliver entertainment to fill the long hours of isolation, often watching content originally made for the silver screen. Audiences have increasingly been consuming more films at home anyway, of course. But now that trend has become a fact of life, many are questioning whether the culture of cinemagoing will resume in the same way once the pandemic abates.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
