art
Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.
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have turned to streaming platforms to deliver entertainment to fill the long hours of isolation, often watching content originally made for the silver screen.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
Why does cinema ignore climate change?
Whether you believe that art imitates life or life imitates art, it often seems as if the 21st Century is imitating a Hollywood blockbuster. At the moment, as many of us have observed, the current situation seems to be echoing Contagion and 28 Days Later. Before that, the climate crisis – with its news reports about hurricanes, tidal waves and wildfires – felt like every mega-budget movie about a world-shaking apocalypse.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
How the Marvel Cinematic Universe has helped me grieve
I’m going to explain to you why the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is my happy place in a moment but first I need to tell you about something sad. My grandmother died from Covid-19 complications on Good Friday and it’s the first time I have really experienced the true pain of losing a loved one. Monica had been my only grandparent since I was five years old; she was a Grade A, god-tier grandma and here I was, in my flat in London, having to come to terms with her death alone, with the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to leave lockdown to say goodbye at the funeral in two weeks’ time.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Withnail and I: The ultimate cult film?
Withnail and I wasn’t a box-office sensation when it came out in 1987. “I remember actor friends really liking it,” one of the film’s stars, Paul McGann, tells BBC Culture. “Reviewers not so much. It wasn’t given a big release. It played in a handful of London venues and then it was gone.”
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
The greatest decade in cinema history?
Since motion pictures first arrived in the late 19th Century, each new decade has heralded movements and styles that influenced the development of cinema. The 1940s and ‘50s constituted peak periods for US film noir, for example, while the convention-upturning French New Wave blossomed in the 1960s. Both of these genres made a big impact on cinematic storytelling, but which decade tipped the axis of the motion picture medium in the most profound ways?
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
Why the apocalypse is being reimagined as a beautiful
The Last of Us may have been a zombie horror survival game, about a duo traversing a post-apocalyptic US overrun with cannibalistic creatures, but its most memorable moments weren’t daring escapes from zombie hordes, nor explosive shoot-outs with hostile human survivors. Instead, the greatest draw of the 2013 best-seller – lauded as one of the greatest video games of all time – was its quiet story beats, and one quiet story beat in particular.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
Pink Flamingos: The most outrageous film ever made?
John Waters’ legendary underground classic, Pink Flamingos, was made in 1972, but it wasn’t until 1989 that a brave video distributor submitted it to the British Board of Film Classification, in the hope it might receive the official rating that would allow it to be stocked in high street shops. The BBFC agreed to grant Pink Flamingos an 18 certificate, but only on the condition that three minutes of footage were cut from five outrageous scenes.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
The films that make the countryside seem less white
“People stick to their own kind. You are forced to accept that when you grow older.” So says the disillusioned father Jay to his daughter Mina in one of my favourite films, Mississippi Masala – and it is a line that has haunted me ever since I first watched Mira Nair’s 1991 drama about a Ugandan-Indian family who have emigrated to rural America.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
What makes the ultimate film soundtrack?
he snaking rhythm and ripple of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966); the pastoral atmospheres of Days of Heaven (1978); the icy tension of The Thing (1982); the elegiac beauty of Once Upon a Time in America (1984); the swelling heartstrings of Cinema Paradiso (1988)… the prolific film scores of Italian maestro Ennio Morricone not only elevate classic scenes onscreen; they seem to live with us beyond them, in surround sound. The news of Morricone’s death this week, aged 91, bears a particular emotional weight, so vast was his repertoire (around 500 scores), and so intimate its connection with countless listeners. In the 2019 book Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, he said that “Most of the time, people experience the music in a film as a subconscious suggestion… In other words, music manages to show what is not visible, to work against the dialogue or, even more, tell a story that the images do not reveal”. What makes a truly great film soundtrack might be a perennial question – but Morricone left us with timeless responses, across a multitude of genres.
By Sue Torres3 years ago in Geeks
How Clueless transformed the movie makeover
If there is one thing that Cher Horowitz, the heroine of 1990s teen-movie classic Clueless, loves, it’s a makeover. It’s her “main thrill in life,” her best friend Dionne points out, “It gives her a sense of control in a world full of chaos”. But as Cher plans the transformation of new friend Tai from grungy misfit to Beverly Hills princess, she is blissfully unaware that the person getting the real makeover in this movie is herself.
By Cindy Dory3 years ago in Geeks
