Jake Gyllenhaal has spent his entire career playing the creepy guy. Some would say he's now typecast, but somehow he manages to keep his performances fresh and exciting. With Nightcrawler, he puts in a tour-de-force performance, which is arguably his best.
by Liam McMillen
Jake Gyllenhaal has spent his entire career playing the creepy guy. Some would say he's now typecast, but somehow he manages to keep his performances fresh and exciting. With Nightcrawler, he puts in a tour-de-force performance, which is arguably his best. by Liam McMillen With the release of Nick Cave's fantastic semi-documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, I decided to look into other musicians who have taken on film roles. Of course there are some terrible ones: Madonna, Prince, Snoop Dogg, Ludacris – who do they think they are ruining our eyes as well as our eyes?! But there's also some very good musicians turned actors and I look at the best performances. by Liam McMillen Slick con-man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) is saddled with the task of transporting 9-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) to her aunt’s home in Missouri. Addie, it turns out, is a supremely clever girl. She quickly gets wise to Moses’ larcenous ways and demonstrates a genuine (and perhaps inherited) gift for running his con; they temporarily delay her journey and move from town to town selling overpriced Bibles to new widows. Director Peter Bogdanovich gives their nefarious dealings and developing relationship a tart but never astringent tone — and gets a stupendous performance from Tatum (who remains the youngest person to win an Academy Award). Director of photography Laszlo Kovacs, who would ultimately work on six of Bogdanovich’s films, gave a lovely, high-contrast look to this evocation of Depression-era America. The car scene below, a deceptively complicated moving single-shot, took a day and a half to shoot. Manchester based paper mache tyrant Frank had been louting it up on our television screens for as long as we can remember. And now he has been immortalized on the screen. Out on DVD today, Frank is loosely by Ronson's own memoirs about cult-comedy icon Frank Sidebottom, hence the instantly recognisable paper mache head that Michael Fassbender wears throughout the majority of the film. This probably goes someway to explaining the story - Jon (Gleeson), joins up with Frank's (Fassbender) band after their keyboard player is institutionalised. Jon believes that this will finally allow for his dream of becoming a singer to come true, however he quickly finds that not all is at it seems. Frank's band is, for lack of a better phrase, extremely out there. All members seem to have mental health problems in various degrees and their methods in producing music are alternative. But is it good or bad? Vanessa andLiam battle it out! by Liam McMillen Welcome to my column, Colour Me (Dis)Interested (Ha! Isn't it clever?), where I will look at a black-and-white film a week that was filmed in the colour era. This week, I will be looking at Woody Allen's 1979 classic, Manhattan. by Liam McMillen They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but thinking about all the great revenge flicks, the say should be: revenge is a dish best served on the silver screen. Blue Ruin, out on DVD today, is a classic example of this basic set-up – a lean, effective and sometimes very bloody revenge thriller in which vagrant Dwight (Macon Blair) returns to his childhood home town to kill the man who murdered his parents, unleashing a wave of tit for tat reciprocal violence which escalates out of control. Blue Ruin is a timely reminder that the well-worn revenge genre can still be fresh and intriguing. Not only that, but it seems to have shifted a renaissance in the genre, with this year showcases some fine, low budget thrillers. To mark its DVD release, here is a selection of ten more of the greatest revenge thrillers from cinema history, from the wildly over the top to the bittersweet and tragic. Now everyone, how are are we all? Welcome back to another school year! I hope you enjoyed your break and are ready to get stuck into knowledge, excitement and yes, exams. But first, I want to know what did you all watch over summer. (this is presentation of the children's work contains spoilers) by Liam McMillen Tom Hardy delights in the film Locke, out now on DVD and Blu Ray. Telling the tale of a man caught in a web of lies, deceits and phone calls as he drives home, the claustrophobia and tension amount as he is confined to the four doors of his car . Setting the film in the same place, Locke amounts the thrills in this unnerving movie. However, what other films have succeeded at placing the drama in one place? Let's have a look ; by Liam McMillen Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone are two of the most influential, yet different directors in cinematic history – but they met on a crossroads. That crossroads was Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone's Western that took the world by storm, that was said to be a copy of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. I decided to watch both back-to-back and have my say on the matter. by Liam McMillen Of all Kaufman's screenplays that delve into the interior landscapes of its characters, Eternal Sunshine is the most fully formed and moving story of the bunch, a rumination on the possibilities and consequences inherent in making the process of removing unwanted memories from your consciousness as easy as going for a check-up. Kaufman here plays on our desire to forget the bad things that happen to us and what happens when we are given the power to forget those things permanently, and the conclusion he arrives at is that it ultimately creates as many - if not more - problems than it solves. At the very least, it can result in making the same mistakes again ("Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it"); at the worst, it eliminates the possibility of our ever reconciling and coming to terms with our life experiences, the way we relate to the people who help to shape our lives and whose lives we shape through ours. |
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