art

Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.

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
The films that defy censorship
n 1989 the blooming cinema industry in Sudan came crashing down like the Berlin Wall. On 1 July of that year, a coup saw Omar al-Bashir take power, and until he was deposed in 2019, he pursued a hardline Islamist agenda. Cinema suffered. Support for the production of Sudanese films collapsed, and government-owned cinemas were sold off. Operating cinemas became an unprofitable business, with draconian censorship laws, high taxes and import customs. Sudanese filmmakers were arrested, jailed and tortured, seen as liberal threats to the new government and asked to denounce each other; many of them went into exile. The Sudanese film industry was dead. Or was it?
By Monu Ella3 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
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