Vision This promises two things. One is a lightweight system to connect an App with a movie. You download the free App and launch it. It listens to the film and synchronises some images and a little video from time to time. This is a fantastic idea, but in this case the experience wasn’t expanded.… Continue reading App (2013)
Tag: f2013
Films released in 2013
Under the Skin (2013)
Seduction A fair enough way to divide filmviewers is between those that come for a coherent sequence of facts (to call a story) and those that come for an experience induced by any means. Most films address both communities, but grand experiments in contrasting the two can be powerful. For me, the greatest evocation of… Continue reading Under the Skin (2013)
Oblivion (2013)
Appropriated Appropriateness One measure of a science fiction movie is whether the science and fiction are coherent. I’ve been following the Hunger Games saga and this is driving me crazy. Some technology is advanced, some adopted from the sixties. In good hands, like with Nolan’s Interstellar, this could be used to advantage. In that case,… Continue reading Oblivion (2013)
A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Vehicle Porn I’m pretty sure I understand how this got funded. The franchise is pretty worn out; since the first one, we have hundreds a year of tough boys and girls who manage to flamboyantly kill a lot of bad guys. (Set aside for a moment that most of these dead aren’t crooks, but soldiers… Continue reading A Good Day to Die Hard (2013)
Her (2013)
Wild Things One recipe for a whole narrative is to create a world, a character and a situation, each affecting the others while containing them. It is a hard, hard thing to do cinematically, but look at what has been done here. The world is conveyed by our character passing through it. It is a… Continue reading Her (2013)
Snowpiercer (2013)
Loco Motives I am trying to put my finger on what I see from a few of the best Korean filmmakers. It has something to do with simultaneously seeing things more sharply than usual, with more emotional impact and at the same time having an emotional, abstract distance from the dynamics of the enclosing world.… Continue reading Snowpiercer (2013)
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Lens Flare I’ve put Abrams in the same category as Soderbergh and Kubrick but only as a junior member. These are directors that do all the production stuff excellently, but whose creative life is in what the camera brings. They see the film not as storyboards (like, say Spielberg) but as the dynamic vision the… Continue reading Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Precision Convoy I really have to give the producers credit for how they have tuned this franchise. At some point, the formula will have to outlive Diesel like Bond had to survive after Connery. The fans won’t abandon the series but as with Bond, the constraints will get ever tighter. In the meanwhile, this is… Continue reading Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
Iron Man 3 (2013)
Refreshing I’m surprised that Downey has held out this long. At some point, you have enough money and want to return to your art. He says this is his last, and I believe him. What we have in this case is him on his way out, dictating terms. And we have a pretty good movie… Continue reading Iron Man 3 (2013)
Mystery Road (2013)
Wholeness in What You Sow All of us want to be genuinely ourselves, and nearly all of us are at the mercy of societal imprints with urges so great we cannot escape them. Few of us can be calm in ourselves. I suppose this is one reason we seek films that are genuine and/or characters… Continue reading Mystery Road (2013)