Tag: Film Analysis

Halloween, Retrospect Reviews, World Cinema

Nosferatu: A Bold Vision of a Familiar Story

a story become too familiar? After almost a century of Dracula narratives, whether they are adapted directly from the Bram Stoker novel or not, the character and his arc feels as familiar as a family heirloom, passed down the generations. This is part of why F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” is the adaptation of the
story I come back to more often than any other- Murnau’s film feels like an oddity, like that weird uncle you don’t really want to talk about. And yet, it still has a place in the family, because the DNA remains constant. Continue reading Nosferatu: A Bold Vision of a Familiar Story

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Activism, Feminism, Women in Film

The Terror of TERFs Revealed in “Midsommar’s” Summertime Setting

The last scenes of Ari Aster’s premier horror masterpiece “Hereditary” (2018) take viewers through a winding middle-American manor, with dysfunctional family dynamics incarnated as demons in the eerie night-time environment. Aster abandons this classic horror imagery for a more subversive setting in “Midsommar” (2019), where his familiar formula of manifesting the characters’ resentments towards one another as violent retribution instead takes place in the long-lasting daylight of a secluded, Scandinavian commune. Continue reading The Terror of TERFs Revealed in “Midsommar’s” Summertime Setting

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Female Characters, Mental Health, Women in Film

Mental Health Awareness Month: Inland Empire and The Mental Health of Women in Hollywood

“Inland Empire” is Lynch’s commentary on how Hollywood treats women. It also says a great deal about how this takes a toll on a woman’s mental health and motivates her to do things that would get in the way of her own personal happiness. According to Hollywood, women have short shelf lives because their looks and youth play a huge role in the jobs they get. It’s also sort of an acknowledgement of us, the audience members–the people who consume films and the sum total of our life experiences with us when we see a movie.  Continue reading Mental Health Awareness Month: Inland Empire and The Mental Health of Women in Hollywood

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Female Characters, Film Industry, Television Review, Women in Film

The Menkes List: 5 Camera Techniques That Objectify Women In Film

Have you ever seen a film and found something just a bit distasteful about the way female actor came across but you couldn’t quite point to exactly why it didn’t sit right? And, maybe others have pointed out that the main female character have been treated very well because they ended up saving the day, so what are you complaining about?

There’s more to a film than the simply action that takes place and who is on screen. It’s a visual art form and we’re all trained in the visual language of cinema from the moment we start watching films. By ‘visual language’ we mean the way people are photographed in order to convey meaning beyond what they say or do. Someone shown in the frame as towering above another person is often the one with the power for example. Continue reading The Menkes List: 5 Camera Techniques That Objectify Women In Film

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Film Reviews, Personal Essays

Joker Film Analysis: Sympathy For A Psychopath?

A piece of art’s problematic-ness is subjective to the viewer who consumes the art; there is no definite arbiter–or way of deciding–just what kinds of art are inherently, objectively problematic. Only the individual can deem something to be problematic. If certain individuals agree with others, a mass of individuals with like-minds (and nuanced values) come together, then we have a basic form of society.

Some things register as problematic because it goes against culture–or the ideas of a particular social group. To suggest that something is problematic because society or culture deems it so would be like suggesting that something is okay just because certain cultures deem it to be so, but I digress. Continue reading Joker Film Analysis: Sympathy For A Psychopath?

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