Cindy Dory
Bio
When you think, act like a wise man; but when you speak, act like a common man.
Stories (73/0)
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 Dory2 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 Dory2 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 Dory2 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 Dory2 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 Dory2 years ago in Geeks
Tenet review: ‘It feels like several blockbusters combined’
Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is the first new Hollywood blockbuster to be released in cinemas in almost six months. The good news is that it is so sprawling, so epic, so crammed with exotic locations, snazzy costumes, shoot-outs and explosions that you get six months’ worth of big-screen entertainment in two and a half hours. Clearly, it never occurred to Nolan to tone it down every now and then. Having directed Inception, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy, he’s not someone you associate with quiet, intimate indie dramas. But it’s still startling to see a film so over-the-top that when one character asks if the villains are planning a nuclear holocaust, another character snaps: “No. Something worse.”
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
Five stars for I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Imagine if Meet the Parents was remade by the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and by the writer-director of Synecdoche, New York and Anomalisa, and you’ll have a fair idea of what to expect from Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. To put it another way, you won’t really know what to expect at all, because Kaufman’s films are always weirder, gloomier, and more unsettling than you might assume, and his latest, adapted from a novel by Iain Reid, could be the weirdest of them all.
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
A ‘lovely, elegant, funny little film’
The Bill Murray we know today has an image – droll, wise, sensitive – that was cemented by his role as a deadpan, world-weary actor in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. It was a breakthrough for Coppola and positioned Murray as a serious actor as well as a brilliant comedian. Seventeen years on, he is the shining centre of On the Rocks, Coppola’s lovely, elegant, funny little film with a throwaway plot.
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
Pixar’s Soul is ‘a gorgeous muddle’
These days, Pixar is no longer synonymous with the finest in American animation; other studios turn out more entertaining and more technically impressive cartoons on a regular basis. But when it comes to mind-expanding concepts and existential enquiries, Pixar is still in a league of its own. Competitors may content themselves with rebooting The Addams Family or Scooby Doo. Pixar examines emotion (Inside Out), creativity (Ratatouille) and play (Toy Story). More often than not, its films are concerned with how we can lead meaningful lives – but their latest cartoon is the first to make that philosophical theme explicit. Directed by Pete Docter, and co-directed and co-written by Kemp Powers, Soul ponders nothing less than the purpose of existence itself. It isn’t as profound as it was clearly intended to be, and its breezy depiction of bustling city life can’t help but feel anachronistic in the middle of a pandemic. But still, which other studio would dare to attempt what Soul is going for?
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
African Apocalypse: The real ‘heart of darkness’
In a year that has sharpened the focus on how Britain’s Imperialist legacy is remembered, the arrival of African Apocalypse seems rather prescient. The documentary – fronted by British-Nigerian poet-activist Femi Nylander and directed by Rob Lemkin – is a nonfiction retelling of the real-life barbarity inflicted on the people of Niger, in West Africa, by a French army captain called Paul Voulet. Taking cues from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness, Nylander travelled to the African country to retrace Voulet’s steps for the film and give voice to those still living with the collateral damage of his campaign.
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
Why Hollywood gets the Irish so wrong
Like everyone else in Ireland, last month I watched the newly-launched trailer for Wild Mountain Thyme with my jaw on the floor as a parade of diddly-eye Irish clichés not seen since the dark days of Walt Disney’s 1959 leprechaun fantasy Darby O'Gill and The Little People was crammed into two-and-a-half minutes. Like the diaspora of Irish people living all over the world, my toes curled as dollops of synthetic paddywhackery followed broad cultural stereotype followed borderline national insult. Like anyone who has ever visited Ireland on holiday, or met an Irish person, I rubbed my ears in disbelief as our melodious native accent was mangled beyond recognition once again by an actor playing "Irish".
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks
Why The Empire Strikes Back is overrated
It’s 40 years this month since The Empire Strikes Back was released, and for most of that time the second film in the Star Wars series has been enshrined as the best: the darkest, the most complex, the most mature. Directed by Irvin Kershner, it’s the Star Wars episode with the highest score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes (94%) and from viewers on Imdb (8.7), and the one that is said to elevate the saga as a whole. “It is because of the emotions stirred in Empire,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times when the film was re-released in 1997, “that the entire series takes on a mythic quality that resonates back to the first and ahead to the third. This is the heart.”
By Cindy Dory2 years ago in Geeks