Many A-Sun
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Where your interests lie, that's where your abilities lie.
Stories (55/0)
Toronto International Film Festival review: The Goldfinch
“I don’t have to tell you about loss,” Nicole Kidman says softly to Ansel Elgort, whose character’s mother died years before, when a bomb exploded at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We are well into The Goldfinch by then, but Kidman’s controlled, elegiac manner captures the tone that dominates throughout. John Crowley’s adaptation of Donna Tartt’s novel is beautifully photographed and eloquently told, but too emotionally muted for its own good.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
For Sama and the female perspective on war
“Everything we know about war we know with ‘a man’s voice’. We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. ‘Men’s’ words. Women are silent.” So writes the Nobel prize- winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich in the introduction to her celebrated book The Unwomanly Face of War.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
Abdus Salam: The Muslim science genius forgotten by history
In 1979, Pakistani scientist Abdus Salam won the Nobel Prize for physics. His life’s work was key to defining a theory of particle physics still used today, and it laid the groundwork for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson – the particle responsible for giving all other particles mass.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
Terminator Dark Fate review: Please terminate this franchise
Well, he did say he’d be back. Arnold Schwarzenegger made that promise in The Terminator in 1984, little realising that “I’ll be back” would become his most famous line of dialogue, or that the homicidal cyborg he was playing would become his defining role. True to his word, he was back for Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, along with the original film’s writer-director, James Cameron, and its co-star, Linda Hamilton. After that, Schwarzenegger was back for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, Terminator Salvation in 2009, and Terminator Genisys in 2015, but they wandered further and further from the lean, mean high-concept thrills of the 1984 classic. And now he is back again in Terminator Dark Fate.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
A cultural history of gaslighting
In her Oscar-winning performance in the 1944 movie Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman plays a young opera singer, Paula, traumatised by the death of the aunt who raised her, but swept into a whirlwind marriage to a charming musician (Charles Boyer). We watch as Paula becomes increasingly isolated and disorientated, convinced by her husband that she is losing her mind: items disappear; strange noises seep from a locked attic; the gas-fuelled house lighting mysteriously fades and glowers. We realise, before Paula does, that it is her husband creating these head-spinning disturbances; in one scene, she entreats him: “Are you trying to tell me I’m insane?” Her husband retorts: “Now, perhaps you will understand why I cannot let you meet people.”
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
Top 100 films directed by women: What is ‘misogynoir’?
Magical Negro Rehab is a satirical sketch for new TV comedy series Astronomy Club. The skit brings together the traumatised supporting black cast from Driving Miss Daisy, The Green Mile and Ghost, among other films. Without a central white character in their lives, the kind-hearted and meek group struggles to find meaning in their own lives.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
The women revolutionising Middle-Eastern film
Although only one woman from outside Europe and North America makes it into the top 25 of BBC Culture’s 100 greatest films directed by women (Argentinian Lucrecia Martel for The Swamp), there’s one part of the world that puts Hollywood to shame when it comes to gender parity in filmmaking – the Middle East.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
Star Trek: Picard: Why Trekkies are the greatest fans of all
Fans of Star Trek, or 'Trekkies', are notorious for their zeal. (I count myself among the most rabid of them. Although I’ve only ever dressed up as Spock, once.) In a sense, Trekkies were the original geek superfans, turning up en masse for conventions and meetings, and hotly debating minutiae of the scripts of the original Gene Roddenberry series (1966-9) as if they were far more pressing than reality itself. As Kevin Lyons of the British Film Institute, says in his history of trekking, “Star Trek was the first of the media-led fandoms, the ‘mother fandom’ from which all similar followings sprang.”
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
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-Sun2 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-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Five stars for the 'timely' Summer of Soul
n one astonishing performance after another, Stevie Wonder does a ferocious drum solo, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sing gospel together, Gladys Knight and the Pips do Motown, and BB King plays the Blues. All the while, thousands of people dance in the park, a few spectators sit in trees and the Black Panthers provide security. It was 1969 – the same summer as Woodstock – and for six consecutive Sundays, an outdoor celebration of black music and culture took place in the New York City neighbourhood of Harlem. More than 40 hours of performances from dozens of artists were recorded, then languished in a basement for nearly 50 years.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks
How masterly horror Deliverance set a controversial trend
ased on James Dickey's best-selling novel, Deliverance (1972) marked a highpoint in the work of British director Sir John Boorman. Having made the successful jump to Hollywood several years before, Boorman directed some of the strongest films of the period. In particular, Point Blank (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968) confirmed him as a director of note in the 1960s. Boorman went on to have a highly successful career, his films littered with prizes, while he received a Bafta fellowship in 2004 and, earlier this year, a knighthood. Yet Deliverance, released in the US 50 years ago this weekend, is the work that stands out in his varied and accomplished catalogue of work, not simply for its qualities but as one of the most controversial and unnerving films of the 1970s.
By Many A-Sun2 years ago in Geeks