Sue Torres
Bio
Is there any other reason to live to change the world?
Stories (72/0)
Frenzy at 50: The most violent film Hitchcock ever made
child of the Victorian age, Alfred Hitchcock was always fascinated by stories of the elusive Jack the Ripper and other supposedly "gentlemanly" murderers who lived in plain sight but stalked their victims from the shadows.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Will Hollywood ever show us the ‘real India’?
In a minor scene in the new film The White Tiger, released today on Netflix, rich-kid businessman Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) exclaims to his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), "you know the real India". The two of them are at a Delhi dhaba – a local quick-stop restaurant, one of hundreds spread over north India – tucking into what looks like a simple meal. Balram possibly eats an even sparser version of this food every day. But Ashok is just back from the US, American-Indian wife in tow, and giddy at the promise of what this market of over a billion people holds for his new business ideas. To him, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that is his home country.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Luca is 'personal and charming'
If you don't live in Italy, and you don't have a holiday booked there, then watching Luca might be the next best thing. The new Disney-Pixar film is set in and around an idealised Riviera village, a rustic paradise of trattorias, vineyards, and crumbling town squares with fountains in the middle. In fact, celebrating the Italian dolce vita could well be the cartoon's main purpose. A gelato-sweet coming-of-age fantasy, Luca is inspired in part by The Little Mermaid, but mostly by the childhood of its director, Enrico Casarosa, an animation veteran who makes his debut as a feature director here. Instead of aiming for the metaphysical profundity of Pixar's last offering, Soul, or the mythological sprawl of Disney's recent action-epic, Raya and the Last Dragon, Casarosa has crafted a modest and gentle yarn about a few good-natured people in a small area, and their enviably simple way of life. His cartoon is aimed at the heart – and the tastebuds – rather than the brain. And it's no less of a delight for that.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Dwayne Johnson and why wrestlers make ideal Hollywood stars
he movie star is dead. That's at least what box-office trends would have you believe. In a shift from the star-driven days of old, the past decade has seen the Hollywood movie studios instead defer to the power of brand-name recognition as their films' main selling point.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
The Power of the Dog: A five-star 'brooding melodrama'
It's been 28 years since the release of Jane Campion's Palme d'Or- and Oscar-winning masterpiece, The Piano, but you can hear its echoes ringing through her new film, The Power of the Dog. Again, Campion has made an atmospheric period drama shot in the wilds of New Zealand. Again, it features a cruel man, a sensitive man, and a single mother who marries one of them. You can probably guess which instrument the single mother plays. But for all its similarities to Campion's best-known work, The Power of the Dog is darker, stranger, and horribly gripping in its own right. Unless you've read the novel by Thomas Savage from which it's adapted, it's impossible to guess where it's going. It also boasts one of Benedict Cumberbatch's most remarkable transformations. Perhaps he told his agent that he was sick and tired of playing socially awkward scientists, and that he wanted to try the most different role imaginable – preferably while wearing a ten-gallon hat.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
The Last Duel: Cinema's 11 best showdowns
The duel in The Last Duel is a long time coming. Ridley Scott's Medieval drama has been underway for two hours before Matt Damon and Adam Driver get on their horses, grab their lances, and gallop towards each other – and by then we know their characters, we know why they're ready and willing to fight to the death, and we know what's at stake in the wider world of 14th-Century France. In other words, Scott has laid all the groundwork necessary for a classic big-screen showdown.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Is the U.S.-Mexico border wall that Trump insists on fixing useful or not?
The U.S. government was shut down for nearly a month over Trump's promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. That broke Clinton's record for the longest shutdown in the history of the U.S. federal government.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in FYI
Don't Look Up: The stories that reflect our oldest fear
Sometimes publicity falls out of the sky. On 24 November, just a couple of weeks before Adam McKay's apocalyptic disaster comedy Don't Look Up opened in cinemas, Nasa launched a spacecraft called Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) to see if it could alter the trajectory of the moonlet Dimorphos. That particular chunk of rock turns out to be no danger to Earth. Not so the Everest-sized comet in Don't Look Up, which is only six months away at the beginning of the movie. With a cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, McKay's film is a striking example of what you might call "impact fiction", a diverse sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction that goes all the way back to Edgar Allen Poe and is currently enjoying (if enjoying is the right word) a major revival.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Mass and the films trying to make sense of senseless violence
n 20 April 1999 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold walked into their high school in Columbine, Colorado and, with one act of violence, changed America forever. Harris and Klebold's plan, which they had been working on for over a year, was to set off homemade bombs, but when those failed to detonate they instead walked through the halls and used the four guns they'd acquired to injure 24 people and kill 13 more before taking their own lives.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Why Jennifer Lopez is Hollywood's most underestimated star
Sing the lyric: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got" to any millennial, and chances are they'll pipe back: "I'm still, I'm still, Jenny From The Block". Twenty years on from its release in September 2002, Jennifer Lopez's song Jenny from the Block is still just as infectious an earworm, and has pulled in 162 million views on YouTube and counting.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
A brand new black hole will appear!
We all know that there are many black holes in the universe. In addition to supermassive black holes, primordial black holes, and newly discovered intermediate-mass black holes, which are not yet known exactly why they form, massive stars also become stellar-class black holes after collapsing at the end of their lives.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Futurism