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Top celebrities in the geek entertainment and comic convention business. Our favorite geek advocates.
Why The Piano is the greatest film directed by a woman
In 1993, Jane Campion made history when she became the first woman (and the first New Zealander) to receive the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her haunting period romance The Piano shared the award with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, but in BBC Culture’s critics’ poll of the 100 greatest films by women, Campion doesn’t have to share the prize a second time: The Piano was chosen as the number one film in a remarkable list that showcases more than 100 years of female filmmaking.
Alessandro AlgardiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksTop 100 films directed by women: What is the ‘female gaze’?
It asked 368 journalists, critics, film programmers and academics to name their favourite films from female directors, and the results made fascinating reading. Jane Campion’s Oscar-winner The Piano made it to the top spot, shortly followed by Cléo from 5 to 7, the real-time drama from the late great Agnès Varda. Also featured were cult filmmaker Chantal Akerman, controversial French director Claire Denis – who’s known for her defiantly individualistic, often explicitly erotic work – British working-class heroine Andrea Arnold and Hollywood greats Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow.
Will disabled people ever get the stories they deserve?
Diversity has become a buzzword in the entertainment industries – and if there’s still debate about how much things are really changing, or if moves towards greater representation are too often mere lip service or box ticking, the diversity conversation is at least being had. Do badly, and it will get called out. And there genuinely do seem to be signs of change, whether that’s British theatre embracing gender-fluid casting, or Hollywood learning the lessons of Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians, that ethnically diverse casting and storytelling can help the industry reach new audiences – and net new profits.
Alessandro AlgardiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksThe bold pioneers of cinema who paved the way
Cleo Madison’s name is little known now, catchy though it is, but in 1916 she was a popular screen actress making the transition to writer and director. Asked years later if she had been afraid to direct, she reportedly said, “Why should I be? I had seen men with less brains than I had getting away with it.”
Mao Jiao LiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksBombshell review: ‘Nuanced and surprisingly entertaining’
Wit is the sugar-coating on Bombshell, a film that is surprisingly entertaining given its subject: sexual harassment at the Fox News Channel, and how the anchors Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson brought down their powerful boss, Roger Ailes. Treating the media business with healthy cynicism, the film makes the right-wing Fox News the target of its humour. “Ask what would scare my grandmother and piss off my grandfather – that's a Fox story,” says a savvy producer. The place is as insular and absurd as Alice's Wonderland, with Ailes as its imperious, off-with-their-heads ruler.
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.
Many A-SunPublished 2 years ago in Geeks1917: Five stars for ‘dazzling and profoundly moving’ film
The baby-faced soldier running toward the camera in 1917 perfectly captures what was so heart-breaking and haunting about World War One – all that innocence sent into battle, all those futures destroyed. Perhaps no film can capture the enormity of that war, which left around 17 million dead, and generations to grieve. Director Sam Mendes wisely takes the opposite approach, personalising the experience through two young British soldiers sent on a harrowing, high-stakes, night-long mission, he creates a film that is tense, exhilarating and profoundly moving.
Alessandro AlgardiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksIs it time the all-white period drama was made extinct?
eriod dramas have served as the backbone of British cinema and television, ever since the first films began production at the tail end of the 19th Century. But more often than not, these productions have had one major similarity: an all-white cast.
Mao Jiao LiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksStar 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.”
Many A-SunPublished 2 years ago in GeeksFrom Parasite to Joker: is film really at war with the rich?
After another awards race both retrograde and predictable, one thing could truly make the 2020 Oscars one to remember: a best picture win for Parasite. According to the betting, Bong Joon-ho’s comedy-horror parable is second favourite to scoop the top prize this weekend after World War One drama 1917.
Robert Pattinson: ‘Twilight was an arthouse movie!’
The Lighthouse is a delirious, black-and-white horror drama about two 19th-Century lighthouse-keepers fending off seagulls, mermaids and their own rum-fuelled madness on a tiny island off the coast of New England. To put it another way, it is a typical Robert Pattinson film. Just over a decade ago, the British actor shot to superstardom by playing a sparkly-skinned, lantern-jawed vampire in the Twilight series. Before that, he set young hearts a-flutter as Hufflepuff hunk Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Mao Jiao LiPublished 2 years ago in GeeksOscars 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.
Many A-SunPublished 2 years ago in Geeks