Several decades into its inception, the internet is the most prominent form of mass media. While today social media brain rot is the social concern du jour, twenty years ago the sheer expanse of accessible information online was an idea met with skepticism and fear. This paranoia was examined most patently in two films from […]
Category: Double Bill
Whatever your very own personal take on the whole concept of travel in the pandemic/lockdown era, you will probably agree film is one of the safest and most rewarding ways to see the sights, out and about, out of yourself when you’re sick of your stinky boots. One of my favourite destinations in cinema year […]
Double Bill: Rashomon & After Life
It is perhaps unusual to deal with Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon (Japan, 1950) and another film in such a short article. However, when I watched Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s After Life (Wandafaru raifu, Japan, 1998), I was immediately struck by the parallels between this film and Rashomon. Both deal with memory, the relativity of all things, and […]
Double Bill: Speed & Paterson
First of all, credit for highlighting the potentiality of this double feature must go to my friend Rachael Jones, who mentioned it following a screening of Speed for my podcast The Cinematologists. As soon as she said “you should watch Paterson now” something clicked. It’s a perfect double bill, not least because of the full-on […]
When I was informed about this month’s “double feature” topic, I spontaneously decided to write about Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai, 1954) and Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins (Jusan-nin no shikaku, 2010). On rethinking the matter, I quickly became discouraged. Is it possible to deal in one short article with a masterpiece such as […]
In Happiness (1998), the ever-smiling Trish (Cynthia Stevenson), in her neat kitchen, is strongly reminiscent of the female ideal as propagated in American films and commercials of the 1950s and 1960s. However, her affected demeanour und put-on optimism cannot hide the illusion behind the image of the idyllic home that is associated with the American […]