Engineered Criticism

I had forgotten how taxing watching The Fountain was. I came away from seeing it today with the feeling that I had been punched in the gut, like I needed to sit with it and let it settle for a while. Aronofsky movies tend to have that effect – most memorably, Requiem for a Dream, after which I sat, stunned, for a good ten minutes after it finished. With Aronofsky’s new movie, mother! (which I am super excited for!) around the corner, The Fountain came to mind. It is, in all likelihood, Aronofsky’s most polarizing film. I remember hating it when I first saw it. I think I was around thirteen at the time, and thought that it, while visually beautiful, was incredibly contrived and convoluted. I caught some of the meaning then, but I don’t think that it fully came across to me then. As this blog evolves, I think you’ll find that this is a pretty common thing for me – I also hated Melancholia the first time I watched it, but with years of experiences and maturity it became, ...

The image that has stuck in my mind most clearly after two viewings of Dunkirk is at the very outset of the movie – just as one of the major characters, Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) makes it to the beach (the group of nameless soldiers he has been with gunned down just moments earlier), he dives to the ground as German dive-bombers drop their explosive cargo with a ruthless consistency down the beach. This scene captures the themes we are to expect from the rest of the film – randomness, anxiety, and most of all, the undercurrent in each of Nolan’s films: dread. Nolan has always been, in my mind, an amazing yet flawed director. His movies carry with them ambition and bombast. They are feats of directing, cinematography, musical direction, etc. This is an enormous strength of Nolan’s, and yet it is also exactly what drags his movies down consistently. Whether it is voyages spanning light-years in Interstellar, traversing the human consciousness in Inception, or the machinations of a few...

Just starting this blog up! I plan to use it for reviews of films, from the newly released to a number of movies from any time period. I tend to lean more towards modern film, and have a particular interest in cinematography. Can't say quite where this blog will evolve - whether I'll begin discussing film more broadly or even extending beyond - but for right now, expect a forthcoming post with my thoughts and review of Dunkirk. So, if you're looking for the blog equivalent of your friend excitedly gesticulating about that movie they just saw and why it's the best/worst thing they've ever seen, stay tuned!