Viewing posts written by: Jessie Scott
If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.
The verite aesthetics of Ben Affleck’s follow-up to Gone Baby Gone are undermined by a generic storyline, argues Jessie.
Jessie is inspired by a night of collaboration between video artists and their dialogue between analog and digital media.
In Cremaster, Barney has woven the most intricate narrative from a post-modern melange of contemporary and ancient, obvious and opaque, brutal and divine symbols.
Unlike other comedian cum documentarians like Michael Moore or Bill Maher, Chris Rock doesn’t take a hard-nosed political stance, or use the format to ‘out’ and humiliate in order to prove his point. His latest film Good Hair, about African-American culture’s obsession with straight hair, is all the more enjoyable because it takes the subjective experiences of real people so much into account in its narrative.
Crazy Heart (which won its lead actor Jeff Bridges an Oscar just recently) gets pretty much everything wrong, including a falsely optimistic ending, offering its audience nothing but cheap humanism.
Remember the first time you saw the now ubiquitous (and roundly loathed) iPod ad?
Remember how sharp, how snapped together the image and sound seemed, how simple and obvious, and yet totally new and now it was? The irony being that the building blocks which enabled motion graphics designers to put that together on their iMacs in the noughties, were first laid over 70 years ago by a New Zealand film maker working on an ad for the British Post Office.
Sometimes…
