Film
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Ed tech indie horror
I’ve been reading some interesting takes on horror recently: the meta-fiction of Native American author Stephen Graham-Jones; the influential feminist analysis of horror exploitation movies Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover; a personal account of the importance of horror in Kris Rose’s Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist; and The Black Guy Dies First, Robin Means Coleman’s analysis of black representation in horror. And it got me thinking about analogies to ed tech. I know, as usual. First of all, the horror take… It has to be acknowledged up front that horror is often problematic – slasher films centre on the male gaze; women tend…
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Death Star vs Storm Trooper investment
Let us put aside the whole being evil and blowing up planets part of the Empire for now (although, admittedly that is a large part of their brand), and simply focus on the most efficient use of resources. Imagine you are Chief Imperial Budget Setter for the Empire. Over Christmas I rewatched the Star Wars movies. And boy, do those Empire guys not learn the lesson about centralisation of resources. Three times they create an epic planet destroyer only to have it blown up by someone pressing the ‘Destroy Death Star’ shiny button. There has been some good work on the economics of the Death Star and Rebel Alliance. But…
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Films of 2020 (yeah, I know)
So, cinemas eh? The last film I saw before lockdown at the cinema was Birds of Prey. I then managed to pop to see Unhinged in the brief 5 minute window where cinemas were open again, before we went into local, then national, then sorta lockdown again. So, it’s. not going to be a bumper crop and some of the films I wanted to see eg Saint Maude, haven’t come out on streaming yet and I am too old to bother with torrents. Here are ten films then that were released this year, which I managed to see and weren’t terrible: The Hunt – the old people are kidnapped as…
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Those Beaches Will Be Open For This Weekend
via GIPHY In an earlier post I played with the analogy of Jaws and the online pivot. In that I concentrated on the second act of the film, but watching the return to campuses, I think there is resonance with the first act also. In that first act, which takes place on Amity Island, the tension is between Chief Brody who wants to close the beaches on safety grounds and Mayor Vaughn who wants to keep them open for the 4th July and the local economy. It is perhaps unfair to portray principals and Vice Chancellors who want to resume campus study as the Mayor Vaughns in this situation –…
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Jaws and the online pivot
Unless you are very new here you will know that I like a metaphor, and I also like Jaws. So, here it is, the Jaws/Covid19 online pivot analogy you didn’t ask for and don’t want. Jaws is a movie in two acts, much like our Pandemic response thus far. The first act takes place on the island of Amity, gearing up for its summer boom of the 4th July. Our central character, Chief Brody, wants to close the beaches, because people being eaten by a shark is a bad thing. The sartorially exemplary Mayor Vaughn wants to keep the beaches open because of the economy. People have been having some…
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2019 – Films of the year
Beginning my end of year series of posts with my annual film round up for no real reason. I don’t feel it’s been a great year for movies, I struggled to find ten I really rated, but I must confess I missed quite a few at the cinema that coulda been contenders. In the end though there are some great films in this list. So in no particular order, here they are: The Favourite – Yorgos Lanthimos’s delightfully sordid, sweary account of Queen Anne and her competing favourites was as if Kathy Acker wrote an episode of Downton Abbey. It was also a reminder that the idealised version of Heritage…
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To re-know the known
I’ve had a couple of experiences recently that have made the familiar be seen in a new light, which if not exactly as new, is certainly fresh. The first was watching the film Yesterday with my daughter. This is a cheesy, cliche-ridden rom com with all the usual Richard Curtis tropes (what is it with him and public declarations of love?). And yet, the basic premise – that everyone forgets the Beatles existed except the main character – is quite profound despite all the other stuff. It makes you, the viewer, also hear those songs as if they are new. Occasionally you might find yourself somewhere, a European city in…
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Films of the year
I must confess that after a good start, my film-going waned somewhat, so at the time of writing I haven’t seen Suspiria, Widows or Overlord, all of which I like the look of. But hey, it’s not like I’m a Guardian film critic. So, in no particular order here are 10 films this year that I feel merit special attention: Lady Bird – Greta Gerwig’s coming of age tale was by turns cool, funny, insightful and touching. Saoirse Ronan’s Lady Bird is the kind of realistic character that once you see them portrayed, you feel every other teen representation to be fake. I would’ve given this beautifully crafted film all…
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Annual film review
I didn’t get to see as many films this year as I’d hoped, but it turned out to be a pretty good year. After a few years where the blockbusters have been uniformly awful, this year’s batch contained some movies that finally understood their role as entertainment (Thor, Wonder Woman) and even had people discussing narrative structures (Dunkirk). Either side of these were films that, like my book choices, couldn’t be divorced from the current climate. Many of the films that follow were officially released in 2016, but I’m going on when they got a cinema release in the UK. So, here’s my top ten, because who doesn’t love a…
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Easy Profs and Raging MOOCs
I’ve been reading (well listening to on Audible) Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s the account of New Hollywood, covering roughly 1969 to 1982, and plotting the rise and fall of the Hollywood auteurs such as Coppola, Scorcese, Altman, Friedkin and Bogdanovich. As is my wont, I’ve been drawing parallels with the education sector as I’ve been going through it. The tale is often portrayed as one of these plucky outsiders with artistic vision challenging the studio system, but ultimately failing and the money men then ruining cinema forever. Certainly when you consider the best films that arose form this period – The Godfather, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Jaws,…
