Despite the bitter cold plaguing Western Mass last week, over 155 college students, faculty and community members found their way into a packed screening room at Amherst College for the 26th annual Five College Film Festival. The two hour collection of videos were artistic, eclectic, experimental and occasionally abrasive. But regardless of the films’ conceptual or technical ability, there was an infectious and radiant wealth of appreciation and support from everyone within the space.
Posts published in “Movies”
This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded South Korean film “Parasite” with its top prize, resisting their usual favorites -- Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, flashy war movies -- and just barely avoiding total irrelevance. The political black comedy was nominated for six awards, winning Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film, and, most notably, Best Director and Best Picture.
“Knives Out,” directed by Rian Johnson and theatrically released on Nov. 27, contains a scene in which a character describes the film’s forbidding mansion setting as “practically […] a Clue board.” It is an unexpected but wholly appropriate moment. A whodunit murder mystery inspired heavily by “Clue,” “Knives Out” isn’t interested in shying away from its modern time period or in denying its genre roots. Part homage and part subversion, “Knives Out” relishes the way it plays with audience expectations, seeming to welcome comparison to other works.
At once a slick piece of cinema and a compelling instance of storytelling, “The Lighthouse” reminds us what it means to be completely stunned by a film in the current climate of conveyor-belt movie-making.
“Wild Nights With Emily,” a dramatization of the passionate and untold love life of American poetry icon Emily Dickinson, premieres in Amherst this spring at local theaters. Initially produced as a play in 1999, the film revels in Dickinson’s unacknowledged status as an infamous gay woman.
“Suspiria” is bad. “Suspiria” is a mess. “Suspiria” is a movie set in 1977 Berlin that’s about both a psychotherapist mourning his wife and about an American Mennonite girl who gets admitted into a prestigious dance academy that turns out to run by a coven of witches. “Suspiria” tries to do many things and does none of them well. But this and its other technical problems are the least of its flaws. In fact its greatest flaw — no, its greatest sin — lies in what it tries to seem like it’s saying and what it instead is actually saying.
“You can do anything with my legacy, but never make me boring.” The legendary singer and frontman of Queen, Freddie Mercury, was quoted as saying this before his tragic death from AIDS-related causes in 1991. This writer believes that even the most aggressive attempt to make Freddie Mercury’s story boring would be impossible. “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a biographical movie about Queen — is entertaining, but beneath its flashy surface, it is as hollow and clichéd as Mercury was complex and revolutionary. The film’s fun yet disappointing result can be attributed to a number of factors: pre-production limbo, cast changes, director replacements and questionable narrative choices regarding the singer’s sexuality. All of this culminates in an ultimately forgettable movie. But this movie is about Freddie Mercury — how is that possible?
Meet Serena: she regularly gets kicked out of movie theatres, snaps at coworkers in her microbiology lab and corrects the grammar of her date mid-hookup. In her opinion, the fewer people she has to fake kindness towards, the better. But after taking a critique of a colleague too far, she must undergo sensitivity training if she wants to keep her job.
The beginning of “mid90s” is comprised of sudden images cut together. Skateboards, still on the ground, are scattered with a force. A hallway where an older brother pounces on the younger one, pelting him with his fists. And the younger brother — the thirteen year-old boy we will come to know as Stevie — looks in the mirror and pokes at his bruised chest, then punches it, groaning with the pain.
Jacqueline Richardson ’21 | Assistant Arts Editor
Oh, the lesbian movie! If there exists a genre more fraught and loved to the people it tries to portray, I haven’t heard of it. Dead lovers, sex scenes so obviously shot with a man panting behind the camera and straight actresses fumbling through flat performances fill the film’s minutes, and yet we continue to watch. Of course some successes exist. But these are few.