Change Your Image
JaredSyko
18 year-old film addict from Western Australia.
My favourite ending to a movie is "There Will Be Blood".
Favourite movies:
Inception, The Shining, Memento, Interstellar, The Silence of the Lambs, Shawshank Redemption, Django Unchained, Pulp Fiction, The Wolf of Wall Street, Forrest Gump
Favourite directors:
Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg
-------
Update, 2023:
22 year-old film addict.
Additions to Favourite Directors:
Robert Eggers, Ari Aster, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Rose Glass, Wes Anderson, Safdie Brothers, Daniels, Darren Aronofsky, Steve McQueen
Additions to Favourite Movies:
Oppenheimer, Pearl, The Artist, La Haine, The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Northman, Midsommar
Favourite Genres:
Art, Art Horror, Psychological, Non-Linear, Maximalism
Subjective involvement with a film is essential. Film is a medium of interaction and has immense oppurtunity for philosophical exploration. Films can be edifying, films can make you understand. Films can win your heart before you realise it, and take your soul and the eye of your mind.
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againWhich of the following films are most successful due to their application of B&W cinematography?
Discuss the Poll Here
Reviews
The Father (2020)
Bold, Honest Cinema
What I appreciate most about The Father is the choice of narrator - who is telling the story? This leads to the questions: How sane are they? How confident are they in this? And how confident should we be that this is true?
The film progresses with a sense of temporal dysphoria. People come and go, disappear, change names, change faces, change attitudes, and sometimes, events completely contradict one another. However, our character remains confident in his sanity, and instead reacts to this seemingly changing world with hostility, some of which falls on his own daughter.
This is a powerful example of how changing the reference frame from which a story is told can paint a clearer picture. Often, we watch mentally unstable characters through the eyes of others, and in our minds, create the association that that character is very odd, in comparison with our narrator, the other person. If we instead tell the story from the point of view of that so-called mentally unstable person, then they are completely sane, yet almost the entire world around them is incomprehensibly peculiar. Which of the two stories do you think emphasises the extent of the psychological disorder? In the case of The Father, it is by far the latter.
The movie ends with a touching soliloquy, which probably secured Hopkins his Oscar for the performance. "I feel as if I'm losing my leaves" he cries, as he begs for his mother - as a man in his 80s. In the end, our character finally admitted that he was ill, and for a brief moment before the end, things seemed normal. We can hope that he came to terms with himself, and found some sense of peace, in the days he had left on this Earth.
Manchester by the Sea (2016)
A Sobering Masterpiece
I never thought that such a slow-moving, melancholic movie could captivate me like Manchester by the Sea did. Once I started watching it I could not stop; all of a sudden I was in the world of Lee Chandler as he is pushed outside of his comfort zone, and his limits tested.
From the very start of the film we learn that Lee is quiet, not the shy type but rather the broken type. The story has us guessing what possibly could have happened... what made the man who he is? And instead of revealing the backstory all at once, we get snippets - bits and pieces from the past. Laced within these flashbacks, so to say, are huge amounts of subtext. This is something the screenwriters excelled in, that is leaving most of the premise of the movie unspoken, where silence speaks the loudest.
I absolutely loved the cinematography as we see a lot of wide shots and simple landscape shots, and the bleak, blue visual tones that fit perfectly with the movie's theme. Some constants are snow, shots of boats bobbing up and down in the bay and quiet moments in dialogue.
We remain interested until the very end as an unlikely relationship forms between Lee and his nephew Patrick, who's father as well as Lee's brother passed away, leaving guardian responsibilities to Lee. We watch as the two move from an at first destructive relationship to one much more accepting of each other, and in the end they work out how things are to go on.
As the film closes we are reminded that despite the intensity of tragedy and the effect it has on people's lives, life must go on. The credits roll in and are accompanied by more wide shots of the bay, which I absolutely love.
A hypnotizingly beautiful movie and a solid 9/10 for me. This movie is well deserving of its Metascore of 96.
Green Book (2018)
A Perfect Picture about Accepting our Differences
"The whole story is about love... it's about loving each other despite our differences and finding out the truth about who we are; we're the same people."
These are the words of Director Peter Farrelly upon accepting the movie's well deserved Best Picture Academy Award. Despite all the controversy about the film at the moment I must say I have enjoyed it. Spike Lee and other not-so-enthusiasts set aside, Green Book is the perfect metaphor; a symbol of pacifism and interracial respect that we should all take into personal account.
African-American piano virtuoso Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and Italian-American Tony "Tony Lip" Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) face a fair share of injustice and discrimination as they travel together through Southern USA, encountering all sorts of people types and scenarios that they must work together to resolve. Ali's character is a reserved, unspoken type with a pacifistic approach to the dilemmas the pair find themselves in, with Tony being quite the polar opposite. But at the end of the day, the two are safe from trouble and on their way to the next location. As the film moves on, we watch the pair get to know each other and respect each other for their own differences, a rather satisfying feeling if you ask me. A picture is painted of the way things were in the early 1960s and it could not be more accurate.
I think that most of the controversy originated from the fact that Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga never got the revenge that some cinemagoers were expecting. Green Book is not a story of zeal but that of pacifism. And even if you don't personally agree with the story's message, the excellent job the movie did at presenting their perspective must be appreciated. For I do not believe a movie should be judged in regards to one's own personal prejudice or anecdotal experience.
Mortensen and Ali both played out their characters perfectly, and accompanied by 2019's Best Original Screenplay, the film was already set for big results. I doubt I will forget this wonderful film anytime soon, I would rather remember it as the iconic masterpiece it is. And to the rest of us it can be a reminder that even in 2019, there still are decent and authentic movies being made.
The Shining (1980)
The Horror That Changed Cinema
Soon "The Shining" will be forty years old, and yet its appeal remains as strong as ever. This is a film so unique in nature yet classic in plot, a film that will always be remembered; not just as one of the greatest horror masterpieces but as one of the greatest movies in history.
Jack Nicholson delivers a perfect performance as the iconic mad man Jack Torrance, out to teach his wife and troubled son a lesson in the harshest of ways. With an excellent script in hand, Nicholson filled shoes no other actor could have filled or should have filled if they were given the role.
What's most memorable to me about the movie is the constant suspense. Not for one minute of the 140 minute feature did I dare look away. My visual appetite was met with incredible and sometimes peculiar cinematography.
By the time the credits roll in, some loose ends are left to the imagination, but I think this is just how Kubrick wanted it - everything coming full circle, except for some odd bits and pieces here and there to give the viewer their own taste of the madness. It is then that we realise that there's a little bit of insanity in all of us.