Throughout its long and storied history, Hollywood has made countless remarkable films that tell important and impactful stories, provoking thought and stirring conversation with discourse around a range of deep themes. Romance on the High Seas is not one of these films – instead, it is an outrageous, vaguely absurd musical comedy that is about…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Woman Chaser (1999)
There’s a very narrow boundary between paying homage to a genre of film, and fully becoming part of it in itself – and when it comes to The Woman Chaser, the distinction has never been more clear. A relatively underseen (some may even say obscure) dark comedy produced in the late 1990s by a director…
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)
In the opening scene of his masterpiece Annie Hall, Woody Allen provides us with a quote that has gone on to become iconic: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering, and it’s all over much too soon”, which serves to be a perfect summary of life for those who have adopted it as their…
Vagabond (1985)
The sight of a young woman walking through the pastoral winelands of rural France remains one of the most enduring and complex images in the history of cinema, and is the foundation on which Agnès Varda builds Vagabond (French: Sans toit ni loi), which remains one of her signature films, and one that has come…
The Little Foxes (1941)
Misery loves family – and you’ll find few families whose entire existence is more propelled by sheer conflict than the Giddens, who spend their days bickering about the future, genuinely believing it is their birthright to be the embodiment of wealth and affluence, to the point of causing a range of crises within the family…
My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
As far as the canon of great romantic comedies goes, you will struggle to find any more iconic than My Best Friend’s Wedding, which has come to be viewed as one of the most effective entries into a genre that has become somewhat oversaturated to the point where it has lost the spark that made…
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus (2023)
There is a quote I adore by Friedrich Nietzsche, who boldly proclaimed that “without music, life would be a mistake” – I’ve constructed many conversations around the power of music in the past, and it bears as much relevance today as it did when the words were first spoken. To be a musician is to…
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
“Fortune smiles on the brave and spits on the coward.” Perhaps it’s a bold assertion, but Werner Herzog may be the most fearless filmmaker in the history of the medium. Very rarely have we seen any director who is so willing to put himself in the path of danger for the sake of artistic expression,…
Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
The concept of a soulmate is certainly very interesting, since the idea of everyone alive having someone designated as their ideal partner, while encouraging and beautiful in theory, is logically implausible and probably just a way to comfort those who have not had luck in terms of finding a long-lasting romance. However, for the sake…
Fantastic Night (1942)
What is a dream other than a fantastical scenario that our minds create, convincing us that they are real for a very brief moment in time? We’ve seen countless works of art that look at the bizarre but universal phenomenon of dreams, whether directly or as the supplement to a larger narrative – and its…
The Postmodern Pelican 