At some point, we have all likely heard the adage that “people come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime”, which relates to the idea that some friendships are meant to be temporary, while others become a much more important part of one’s life. We can apply this premise to just…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
Every era has to come to an end, regardless of its cultural or historical impact, since this is the very nature of viewing the past as a series of extended moments, which can be compartmentalized in various ways based on the influence it had on the future. Starting sometime in the late 1980s, the Walt…
Perfect Days (2023)
It has been quite some time since Wim Wenders made a narrative feature film that lives up to the masterpieces he made earlier in his career. Before becoming more interested in non-fiction filmmaking, Wenders was one of the most prominent names in a new wave of German cinema that saw many creative individuals weaving together…
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)
By the time he reached the mid-1980s, Pedro Almodóvar already had three mildly successful but widely appreciated comedies and several short films, which made him a name recognized by those with a penchant for alternative art, specifically within his native Spain, where he came to be known as someone of a high-level provocateur, but someone…
Sabotage (1936)
As enormously respected as he may have been, Alfred Hitchcock seemed to be driven by the concept of quantity over quality, especially earlier in his career. It was not unheard of for the esteemed filmmaker to produce more than one film in a given year, which mercifully became less common as he grew in stature…
Jules (2023)
Who of us has not had the experience of having an alien spacecraft crash-landed in our backyard, its occupant (a mysterious and entirely silent grey entity) entering our homes and becoming quite a pleasant houseguest? The absurdity of this situation is exactly what makes Jules, a film by Marc Turtletaub, so incredibly engaging and entertaining….
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
There is a tendency for cherished works of literature to be the subject of unnecessary trifling when artists (normally far detached from the original creator of the work) attempt to redefine the characters through their perspective – it’s not so much a matter of adapting a particular work as it is plucking out the characters…
Godzilla Minus One (2023)
As far as fictional creations go, there are few characters more iconic than Godzilla – the enormous, otherworldly lizard that towers over the tallest skyscraper of whatever city he has chosen as the scene of his next bout of terror, who is mainly a villain but sometimes takes on a more heroic role (particularly when…
American Buffalo (1996)
Much like satire and pornography, the literary works of David Mamet are difficult to describe or define but are immediately recognizable when you see them. As one of America’s most beloved and intriguing playwrights, Mamet is responsible for several iconic and vitally important works of 20th-century theatre, each one of them a complex, engaging and…
The Color Purple (2023)
There are a few novels that have wholeheartedly earned the title of being a contender for the greatest work of American fiction, and one of the leading candidates is Alice Walker’s astonishing The Color Purple, a sprawling epic set in the first half of the 20th century, which follows the life of a young woman…
The Postmodern Pelican 