Being a documentary filmmaker can be the most exhilarating, fascinating career in the movies – but it also comes with tremendous responsibility. Unlike narrative filmmakers, documentarians have a responsibility to reflect real life – reality needs to be told through the lens of their camera, and the world they portray needs to be truthful. Whether…
A Walk to Remember (2002)
There are some names that sometimes induce fear into some people – one such name being Nicholas Sparks. I am guilty of being someone who never really understood the appeal of Sparks’ work. I always associated him with melodramatic, overly saccharine, clichéd stories that don’t have much under the surface. However, sometimes someone can be…
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a film I have been meaning to get around to watching for a long time. I think Edgar Wright has made two of the greatest comedy films of the twenty-first century – Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (I have yet to see the final part of the…
Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966)
Sometimes the most touching films come in the smallest packages. One recent film I saw that I found truly wonderful is Santa Claus Has Blues Eyes (French: Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus), a charming and lovely little film that may not technically qualify as a short film, but clocking in at just under…
Ghost World (2001)
A few years ago, I became increasingly fascinated with graphic novels – I discovered that there was a world way beyond newspapers “funnies” and superhero comic books. There was an entire world of alternative literature that just so happened to be visual rather than just the printed word. One figure that I found myself connecting…
Dutchman (1966)
I am not entirely sure what drove me to watch this film, other than a brief recommendation and a strange curiosity to watch a film that I had only known the existence of for about 10 minutes prior to watching it. Perhaps it was the run-time (clocking in at just less than an hour), or…
Okja (2017)
Cinema can change hearts and minds. This is something that is imperative to understand – cinema isn’t only there to entertain, it is also there to occasionally show us something that will make us change our thinking, if not our entire lifestyle. When I started watching Okja, I wasn’t expecting to see one of the…
Buster’s Mal Heart (2017)
It has not been a secret that two authors I absolutely adore are Thomas Pynchon and Franz Kafka. There are a number of reasons why I love them, but one is how they create an uneasy sense of paranoia, and their use of their main characters being an individual in an unforgiving world. There have…
Hounds of Love (2017)
Support independent film. This is my plea to you. Without the support of audiences seeing their films, how can we possibly expect young and talented filmmakers to make it in the industry and have their visions realized? In a world dominated by blockbusters that are mainly sequels, remakes or reboots, it takes a lot for…
The Long Take: The Career of…Paul Thomas Anderson (1970 – present)
This is a new editorial series I am starting. Essentially, I choose a filmmaker and watch all of his or her films, and then review each of them. Once I have completed their filmography, I will write a piece, ranking their films and doing a general overview of their strengths and weaknesses as filmmakers, looking…
The Postmodern Pelican 