Film Review: War Horse (2011)

War Horse is a heartfelt, affecting film about the devastating power of war that is almost undone by the incredibly silly conceit at its heart. Based on Michael Morpurgo's children's book and the absurdly popular stage play that it inspired, Steven Spielberg's film tells the story of World War I not through the eyes of the soldiers fighting it, but by following the journey of a horse named Joey, who is raised by a young man named Albie (Jeremy Irvine) in Devon, then sold to the Army by Albie's father (Peter Mullan) to pay the rent on their farm. Once he is on the continent, Joey is passed from owner to owner, and through him Spielberg depicts the various ways in which war affects all those who are touched by it.

Shot/Reverse Shot, Episode 1: 2011

In November, I recorded the pilot of a new podcast with Adam Batty (of Hope Lies) and Joe Gastineau (of The Wooden Kimono). It was pretty sketchy on the technical front, owing to the less than stellar circumstances under which we recorded it, but the central idea of taking a theme and hashing it out through a roundtable discussion was sound, and we just needed to work out the kinks.

Hope Lies on Television #12 - A Family Tradition, From A Non-Traditional Family

A few weeks ago Adam Batty, the editor of Hope Lies, suggested that I should write about The Simpsons for Hope Lies on Television, with a particular focus on their Christmas specials to provide a bit of seasonally appropriately content for the site. Since I sometimes spend most of my days thinking about The Simpsons anyway, it being my favourite television show ever and the single piece of art which has done the most to shape me as a person, I relished the opportunity, but never really found a way into the subject matter.  Fortunately, the show itself came to my rescue by producing a great Christmas special this year that created a nice framework for the resulting article, which I'm pretty proud of, even if the proof-reading leaves something to be desired on my part.

As an aside, I was surprised to discover whilst researching the article that I had seen all but one of the specials, since my viewing of The Simpsons has been spotty in recent years, so in the end all I had to do was catch that last un-watched episode. The episode in question was "The Fight  Before Christmas," and whilst it isn't the worst episode I've ever seen, but the moment at the very end when they make a joke about a Muppet version of Moe performing oral sex on Katy Perry makes a strong case for being the nadir of the show as a whole.

Things I Learned From Movie X: Home Alone 2: Lost In New York

I've been meaning to launch myself back into writing the Things I Learned From Movie X columns for the last few weeks, but with my new job and having to prepare for Christmas, it fell by the wayside. With the big day looming, I decided that the best way to kick off my new commitment to the feature would be with a review of a "classic" Christmas film that isn't terribly good, and I found plenty of material in the ugly and mean-spirited Home Alone 2: Lost In New York. It was equal parts fun and dispiriting to revisit the film since I loved both of the original Home Alone films as a child, so revisiting it to discover that I didn't like it at all was kind of sad. On another level, the resulting column is one of the funniest things I've written, so it all balances out.

Hope Lies on Television #11 - To End, or to Finish

After a brief-ish hiatus, which was brought on partly by being too busy in real life to research the columns and partly due to a lack of strong ideas for them, I semi-triumphantly returned to Hope Lies on Television with a column about the possibility that Community might be cancelled, and how the reactions of the fans to that possibility suggest that the way in which people perceive television shows has changed over the years, to the extent that a show that people are worried that Community, a show which does not have a strong central narrative, might end before it gets to properly tell its story.

This was a fun, if difficult, column to write since I got sidetracked on a massive tangent about serialisation in television. Thankfully, I realised before the column got completely swallowed by the tangent that the subject was too big to be just an afterthought, so it'll form the basis of the next one.

Film Review: The Artist (2011)

French director Michel Hazanavicius has established a strong reputation as a master at mimicking the works of others; his two hilarious OSS 117 films skewer the silliness of spy movies by recreating their style and tone, whilst throwing a healthy dose of modern absurdity into the mix to create films that feel both like undiscovered cult gems and very fresh, irreverent modern works. With his latest film, The Artist, Hazanavicius reaches for something grander by using the style and conventions of silent cinema to create a funny, touching and thoroughly charming romance that doubles-up as a tribute to the earliest days of Hollywood movie-making.

Film Review: Hugo (2011)

Martin Scorsese loves cinema. This is pretty much indisputable. Ever since he was an asthmatic youth who fell in love with figures dancing across a shimmering screen, and all through his career as one of the world's greatest film-makers, that obsessive passion has guided and shaped his best films. Even outside of his directorial work, he has forged a second life as a champion for film preservation, establishing The Film Foundation and overseeing the restoration of such great works as Peeping Tom and The Red Shoes. Few can lay claim to have done more to promote the transcendent power of film than Scorsese.