You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About the 2016 Oscar Nominations?

The Oscars aren't perfect. They aren't even good. They get things wrong all the time, ignoring greatness while rewarding mediocrity. They're not-so-secretly racist, as evidenced by this year's list of nominees, which features not a single non-white face among its TWENTY acting nominees for the second year in a row, despite a strong slate of performances by people of colour, as illustrated by this Decider column by Joe Reid. They're also not-so-secretly sexist, since even in these nominally more enlightened times, the work of female directors and writers is routinely ignored. (Admittedly that stems from a much bigger problem to do with how Hollywood repeatedly and completely fails to support female filmmakers, but just because the Oscars are a symptom of a problem doesn't mean they aren't also a problem on their own.) Even when they do get something right, they suck all the fun out of art by forcing people to compare wildly different films, pick sides over which is going to be their film this year, then presents them all in a leaden, slovenly ceremony that's usually only interesting for how it turns people who make their living entertaining into complete dullards. (Poor Neil Patrick Harris, you never stood a chance!)

Half-Time Top Ten

I promise that this is the last picture of Inside Out I'll use for a while. Probably.

2015 is halfway done, so what better time to look back on the year so far and ponder how things are going, cinematically. Blockbuster season is throwing up its usual grab bag of interesting and terrible movies, with a handful of brilliant films in there for good measure, while even the early spring dumping ground had something to offer. It doesn't feel as strong as last year did through the same point - I have to admit that I'd be pretty disappointed if this ended up being my Top Ten for the year - but it's a solid start.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 46 - 2013 Round-up

Well, another year has passed, and like everyone else on the Internet, we at Shot/Reverse Shot have decided to sit down and ask ourselves the question, "2013, what was all that about, then?"

In pursuit of an answer, Joe Gastineau and myself talk about the big news stories of the year, such as the proliferation of non-stories about imaginary Star Wars casting, the "Marvelisation" of cinema, changing modes of distribution, and why everyone hated Zach Braff's Kickstarter. We then get into specifics and talk about the most disappointing films of the year, why The Lone Ranger is secretly pretty good, and which films were so terrible they made us wonder if cinema is all it's cracked up to be. We round out the episode and the year by revealing our Top Ten films of 2013. It's a pretty great list, though that's as much due to 2013 being a pretty great year for films as it was us having amazing taste. So take a bow, 2013!

Thanks to everyone who has listened to the show this year. It's been an experimental time for us as we got to grips with recording on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and we're still trying to do new things with the show and generally make it as good as we possibly can. The feedback we receive from listeners is hugely important to us, as is the idea that anyone would listen to us in the first place. Thanks again, and here's to another good one in 2014.

As always, you can stream the podcast using the link below, or preferably (from our point of view) you can subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the latter, please rate it and leave a review because it helps us to get more listeners, and also gives us something to obsess over. Speaking of which, you can also Like us on Facebook, assuming that you do.

Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Day One

Welcome to A Mighty Fine Blog's coverage of this year's Doc/Fest, coming to you live from in and around and up and down Sheffield's fabled streets and hills. I'll be updating the blog constantly over the next few days with brief capsule reviews of everything I see, assorted musings on the festival itself, and, depending on how sleep-deprived I become as the week goes on, surrealistic vignettes about pasties. I'll also probably do a final post on Monday with my final thoughts on the highs, the lows and the rich, creamy middles.

Doc/Fest 2013 Coverage: Intro

This week is a most thrilling and exciting one in my little corner of the Internet. Not because of the impending release of Zak Snyder's Man of Steel, a film which I have very mixed and tentative feelings about. No, the reason I'm excited represents the exact opposite Snyder's opus, because right in the middle of a summer season awash with big, booming spectacle and fantasy, I'm going to spend five glorious days watching films dedicated to the real world, or something very much like it.

Yes, it's time for Sheffield's Doc/Fest, one of the biggest and brightest documentary festivals in the world, and I am delighted to say that I am going to be covering it, both on my lonesome and in partnership with my comrade-in-pod Joe Gastineau of The Wooden Kimono and Shot/Reverse Shot. Expect plenty of words, both written and spoken, to spill out onto this space over the next couple of days.

Film Review: A Guy Named Joe (1943)

After America entered World War II in the wake of Pearl Harbour, there was a raft of Hollywood films dedicated to making the case for war in ways both subtle and not. The Ox-Bow Incident, for example, is a Western about the dangers of mob mentality and the terrible things that can happen when good men do nothing. It's a story that could have been told at any time, yet the context of when it was produced and released - not to mention the inclusion of a card asking viewers to buy War Bonds at the end - indicate how film-makers were using their art to support the national cause.

Film Review: The Wedding Banquet (1993)

Considering the mercurial nature of Ang Lee's career, which has seen him direct everything from costume dramas (Sense & Sensibility) to superhero movies (Hulk) by way of Oscar-winning dramas (Brokeback Mountain) and 3D extravaganzas (Life of Pi), it shouldn't be surprising that The Wedding Banquet, Lee's second film, also refuses to be pigeonholed. Its writer-director has refused to get stuck working in any single genre, so why should the film itself?

Film Review: Vampyr (1932)

As anyone who has read a short story by H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe can tell you, great works of horror transcend the time in which they were created. References, language or style might change, but something elemental remains, something still chills. The eerie and the uncanny retain their power in works of literature, though this is not always the case with cinema. Whilst an individual's imagination can make the fevered words of a drunken lunatic come alive in terrifying detail over a century after they were written, visual effects can often render what was once scary tame, or even silly.

Film Review: Tabu (2012)

Shot in gorgeous black-and-white and, at least initially, set in Lisbon between Christmas and New Year, Miguel Tomes' Tabu introduces us to three women; Pilar (Teresa Madruga), Aurora (Laura Soveral) and Santa (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso). Pilar is kind to a fault, and she dedicates her time to helping people, either through actions or through prayer. Despite her kindness, her life seems sad and unfulfilled, an idea which is never spoken of, but which Gomes illustrates - in the best moment of the whole film -  by showing Pilar quietly sobbing in a cinema. Pilar is a fascinating character whose unspecified melancholia colours the entirety of the first half of the film, which is appropriately titled "Lost Paradise" (though this title has a more specific meaning in relation to the second half of the film, it also speaks to Pilar's nostalgia or pining for something she can't articulate).

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 15 - Directors

In the latest episode of Shot/Reverse Shot, Joe and myself decide to turn our attention to the people behind the camera, the ones who shout "action", "cut", and probably do something else in between to ensure that the films get made. Yes, we talk about Directors. In that spirit, we do a brief history of the role of director, talk about the different kinds of directors that exist in modern film-making, and round things off with a quick Top Ten in which we look to the future and discuss directors who we think have a bright career ahead of them. We also digress along the way, at one point making a reference that will only make sense to longtime fans of the Comedy Bang! Bang! (nee Comedy Death Ray) podcast.

You can stream the episode below or subscribe using iTunes. If you choose the latter, please listen, rate and review.

Film Review: Magic Mike (2012)

This picture is the end result of a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to find a decent image from the film that did not feature a shirtless Channing Tatum.

Steven Soderbergh has always been a mercurial talent, able to move smoothly from making mainstream films with big name stars to off-kilter experimental films without losing step, all the while maintaining his own style and voice on every project. Within the last twelve months alone, he has made a bleakly realistic disaster movie and a minimalist action thriller, both of which were vastly different in scope, but which were unmistakeably his own. He even found time to squeeze in some second-unit work on one of the most successful films of the year. Even given how varied his workload has been, it says something that Soderbergh's latest film, set amongst the lives of male strippers in Florida, is probably the strangest prospect of them all.

Film Review: Ted (2012)

Growing up in a town just outside of Boston, John Bennett was such a thoroughly lonely child that he even  envied the Jewish kid everyone else on the street would regularly beat up. So one Christmas he wished that the stuffed teddy bear he received as a present would come to life so that he could finally have a friend. Since there is nothing more powerful than a child's wish (other than military hardware) that wish came true, and John and Ted vowed to be best friends forever. Fast forward twenty-something years and John (Mark Wahlberg) and Ted (voiced by writer-director Seth MacFarlane) share an apartment together where they routinely waste their days getting spectacularly high whilst watching Flash Gordon. When this behaviour endangers John's chance for a promotion, as well as his relationship with his girlfriend Lori (Mila Kunis), John is forced to choose between growing up, or getting rid of his best friend/stuffed toy.

Film Review: To Rome With Love (2012)

Though the films Woody Allen has made since decamping from his New York stomping ground have varied in terms of story, tone and style, one of the main consistencies has been that each new city he has visited on his European Vacation has invigorated the resulting work. This is particularly noticeable with his latest film, To Rome With Love, since, whilst it bears a number of similarities to his pretty woeful London-set 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger - both are films set in a major European city, both are ensemble comedies, and both consist of disparate stories connected almost solely by location - the former film is actually a lot of fun, whilst the latter was a terrible chore. There's a vivaciousness to the film that suggests that Allen enjoys exploring a great city on screen almost as much as he does telling a story set in that city, and that sense of discovery then infuses the story itself with new life. The quality of his trips to Paris and  Rome suggest that a change of scenery does the veteran director a world of good, so long as he doesn't hang around for too long.

Shot/Reverse Shot: Episode 6 - Education

In our sixth episode, very much the Return of the Jedi of the SRS Saga, myself and Joe discuss Education in films. Along the way, we talk about whether or not high school movies are better than college movies because they are more universal, Joe explains to me what the hell Soul Man is, I run through the many ways in which being a Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher can prove to be a poor career choice, and we argue about the merits and benefits of going to film school. To round things off, we bring back our (apparently) regular feature of listing a Top Ten related to the subject. This time, we list our "best" educators in film history. Also, I reveal how Wonder Boys is the lynchpin film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

You can stream the episode using the link below, or subscribe to it on iTunes. Listen, rate and review, thanks. 

The Viewer Who Knew Too Much

Warning: Since this article is about the nature of spoilers and twists, it does mention several in detail. If you haven't seen Audition, The Third Man, Psycho, Citizen Kane or The Usual Suspects and don't want them ruined, best not to read it.


For a very long time I've wondered about "spoilers" and the question of how much should be revealed about a film to prospective viewers. Where should the line of demarcation be drawn? At what point does giving a plot synopsis bleed over into ruining the film?

Issues Gloriously Rendered in Three Dimensions

So, last Monday I, like seemingly everyone else in the Western world, went to see Avatar, James Cameron's science fiction epic about blue cat people re-enacting the plot of Pocahontas. I enjoyed the film quite a lot; I though the plot, whilst very, very predictable, was carried off with gusto, the action set-pieces that littered the film were exciting and frenetic without sacrificing cohesion, and the effects were absolutely glorious and created a fabulous world.

I'm going to write a full review of the film later this week - I'm hoping to see it again to just shore up my opinions about it - but I wanted to write a separate entry entirely devoted to the aspect of the film that has been the most trumpeted - its use of 3D - so as not to bog down my review with my concerns.


My issues with the 3D are not to do with the experience itself which was great and, apart from a slight bout of nausea at the start of the film which was more to do with acclimatising to wearing the 3D glasses over my regular glasses, I found nothing about the actually experience of wearing the glasses to watch the film all that difficult or intrusive. No, my issues are with the implementation of the 3D and the question of whether or not it added to the experience of watching the film.

The phrase that is being thrown around a lot whenever people describe the RealD 3D process is 'immersion'. Unlike old 3D, the kind used in the 50s, 70s and even today in theme park attractions such as Shrek 4D and T2:3D (proof that Cameron is no late-comer to the 3D party), which was often used to point things at the audience (for a recent example, see the remake of My Bloody Valentine, which made full use of its pickax-wielding killer) where this new process is all about pulling the audience into the film by creating space and depth that 2D, theoretically cannot provide.

This year, many animated films have employed 3D to exactly this effect. Pixar's Up used 3D to create a sense of vastness and scale for the film's Paradise Falls locale, whilst Henry Selick's Coraline used 3D to help delineate between the Real world and the Other world that its heroine travelled between, with the real world being flat, grey and dull, and the Other world being given a sense of hyper-reality by being rendered in colour and in 3D.

Even though both those films utilised 3D in intelligent and subtle ways, I can't help but think that there is an erroneous presumption at the heart of their use; the presumption that you need 3D to create a sense of scale or an sense of something being otherworldly. I saw both Up and Coraline in cinemas in 2D and at no point in either did I feel that I was losing anything by not experiencing that extra dimension. Up's world was vast in 2D and the use of colour and music in Coraline aptly illustrated why Coraline would find the Other world so fascinating compared to her dull reality. It seems that all 3D adds to both films (apart from a few pounds extra on the ticket price) is an augmentation of their existent merits, rather than a genuinely new dimension.

To return to Avatar, the reason that I want to see it again is that I want to see it in 2D, because I feel that everything that I liked about the film is to do with everything but the 3D, which was very good and certainly light years ahead of the 3D I'm used to, but which as far as I could tell did not actually add anything to the experience. Any sense of immersion in the world I felt could be attributable more to the visual effects than the effect of the 3D, since it is the wealth of invention and imagination that has been put into the creation of Pandora that drew me in, rather than the 3D. Similarly the story, as predictable as it was, was involving enough for me to care about the characters, something which the 3D would not be able to engender.

The 3D in Avatar is bizarrely counter-intuitive. The story takes place within two distinct realms; half the film consists of the protagonist, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, inhabiting his avatar and running around on the lush and verdant surface of Pandora, whilst the other half consists of Jake talking with scientists and military men inside confined interior sets. The paradox of my experience was that whilst at no point was I taken out of the story by the sections concerning Jake and the Na'vi, I frequently found myself disconnecting from the narrative whenever it switched to the military/scientist side. This was not down to the acting, which was uniformly solid across the board, or the writing, which was weak but was at least consistently weak, but because whenever the film went inside, the 3D became incredibly intrusive as bits of the sets would be really, really prominent and distracting in a way that they wouldn't be in 2D. Whereas the grand vistas of Pandora were so vast that you actually didn't notice that any 3D was being used at all. The most when the 3D should not have been noticeable were when it was at its most distracting, and the moments when it should have been apparent in all its glory it was almost as if it wasn't being used.

I'm no Luddite and I'm not writing this to bemoan 3D. I think that it is a perfectly viable extension of the medium and I'm sure that one day someone will find a way to do something truly revolutionary with it, I just don't think that Avatar is the film that does it. It does show us the possibilities of 3D, but it also confirmed to me that at worst it is a distraction and at best it can only marginally enhance what is already good in a film. With full awareness that I am putting into words something that may leave me branded a fool, I am going to say the following:

I think that in 10 years time, people will still be talking about Avatar and that it will be remembered as an important film. But it won't be talked about for its 3D. It will be talked about as a film that pushed the envelope of special effects and motion capture, and will be considered as part of the evolution of digital visual effects alongside Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings. But it will not be talked about for its 3D. I don't think that 3D will fail or be abandoned as it has historically, there seem to be far too many people - including big names like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson - behind it now for such a failure to occur, but neither do I believe that it is the future of cinema. I can easily see films like Avatar - i.e. blockbusters with bloated budgets - and CG animated films being increasingly reliant on it to increase ticket prices, as but beyond that I don't think it will become the industry standard.