There’s a pivotal scene in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows in which the reflected image of Jane Wyman’s Cary is framed within a television screen, bought for her by her family. Its a symbolically charged moment, the film revolving around the socially ‘scandalous’ relationship of an affluent widow and her younger gardener, dictating that a woman of Cary’s age and marital status must be prisoner to a life ruled by consumerism and the home. Sixty-seven years later, Anna Biller appropriates the image in The Love Witch, maintaining Sirk’s glorious technicolor, in her use of a mirror as the captive frame not of the woman, who moves freely in and out, but of the man, who is slavishly trapped in his bed. Whilst perfectly capturing the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century Hollywood, Biller’s film is a subversive, and deliciously addictive, feminist hit.
Heritage Cinema is too easy to sniff at. Likewise, populist historicals are too often the recipient of critical derision. Indeed, much of my own criticism for Theodore Melfi’s recent Hidden Figures was perhaps even guilty of this. Broad strokes in cinema can grant a complex issue vital accessibility, a fact that should absolutely be celebrated. That said, it’s a fine balance and I maintain – for now anyway – that Hidden Figures takes simplification just too far in its crowd pleasing to fully enable a more than surface-level depth.
Who would win in a fight between King Kong and Godzilla? My Dad, ahead of our seeing Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ new picture Kong: Skull Island, reckoned it’d be no contest and that a giant sentient ape would have no issues in crushing a big lizard with little arms and a pea-sized brain. What my Dad was quite evidently forgetting is that in his last big screen outing (Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong) Kong measured up at just 25ft compared to the 355 feet that Godzilla clocked in at in Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla from 2014. That’s presumably why this latest reboot in the character’s eighty-four year history sees Kong boosted to his mightiest height yet, an impressive 104ft. As we all know, bigger always means better, right? By that logic Skull Island could only be incredible, yes?
The Film Blog 