was successfully added to your cart.

Cart

All Posts By

Ben

The Boy and the Heron: A Young Man’s Symbolic Journey through Grief

By | Adventure, Animation, Anime | No Comments

**Spoilers**

As an animation enthusiast, I am admittedly a latecomer in experiencing Hayao Miyazaki’s long-celebrated gallery of animated storytelling. I regrettably had never experienced the spellbinding masterpiece that was Spirited Away when it arrived at Western theatres in 2001. The first time I viewed Howl’s Moving Castle, it was in French and without English subtitles, so I had no real idea as to what was going on. The first Studio Ghibli movie I went to the cinema to see proper was Ponyo back in early 2010. It was a fun, colourful and vibrantly animated viewing experience. However, it felt much too cutesy and saccharine for my liking, as it catered to a much younger audience. Consequently, it lacked the robustness and emotional depth that Miyazaki’s productions were known for. Suffice to say, It wasn’t an ideal first impression of his filmography. After recently viewing his earlier works; Kiki’s Delivery Service, Nausicaa, of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke I recognised how Miyazaki had become a household name in animated cinema. His library is rich with nuanced fantastical storytelling, strong and compelling character writing, and sumptuously detailed backgrounds and animation.

Read More

Dream Scenario: Nicolas Cage’s Chaotic Journey into your Dreams

By | Comedy, Horror | No Comments

Spoilers.

Dream Scenario is a bizarre dark comedy movie focused on the premise of a man appearing in people’s dreams. Without a doubt, a familiar concept to fans of A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, except rather than the mutilated spirit of a deceased child murderer, the subject appearing in people’s dreams here is an almost comically unremarkable, balding middle-aged family man who evolves into a social media sensation virtually overnight for the simple fact that he appears in people’s dreams and does nothing but stand around in them, depicted by none other than Nicolas Cage. And with an outlandish premise like that, there’s no doubt that Nic Cage would feel completely at home in this kind of role, despite the character being one of his more, let’s just say, ‘subdued’ roles.

Read More

The Breadwinner: How Fairy Tales are used to Cope in a World of Oppression and War.

By | Animation, Drama | No Comments
Originally written on June 6 2018:

**Spoilers**

Ever since I had first viewed Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea back in 2015, our local, Kilkenny-based animation studio, Cartoon Saloon had filled me with both a personal sense of pride for Ireland’s steadily growing animation scene as well as a general wonder and awe for international animated cinema as a whole, given the studio’s multiple nominations at the academy awards. The fact that the studio doesn’t conform to Disney’s contemporary 3D model of animation like the grand majority of Hollywood animation studios nowadays gives me a newfound optimism that 2D animation in contemporary cinema hasn’t been completely supplanted. However, as much as the studio’s previous productions under Tom Moore, The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of the Sea (2014) have held a firm place in my heart, they mostly came across as straightforward but loving tributes to Hayao Miyazaki’s style of mythology-themed, visual-driven animation, but didn’t provide a particularly deep narrative vision outside of that. All that being said, however, their 2017 production, and solo debut under Nora Twomey, The Breadwinner had exceeded my expectations tremendously, as it confronts, with brutal honesty, surprisingly mature and very real cultural issues that its more accessible predecessors would, at times, touch upon, but not explore too in-depth.

Read More

A Silent Voice: A Touching Pursuit of Reconciliation and Self-Love.

By | Animation, Anime, Drama, Slice of Life | No Comments
**Spoilers**

When it comes to addressing delicate and uncomfortable subject matter such as bullying, depression, or suicide within a fictional narrative, a writer must take great care in considering the various nuances and complexities that these issues entail in providing an honest and meaningful discussion surrounding them. Some narratives that tackle these issues can, unfortunately, fall into the trap of oversimplifying them and end up coming across as contrived, disingenuous, and even problematic as a result. A Silent Voice (2016) is not one of those narratives. This 130-minute long anime movie delivers a hard-hitting, poignant yet mindful assessment of the pervasiveness of bullying and the many forms it can take, the struggles and anxieties that people with disabilities face in connecting and communicating with others, and ultimately, the journey towards self-forgiveness and self-discovery. It is a stunningly beautiful and heartfelt piece of animation that speaks volumes of the potential of anime as an artistic medium to critically evaluate sensitive topics with the level of sincerity and nuance that they deserve.

Read More

Knives Out: A Fiendishly Crafty and Hysterical Contemporary Whodunnit.

By | Comedy, Drama, Mystery, Thriller | No Comments
**Spoilers**

The classic Agatha Christie-style whodunnit murder mystery story is a genre that I have, admittedly, had limited exposure to in contemporary Hollywood productions, let alone one that is set in our present-day Trump-governed America. It was a genre I had always associated with the Cluedo board game growing up as well as the infamous Simpsons two-part episode ‘Who Shot Mr. Burns’. When I had heard that Rian Johnson’s latest cinematic outing, Knives Out would present a more playfully comedic, theatrical take on the whodunnit genre, I was initially rather apprehensive. This was mainly due to Johnson’s previous film Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) having been met with possibly the most controversial and divisive critical reception of any film that I had heard of. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that Knives Out was a thoroughly entertaining and well-crafted production with a wonderfully talented cast, masterful use of staging, intricately detailed and theatrical set-pieces interwoven with a devilishly tongue-in-cheek brand of comedy and deft use of classic murder-mystery tropes.

Read More

Joker: One Man’s Harrowing Descent into the Depths of Lunacy.

By | Drama, Thriller | No Comments
**Spoilers**

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”

To say that the Joker, the arch-nemesis of Batman and one of the most notorious comic-book villains of the modern age has had a storied legacy within the realm of Hollywood cinema would be trivializing the character’s notable impact on the medium. The fact that he has 7 cinematic incarnations with each one wildly differing from the last stands as a testament to the Clown-Prince of Crime’s pervasiveness and longevity in Hollywood film. As befitting a character with a knack for dramatic and grandiose entrances, it only seems appropriate that the Joker makes an explosive solo return to the 2019 cinematic scene in a sea of anticipation and contention in equal measure.

Read More

Toy Story 4: A World of Toys that Still has a Story to Tell.

By | Adventure, Animation, Comedy | No Comments

**Spoilers**

It’s been a good nine years since Toy Story’s third installment had been released. A film that was once universally regarded to be the definitive and beautifully bittersweet capstone of the genre-defining Toy Story films. But, knowing Disney’s habit of capitalizing on its more nostalgic properties as of late, the release of a fourth installment to this beloved franchise was, more or less, to be expected, albeit with relative scepticism of its quality compared to its predecessors. With a new director, Josh Cooley at the helm along with writers leaving the project due to creative differences, and an almost 2-year delay of the film due to other projects, such as The Incredibles 2, audiences were nervous that Toy Story 4 was doomed to fall short of their expectations set by previous installments. For nine years, audiences were convinced that the potential of Toy Story had been fully realized, but with Toy Story 4, this make-believe world of charm and wonder could still breathe new life into the toys that inhabit it.


Read More

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu: A Relentlessly Fun Love Letter to the Pokémon franchise.

By | Action, Adventure, Comedy | No Comments

**Spoilers**

I had always been a casual fan of the Pokémon franchise. I had enjoyed the show as a kid, I still play many of the games to this day, and I even briefly got on board with the Pokémon GO craze that came about in 2016. That being said, while Pokémon, to this day is still a big hit with younger audiences, I’ve always considered it’s older demographic to be a rather niche market. Which is why I never would have expected a film concept as shockingly outrageous as Pokémon: Detective Pikachu to be greenlit. Pun intended.


Read More

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum: An Elegantly Brutal Ballet of Bullets.

By | Action, Thriller | No Comments

**Spoilers**

When it comes to elegantly stylized, energetic and gloriously ultraviolent contemporary action flicks that aren’t bound to a comic-book mega-franchise, the Chad Stahleski-directed John Wick trilogy are without a doubt, the films that set the standard for the mid/late 2010s and continue to live up to their hype with each instalment. As with its predecessors, John Wick 3 Parabellum delivers another brutal orchestra of stylishly choreographed and over-the-top bloodshed with Keanu Reeves starring as its merciless conductor, using any and every means in the vicinity to put down his enemies, whether it be a gun, a book or even a horse. It gives me great satisfaction knowing that Reeves who was long criticized and disregarded for his ‘wooden’ performances in past performances could spring to life in these films through his energetic movement and innate determination in conducting his own stunts.


Read More

Bumblebee: Transforming a Tired Franchise

By | Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-fi | 2 Comments

**Spoilers**

During its rather explosive 11 year
run, the Michael Bay-helmed Transformers film franchise hasn’t exactly
developed a particularly stellar cinematic legacy, with most productions being
widely regarded as crass, noisy, explosion-filled, soulless Hollywood drivel
with no shortage of puerile sophomoric humour and scantily clad girls draped
over car bonnets. For the longest time, this was the status-quo for this
franchise, to the point that I’d stopped caring about investing my money in
seeing these films at the cinema by the time ‘The Last Knight’ rolled around. This
simply boils down to the fact that since 2009, the mere act of watching Bay’s
transformers films, with all their typical tempestuous bombast, incoherence and
shameless product placement was in itself an exhaustive and mentally-draining
endeavour in and of itself. This speaks volumes of the sloppiness and utter
creative emptiness that Bay had invested into these films, and the knowledge
that a big budget Hollywood media franchise is comfortable to reduce itself to
such a state is utterly soul-destroying for modern cinema as a whole.


Read More