Here's our list of the best films of 2015 so far: 15. Slow West Though Western films have long become stale, a fresh spin on its familiar tropes comes out every few years to show the genre still has some life left in it. In this period piece, a young[Read More…]
Film and TV
Pop Rhetoric: Don Draper’s last stand
**SPOILERS** A man sits alone at a hotel restaurant smoking a cigarette. He's classically handsome in a way that went out of style with black and white cinema. It's 1959, and Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the most talented advertiser in a city full of talented advertisers. Years later, the[Read More…]
Summer Film Preview
Tomorrowland (May 22) Brad Bird of The Iron Giant (1999) and Ratatouille (2007) brings one of the summer’s only blockbuster films that isn’t a sequel or an adaptation. George Clooney stars as a fading former boy genius who teams up with a troubled, yet brilliant teenage girl to discover the secrets[Read More…]
Peer Review: Mountain of Servants
Sometimes, amazing things can be the product of pure chance and timing. This is exactly the case with Daniel Lombroso’s documentary, Mountain of Servants, which documents the Syriacs, a dwindling minority in Eastern Turkey. Lombroso is a U3 Political Science major here at McGill University who grew up in Westchester[Read More…]
10,000 hours in 84 minutes
Seymour: An Introduction, the new documentary from actor/director Ethan Hawke, focuses on pianist Seymour Bernstein, but it’s really an in-depth look at the search for greatness. Without taking attention away from Bernstein, who’s given a treatment bordering on hagiographic—and deservedly so—the film becomes a guide to those seeking answers to[Read More…]
Inside the Echo Chamber
We are in the midst of a culture war where the personal and the political are becoming increasingly intertwined. A new discourse of social consciousness is emerging as the generation that was born in a world with ostensible equity across racial, sexual, and gender lines comes of age and realizes[Read More…]
Pop Rhetoric: A fresh perspective? It’s a boat time
The airing of the show Fresh Off The Boat (FOTB) on ABC was met with much fanfare and hype. The show—based off the life of chef Eddie Huang, as numerous blog sites were quick to note—was the first TV show in American mainstream media starring Asian Americans since All-American Girl[Read More…]
Iran gets spaghetti westernized in latest film
Director Ana Lily Amirpour is billing A Girl Walks Home at Night Alone as Iran’s first vampire spaghetti western, as though vampire spaghetti western is a popular genre in Hollywood. While entirely in Farsi and featuring an Iranian cast, the film was shot in southern California, which barely passes for Iran. The[Read More…]
Pop rhetoric: #sixseasonsandamovie: Community’s self-fulfilling prophecy
Depending on how you look at it, the fact that Community will premiere its sixth season on Yahoo! Screen today is either an astonishing achievement or a preordained inevitability. On one hand, the unconventional sitcom has been fighting off (and eventually succumbed to) cancellation since 2011. Yet, while Community may[Read More…]
It feels good to let go
Co-produced by legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar (of Volver (2006) fame), Wild Tales will make you laugh, shake your head, and turn to the stranger next to you to make eye contact. In his first feature-length film, Argentinian director Damián Szifron threads the common theme of revenge through six disconnected[Read More…]
