Just a short post here, for the Thanksgiving Holiday is keeping from working up the energy to post a new review in full (there’s always tomorrow). In the meantime, here’s a link to a lengthy piece I wrote for Taste of Cinema about Opening Title Sequences. Have fun!
edited
Hello everyone,
So things are going well here at The Long Take, in that I am, shockingly, keeping (mostly) to the plan I set out to several months ago (excepting that pesky About page I will get to eventually). I’ve been silently patting my back to this effect for a while now, and as a reward for myself, I’m going to flip the script a little and re-arrange things for my sanity’s sake. The National Cinemas feature will continue as planned (as soon as I manage to publish a little special something to conclude the German Cinema month – there’s a reason there haven’t been that many films covered, and rest assured, the total length of the posts will equal those for the British Cinema month) with Japan in October. Midnight Screenings should continue. And the American New Wave should hurtle into its closing six weeks. All the fun, huh?
At the same time, I feel like I’ve done some of my duty toward reviewing old favorites and esteemed classics, and I’d like to let my hair down a bit. Firstly, I have a surfeit of reviews of more modern films I can’t even begin to link thematically (although trying would be fun) and I’d very much like to get them up sans any linking series. My not-so-arbitrary cut-off for random reviews of new films isn’t really that recent at all – 2005, the reason being that 2005 has a special place in my heart when it comes to film. It was the first year I considered myself a “film” person, insofar as being a person who actively cared about film as more than a diversion and pursued it as a hobby or interest proper. Also fittingly, we’re closing in on the ten year anniversary of this year, and it seems fitting to get reviews out in the coming few months to mark the occasion and to allow me to move on to fully covering more literally new films and films I feel more comfortable calling classics.
In addition, when the American New Wave feature comes to a close mid-November, I’ll be using the opportunity to explore some of my other passions, namely music (I’ll probably dabble in writings about video games and television as well, of which I admittedly have much less to say). The bread-and-butter of the site will continue to be film, but I’d also like to widen my gaze somewhat away from only basic reviews and toward more thematic essays or conceptual pieces about film, for instance, as it relates to social justice or critical theory. We’ll see how that goes, of course.
In addition, I couldn’t resist a return to my first love: horror. While I had suspected my weekly Midnight Screenings column would be enough to tackle my horror needs, that feature has become much more chaotic and all-over-the-place than I had suspected. I’m not sure what the plan is yet, but I’d definitely like to return to horror in more full force in the coming month – it is the season after all.
Finally, I’m also planning out some sort of series with the primary goal of reminding people I’m not some old curmudgeon who only likes high-commitment thought-pieces and actually does enjoy plain ol’ fun-time-at-the-movies moving pictures. I’d like to start with an off-the-cuff series about Superhero movies (the current pop culture genre du jour) that will not in any way reflect a substantive series of severe thought but will instead be much lighter and more low-key – perhaps every week I will write one piece containing short capsule reviews on a particular series, that way everyone can know how I feel about that particular cultural trend that has somewhat overstated it’s welcome. But, alas, this is less of a full series than a short time-pass (maybe a month?) until I can gear up for something more serious (making sure to take our pop fluff very seriously indeed)
Perhaps a follow-up to the American New Wave looking at the 1980s is in order? If the 1970s was America’s big coming out party for it’s quickly renewed burst of primal energy, the 1980s were it’s grandstanding stealing and running away with populist entertainment and pushing it as far as it could go commercially (sometimes it seems like we’re still in that particular decade doesn’t it?) So there’s somewhere to start, but I’d definitely like to pursue a series in the upcoming months on bigger-budget, blockbuster films as well as smaller, more escapist fare to counterbalance all of the self-serious depressive-ness that can be found on this blog.
So all manners of treasure small and large are approaching. I hope you are all as excited as I!
And here is where I could reveal my name, I suspect, for the first time. I’m considering being saucy about it and leaving blank as though I’m some mysterious internet figure you’ll never get to know. But I also dislike impersonal blogs very much. So I’ll split the difference for now.
Best,
Jake
Edit: I shall be continuing the month on “music” related films as planned for this October anyway, albeit starting a bit late, as I discovered reviewing a bunch of superhero series (as I originally planned to take over the music movies month in October) would require a large amount of film watching in a rather short span of time to complement the already rather large amount of film watching in short time periods I do, and I had to say “when” at some point. I shall continue the superhero films series at a later date closer to the end of the year, after I’ve had time to re-watch certain films.
Prometheus:
Watching Prometheus provokes more of a shrug than anything, but it’s not an entirely hopeless shrug. It misses the mark, but it’s reasonably entertaining in doing so, has at least one terrifying scene, and ponders big questions about the nature of the world and the relationship between science and religion. Thankfully, it doesn’t give easy answers either, but that comes off more as a result of not addressing the questions as much as it could have.
The narrative, as it is, plays kind-of like a remake of Ridley Scott’s first Alien film even though it insists on its prequel status. Essentially, a bunch of characters venturing to a far-off alien land meet the neighbors before everything goes awry. The film is, thankfully, sufficiently meaty and fleshy to earn its semi-horror stamp, but it’s more interested in pondering things like science vs. religion and man’s ego and “what is man?” and all those tried-and-true sci-fi ideas that, to be honest, used to be a whole lot more interesting before they were pummeled to death. A bigger problem, however, is that the film feels like a weird off-the-wall mixture of body-horror and kind-of incoherent, esoteric sci-fi musings about “the state of things”. I’m all for a game attempt at style-bending, but this one bounces from evisceration to idea to evisceration to idea and it’s awfully easy to walk away waving your hands up in confusion and never really being able to put them down. The film tries a lot and doesn’t succeed especially well at any one thing, but at least it is trying a lot in the first place. Continue reading
Having begun my weekly descent into the netherworld of the Midnight Screening, I also want to lay out future plans for publishing reviews of older films for the next few months, taking us roughly to the end of the year. I’ll continue to publish reviews of newer films I see, and a number of other films released in the past few years, without feeling any particular need to force them into a series for reviewing. These are films still somewhat fresh in the public mind, and thus I’m comfortable posting them as is.
For older films though, I’d like to organize my often chaotic and disjointed writing process into some semblance of organization, and as such I’d like to give a heads-up on the planned series I have for the next few months, which will commence in the month of August. This post serves this purpose, as well as providing some sort of holdover until I finally finish with that pesky “Blog Intro” business I should have had posted long ago. Continue reading
The Long Take 