Month: September 2017
Tilt Shift: Andy Muschietti’s “IT: Chapter One”
What is it about Andy Muschietti’s It, an adaptation of Stephen King’s monstrously sized novel of childhood trauma and clowns, that makes the film feel so bland and unimportant? It certainly wants to feel lively and fun and maybe even a little important. It wants to feel alive. The various iterations of It have all tried to reconcile with otherness, being an outsider, a “loser”, if you will. But the gravity of those implications isn’t there perhaps because It is a film that is unsure of what It is, shifting and transforming in tone as quickly as the monster haunting the film’s characters. But It is unable to settle confidently in any one of its tonal or aesthetic personae. Read the rest of this entry »
The Mirror Has Two Faces: On Fame, Politics, and Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” and Beyoncé’s “Formation”
Regardless of the accuracy of the claims of stealing from Beyoncé lodged against Taylor Swift regarding her new single and video “Look What You Made Me Do”, directed by the prolific Joseph Kahn, there is nonetheless a quick jolt of schadenfreude when someone quips, in quotes, “Okay ladies now let’s gentrification.” The riff on the chorus from Beyoncé’s single “Formation” sits atop one of the first images that appeared from Swift’s video, of the singer standing before a “squad” of dancers, in black. After seeing this teaser, before the video actually dropped, folks on Twitter ran with the vague similarities between that and a shot from the Melina Matsoukas directed “Formation” video, making a litany of variantly amusing jokes. But while the resemblance between the two music videos is arguably a stretch — the shots in question barely have the same blocking, never mind a difference in costuming, color palette, set design, and general scene composition, in context of the whole video or otherwise — there is a likeness between the tracks themselves that seems to have gone without much comment. It’s two women, under intense public scrutiny, answering the public in very different ways. Read the rest of this entry »
I Like Things That Look Like Mistakes 