Peyton Reed's Down With Love cleverly uses exaggeration, artifice, and opulence to rocket it past pastiche and into a new space where it utilizes the genre’s shenanigans in order to comment on the genre itself.
JoinedAugust 20, 2018
Articles7
Merritt Mecham is a writer based in Salt Lake City, where she works in the University of Utah's Department of Film & Media Arts. She is also an MFA student in Emerson College's Writing for Film and Television MFA program ('22). Occasionally, she can be found on Twitter.
Don’t Look Now is a story about vision. The things we see, the things we don’t, the things we see without using our eyes.
The Muppets are an invitation to look at our weird, messed up world, and laugh instead of cry. Their acceptance of chaos means an acceptance of everyone, from seven-foot-tall carrots to psychopathic coffee spokesman to neurotic frogs.
If Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover is Brechtian, then The Pillow Book is a painting by Rothko, dependent on its many layers to communicate the meaning of its abstract imagery.
Whether by accident or instinct, Carnival of Souls captures a sense of alienation. And the film itself, fiercely independent, with a singular vision, experienced a similar outcome as its protagonist.
While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again.
Through a combination of live-action and stop-motion, Jan Švankmajer’s Alice leans into the unsettling nature of assemblage.
