E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A GEORGE ON A GREAT INDIE FILM The Lincoln Lawyer and The Paperboy really depended on him, Killer Joe and Mud electrified because of him, and his cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street was apparently the only scene not cut down for the sake of running time. The Matthew McConaissance has reached a peak, and with McConaughey playing the lead in the upcoming Christopher Nolan epic Interstellar ; it’s likely he’ll keep climbing. Perhaps his most fully fledged, head-rattling and enigmatic performance so far is as Rust Cohle in new television series True Detective – a landmark achievement in a somewhat stale medium (despite what the idiot-box machine might be trying to tell you). Detective aside, the flag at the top of McK2 is in the shape of Ron Woodroof in the biographical Dallas Buyer’s Club .             Ron Woodroof, a rodeo bull rider by day, drug, drink and sex addict by night, is informed he is...

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC ON A FILM THAT PEOPLE WILL BE DISCUSSING FOR DECADES TO COME, DESPITE, OR BECAUSE OF, ITS HEDONISTIC VIM AND STARK LOOK AT BANKING CRIME.   Martin Scorsese delves into a territory not completely unfamiliar to him, but perhaps at a level of rambunctiousness, vivacity and also repugnance that reminds us how great a director he can be. There is certain material that beckons his cinematic technique and knowledge that puts him on a pedestal among his contemporaries. In every regard, American Hustle looks like an ITV soap in comparison to The Wolf of Wall Street . The film tells the true story of Jordan Belfort , a wholly unlikeable character that due to incisive and bombastic screenwriting and editing, by Terrence Winter and Thelma Schoonmaker respectively, we are happy to watch for three hours. While we certainly are not rooting for Belfort, we are fascinated by what the abomination will do next.         ...

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A GEORGE THINKS AMERICAN HUSTLE, DESPITE ITS GOLDEN GLOBE FOR BEST COMEDY OR MUSICAL IS A DUD. Clearly, American Glasses American Hustle is the story of a great con. No, not the film’s plot, which has the wow factor of the BBC’s mediocre television show from some years ago, Hustle . The con is the plenitude of awards this film is getting. I don’t want to imply that director David O. Russell is the artist behind these cons, but he has certainly been lucky these couple years. Silver Linings Playbook was released around this time last year, and also got multiple awards nominations despite being a very plain feat of moviemaking albeit with an enjoyable script. Driven by this popularity, it seems Russell has abandoned the quirky traditions that made his earlier films so interesting under some pretence that he is now John Cassavettes ; sacrificing plot in favour of caricatures – I mean, characters.          ...

JAMES A GEORGE , EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC, REVIEWS ONE OF THE MAJOR FILMS OF OUR TIME... There’s a lot to be said about artist turned filmmakers – both good and bad – but Steve McQueen is the crème de la crème. His short art films like Bear , Carib’s Leap and Western Deep , felt like art films seeking a narrative, but nonetheless enthralling works. This is a feeling he himself reciprocates, citing his art films as poetry, and his feature lengths as prose. I can’t confess to having seen all of McQueen’s art, but his new film based on a true story set during the later years of the American slave trade, feels like his most successful artistic endeavour and yet his least “artsy”. McQueen’s three features have all been about physicality and confinement: Hunger , Shame , and now, 12 Years A Slave . The stoic main characters in the past films have had to deal with different types of suffering, and the viewer sees this in great brutal detail, often left to figure out how and why th...

OUR CRITIC WONDERS HOW MUCH SEX AND DEATH IS GOOD FOR SCOTT A script written by one of the, if not the, best contemporary authors, Cormac McCarthy . Directed by Ridley Scott . A leading cast both A-list and prodigious: Michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt . It seems like a sure winner, but alas the critics have been harsh. Perhaps rightly so, as The Counsellor is not the sum of it’s parts. But is it bad, or just odd? McCarthy’s familiar devices appear. The Counsellor, played by Fassbender, is our nameless protagonist who makes one bad decision from which seemingly unavoidable consequences entangle him and his loved one. The tragic fate characters run into isn’t played out on screen, thankfully for the sanctity of the viewer, but the absence of an identifiable face or avatar or symbol for the antagonists, visual or audible or whatever, voids of the film of a lot of potential tension. I think it may be a sign of a larger issue surrounding Scott’s more re...

JAMES A. GEORGE ON GRAVITY, FILM OF THE YEAR? “Of the Year” is used flippantly as winter approaches, be it books, music or film, and Alfonso Cuaron ’s Gravity has harboured most of the “film” prefix usage. While this is clearly false and smart marketing, one even more surprising statement widely attached to this film has turned out to be true: it has to be seen in 3D! Last year, Ang Lee ’s Life of Pi dabbled with successful 3D projection by composing steady images with careful editing and composed pacing and focusing. In my review of this film for this blog I pointed out that the change in the film’s aspect ratio allowed for startling moments of “pop-out” effects that were genuinely effective in the way that shrill, loud violins in horror movies don’t cause genuine alarm. But on the whole the 3D was just, there. An add-on that worked sometimes but also suffered due to the inherent light loss from stereoscopic projection and wearing clumsy dark sunglasses. Werner Herzog ’s docum...

Only ten minutes in, a young girl, followed by her mother, ran out of the screening room. “I’m too scared!” She declared. Perhaps she was a bit too young for the vague 12A rating, but it certainly suggested the tone of the book had been captured. Unfortunately this suggestion was quickly shattered.             The novel, Ender’s Game , was released in 1985 and provided author Orson Scott Card with both the Nebula and Hugo awards, prestigious awards given to the best science fiction novels of the year. A strong following later, and we have around fourteen stories in the “Ender Saga”. While Ender’s Game is often cited in many a top ten of sci-fi reading lists, it has always seemed one of the more easily filmable novels when compared to the likes of Isaac Asimov , Arthur C. Clarke , Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick ; authors like this have only had successful film adaptions from masters like Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott ...

Early on in Prisoners , we see Jake Gyllenhaal eating alone in an empty Chinese restaurant on Thanksgiving. This is the only backstory we ever get about the detective he portrays, Loki, throughout the entire film, and yet cue the most enthralling performance of his career. His tattoos, fashion sense, hairstyle. His sweeping movements from raw anger to determined professionalism. His tic and his unconventional mode of wielding a pistol.             With great actors left, right and centre, Prisoners explores how we deal with extreme tragedy. At one point early on, the camera crawls forward, close to a single tree trunk in front of a house, seemingly focusing on nothing and everything, and it’s extremely creepy – from here on out you’re going to be sitting very stiff on your seat. The tension isn’t the only reason the two and a half hours speed by, the balance of character and plot grapples with the audience’s attention a...

EYEWEAR 'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A. GEORGE ON A GREAT AMERICAN FILM Ryan's regrettable tattoos Derek Cianfrance blew everyone away with Blue Valentine in 2010. A raw and painfully accurate story of a couple’s love and love loss. Despite shattering me, it was my favourite film of the year. The Place Beyond The Pines is his follow up, this time exploring a wider spectrum of relationships within family, particularly fathers and sons and the legacy they can leave. The lengthy opening shot channels the American master directors , Scorsese, Welles & P. T. Anderson , informing us that what we are about to see is of such calibre; an endeavour as cocky as it is noble. The film is an emotional epic triptych that doesn’t buckle under its own weight, if sometimes doing all but signpost its own structure. The film fizzles out a little towards the end, but our interest is already with the characters, we want to know the outcome even if we have spotted it a mile away....