The Final Take with Parker Mott

The first time: a not-so intimate moment in the many first sexual encounters in the poignant "Just About Love".

Lola Doillon’s visual style in Just About Love (2007) is admirably observational with how it follows the film’s characters and naturally shows them interacting with their environment. This style is predominantly manifested in tracking shots, a technique that fosters an inherent intimacy amongst the characters, because it shows they are spatially close, coming in and out of the frame concurrently. (continue reading…)

The famously garish Trevi Fountain scene in "La Dolce Vita".

There is an important irony that Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life” – 1960) signifies a transition for Italian cinema, while its protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is ostensibly in one himself. The first refers to La Dolce Vita as Fellini’s departure from Italian neorealism and themes of salvation and grace within a bleak Italian social reality. The second – ultimately the consequence of the first – indicates Marcello’s fruitless stroll through a new Italian reality of stardom and media consumption. The social reality was just as bleak, but it was adorned by Marcello’s self-gratifying, insatiable, and ostensibly pleasurable search for “the sweet life”. (continue reading…)

Charlotte Rampling.

In “Does a Long-Term Relationship Kill Romantic Love?”, Bianca P. Acevedo and Arthur Aron argue that “romantic love – with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest – can last. Although it does not usually include obsessional qualities of early stage love, it does not inevitably die out or at best turn into companionate love – a warm, less intense love, devoid of attraction and sexual desire” (59). (continue reading…)

Rachel Weisz is the unwavering, intelligent Hypatia in "Agora".

Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora is a fitting way to wrap up this course, because it emulates many of the studied peplum tropes, in order to tell a Roman epic that is convincingly cerebral in nature. As the late critic Roger Ebert wrote: “I went to Agora expecting an epic with swords, sandals, and sex. I found swords and sandals, some unexpected opinions about sex, and a great deal more.” (Ebert) Ebert indicates that Agora challenges the contemporary preconceived notion, as a result of Hollywood action bombast like Clash of the Titans and Immortals, that peplum films automatically involve a robust male hero with a gorgeous woman tucked at his side, and plenty of chariot races to carry us along to the conclusion. (continue reading…)

Gemma Arterton plays Clara, the owl-eyed mother/vampire, in "Byzantium".

“I throw my story to the wind”, writes Eleanor Webb at the beginning of Byzantium as she sits at her desk in low-light, casting away her age-old secrets. Psychologists often recommend if one is grieving or conflicted, they should put their thoughts down on paper and then destroy them. It’s the ultimate catharsis. Eleanor clearly understands this human exercise, but she’s a vampire, which means she is immortal and must perpetually feed off fresh human blood. (continue reading…)

Anna Karenina (dir. Joe Wright, 130m) – **
Like Someone in Love (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 109m) – **1/2 

Keira Knightley is Anna Karenina.

My moviegoing experience at this year’s 2012 Toronto International Film Festival begins in the realm of love. Love is an emotion that has driven art for centuries; it carries a potency that is timeless and can imbue or infect anyone. But what is love, or rather what is romance? Is it always symbiotic? Do love and romance go hand-in-hand? Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina are by no means identical films, but both carry bold visions to telling their love stories. (continue reading…)

Rust and Bone.

French writer-director Jacques Audiard, like Oliver Stone and the late Tony Scott, is at his best depicting a man’s world. I mean this stereotypically speaking, with “man” indicative of greed, competition, professionalism, and primal power. Stone romanticizes, Scott hyper-stylized, and Audiard realizes, with a bleakness that feels organic to the story rather than shoehorned in. Evidently with his 1996 film “A Self-Made Hero” and 2009’s masterpiece-and-then-some “A Prophet”, Audiard is an expert assessor of the criminal underworld. He’s walked a mile in its moccasins. (continue reading…)

Rating: R
Run Time: 115 minutes

Rachel Weisz and Jude Law are distraught lovers in "360".

360 begins with a paradox: “if there’s a fork in the road, take it.” But to where, when all the paths are unjustifiably similar? This ambiguity wafts over 360, as it tries to find a way across its characters. Cultures and human identities clash in a shrinking world. Fates and lives overlap inevitably. Perhaps unknowingly, we are in a constant dynamic of coming together. (continue reading…)

Rating: 14A – Sexual Content, Substance Abuse
Run Time: 117 minutes
Now playing in limited release (at the Varsity Theatre in Toronto, ON).

The crestfallen face of Trishna (Freida Pinto).

Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna encompasses tragedy from west to east India, all in the spirit of a dispassionate romance. This is a predictable love story, yes, but different in a way that it is not so neatly about a triumph in love. A severe, lingering sadness pervades the screen as a wealthy young businessman named Jay (Riz Ahmed) comes to neglect his affections for the 19 year-old Trishna (Slumdog Millionaire‘s Freida Pinto), an Indian maiden from a poor rural district in Rajasthan. (continue reading…)

Run Time: 93 minutes

Proud and wild Hushpuppy (Wallis) in the company of her father, Wink (Henry) in "Beasts of the Southern Wild".

If “Beasts of the Southern Wild” deserves any acclaim it should be for its bold creation of new and outlandish images. This is the goal Werner Herzog has pursued ever since he entered the Amazon to film “Aguirre: The Wrath of God”. Recall that great film’s first shot of the Spanish conquistadors marching down the Andes mountain in an ethereal fog? Incredible. (continue reading…)