Rack and Ruin

As of this past week, I have officially finished viewing all of last years Oscar Best Picture nominees. The sole one that slipped through my grasp prior to the Academy Awards was Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s epic The Revenant. Snagging Best Achievement in Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezki), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Best Director (for Iñárritu), the filmmaker transports us to the year 1823, placing us in the heart of the wilderness – more specifically, a piece of pre-government structured territory in the United States located close to the Dakotas.

Dealing with the moral quandary of a drone strike, Eye in the Sky captures the complex nature of pulling the trigger when you’re thousands of miles away from your target. Written by Guy Hibbert and directed by Gavin Hood, the story demonstrates the interconnectedness of military decision making in the twenty-first century. Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is running a complicated capture mission from a military base in England. She is attempting to seize high value targets from a terrorist group, including Susan Danford (Lex King) – a British citizen turned terrorist (on the top-ten most wanted list). After many long years, Colonel Powell finally has a bead on the elusive militants – who are making a stop in a safehouse in Nairobi.

I have always been fascinated by directors who utilize long takes in their films. By concocting a lengthy shot, filmmakers expect the most from their actors as well as the cameramen, and in so doing, make the audience feel as if they are walking the same path that the characters are journeying. Numerous directors have been successful at elongating the editing pace in which we are accustomed to, a few that immediately come to mind are Brian De Palma, Alfonso Cuarón and Martin Scorsese.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of the double, also known as the doppelganger in both film and literature. There is something about the device, that is often used in gothic tales, that makes for a wonderfully suspenseful thriller. Perhaps it is my early fascination with the works of Edgar Allen Poe that have influenced my interest in the subject matter, or perhaps it is the fact that I have been told by others that I have multiple doppelgangers, in any case, a film that uses this classic idea is the 2013 motion picture Enemy.

There is nothing like receiving a present, especially when it is unexpected. It is exciting to open a perfectly wrapped box to find something that has been purchased specifically for you hiding inside. Yet, this simple concept takes a much more ominous and sinister turn in the 2015 mystery thriller, The Gift.

10 Cloverfield Lane is an unusual quasi-sequel to the 2008 handheld found-footage Godzilla-like monster movie Cloverfield. I watched the original in theatres back when I was at University, and it struck me as a rather exciting, large scaled horror movie. The gargantuan scope of that picture is interestingly scaled back to the complete opposite in this loose spin-off.