Musings on art and modern audiences

  Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick : the same, but better? You know a film franchise has got it right when it can recycle its opening titles shot-for-shot and still make a good film. That’s exactly the case with Top Gun . I think many people were actually quite taken aback by how much they enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick , either more so than the original Top Gun or just as much. But what is it about these two films which has made them into such a successful duo? For anyone who’s familiar with the original Top Gun , it’s clear that Maverick is leading us through a very similar storyline. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this case, though. Oftentimes, rehashing the original storyline and just replacing the principal characters with younger versions doesn’t work at all, but that’s not the sense we get with Maverick . By reviving the original story, audiences can lean into a sense of nostalgia they might associate with the original film, putting them more at ease when they’re dealing w...

  Alice in Wonderland : strange new worlds The kookiness and nonsense of Alice in Wonderland is precisely what makes it such a wonderful story. Lewis Carroll was interested in telling the story of a young girl, and her encounters with a strange world, but also interested in redefining the ways in which we might tell a story. Alice in Wonderland does have a linear narrative structure in the sense that we move relatively logically from one scene to another. In other ways, however, the story we are being told does not necessarily have a clear direction. Alice is indeed wandering in Wonderland, following characters she meets, pulling at narrative threads with no particular aim or direction. And as readers, we’re invited to escape in a similar way. We’re invited to simply follow the story in whatever direction it might take us, and not to concern ourselves with waiting for a clear moral or structure. By the time we get to the end of the story, I’m not sure we can necessarily say we’d ...

  Divergent : YA dystopian allegories Conceptually, Veronica Roth’s Divergent works really very well for its target, young adult (YA) audience. It reframes notions of fitting into certain categories by which the rest of your life might be lived, i.e. by selecting a faction. To be “divergent” is to belong to more than one faction - in real terms, to be a rounded human being with multiple core values, rather than just one. Perhaps you can be brave and also be selfless; perhaps you can value learning and honesty at the same time. Divergent ’s faction system throws into question what it might mean to choose an identity, whether indeed we can choose our identity. How do we choose what our core values are, how can we choose who we are (on our own terms) when the world we live in seems to be concerned so deeply with fitting us into boxes?  Tris is an attractive heroine to YA readers because she doesn’t just demonstrate the teenage struggle of being faced with seemingly impossible an...

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s : glamour, romance, and gilded cages Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of those stories people seem to know of but have never watched. You might know that Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard star in it, you might know Henry Mancini did the soundtrack, and that it features the song “Moon River” and perhaps you know that it was based on the novella of the same name by Truman Capote, published in 1958. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is, at first glance, utterly glamorous, and Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is the epitome of class and effortless elegance. The opening titles are iconic, Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River” well-loved, and the aesthetic of the film is just classy.  But there are demons which haunt this story and its characters. There’s a yawning chasm between the glamorous way this film is remembered and the content of its story, which is itself much sadder and darker than I think people anticipate when watching this film for the first time. Yes there...

Howl’s Moving Castle : Diana Wynne Jones and Studio Ghibli Most people who’ve heard of Howl’s Moving Castle have never realised it was a book first, then a film. Now that I’ve both watched and read the story, the primary question that arises is: why did Studio Ghibli choose to adapt this particular story? Diana Wynne Jones’ novel has not much about it that suggests an affinity for Studio Ghibli aesthetics (although she does say she admired Studio Ghibli’s work for a long time before her novel was adapted). There are really a lot of differences between the book and the film which are quite significant to the original story, but they both still work as stories in their own right. Let’s start with the basics. One version of Howl’s Moving Castle is a novel, and one is a film. That immediately creates some distance between the two stories because they’re working with different forms and techniques of storytelling and character- and world-building. For example, one of the big differences y...

  Oppenheimer : He's just Ken? Is it fair to say that J. Robert Oppenheimer was just another guy? Obviously he is (in)famous for his instrumental role in the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb by the USA during the Second World War, but in Christopher Nolan’s film what we really get to see is a man with an extraordinary talent who is drawn in by the power he sees in the ability to “become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s an unbelievably narcissistic statement to make, and although you probably have to admit his work did result in him becoming something close to that level of power, how ethical is it for us to celebrate the legacy of a man who was responsible for such unfathomable human losses?  The biopic as a genre itself tries to bring the audience closer to a particular public figure and dispel some of the mystery and mythology around them. And it seems this film has come at an interesting time for the biopic, released between two Elvis Presley biopics (with ve...

The Nightmare Before Christmas : film, musical, or poetry? Everyone who knows anything about this film is aware of the age-old question: is it a Halloween film or a Christmas film? No one can seem to agree! What people can make their minds up about is that we get to this vaguely Halloweeny vaguely Christmassy time of year and this film has to be played at least once at some point. Fair dues, it’s a classic. So what is it about Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas that people seem to love? Probably many different things, which goes to show how well all the different elements of the film tie together. This is a film of many forms, all working together to create a single, cohesive piece of art. We have poetry weaving through the storytelling and dialogue, musical numbers that bring new energy to scenes, Danny Elfman’s gorgeous score helping to tell the story and build characters, intricate plasticine figures and painstaking stop-motion animation creating the semi-real feel of the f...