Tag / danny devito

by Jaime Rebanal

Sofia Coppola and How Male Obsession Amplifies Female Pain in The Virgin Suicides: A Review

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Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut The Virgin Suicides is a teen film with a dreamlike quality that is so rare for the genre, but it is within this quality alone where you have a directorial debut so fully realized it’s difficult to even believe that it was a first feature. Though to talk about what it is that this movie manages to accomplish as a teen drama, everything starts from the way in which it is structured – for it plays out like a fantasy in order to emphasize one’s perspective that understands circumstances like a mystery. In telling the story of the suicides of the Lisbon sisters, who have been loved by a group of teenage boys for obvious reasons, there is yet another dimension to this story that only a director like Sofia Coppola can bring to the table that would also make this one of the best teen films of the 90’s, let alone ever. As Sofia Coppola frames this as a story about teenage obsessions and how they affect the way we grow, what she also shows us in The Virgin Suicides is a darker side of growing up that is so often misunderstood by the images that have been set inside one’s head.

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by Jaime Rebanal

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Review

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I don’t really know how to put into words the sort of impact that this movie had on me the first time I saw it, and still carries on me now. But I figured that maybe it may be the perfect time in order to talk about what it is that this film means to a person like myself. It’s the sort of experience that almost feels very vindicating for myself, because I always have that very fear of being stigmatized by people around me for my own mental health. I’ve lived within a sheltered life for most of high school and when I watch this movie, I always find myself feeling like there will be people out there that see in the sort of person that I am, I’m capable of being far more than what I may seem like. For helping shape the way that I view cinema as a whole, and to have made a film that reminds me that there are still good people in this world who see us as being far more than what others would see, I don’t know if I can be grateful enough that this film exists.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Man on the Moon – Review

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“Man on the Moon” has always been one of my favourite songs from R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, because it was as beautiful a tribute to Andy Kaufman as one can create. It was only fitting that when Milos Forman were to direct a film based on Kaufman’s life, he wouldn’t only take the title from the R.E.M. song but he’d also have them score the film. And to play Andy Kaufman himself, he’d cast a comedic actor who’s already odd in his own ways, Jim Carrey. But as I’ve never known so much about Andy Kaufman prior to watching Man on the Moon for my first time as a younger kid who would look up to Jim Carrey’s comic persona, only to find myself appreciating the man all the more after looking into his performances and my appreciation for Man on the Moon had only grown stronger. And it still remains a side to Jim Carrey that I wish was more common.

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by Jaime Rebanal

L.A. Confidential – Review

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Another time capsule in a sense it goes through the glory of classic Hollywood film-noir, but if something else had come about in order to allow Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential to stand apart not merely as a tribute, it takes one through an exhibit but understands its display at heart, lives in its glory – emulates a mood like the artifacts up for show it could merely have been one in itself. At its heart there is a great police procedural drama but its background is something that carries something all the more mesmerizing. It’s delightfully classical Hollywood in a 90’s manner, for a distinct blend of eras only gave away a timely feeling.

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