Author: Jamie Shutt
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Sour Grapes, Guilty Pleasures
Raised in a culturally middle-class British family, I am an expert on the experience of guilt. Not of ‘guilt’ in a legal sense. I am a nervous goody-two-shoes without a rebellious bone in my body – I would never dare to scan through all my groceries as potatoes. But I am a begrudging expert in…
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The Past Colours the Present, and the Present Colours the Past: Lynne Ramsay’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ (2011)
As a mid-twenty something severely lacking in the virtue of shit-togetherness, children terrify me. Little chaotic balls of energy that are unpredictable, sticky, smelly, loud. Perhaps my perspective was somewhat negatively skewed by my last few years working in the hospitality industry. I was a waiter and host for a bar that had an inbuilt…
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Simplistic yet Expressive Dialogue Sequences and Camera Movements in Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘Mother’ (2009)
After winning the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture with Parasite (2019), Bong Joon-ho finally got the western recognition that he deserves. But it should be known that he has been releasing bangers his whole career. His films are challenging and compositionally interesting. Most importantly, however, they are endlessly watchable. The most significant…
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The ‘Modern Marriage’ and Social Transgression in Dorothy Arzner’s ‘Merrily We Go To Hell’ (1932)
“Gentleman, I give you the holy state of matrimony. Modern style. Single lives, twin beds, and triple bromides in the morning” – Sylvia Sidney as Joan Prentice Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) follows Joan Prentice (played by Sylvia Sidney) through her romance and eventual doomed marriage to journalist, hopeful playwright, and pathetic drunk Jerry…
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Lighting Perpetual Motion in the Safdie Brothers’ ‘Good Time’ (2017)
With perhaps one of the most misleading titles in western film canon, the Safdie Brother’s Good Time is anything but… For the characters that is. For me, watching it for the first time in 2022, it was a very good time. Now that the obligatory joke about the title is out of the way: Taking…
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