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Joyless Creatures Anti-Oscars

28/2/2016

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by Joyless Staff
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As the 88th Academy Awards approach we are faced with an unhappy reality. Once again every single acting nominee (and nearly every director, screenwriter, cinematographer, etc.) is white. In light of this, we at Joyless Creatures have decided to forego our ordinary Oscar Feature and instead hone in on something more obvious about the Academy Awards: they suck. Not only is the Academy a hotbed of racism, classism, sexism, cronyism, and basically every other negative -ism in the book, but it is also notoriously bad at picking a good movie.

Sure, with hindsight, it's easy to see the sore thumbs sticking out in the history of the Academy Awards (here's looking at you Crash) but this institution has been consistently atrocious at predicting whether a film would become a classic. So to show solidarity for #OscarsSoWhite, we at Joyless Creatures have decided to look back at the worst Academy Awards ever given.

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Hooked to the Silver Screen: Remembering David Bowie

21/1/2016

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by Joyless Staff
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One of the most important legacies that David Bowie leaves behind in the wake of his death last week is his key role in catalyzing the potential of music to be not only an aural medium but a visual one. His iconic personae, including Ziggy Stardust, were forged out of both sound and image, through fashion, performance, and a spate of promotional films that presaged the contemporary music video.

It’s fitting, then, that he also penned pop’s greatest ode to watching movies. “Life on Mars?,” the surreal centerpiece of Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece Hunky Dory, expertly captures the sweeping duality of spectatorship, of feeling not only one’s own emotions but also those of the figures on screen. In one brilliant lyric, Bowie’ finds his protagonist—a young girl “hooked to the silver screen”—honing in on this central paradox, as she contemplates whether a film’s characters are as aware that they’re being watched as she is of watching them: “Take a look at the lawman / Beating up the wrong guy / Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know / He’s in the best-selling show.”

The questions raised by the song’s uncanny and cerebral wordplay echo throughout Bowie’s career, which spans not only some of the most vital and revolutionary music of the past 50 years, but the dozens of movies in which he appeared either as an actor or as himself (or somewhere inseparably between the two). Here, the staff of Joyless Creatures pays tribute to this inimitable icon by reflecting on his music, his films, and his influence. (Peter Valelly)

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Best Movies of 2015

15/1/2016

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by Joyless Staff

Any list is just the sum of its parts, and in the case of Joyless Creatures' Best Movies of 2015, those parts include ten cinephiles whose tastes run the gamut of what the year had to offer. Ten lists from ten individuals produced a staggering 70 titles, a virtual cage match between a seductive lesbian love story and a rousing boxing throw-back, and a number of eclectic ties (check out the three movies tied for the number three spot) that raised our top ten to sixteen. See our individual lists here. Enjoy!
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Our 10 Best Worst Films of 2015

16/12/2015

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by Joyless Staff
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For many moviegoers, the review exists to answer the question, "Do I really want to spend ten bucks on this?" We at Joyless Creatures put ourselves on the frontline, subjecting ourselves to a wide swath of movies every year. Some are really bad. (Seriously) But then, among the most critically maligned there are a few diamonds in the rough, misunderstood films that slip through the cracks and fall into undeserved critical disdain. Here is our attempt to rejuvenate a few of those films that were wrongfully condemned as stinkers. Here they are, 2015's best of the worst.

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Daydreams Probably: An Interview with Kent Jones

10/12/2015

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by Michael Montag
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​Like Hitchcock and Truffaut, Kent Jones lives for and through the movies. Over the past two decades, Jones has worked as an archivist, programmer, critic and documentarian. He’s now the director of The New York Film Festival and also one of the chief editors at Film Comment. His latest picture, Hitchcock/Truffaut, is one of the year’s finest films, an adaptation of Truffaut’s book-length interview of the same name. It’s still hard to fathom, but when Truffaut undertook the project, Hitchcock was not well regarded in America. Truffaut considered Hitchcock “the world’s greatest director” and aimed to free Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer. Hitchcock/Truffaut is a film about filmmaking with an entire cast of filmmakers. Picture makers ranging from Hollywood's 2nd Golden Age (Scorsese, Schrader, Bogdanovich) to new auteurs (Wes Anderson, Fincher, Assayas) make pithy observations throughout the documentary about Hitchcock's entire body of work. Jones pays special attention to Vertigo and Psycho. It'd be no exaggeration to say that the former is Hitchcock's greatest achievement, while the latter is the most famous film he ever made. To quote Mr. Bogdanovich, Psycho "was the first time going to the movies was dangerous." Jones's film is ultimately a tribute to both Hitchcock and Truffaut and a masterpiece of film preservation.
 
Just last week, Kent Jones was kind enough to call me up for a little conversation about his film.

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Sound Unseen 16 Preview

10/11/2015

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by Joyless Staff
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Sound Unseen 2015 runs this week, November 11-15. Truly one of Minnesota's most unique cinematic forums, Sound Unseen pulls in a variety of films for, by, and about musicians. From conventional documentaries to narrative films starring musicians to films directed by musicians, Sound Unseen delves into what it means to be a music film. The Joyless Creatures staff took a look at a sliver of what the festival has in store.

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Joyless Creatures Halloween Spooktacular

29/10/2015

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by Joyless Creatures Staff
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"What's your favorite scary movie?" a creepy voice asks Drew Barrymore to open Wes Craven's 1996 film, Scream. We at Joyless Creatures decided to ask ourselves the same question. Here follow our Halloween picks – from chilling characters and half-human monsters to legitimate encounters with hell itself, these movies are guaranteed to keep your Halloween spooky and your dreams troubled.

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Orson Welles – The Scorpion

14/5/2015

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by Michael Montag and Alyn Divine
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“Aside from ‘Citizen Kane’, all of Orson Welles’s films were severely criticized in their day, too poor or too baroque, crazy, too Shakespearean or not sufficiently so. Nevertheless, in the end, Welles’s reputation throughout the world is secure.” 
– Francois Truffaut    
It is sometimes difficult to separate a man’s art from a man’s personality. Oftentimes artists hide behind their work, and their true selves are never displayed to the public. Other times, artists throw themselves in front of their work and obscure their unique creativity, instead basking in the attention that their art produces. With a filmmaker like Orson Welles, it is difficult to decide what kind of a man he was. Marlene Dietrich’s final line of dialogue in Touch of Evil intimates at the futility of such an answer: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” While she’s referring to Welles’s character, Hank Quinlan, she might as well have been talking about Orson Welles himself. Welles even admitted those lines were about himself, but sadly, in the end, the many things said about Welles had a detrimental effect on his career.

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The 2015 Academy Awards: Predictions & Exclusions

16/2/2015

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by Joyless Staff

This Sunday marks the 87th Academy Awards, an event so hyped that it's hard for even the least involved cinephile to ignore. (As noted in the New York Times this past weekend, 43 million Americans watched the Oscars last year
—seven times the number of people that saw Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave.)  Below are our forecasts for who will win, who should win, and who should have been nominated. Notably underrepresented this year are Selma, Gone Girl, Inherent Vice, and Under the Skin, making for a monochromatic group of acting nominees and an all-male set of directorial and screenwriting nominees—a problem endemic in both Hollywood and the Academy. If there can be any silver lining, it is that Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater, two filmmakers who have previously only been nominated for screenwriting awards, may be taking home more well-deserved Oscars than they can carry.
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Best Movies of 2014

1/1/2015

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by Joyless Staff
Like any other year, 2014 is a bag of mixed pleasures—some we generally agree on and others that spawn incredulity. Our top movies of the year, as voted on by the Joyless Staff, reflect this diverse range of material making an impact. Although the Twin Cities has yet to see some of the year’s biggest films (most notably Selma and Inherent Vice), we have chosen our top 25 movies, taking up 13 spaces, accommodating four ties. Check out our individual lists here. Enjoy and happy New Year!
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