Joyless Creatures
  • About Us
  • Archive
  • Features
  • Reviews

Joyless Creatures Anti-Oscars

28/2/2016

0 Comments

 
by Joyless Staff
Picture
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.

Read More
0 Comments

Hooked to the Silver Screen: Remembering David Bowie

21/1/2016

0 Comments

 
by Joyless Staff
Picture
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)

Read More
0 Comments

Best Movies of 2015

15/1/2016

0 Comments

 
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!
Picture

Read More
0 Comments

Sound Unseen 16 Preview

10/11/2015

0 Comments

 
by Joyless Staff
Picture
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.

Read More
0 Comments

Joyless Creatures Halloween Spooktacular

29/10/2015

0 Comments

 
by Joyless Creatures Staff
Picture
"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.

Read More
0 Comments

The 2015 Academy Awards: Predictions & Exclusions

16/2/2015

0 Comments

 
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.
Picture

Read More
0 Comments

Best of 2014 So Far: Twin Cities Edition

4/7/2014

2 Comments

 


2014

          so far

Taking stock in the year’s offerings in December while happily gorging on prestige flicks that have graced Cannes and Toronto seems habitual even if you don’t partake in the Wide World of Film Criticism. But undertaking the same kind of survey in June while suffering through summer bonanzas like Transformers or Godzilla and enjoying the pleasures, as major or minor as they may be, of movies like 22 Jump Street and Edge of Tomorrow feels a little more counterintuitive. Have we really seen anything good so far in 2014? Most definitely. Although our choices might differ, I think we can all agree that there were many gems in the first half of 2014 hiding under the buzz or right in plain sight.

Making our survey specific to films screened in the Twin Cities between January 1 and June 30 encompassed a number of anomalies, including late releases to our no-coast market from 2013 (Her, which opened January 10, locally scored big) as well as a large slate of early looks and undistributed films in April’s Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival (Boyhood earning standout marks). Other top tier movies in our accumulated votes--The Grand Budapest Hotel, Stranger by the Lake, Under the Skin, and Ida—will no doubt resurface in six months with our year end assessment.

Without further ado, our collective list scored via ranking and our individual ballots. Eight ballots resulted in 51 movies.

Read More
2 Comments

Alain Resnais: In Memoriam

4/6/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
Many directors switch styles and thematic interests from film to film, but few are as fascinatingly chameleonic as Alain Resnais. In a career that spanned seven decades—from his initial short documentaries of the 1940s to his final film, Life of Riley (2014), made at the age of 91—Resnais refused to succumb to audience and critical expectations, instead prioritizing ceaseless innovation in narrative, form, and subject matter. An only child born in 1922 in the small Brittany town of Vannes, the asthma-stricken Resnais was home-schooled and quickly developed a voracious appetite for reading, from comic books to the surrealism of André Breton. It was, perhaps, this eclectic self-instruction in the history of literature that instilled in Resnais a love for the unpredictable and polysemous. Though he initially studied acting, Resnais became attracted to film editing in 1943 under the tutelage of Jean Grémillon, though his education was interrupted when he served in the French military during World War II.   

Read More
0 Comments

The New Auteurism: TRUE DETECTIVE, TOP OF THE LAKE, and Avant Garde Television

12/3/2014

3 Comments

 
by Jeremy Meckler and Peter Valelly
Picture
Last Sunday marked the climactic final installment of HBO’s True Detective, a show whose innovative production format may transform and modernize television’s approach to narrative form. Conceived and heavily guided by its showrunner and sole writer Nic Pizzolato, a novelist and creative writing professor before making a foray into television, the show is a pure serial with its eight episodes forming a complete narrative arc. It runs sequentially on a weekly basis, in standard television fashion, but in a startling reversal of convention, it was shot in one six-month shoot, using the same director and cinematographer for its entire run. There’s a reason for this: the show is conceived so that each season will feature a new storyline and cast (assuming the show is renewed for a second), so this season of True Detective represented a fixed commitment. The format allowed Pizzolato to attract talent that would not normally sink as low as television—including bona-fide movie stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson—but more than that, it freed all involved from television’s primary constraints: the need to draw a continued audience and to perpetuate its characters’ stories over an indefinite succession of seasons. Instead, True Detective’s story arc is a well-drawn whole forming the show’s beating heart.

Read More
3 Comments

    RSS Feed

Contact Us