The costume vault

The Oscars have come and gone once more, and so I am faced once again with the task of analyzing and reviewing this year's nominees (and eventually the winner) for Best Achievement in Costume Design. The first of these nominees which I'll be covering in this year's retrospective will be Joe Wright's latest period drama; Darkest Hour , a movie that in the end leaves us quite unimpressed by the effort. It's a paint by numbers movie that even though it boasts of outstanding photography, camera work, and incredible acting talent, still manages to waste it all into a boring, run-of-the-mill script that has nothing new to offer. Darkest Hour  focusses on the one month span between Churchill becoming Prime Minister and his famous "never surrender" speech that marked the decisive moment in which Great Britain decided to confront Germany and Hitler head-on. And while it sounds interesting enough on paper, it doesn't help that it feels that betwe...

The inspirational biopic is, at this point, a subgenre riddled with cliches, tropes and tired redundancies even when compared to other formulaic cinematic genres. Why? Because it always does the same: it takes a real story, follows it loosely and cajoles it into fitting the standards and usual structure of these types of movies. And, unfortunately,  Florence Foster Jenkins  falls exactly into that category. This is a paint by numbers movie. It goes exactly where you think it's going to go after watching the trailer, it brings no surprises, nor any sort of interesting thought and it sits back and relies on the performances of admittedly great actors to keep the boat afloat. And yes, I can't deny that this is a somewhat competent movie made by a competent director, but it's otherwise completely unremarkable. It's mathematically designed to be a crowd-pleaser and this creates more problems than anything, particularly in regards to the story, as it just doesn't...

The complexities of gender-fluidity are nothing new to humanity (even though the vocabulary for it is still being coined). So it's only logical that cinema would, throughout its history, touch upon it at some point. And so, The Danish Girl is hardly the first movie to deal with a man feeling like a woman or wanting to be one. But it's one of the most visible. Why? Perhaps because it bases itself on a true story or perhaps because it's also the most recent one dealing with the subject. It's a competent movie coined by a competent director, but its main problem is that it's not very memorable. It's a movie that we've seen a million times over: the inspirational biopic (which, by now, it's a genre in and on itself). You know what's going to happen, and how everything is going to transpire from the get-go. So it's hard to be truly interested. This is terribly unfortunate because it IS a subject matter that deserves more visibility. S...