A Movie Year

Stolen Sex Tapes (2016)

Dir: Pinky Bardo

Key cast: Pinky Bardo, Fox Killdeer

Synopsis: Stolen Sex Tapes is a feature length documentary by and about the husband-wife punk rock duo of Pinky Bardo and Fox Killdeer - known musically as Bardos (f.k.a Cursed Arrows). Edited by Pinky Bardo, it is compiled from several years’ worth of footage that explores touring, living, loving and making art together.

Featuring live performances introduced with dates, locations and often lyric fragments on a black screen, the film intercuts performances and audience reactions with video clips of both artists in their everyday life. Raw, cinema vérité scenes (often subtitled for auditory clarity) show philosophical discussions about the nature of reality jostling with candid, rolling documentation of their personal lives. Fox walking through sunlit woods, talking and gesturing soundlessly. Pinky sitting on the ground somewhere in the afternoon, looking away from the camera. Fox standing around a campfire at night, face lit from below in the grainy video. Pinky nude, lying submerged in a bathtub, her tattoos standing out against her skin in the black and white footage.

Overlaid audio from media interviews as well as candid conversations caught on camera form the loose narrative of their lives, guiding the viewer’s experience of their artistic, convention-defying world through all of its pain and beauty. For these two, the music and their lives are too tightly intertwined to be easily separated.

From living on the road, to serious health scares, to slowing down and evolving their family dynamic with the birth of their first child, the film offers gems of insight into the fascinating, deeply lived life of Bardos.

While the title might hold the implication of a voyeuristic indulgence in someone else’s intimate acts, this film subverts that somewhat, instead showing you scenes of deep emotional intimacy deliberately captured and offered up as freely and genuinely as their art and their music.

Stolen Sex Tapes, despite the titillation that its title might suggest, is a visually dreamy meditation on survival, commitment and art, heavily punctuated by the driving sounds of the duo’s music.

Quote: “What’s the most important thing that’s happened to you lately?” “Everything.”

A Movie Year 2016 film September films Stolen Sex Tapes

See more posts like this on Tumblr

#A Movie Year #2016 #film #September films #Stolen Sex Tapes

More you might like

Warm Bodies (2013)

Director: Jonathan Levine

Key cast: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco, John Malkovich, Cory Hardrict

Summary: Warm Bodies is a romantic comedy horror film told from the point of view of a sentient zombie, R (Nicholas Hoult), who has forgotten everything about his life before turning into a zombie, including his name and much of his faculty for speech, but maintains a humorous running commentary in his head about what his - and everyone else’s - life has turned into.

Living in an airplane cabin at an abandoned airport, he is very self-aware about his condition, but he doesn’t just eat people because of his new instinctual urges. He specifically eats their brains to prevent them from becoming a “Corpse” like him, as well as to re-live the joy of being alive by consuming their memories - an apparent side effect of his condition. And then he meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), moments after eating the brain of her dead boyfriend, Perry (Dave Franco). Unexpectedly triggered by the sight of her crying, R resists his primal instinct and instead saves her from his zombie horde friends. As the somewhat rebellious daughter of Grigio (John Malkovich) the head of the military resistance force, Julie has been itching for a life outside of the walled city she has called home for most of her life. But she gets a little more than she bargained for when R. covers her face in zombie gunk to mask her human scent, and leads her back with the zombie pack to the airport they call home.

Over several days, R falls in love with her while reliving her and Perry’s relationship in his mind, and keeps her occupied with his record collection and various knicknacks he has hoarded over time to remind himself of what it was like being human. She begins to overcome her revulsion as curiosity makes her question why he seems to be less undead than usual, and whether the long-hoped-for cure might actually be within reach. Along the way, something strange happens to R. He begins to remember more words, to fall asleep and dream once more, and to feel sensations…and then his heart starts to beat.

When R’s best zombie friend M (Rob Corddry), who had previously tried to eat Julie, saves her life from another group of undead who in turn refrain from attacking when they see her holding hands with R, she realizes that they are changing somehow, and that the assumptions she has lived with about zombies are all wrong. But she still has to go home behind the wall and convince her father, and all the other remaining humans who have learned to shoot first and ask questions later, that their hope for survival actually lies in those they’ve long considered the enemy.

Meanwhile, there’s a greater threat to Julie and the other humans than R’s zombie friends. “Boneys”, zombies who have stripped their lingering humanity away (literally - they look like skeletons) have come across her scent, and will track it all the way to the end in order to get what they want. R and his newly-evolving zombie friends are all that stands between them and the human settlement becoming overrun, but it’s up to R and Julie - with the help of her best friend Nora (Analeigh Tipton) - to convince both sides to trust each other.

Essentially Romeo and Juliet with a zombie twist, Warm Bodies is unexpectedly sweet, surprisingly funny, and a really fun take on the genre. Also, the soundtrack is pretty boss.

Quote:
“I know it’s really hard to meet guys right now, you know, with the Apocalypse and stuff.”

A Movie Year 2016 Film August films Warm Bodies

Tallulah - 2016

Director: Siân Heder

Key cast: Ellen Page, Allison Janney, Tammy Blanchard, Evan Jonigkeit, Uzo Aduba, Felix Solis, John Benjamin Hickey, Zachary Quinto

Summary:

A stirring, deeply affecting story of how doing the right thing might mean having to do the wrong thing. Tallulah (Ellen Page) is a young drifter recently abandoned by her boyfriend Nico (Jonigkeit) when she crosses paths with a neglectful mother, Carolyn (Blanchard) who exudes the tragic desperation of a beauty who perceives herself as past her prime after the birth of her baby.

When Carolyn (hiding from her rich husband in an expensive hotel with her toddler daughter so as not to arouse his suspicions about her planned infidelity) enlists Tallulah as an impromptu babysitter while trying to get to her romantic tryst, the reluctant young woman finds herself bonding with the neglected baby, and doing the unthinkable when she slips away with the child after her mother returns, drunk and insensible, to the hotel room.

When Tallulah, clueless and frightened at the implications of her actions, returns the next day to the hotel to give back the child, she balks on seeing the heavy police presence summoned by the hysterical Carolyn, and then turns to the only person she can think of…Margo (Janney), the mother of her recently departed boyfriend.

As they begin an uneasy relationship, based on the fiction that the toddler is Tallulah’s baby and Margo’s granddaughter, their mutual need for love blossoms into a touching, if fraught existence, compounded by the countdown to discovery as the police circle ever closer to finding Tallulah and the stolen baby.

Full of complex, layered performances and real emotion, with no clear sinners or saints, Tallulah is a phenomenal look at the expectations placed on ourselves and on each other, especially in a society that asks very specific things of the different kinds of women who exist within it.

Quote:
“You say goodbye!”

A Movie Year 2016 Film August films Tallulah

About Time (2013)

Director: Richard Curtis

Key cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy, Lydia Wilson, Lindsay Duncan, Richard Cordery, Tom Hollander, Margot Robbie

Summary: Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) is a happy, if slightly awkward young man. Living with his parents (played by Bill Nighy and Lindsay Duncan) free spirited sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) and beloved Uncle Desmond (Richard Cordery) in a big house by the sea in Cornwall, he has had an idyllic upbringing, and is about to venture out into the real world of the London law firm where’s he gotten a job.

But the summer before he leaves, he makes a startling discovery about himself that is about to change the course of his life.

On the first day of the new year after he turns 21, he learns a secret from his father, who’s always been around for him growing up, having quit teaching at 50 to spend his early retirement playing table tennis with his son. He tells him that the men of his family can travel through time.

There are some ground rules, of course. Only back and forth from the present to the past - no future rummaging - and only within their own time lines. At that age, his first thought, of course is to find a girlfriend, and he begins to employ his newfound ability to that effect. But he soon realizes that travelling through time is never enough to make someone love you, no matter how much you tweak your behaviour to match their desires, unless they love you back of their own volition.

When one night he meets and subsequently loses the love of his life, Mary (played by Rachel McAdams), due to a time travelling mixup, he has to find and meet her again after she’s been wiped of all knowledge of him, and woo her all over again.

About Time is a romance movie that, unlike most of the genre, evolves into marriage and parenthood, while maintaining lingering ties to Tim’s extended family, reminding us of the simple magic of ordinary love.

The narrative unfolds and deepens almost like a novel, a fact accentuated by the use of Tim’s voiceover narration. It resists easy categorizing into standard genre fare, and allows for a deeper, more introspective view of love, relationships, and family while raising interesting questions about the ideas of fate and the choices we make.

In the end, it’s less about the idea of using time travel to procure romance and more about the strength of abiding love - between a father and son, between a brother and sister, and between loving couples who choose each other over and over again. And of course, it’s about the importance of living each day knowing that, for most of us, you really can’t go back and change it all - so you might as well live it right the first time around.

Quote:

“We’re all travelling through time together, every day. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.”

A Movie Year 2016 Film August films About Time

Moonlight (2016)

Director: Barry Jenkins

Key Cast: Mahershala Ali, Janelle Monáe, Naomie Harris, Alex R. Hippert, Ashton Sanders, Trevanté Rhodes, Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, André Holland

Synopsis: Moonlight is a modern fairytale. A beautifully filmed story skipping across several years that tracks the growth of one man from boyhood to adulthood, it is a story about identity, love and self-discovery.

The film tells of the coming-of-age of the protagonist Chiron in three distinct parts. Each chapter is titled with a different name - Little, Chiron, Black - reflecting the three different people he was, is, and becomes.

In chapter one, Chiron - whose name sounds appropriately mythological for the modern day hero’s journey he’s fated to undertake - is Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a young black boy growing up in a poverty stricken neighbourhood in Miami, son to a functional addict mother who works long hours as a nurse (Naomie Harris), and whose brief life has already begun to reveal a quiet sensitivity threatened by the harshness of a world designed to crush sensitive young black boys.

Taken in by the drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali), whose ruthless exterior covers unexpected layers of history and sensitivity, and his partner, the lovingly no-nonsense Teresa (Janelle Monáe), Chiron’s tragic trajectory seems to have been interrupted, and hope for a better life seems within reach, until he uncovers stunning revelations about the way the adult world works.

Chapter two has him reclaiming his name, Chiron, as a teenager (played by Ashton Sanders). Tall and lanky, no longer “little” but still the target of unceasing bullying, primarily centred around the slur that has followed him from childhood - faggot. His only respite is the friendship he has maintained with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), his sole childhood friend (played by Jaden Piner as a child, and André Holland as an adult), that persists even through the social striation of high school hierarchies, where Chiron is firmly at the bottom of the totem pole, whereas Kevin’s charisma and good looks ensure his popularity and status near the top. A chance late night meeting between the two of them leads to a sexual awakening that is quickly followed by a devastating, life-changing incident.

Chapter three shows a visual transformation of Chiron that is as incredible as it is subtly devastating for its implications about who he has become, in contrast to what he could have been. Chiron is now Black (Trevanté Rhodes), a hyper-masculine drug dealer with his own turf to patrol, and young dealers to train. And then an unexpected phone call, a decade in the waiting, shocks him out of the heavy armour that he has built around himself to protect against vulnerability. He has to look within himself, rediscover the authentic innocence buried beneath a lifetime of hardship, and make a healing choice about who he is, and who he wants to be.

A simple, deeply moving, lyrical film, Moonlight challenges what it means to be masculine. To be queer. To be black and male and poor in America.

It challenges ideas about how we see each other… and ourselves.

Quote: “Who is you?”

a movie year 2016 film october films moonlight barry jenkins

Interstellar - 2014

Director: Christopher Nolan

Key Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, Mackenzie Foy, Timothée Chalamet.

Summary: A mindbending sci-fi chronicle of a future where humanity’s last hope lies in digging the last viable crops for food in a world turned to dust, and where the only technology that counts anymore is that which helps the dwindling agricultural options of a dying world. Cooper (McConaughey), a one-time NASA pilot and engineer, is striving alongside his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow) to keep his farm going to provide for his young daughter Murph (Foy) and teenage son Tom (Chalamet), when a series of strange events leads him and his daughter to stumble across a decommissioned NASA’s secret plan to reboot the human race in a new galaxy. Learning of a half-century-old initiative that had already seen twelve pilots sent through a wormhole to check out twelve possible habitable worlds, Coop finds that he is now the most qualified pilot to attempt one last mission, taking with him the seeds of the human race - literally. Professor Brand (Michael Caine), his former mentor, places him on a tiny crew that includes Brand’s own daughter (Hathaway), and briefs him on the two options they have available. One, use the spacecraft’s fuel and the wormhole discovered around Saturn to shoot into the new galaxy, gather data on which of the new worlds discovered prior is the most viable for human habitation, and then use the remaining fuel to head back to Earth, give or take a few decades, thanks to the relativity of space and time. Or, option two, land on one one of the new worlds, incubate the human eggs, and breed a new colony, never to return to Earth.

Scattered throughout the film are subtle hints that there are greater elements at work than simply the cold calculations of an indifferent universe, but encounters with the brutal reality of the relativity of space and time make for a film whose dramatic arc spans over seventy years on Earth, and over two decades for a crewmember left in orbit around a black hole, but mere hours for Coop and Brand down on the surface of the planets they discover on the other side of the wormhole.

The odds of a return to earth are slim from the outset. But Coop promised his young daughter, Murph, that he’d be back, and nothing in all of space and time is going to stop him.

Quote: "It was me, Murph. I was your ghost.“

A Movie Year 2016 Film July Films Interstellar

To Catch A Dream - 2015

Dir.: Jim Chuchu

Key cast: Ajuma Nasenyana, Tom Nandi, Rahel Equbay

Summary: This surreal, short film is an afro-futurist gem from Kenyan arts collective, The NEST Collective. Conceived as a fashion film featuring the designs of eight separate fashion designers collectively known as Chico Leco, it does more than simply display their striking, beautiful designs. The film digs deep into African folklore while playing out against a backdrop of sleek, metropolitan Nairobi, and the vast, beautiful, and appropriately sublime landscapes of Magadi, Lake Naivasha.

To Catch A Dream tells the story of a grieving widow, Ajuma (played with the perfect mix of poise and dread by Kenyan model/actress Ajuma Nasenyana) who finds her nights plagued by dream visits from her recently deceased husband. When the pills her doctor prescribes don’t work, instead increasing the intensity of her nightmares, Ajuma decides to turn to an old fairytale that promises to teach her how to catch and get rid of a nightmare.

But she soon discovers that fairytales are slippery, tricky things, and that traversing the boundaries between the living and the dead can be as simple as waking up in a dream.

Quote: “Don’t look back, no matter what happens.”

Watch the full film on The NEST Collective Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/116848487

Listen to/download the haunting, ethereal soundtrack from The NEST Collective Bandcamp: https://thisisthenest.bandcamp.com/album/to-catch-a-dream-original-soundtrack

amovieyear 2016 film january films nest collective nairobi kenya ajuma nasenyana african filmmakers jim chuchu To Catch A Dream

Song of the Sea – 2014

Dir: Tomm Moore

Key cast: David Rawle, Brendan Gleeson, Lisa Hannigan, Fionnula Flanagan, Lucy O’Connell

Summary: Song of the Sea is a gorgeous film heavily steeped in the richness of Irish mythology and Celtic folklore. An award-winning, traditionally animated fantasy set in 1981, it features the young Ben and his mute younger sister Saoirse, who live on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland in a lighthouse with their father, Conor (Brendan Gleeson). One day, soon after Saoirse’s 6th birthday (six years to the day since their mother Bronach (Lisa Hannigan) disappeared), the siblings discover that Saoirse is a selkie - a supernatural creature that is human on dry land but turns into a seal when she enters the sea.

Soon after, they are whisked away from the island by their overbearing but loving grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan), who thinks they belong in the city. But before long the children find their familial bonds tested as they embark on a grand adventure, racing against time as they attempt to return Saoirse to the sea and also save the faerie folk suffering under an ancient curse laid by a Celtic goddess - if Saoirse can find her voice first, that is.

This is a story that is first and foremost about magic, and the animation style is breathtaking, drawing beautiful contrasts between the everyday ordinariness of the city and the magical supernatural worlds they discover on their journey. However, it is also about the stirring power of mythology - the stories we tell ourselves to collectively make sense of the world. But at its very heart, Song of the Sea is a story about all the lengths we would go to for the people we love.

Quote: “Ben...”

AMovieYear 2016 Film February films Song of the Sea

While We’re Young - 2014

Dir.: Noah Baumbach

Key cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried

Summary: In this comedy drama, middle-aged couple Cornelia and Josh (Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller) find their lives and Josh’s stalled documentary filmmaking career overturned and reinvigorated when they meet a young hipster couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) who proclaim an obsessive devotion with Josh’s work. But in life, as in documentary, there’s always more to the story than what the camera captures.

Quote: “I feel like a kid pretending to be an adult.”

film 2016 amovieyear january films While We're Young

Kill Bill Vol. 1 - 2003

Dir.: Quentin Tarantino

Key cast: Uma Thurman, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, David Carradine

Summary: No one does revenge tales quite like Quentin Tarantino. Told as a series of non-chronological chapter segments, Kill Bill Vol 1. is on one level a story about a bride (Uma Thurman), pregnant on her wedding day, who is attacked by a team of assassins that massacre her wedding party and leave her and her unborn child for dead with a bullet in her head. Except, as it turns out, she’s fairly hard to kill. Fast forward to four years and a coma later, and the Bride wakes up. And the only thing on her mind is revenge…calculated, and cold.

This is the other part of the story. Not just any woman, the Bride, code name Black Mamba, was once part of the team known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad led by the enigmatic, shadowy Bill (David Carradine, seen only in this film as hands and a voice). And she was very, very good at what she used to do. So when she wakes up, she begins to track down the people who destroyed her life, from suburban mom Vernita Green, code name Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), to O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), the Japanese-Chinese-American female head of the Yakuza, code name Cottonmouth, working her way up to Bill, the one who started it all.

She ticks off the names on the list one by one as she wields a samurai sword made by the legendary Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba) who breaks his pacifist vow never to make another sword when he learns of her intentions.

The film is a genre-bending beast that uses a blend of stunningly edited action sequences, masterful cinematography, and intensely gorgeous anime sequences (during the origin story of O-Ren Ishii) to tell a brutal story of revenge, betrayal, and honour. And kicking serious ass.

Quote: “I’d like to believe you’re aware enough, even now, to know there’s nothing sadistic in my actions. Maybe towards those other jokers, but not you. No, kiddo, this moment, this is me at my most … masochistic.”

AMovieYear 2016 film january films kill bill vol. 1

A Movie Year — Stolen Sex Tapes (2016) Dir: Pinky Bardo Key cast:...

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

More you might like