Because Everybody Else Has One

It may have been overlooked by the Oscars but this is a must see for Coen Brothers fans and all aficionados of challenging, multi-layered and poignant cinema.  Incidentally, I have upped the rating to a full-on 10/10 after seeing the film a second time. It's a masterpiece. This review is also up at Channel 24  What it's about Based very loosely on the life story of legendary folk singer, Dave Van Ronk, the Coen Brothers' latest tells the story of Llewyn Davis, a down on his luck folk singer , who is left to pick up the pieces of his quickly disintegrating career after the suicide of his singing partner, Mike. As he tries hopelessly to make a mark in the overcrowded and generally impoverished Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961, he has to navigate his way through incompetent management, fraught relationships and one seriously tenacious cat. Or is that cats? What we thought It's hard to know where to even start with this one. What looks at the outset to be...

Seriously, did I watch the same film as everybody else? Having a director like Baz Luhrmann taking a swing at adapting a literary classic like The Great Gatsby was always going to be something of a tricky proposition. Luhrmann has always had plenty of visual flair and, while it would hardly be fair to say that his films (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) are nothing but all flash and no substance, Gatsby is a novel that seems set to work entirely against Luhrmann's greatest strengths as its brilliance lies strictly under the surface. Fitzgerald's writing is, of course, wonderful and Gatsby's plot is basically interesting enough but what makes The Great Gatsby such an enduring masterpiece is its thematic richness that rises primarily from the complexity of its title character. How could Luhrmann possibly do something like that justice - especially when the trailers and the seemingly insane decision to shoot the film in 3D promised a film that would entirely miss the point o...