#Nikki Amuka Bird

[jgroffdaily]

More photos from the first London Film Festival screening of ‘A Nice Indian Boy’ from @g_woody on X, Pearl Mackie and Karan Soni.

[jaykorianddickkoriforlife]

For ONCE I want a movie where the main character and their companion(s) choose to be selfish, and do the wrong thing for each other instead of sacrificing or hurting each other for the greater good. I want them to acknowledge what they're doing is fucked up, and that they feel guilt over it, but they still choose each other even if it means causing hell for all others. I want to see a movie where the expected "good, and noble" people do the opposite because they'd rather see the world burn than hurt each other. I just want a movie where what's expected to happen doesn't happen, and they're selfish for themselves, and whom they love. I want to see that kind of love on screen for once as fucked as it is. I've seen it happen in books, but I want to SEE it on screen.

Edit:

I want to add that I'm talking about wanting to see BOTH of them simultaneously decide it. Not when one person says fuck the world, and the other doesn't so it creates an issue, and they end up fighting over it because one is having difficulty moving on from it. I want them to be the main characters, I want them both to decide it, I want to see both of them live, essentially 'win', as happily as they can with each other while the world ends, even when the time is ticking for them as well. I don't want to see their demise. I just want to see them choose each other selfishly, and live till the very end before the screen fades into black.

[olympain]

"Let's the three of us leave. Maybe this is the way it's always been. Maybe families have been deciding this all through time. Let's just walk the earth, then. The three of us."

Knock at the Cabin (2023) Dir. M. Night Shyamalan

[chinchillasorchildren]

Films of 2024: Rumours (dirs. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson)

(3/5)

[sliceofberry]

RIP to my absolute favorite show. It was amazing while it lasted.

[nathalieskinoblog]

[scenesandscreens]

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

Director - M. Night Shyamalan, Cinematography - Jarin Blaschke & Lowell A. Meyer

"And you will all live long enough to witness the horror of the end of everything. And you will be left to wander the devastated planet alone. Permanently and cosmically... alone."

[jellyfishinc]

The plot of Knock at the Cabin was an elaborate hate crime

Redmond was the only one of the group who wasn't doing it for someone he loved. Instead he was the one that rounded everyone up from that online server and fucked with them to convince them to do it. He was the only one that knew they were gay. He even called himself Redmond to taunt them with the name of the city he attacked them in

The news reports were doctored, well known to be something people will do to convince vulnerable people of something of this magnitude.

The first reports made a point to say everyone had already been evacuated. Since the report was on something that only happened 4 hours ago, that would mean people were given an emergency evacuation warning. Which someone could easily look up or see on the news.

The virus already existed before any of them even arrived at the cabin.

In the tsunami footage, the tide didn't pull away from the beach, and no one ran away until seconds before it allegedly hit, even as the wave was forming right in front of them.

700 plane crashes, complete with footage of them going down in ways that are not physically possible for an airplane? I don't think so. Most airplane accidents occur upon takeoff or landing. NOT mid-air. Yes, yes, I know. What about the one they saw when they went outside? You just answered yourself: they saw ONE plane crash. Not to mention, it crashed in an area with a high survival rate.

Again, literally any weather phenomena they experience can be easily tracked by weather reports. It also implies just how long Redmond had to have been stalking them, just to know when exactly they would be there and what the weather was going to be like when they got there.

And right at the end, when they're watching the news reports in the diner: all of them were coming from places where those disasters would've happened anyway.

And you know the saddest part? The guy got what he wanted and got away with it.

[coffeeandcinemaandmusic]

Persuasion (2022). dir. Carrie Cracknell

[benjaminaldridge]

Behind The Scenes Knock At The Cabin

Ben Aldridge Jonathan Groff Abby Quinn Nikki Amun’s Bird Kristen Cui

#BenAldridge

[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Playing wide in the multiplexes right now:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

[jgroffdaily]

Behind the scenes photos from ‘Knock at the cabin’ posted by Kristen Cui.

[kinard-buckley]

Matt and Rav | Avenue 5 - That's Why They Call It A Missile

[rickchung]

Rumours (dirs. Guy Maddin, Evan & Galen Johnson) x VIFF 2024.

Set at a Group of Seven (G7) conference gathering the less than esteemed political leaders of the world's richest nations, Maddin and the Johnsons use the intergovernmental economic forum to mine plenty of goofy satirical material under the guise of writing a joint provisional statement after an unspecified global crisis. Starring an accented Cate Blanchett as the Chancellor of Germany, her and her international cohorts bumble through a surreal treatise of political collaboration after everyone else disappears and they get lost in a German forest. The Winnipeger directors present a glossily-lit soap opera satire more reminiscent of a summer camp slasher flick than a serious government summit, but that seems like precisely the point.

Screened at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations series.

Screening at the VIFF Centre from Nov. 18–21.

[janus-cadet]

Did I just spend days working on a single tarot card? Yes. Yes I did. I never drew that many people on a single drawing, and hey, to be honest, I basically drew every characters of the movie this is inspired from.

Yes. It means that it's yet another set of characters, for a deck that is going to be very, very multifandoms. And this time, it's The Judgement, with the characters of the recent movie Knock at the Cabin.

Well, I can't really explain that one, because it would spoil basically all of the movie. But, but, as you can see, the four visitors are waiting for the family's judgement. No archangel in that one, sorry, Gabriel.

So, that card, upright, means that you've got a life-changing decision to make. You might need to look to your past and life lessons to guide you. Reversed, it indicates self-doubt, inner critic, and could mean that you are somewhat ignoring the call. Which are, if you saw the movie, some important characters struggle in the plotline.

I loved this movie, but, to be perfectly honest with you, I do tend to love a lot of Shyamalan's work. I did not read the book, but I'm aware of the change made in the story. I don't think it's a bad thing: an adaptation is a retelling of a story, and each person is free to see something different in it. To talk about the themes that most matter to them. And the choices made in this movie really worked for me.

And damn. Were the actors great, in this. They basically carried the movie from finish to end, all of them. Special mention to Leonard, who might be my favorite character.

[sliceofberry]