ZooScope

Tag: Experimental

  • Roar. Dir. Noel Marshall. Film Consortium, Filmways Pictures. 1981

    Roar. Dir. Noel Marshall. Film Consortium, Filmways Pictures. 1981

    “No Animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 cast and crew members were”. A film tagline that instantly grabs your attention. The Drafthouse re-release in 2015 coined this moniker for the 1981 box-office blunder[1] “Roar”, which lacks plot, conventionality and, as the curious tagline suggests: a lack of safety measures for the actors…

  • Bait. Dir. Mark Jenkin. British Film Institute. 2019.

    Bait. Dir. Mark Jenkin. British Film Institute. 2019.

    Core to Mark Jenkin’s 2019 film, Bait, is a narrative depicting the gentrification of the coastal land and community in Cornwall. Following Martin, a local fisherman, Jenkin’s film emphasises how the tourism industry alienates and disenfranchises localised heritage and livelihoods. Martin’s job is central to this. The fish and lobsters that he catches serve as…

  • Surf’s Up. Dir. Ash Brannon & Chris Buck. Columbia Pictures. 2007.

    Surf’s Up. Dir. Ash Brannon & Chris Buck. Columbia Pictures. 2007.

    Released in 2007, during the surge of penguin movies, Surf’s Up is a unique animated mockumentary exploring how penguins are the ‘real’ inventors of the worldwide sport, surfing. A documentary crew (ironically, Brannon and Buck cast themselves) follow the journey of Cody Maverick (Shia LaBeouf), a Rockhopper penguin from Antarctica who dreams of becoming a…

  • The Secret of NIMH. Dir. Don Bluth. MGM/UA Entertainment Company. 1982.

    “We can no longer live as rats. We know too much.” The Secret of NIMH is remembered by many as a dark, creepy, and disturbing film, with retrospectives published in recent years referring to it as leaving basically every kid who sees it with a lingering dread. Don Bluth’s directorial debut after leaving the Walt…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Twelve Monkeys begins: human beings whoop and rattle in cages, buried deep underground. Wild animals roam free in the streets; in the churches, on top of this underground prison. But who dug the hole? The animals or the human… …beings? The deadly virus which forced the survivors to flee underground came from the animals. But the…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Do you want a second chance, Cole?” In other words – Do you want your body experimented upon to benefit our research again, Cole? The film cuts to a scene where Cole is injected and pinned to the time machine… or rather, torture machine. Cole never gets to answer the question – he has no…

  • The Witches. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Warner Bros Entertainment Inc.. 1990.

    Only undeceived individuals might be able to tell a witch from an ordinary woman, for their most dangerous power is the sophisticated art of deception. “Real witches dress in ordinary clothes and look very much like ordinary women; they live in ordinary houses and they work in ordinary jobs” (Roeg 1990, minute 2:25), Helga Eveshim…

  • Stalker. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Mosfilm. 1979.

    Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction film, Stalker (1979), is marked by depression, desolation and barren wastelands.[1] The film’s loose narrative follows three men into The Zone, a disturbingly conscious and supernatural area of nuclear disaster. Whilst there, the eponymous Stalker encounters a black dog at various points on the journey. As the Stalker waits for his wife in the bar,…

  • The Lobster. Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos. Picturehouse Entertainment. 2015.

    The Lobster is a modern parable in which societal norms are completely called into question by absurdity of form. In the not too distant, or not too past, world of The Lobster, single people are sent to a hotel in which they must find a mate in 45 days or otherwise be turned into an animal of…

  • Werckmeister Harmonies. Dir. Béla Tarr. Artificial Eye. 2000.

    Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), based on László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, sees the arrival of an enormous taxidermy whale in a small Hungarian town. Local postman János, played by the wide-eyed Lars Rudolph, becomes fascinated by the displaced beast, seeing the divine beauty and awe of God’s creation in its rotting…