Archive
EARLY MAN – Harry Gregson-Williams and Tom Howe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
British film studio Aardman have been producing high quality, massively popular stop-motion animated films for more than 30 years, including the four Wallace and Gromit shorts, the Oscar-winning big screen W&G adventure The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and the brilliant Chicken Run, which remains the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time. Their latest effort is Early Man, directed by Nick Park, and featuring a stellar voice cast including Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddlestone, Timothy Spall, and Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams. The story follows a tribe of Stone Age cavemen, led by the amiable Dug, whose valley is threatened by an invading army led by the greedy Bronze Age aristocrat Lord Nooth, who wants to mine the valley for its minerals. With the help of a Bronze Age girl named Goona, Dug convinces Nooth to take part in a winner-takes-all game of soccer, with the fate of the valley at stake. Read more…
PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN – Tom Howe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It seems appropriate that, in a year where the comic book super hero Wonder Woman made such an important and groundbreaking splash at the US box office, there should also be a small independent film about the creation of the character. While many are aware of Wonder Woman’s status as an iconic figure of female empowerment through the big and small screen portrayals of her by actresses Lynda Carter and Gal Gadot, it’s important to remember that she has been around since the 1940s, and that her origins are… shall we say, slightly unconventional. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston using the pen name Charles Moulton. In public, Moulton was an acclaimed psychologist and writer who, notably, invented the polygraph lie detector. In private, however, Moulton was in a long term consensual relationship with two women – Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne – who were also in a lesbian relationship with each other. Not only that, both Holloway and Byrne were early pioneers of the feminism movement that began under Margaret Sanger, while Marston was an enthusiastic practitioner of sexual bondage, dominance and submission, the themes of which often crossed over into his writing. Director Angela Robinson’s film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which stars Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall, and Bella Heathcote, explores the relationship between Marston, Holloway and Byrne, and how their alternative dynamic resulted in the creation of a super-hero who endures to this day. Read more…
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