Ridley Scott
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Despite making his name in the 1970’s in advertising, director Sir Ridley Scott hasn’t made a commercial for the past fifteen years. His continued success in the theatrical feature realm has all but precluded a return to the medium that built his career, so it stands to reason that he would need a very, very…
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Living in Los Angeles, one can’t throw a rock without hitting a… well, a screenwriter or YouTube vlogger, yes… but also some form of cultural or artistic institution. For a city often derided by those outside it as a vapid Babylon of material excess, entirely devoid of culture, LA boasts a staggering amount of art…
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“In space, no one can hear you scream”. That simple, brilliantly effective tagline, devised for a little genre picture called ALIEN (1979), would become the de facto Big Bang of a massively-successful science fiction franchise. With each subsequent installment, the brand steadily accumulated wear-and-tear, moving further afield from the visceral horror wrought by its…
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Since completing 2012’s PROMETHEUS, the pseudo-prequel to 1979’s ALIEN, director Sir Ridley Scott had found himself increasingly enamored with the revitalized mythology he had brought to the once-massively influential science fiction franchise. The stars aligned once more in 2016, when the THE MARTIAN’s runaway success — combined with the coalescing of long-gestating concepts for a…
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Notable Festivals: Toronto International Film Festival As long as we’ve known of its existence, Mars has captivated our imaginations. For centuries, we’ve looked up to that reddish orb in the night sky and wondered what revelations await us there. Subsequent explorations have brought its mysteries into clearer focus, inflating our desire to set foot…
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Throughout the 2000’s and beyond, the historical epic genre had become something of director Sir Ridley Scott’s bread and butter. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the bread went stale and the butter congealed. He had been lucky in that 2005’s KINGDOM OF HEAVEN only narrowly escaped artistic ruin by dint of…
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The runaway success of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007), Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s pitch-black western-noir novel, kicked off a frenzy to bring the rest of the author’s library to the screen. Known throughout the literary community for his gripping, terse writing style, McCarthy was the author of several books…
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My first brush with Sir Ridley Scott in the physical world was in 2008, when I glimpsed him leading a march of collaborators across the sterile boulevard of Warner Brother’s New York backlot. Little did I know then that it wouldn’t be the last time I would come so close to his orbit. Three years…
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Notable Festivals: Cannes If mainstream American cinema in the 21st century has been marked by any one dominant trend, it is this: intellectual property. As studio budgets soar ever higher, necessitating inflated ticket prices at the box office, producers have found they need to hedge their creative bets in order to draw increasingly choosy audiences.…
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Of director Sir Ridley Scott’s many artistic strengths, his sensitivity to the feminine experience sets him apart from other male filmmakers of his generation. A childhood governed solely by his mother while his father was fighting World War 2 abroad cemented the idea in Scott’s young mind that women are inherently “strong”, and can display…
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The 2000’s were a period of peak productivity for director Sir Ridley Scott, with the venerated filmmaker cranking out no less than nine feature films before the decade would come to a close. It’s exceedingly rare for any artist, let alone one capable of commanding massive, logistically-complicated productions, to experience a sustained burst of creative…
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The gangster picture is a time-honored staple of American cinema, equivalent to to the western in terms of cultural influence and popularity. The long, rich history of the genre stretches from early pulp like Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE (1932) to modern classics like Martin Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS (1990). Whereas the western’s straightforward ethical values typically boil down…