Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Yentl (1983) and Ex Machina (2014)

In Hit Me With Your Best Shot we choose a favourite images from selected films. Click on the images herein to be taken to the corresponding article from the participants.

Bronze - a star very much in control of her own image and its various crescendos into iconography

by Nathaniel R

Is there any generation that was so deprived of the movie musical as Generation X? The eighties and nineties were so bereft of live action musicals that whenever one did arrive it felt like both an anachronism and an event. Yentl (1983), as it turns out, still feels like both...

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Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Ex Machina (2014)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Tuesday night. Since Alex Garland's Men is upon us, this week's selection falls on the director's breakthrough feature – the Oscar-winning Ex Machina. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry:

Even though one tries to avoid the online discourse around Men – at least until everybody has had a chance to watch it – some grumblings are rather hard to block off. If that wasn't enough to affect the expectations going into the new movie, this look back at Ex Machina certainly does. The sci-fi chamber drama is a formidable reminder that Alex Garland is a better director than a writer, colligating blunt ideas and blunter dialogue with spellbinding form. Within the realm of glances refracted through glass labyrinths, insinuating architecture and eerie eroticism, Ex Machina triumphs. It's when its characters open their mouth to blabber on that the appearance of cinematic greatness gets spoiled. 

Thankfully, Hit Me with Your Best Shot is about visuals, so we're in a safe place with Ex Machina. Whatever misgivings I might have, the film looks impeccable…

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Horror Actressing: Sonoya Mizuno in "Ex Machina"

by Jason Adams

Is Alex Garland's Ex Machina a horror film? For all of its Frankensteinian elements I could be swayed towards a yes or a no, but when it comes to viewing the film via Sonoya Mizuno's character of "Kyoko" -- Mizuno can currently be seen co-starring on Garland's Hulu show Devs -- the "yes" argument feels substantive and then some...

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"A busy pedestrian and traffic intersection."

...we could go together."

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Beauty vs Beast: Irish Gangs Be Slashin'

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- I don't know if its my walk to work in Lower Manhattan every day or what but you'd be surprised (really, because literally nobody says this) at how often Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York comes to my mind. I mean clearly the nieghborhoods look a little bit different but whenever I look off towards the river I think to myself, "Self, a boat could totally shoot a cannon at you right now." So thanks for that, Gangs of New York. One more New York stress I don't need!

Anyway this morning we're thinking green thanks to the approaching St. Patrick's Day holiday, and I figured it was time to turn that anxiety into action -- it's the angry Irish laddy versus the Original New York Nativist Nightmare (pre-dating Donald Trump by a couple centuries)...

PREVIOUSLY It was a real battle of man against machine with last week's Ex Machina edition, but in the end our lady of the whirring silver midsection Ava slinked away with just about 53% if your vote. Said catbaskets:

"Team anti-rape avenger every time. (As opposed to team rapist creator). We shall not get lost in Isaac's dreamy pecs."