Monthly Archives: August 2011
31/08/11 Cult Australian Cinema
Fred Schepisi’s forthcoming The Eye of The Storm
September sees the release of The Eye of the Storm, directed by Fred Schepisi and based on the novel by Patrick White. It’s Schepisi’s first film in eight years (not including the award-winning HBO mini-series Empire Falls), and his first film made in Australia since A Cry in the Dark in 1988. MarvMarsh takes a look back at one of his best films, while other MostlyFilm contributors choose some of their own favourite Australian films. Sadly, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course didn’t make the cut.
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- Posted under Classic Films, Cult Movies, MF Recommends, Places
30/08/11 Shake Your Money Maker
MarvMarsh looks at the history of big finance on screen
Gordon was very happy with his 'free calls on the beach at sunset' plan
Gordon Gekko; Larry the Liquidator; the Duke brothers. They may sound like professional wrestlers but what they actually are is nothing like as honest and noble. They are cinema’s money men. The people at the top of the writhing pile of maggots that is the financial industry. It is not an industry that Hollywood understands, or if it does then that does not translate into a willingness to portray it accurately. A few broad strokes give us a man on the edge, betting the firm in a desperate attempt to save his drink-soaked skin; a few more give us his boss, who spends his days in his gigantic office or the back of his limousine, drinking whiskey and handing out lessons on what life is really like. A final few more gives us the young Turk who realises something is badly wrong and saves his soul by bringing down the firm and walking away. And that, pretty much, is the financial industry on film.
Given that we now live in a post-apocalyptic landscape after our dreams were all laid to waste by the feckless actions of some greedy banker scum, or so the story goes, perhaps that is all the financial industry really deserves. Films have a difficult relationship with work as it is, so to accurately and interestingly cover the work of people it is going to be hard to portray as human, let alone sympathetic, is a big ask. Also, is there really an audience for a film about an individual diligently carving out a good reputation for himself in the Compliance department of an international bank? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t want to be the one pitching it. Actually, of course I would because what if it sold? I’d be a millionaire! But it wouldn’t. I can’t even get that to fly in my dreams.
Here’s an idea for an exciting scene in a film, Producer Guy.
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- Posted under Classic Films, Cult Movies, Film Making, Politics
26/08/11 Mostly Links – 26 August 2011
By Niall Anderson
Ideas for a brighter tomorrow.
To finish Cinema Week on Mostly Film, here is a list of cinemas in the UK threatened with closure or outright demolition. Most of them have action groups or accounts you can donate to. If you’re in the area affected, or just concerned about the preservation of cinemas in general, please consider yourself invited to contribute any way you can:
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25/08/11 It’s Just A Name These Days
Ricky Young has 33 questions about Torchwood that Russell T. Davies MUST ANSWER
"The plot of the fourth series is written ... here!"
Oh, what exquisite pain it is to be a Torchwood fan. You’ve certainly put us through the wringer over the years, Mr. Davies. Designed as a taboo-busting, Who-flavoured love-letter to US genre shows, Torchwood has survived on its energy and charm, all the while maintaining fairly elastic relationships with taste, sense and quality. From body-horror one week to existential pondering the next, the first two series were the very best sort of mixed bag, going from thrilling to infuriating, often in the space of one episode.
The third series, Children of Earth, amplified this tendency, shooting for epic and very nearly making it, before the last episode drowned in a sea of belm. For the latest series, Torchwood is now a co-production with the US cable network Starz, and at the end of the sixth of ten episodes, even the most ardent fan could be forgiven for having a few questions about – and yeah, in true Torchwood style, we won’t hold back here – what the living fuck is going on. So here’s just a few…
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- Posted under Television
24/08/11 Cinema Week: The Future of Cinemas
In the cinema of the future you'll be able to laugh as loud as you want
Ron Swanson: Uncle Frank and I were approached to write this piece because we both work in the film exhibition industry, and have an immediate professional insight into the issues that are going to affect in what happens in your local multiplex or arthouse over the next five or ten years. We hope you’ll excuse our anonymity, but some of this could be DYNAMITE.
I guess it’d be good to start by talking about some of the great things that are going on? Box office is up (Avatar, Mamma Mia, the latest Harry Potter and Toy Story 3 are the four biggest releases of all time at the UK box office, and all were released in the past four years). Digital presentation means that customers are getting better quality of projection when they buy a ticket, and you can see a wider range of events at the cinema than ever before, from opera to live sport, 3D ballet to a concert film from young whippersnappers like JLS.
So, Frank, what do cinemas have to complain about?
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- Posted under Future Releases, Places
23/08/11 Cinema Week: My Favourite Cinema
The golden glow of nostalgia?
For many of us, our favourite cinema memories are of the cinemas of our childhood, because the old local cinemas, many of them (now lost) Art Deco mini-masterpieces, gave us all our first taste of the magic of cinema, the romance of the flickering screen. For others they are of the fleapit of more recent memory, where old, obscure and downright odd films screened to packed houses of like-minded cineastes. And for some, there are unique little treasures. This collection covers all three. I make no apologies for the length, because some things need to be indulged, especially on a blog – mostly – about film.
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- Posted under Places
22/08/11 Cinema Week: Astoria7, Swiss Centre Nil
Spank The Monkey visits an old cinema come back from the grave
Click for room spoilers
What happens to old cinemas when they die? I’ve lived in London for over a quarter of a century, and I’ve seen a few go in my time. As discussed on this very site recently, the Scala has been a music venue for twelve years now (which, terrifyingly, is the same length of time for which it used to be a cinema). The EMD Walthamstow is in a state of limbo, as a battle rages between local cineastes and a church that prefers half-arsed property speculation to something that the community might actually enjoy. And God knows what the Curzon Millbank is now: most people were barely aware it opened in February of this year, and the company which co-owned it went bust just four months later.
If two instances count as a trend, then we could suggest that the next big thing will be the conversion of cinemas into luxury hotels. You could argue that this is what’s happened in the case of the newly opened W in Leicester Square, which is technically on the site of the old Odeon Swiss Centre. Except in this case, “site” is a euphemism for the entire city block that was demolished to make room for the hotel. There’s another example in San Sebastián in Spain, but at least that one is a little more respectful of its origins.
For The Belated Birthday Girl and me, I suspect the rot set in upon the publication of the first Mr and Mrs Smith guidebook. Up until then, we’d had maybe one or two experiences in hotels that were a little more swanky than we deserved. What the Smiths taught us was that it was all right to make the niceness of your accommodation an integral part of your holiday. Inspired by their books, we spent the next few years spending a couple of nights apiece in miscellaneous glamour palaces – Straf in Milan, Blanch House in Brighton, Pousada de Sao Tiago in Macau. By the time it got to our tenth anniversary, we were at the supremely decadent stage where we were prepared to choose the hotel first, and let that decide where we went on holiday. And from an afternoon spent randomly trawling through the Smith site, we ended up finding out about Astoria7.
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19/08/11 Mostly Links – 19 August 2011
By Niall Anderson
Evolution or the first flatscreen TV?
Mostly Film noticed a few years ago that a lot of what was coming into the cinema and onto TV was strongly retrospective in tone. There were lots of beards and frock coats. There were a surprising number of films (well, two) about fin de siècle magicians. There were violently bollocky reworkings of ancient history (300, Apocalypto). Period dramas – from Far From Heaven up to Mad Men – became lavishly bourgeois and finicky: the pleasure was in the detail or nowhere at all. We had just begun a new century and here we were, as a culture, looking back all the time.
2011 has been a kind of apotheosis of this trend. You can hardly move for birth-of-a-civilisation type films: whether in the fantastical mode of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, or the metaphysical mode of The Tree of Life. And you can hardly breathe for idle, bean-flicking examinations of the recent bourgeois past – like the Spielberg pastiche of Super 8 or one of this week’s big hitters, One Day. Remember when life was, like, innocent?
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- Posted under Links, New Releases
18/08/11 The Last Policeman
Indy Datta ponders what The Guard means for Irish cinema
"You know what they say about a man with big hands. Big pockets." Brendan Gleeson in The Guard
Irish cinema is almost as old as the medium itself – the Lumière Cinematographe played in Dublin mere months after its Paris debut in 1896 – but viewed from the other side of the Irish sea, the history of Irish cinema has always seemed to be largely defined by Ireland’s complex relationship with Britain, and by its relationship (through its diaspora, and through the cultural power of Hollywood) with America and American film. That narrative, which is evidently partial in both senses, provides a consistent story stretching from the 1918 historical epic Knocknagow (cited as Ireland’s own Birth of a Nation and a significant box office success in America) to the Hollywood success of Neil Jordan.
John Michael McDonagh’s feature debut The Guard fits into this broad history. McDonagh is a Briton of Irish extraction, and his film – a verbally dextrous comedy thriller not tonally that different from his brother Martin’s In Bruges – is studded in stimulating ways with the slipstream detritus of American popular culture. This goes from the broadest strokes (the local lawman gets together with the slick big-city cop to run some bandits out of town) to the most peripheral details (an argument about just what Billie Joe and the girl were throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge). But there’s another story to be told here. The Guard has grossed close to three million pounds at the Irish box office: a sum not far shy of what the latest Harry Potter instalment has racked up. And The Guard is not an isolated case. It only this week surpassed the Irish box office tally for In Bruges, and has some way to go to catch the cumulative gross of Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
So The Guard is off to a good start commercially, which is more than can be said for the film itself. Continue reading this article ›
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17/08/11 Mostly Records – August 2011
by Jim Eaton-Terry
Jay-Z & Kanye West – Watch the Throne
This was never going to be as dazzling as it ought to be, and only mildly disappointing is about the best possible reaction to these two finally making an entire album together. There’s a distinct sense of two artists doing what they do – as the song says, you know me by now – but it’s a schtick that’s still not worn out its welcome. Kanye is just coming to the end of his imperial phase, Jay-Z is maybe a shade too magisterial, but at this point a sub-par Kanye/Jay-Z record is still better than most of the rest of what’s out there.
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- Posted under Music
