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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Monthly Archives: September 2011

30/09/11 Mostly Links – 30 September 2011

By Niall Anderson

If we only really see the big Oscar contenders in December and January, then this is the period in which we begin to see the outliers and the chancers: the films that need a strong headwind and decent box office in the Anglosphere to compete.

This is particularly true of non-English language films and films where the star wattage comes from a single obvious source. We saw this last week with Drive, where the appeal of a stellar cast (including the prettily robotic Ryan Gosling) is balanced against the rather less obvious draw of director Nicolas Winding Refn, previously known only to suburban misanthropes with violent dreams.

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29/09/11 Educating the Daily Mail

Caulorlime watches a real British hero in action and is dismayed by the press response

Everyone in this photo, see me after.

Regular readers (hi, Dave) will be aware that I don’t really like much. My longer pieces for this blog tend to consist of me ranting about one of the many things that have annoyed me. I write pseudonymously because the school that employs me, the students I teach and the parents that entrust me with their offspring will all sleep better in their beds if they don’t know what a bile-fuelled, potty-mouthed misanthrope I am. Who would benefit from the knowledge that I am so irritated by advertising and reality TV that I regularly find myself shouting, in another room, after a rage induced black-out? What does it profit a man to discover that I truly believe my greatest achievement in life is that I have never used the word “Cunt” in a classroom*? No-one and nothing, that’s who and what. Information like that will only lead to funny looks in the staff room (and I get enough of those) and ultimately to my losing my job. And I like my job. As I said, I don’t really like much, but my job’s alright.

Obviously, it isn’t perfect. Every good job has its downsides. I believe that soap actors object to people calling them by their character’s names, for example, and fashion photographers often describe a sense of ennui at being fellated, once again, by a selection of the world’s most beautiful women. For teachers the downside is being universally derided. The teaching profession is one of the British media’s favourite whipping boys. If the right-wing press is to believed there is barely an educator in Britain that isn’t tedious, incompetent, sleazy or lazy, or all of the above. Teachers are portrayed as politically-correct, sex-obsessed, illiterate, cowardly, doctrinaire, over-paid, under-worked individuals whose pensions are a personal insult to every hard-working family of middle England. We are what is wrong with this country.

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28/09/11 The Only Way is Essex?

Philip Concannon looks at three linked Brit gangster films. Can nothing stop the Geezer Appeal bandwagon?

The Range Rover in which Patrick Tate, Anthony Tucker and Craig Rolfe were found dead in 1995

On December 7th 1995, three dead bodies were found in a Range Rover on a remote farmland in Rettendon, Essex. The three men – Patrick Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe – were notorious criminals who appeared to have fallen victim to an ambush in a drug deal gone awry, and two men were later convicted of the triple murders. Michael Steele and Jack Whomes are currently serving life sentences despite continually protesting their innocence, and various other individuals involved in the incident have either disappeared into the witness protection programme or made money from books tangentially connected to the three dead men.

That’s about all there is to the case of the Rettendon Range Rover murders, and yet between the years 2000 and 2010 no less than three films inspired by these events were released into UK cinemas (in the same period of time Terence Davies, one of our greatest filmmakers, struggled to get two pictures made). In a world teeming with amazing stories just begging to be told, why has this grubby tale about nasty people proved such an irresistible lure to filmmakers in this country? In truth, it’s not hard to see why – whatever angle you choose to attack this tale from, it offers up drugs, sex, betrayal and lashings of violence. For tawdry thrills that will appeal to an undemanding DVD audience, this incident appears to be a sure thing. If you’re after anything more than that – if you yearn for such cinematic luxuries as complex characters, witty dialogue and nimble plotting – you’d be advised to look away as I delve into the murky world of Essex Boys, Rise of the Footsoldier and Bonded by Blood.

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27/09/11 Unleash Your Enthusiasm!

By Ron Swanson

Here at Mostly Film, we love American TV, but I hate the fact that rubbish like Two and a Half Men is stuffed down your throats for hours a day in the UK while 30 Rock and The Office are left to flounder in their one half-hour spot on Comedy Central. Still, at least there’s a chance to see the oft-neglected, forgotten gem that is Friends. E4 are so concerned you might miss out on this slice of the current cultural zeitgeist that they kindly repeat each night’s episode, um, three hours later.

Given that cultural landscape in the UK, I, and two of our regular contributors, am going to espouse the virtues of a handful of US TV comedies that haven’t received enough acclaim in the UK.

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26/09/11 Let’s Play Hitler!

"Tell your master this: the armies of Mordor must disband. He is to depart these lands, never to return." Ian McKellen as Hitler

Niall Anderson looks at ten cinematic Hitlers and the careers of the men who played him, working out what their changing portrayals say about the rest of us.

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23/09/11 The London Spanish Film Festival: Preview

In the next two months, Mostly Film will be covering a number of major film festivals in depth, including the BFI London Film Festival, the Raindance independent film festival and the London Korean Film Festival.

Susan Patterson kicks off this series with a look at the London Spanish Film Festival, which starts today.

Andrucha Waddington's 'Lope'

Spanish is the first language of some 400 million people on earth, but in 2009 only 12 Spanish-language films were released in the UK.

The 7th London Spanish Festival is previewing a handful of films that will get a general UK release (such as tonight’s gala film at the Ciné Lumière, Andrucha Waddington’s Lope), but more striking is that almost every film in the core programme is a UK premiere. And in many cases it will be your only chance to see these films on a big screen.

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22/09/11 You Really Don’t Want What She’s Having …

The problem with the modern romcom is men, says Ron Swanson, and not for the obvious reasons.

Name this man

The Hollywood romantic comedy seems like it could not be in worse shape unless all films in the genre teamed Jennifer Lopez with Steven Tyler. In the past twenty years only two American romantic comedies have made more than £15m at the UK box office. To put that into context, among the films that have passed that entirely arbitrary landmark this year are Gnomeo and Juliet, The Smurfs and Black Swan.

It’s when you look at the two films, Hitch and What Women Want¸ neither of which, I would imagine, would feature very highly in any ‘best of the genre’ lists that one stark truth begins to appear: the romantic comedy has been betrayed by the absence of the A-list actor.

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21/09/11 Perfect 10

Philip Concannon revisits Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog

Thou shalt not break the fourth wall

The camera moves slowly across the surface of a frozen lake. On its bank, hunched in the snow, we find a young man warming himself against a fire. The man raises his head and then slowly turns to look directly at us, wearing an expression that is hard to read; it could be a look of curiosity, perhaps, or one of reproach. The camera then cuts to another location, where a woman cries as she watches silent footage of a smiling child on television, before it brings us back to the young man who appears to be wiping a tear from his eye.

This is the opening scene from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog, a ten-part miniseries the director made in Poland in 1988. The young man, played by Artur Barciś, appears in eight of the ten episodes, always in a slightly different guise and always observing the drama as it plays out but never intervening, like an omnipotent angel of fate. As Dekalog progresses, we might expect some clarification on this character’s true identity, but Kieslowski was not a man who liked to provide answers.

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20/09/11 At the Mountains of the Night Garden

Mr Moth discusses CBeebies and the rational adult

We do step on bugs, really

MrMoth, third from right, goes for a nature walk

I am still on the island. Days pass, I have no idea how many, and they all seem the same. Every day brings fresh  madness, every day is my worst day ever, every day brings me closer to the source of that infernal music. The music! It haunts my sleep. I cannot dream.

When I became a father in May 2009, I thought I was at least slightly prepared for it. Like every parent before me, I found out very quickly that I was not. It’s not just the sleepless nights (not as bad as you’d think), or the dirty nappies (only sometimes as bad you’d think), or the endless worry (worse than you can imagine), it’s the time. There’s so much of it, and your child expects you to fill it for them. Hello, little creature. What do you want? Everything? Oh. Can I read you a book? Shall we play with these toys? Shall we sing songs? Oh god, I’m exhausted. More books? More toys? More songs? Can’t I just sit for … more books! More toys! More songs! Enough! I love you, but enough!

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19/09/11 Plus ça change …

Emma Street marvels at the sanity of the characters in bodyswap comedies.

The Magic Fountain of Plot Contrivance: Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman in The Change-Up

Hollywood loves a body swap. Whether it’s an older person swapping bodies with a younger one (Freaky Friday, 18 Again) or a man swapping bodies with a woman (It’s A Boy Girl Thing, The Hot Chick) or a person becoming a different version of themselves (Big, 13 Going On 30). Well, in The Change-Up, a thirty-something man wakes up in the body of a thirty-something man! A different one, obviously. It would just be normal life, otherwise.

Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds are lifelong friends. Bateman is a successful lawyer with an impossibly hot wife, three adorable children, tons of money and a very busy schedule. Reynolds is an unsuccessful actor with a sword fixation and a lot of free time. On a drunken night out together, they tell one another – insincerely – that they wish they had the other one’s life. Unfortunately they do so whilst pissing into a magic fountain of plot contrivance. Next morning sees the inevitable:  hangovers, regrets and waking up in someone else’s body.

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