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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Monthly Archives: December 2011

23/12/11 A Festive Pause

MostlyFilm will be back in the new year. In the meantime, why not enjoy this picture of Rita Hayworth up a ladder?

22/12/11 The Devil and George Bailey

By Blake Backlash

Snow falls into the black river beneath him. George knows how cold the water would be – he still has nightmares about going under to rescue his brother. As he remembers, the ear that the cold killed starts to tingle, and at first George thinks it’s because of the memories. But then he realises there’s a voice there. Intimately cradled among the useless workings of his dead left-ear, it speaks to him, and says:

We both know that you’re not going to jump.

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21/12/11 MostlyChristmas: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas Number One

by MrMoth

What’s your favourite Christmas Number One? Regular viewers of BBC4’s excellent comedy drama Top of the Pops 1976 will soon be treated to a Christmas Number One very dear to my heart – Johnny Mathis’s When a Child Is Born. Dear to my heart in that it was number one when I, much like Jesus, was born.

Although that is sentimentally valuable, I do think my actual favourite might be Mistletoe & Wine, because no matter what you think of Cliff, that is a fucking tune. A complete one-off, it sounds like Christmas: a carol caught in pop’s prism, both devotional and lightweight. And he almost, so very nearly, pulls off my favourite music video gimmick: doing it in one-take (the cut when he hits the gong is so bloody arbitrary, like it is there just to spite me). He couldn’t repeat the trick on Saviour’s Day, though the country duly put it to number one through a combination of dazed loyalty to Mistletoe & Wine and a general feeling that Cliff in some way should be number one at Christmas[1]. We have some funny ideas about that sort of thing in this country, and I’m unshakeably of the belief that the Christmas Number One is one of our greatest modern traditions.

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20/12/11 MostlyChristmas: favourite Christmas movies, part 2

After yesterday’s collection of heartwarming Christmas classics, today we bring you the seamier, sexier, more eeevil side of cell-yule-loid (you’re welcome).

Night of the Meek

by Paul Duane

Yeah, it’s a TV show episode (from The Twilight Zone)- the name of the site is Mostly Film, right?

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19/12/11 MostlyChristmas: favourite Christmas movies, part 1

Mostly Film has come over a touch festive this week, and will be bringing you a Christmas-themed post every day. Today and tomorrow, some of our  contributors recommend their favourite movies for the festive season. Today, adopting the Santa Claus classification, the nice ones. Tomorrow, the naughty. Sort of. Don’t hold me to that.

It’s a Wonderful Life

By Ron Swanson

It’s fair to say that choosing It’s a Wonderful Life as a great Christmas movie isn’t a hugely original, or controversial stance. Sometimes it’s important to try and raise people’s awareness of a forgotten or neglected piece of art that could provide some hitherto unimagined joy. Equally, though, the pleasure in re-experiencing a masterpiece should not be discounted.

It’s a Wonderful Life is, for me, a perfect cinematic experience. It lionises kindness, solidarity, justice and hope, while also accepting that even the best of us can plumb the depths of frustrated ambitions, depression and self-pity.

It hangs around a marvellous performance from Jimmy Stewart, who never did more to disabuse audiences of the notion that he was a one-trick pony than he does here. George Bailey is a fully rounded human being: charming, decent, but with a quick temper and the potential for cruelty.

We see Bailey sacrificing his dreams of travelling the world to protect the future of his friends and neighbours by taking over his father’s business – a building and loan company, which is the only barrier to the predatory, pitiless Mr Potter (Lionel Barrymore) from controlling the town of Bedford Falls.

When people talk about It’s a Wonderful Life, they often use words like syrupy and schmaltzy, but there is real darkness to Frank Capra’s movie. George is on the brink of suicide, facing ruin and resenting all of the sacrifices he’s made, he laments his poor luck and vents his anger – claiming the world would have been better if he’d never been born.

As he realises the worth of his life (thanks to an unlikely angel), and goes on a voyage of self-discovery, one honest plea from his wife (the lovely Donna Reed) exercises all of the town to rush to his aid, providing him with the money he needs to save himself (and, therefore, themselves) from Potter’s clutches.

Although the film ends on Christmas Eve, the film manages to evoke festive feelings despite not being ‘about’ Christmas. Instead, it’s a film about loving your family, feeling grateful for what you have, and letting go of what you don’t. That’s what Christmas should be about, and for the 130 minute running time, that’s how it feels. I’m not sure you could ask for more than that.

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16/12/11 MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – True Grit

by Matthew Turner

My favourite film of 2011, hands down, is True Grit, the Coen Brothers’ Oscar nominated adaptation of the novel by Charles Portis. I’m a huge Coen Brothers fan (they’re my favourite current directors and only Michel “The Artist” Hazanavicius is their equal when it comes to pastiche) but when I heard that they were doing True Grit, I initially wondered why they’d want to do that rather than come up with an original western of their own. My doubts were quickly quashed as soon as the official trailer was released. I haven’t read the source novel, but by extrapolating from the overlap between the 1969 film (directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne as Cogburn) and the Coens’ version, it’s easy to see what attracted them to Portis’ novel in the first place, not least because it combines the two elements the Coen Brothers are most known for: jet black humour and moments of shocking violence.

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15/12/11 MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Videogames

by MrMoth

I am spectacularly under-qualified to write this, but when has that ever stopped me? I did a pop column for six months, despite being quite clearly a man in his mid-thirties. So here I am writing about the best videogames of 2011 having only played about ten in total. I haven’t had a chance to play two I’m looking forward to (Skyrim and Zelda). None of the games I have played were the big, brown franchises – Resistance, Gears, Battlefield, Call of sodding Duty – none were quirky Japanese side-scrollers and absolutely none had any downloadable content installed because I haven’t got a fucking modem, okay?

So for the half-dozen of you still here, let’s get cracking.

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14/12/11 MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – The Book of Mormon

by Spank the Monkey

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated TV series, South Park, first hit our screens in 1997, about the same time as domestic internet access was beginning to take off. It was the first TV show I can remember being widely, let’s say, distributed across the web, a factor that probably contributed towards its rapid worldwide success. (It certainly didn’t hurt that in those days of 28k modems, a South Park episode looked so rough already that it could be brutally squished into 30-odd Mb of Real Video without any visible degradation.)

Parker and Stone apparently appeared out of nowhere, but the technology of the web also gave fans like me a method of tracking down their earlier work. There were a couple of crude South Park prototypes, Jesus v Frosty and The Spirit Of Christmas: a curious in-house short for Universal called Your Studio And You: and further back than those was their first proper film, the unholy marriage of Rodgers and Hammerstein with Lucio Fulci that was Cannibal! The Musical.

Cannibal! was made in 1993, which means that Trey and Matt have been getting away with this shit for nearly two decades now. And their 2011 smash hit Broadway musical, The Book Of Mormon, is the perfect synthesis of everything they’ve done over those two decades.

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13/12/11 MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – A Separation

by Adam Howard

In a year full of big-name directors making big, messy, ambitious films – see The Tree of Life, Melancholia, Black Swan - I suppose it makes sense that one of the very best of the year would be a quiet little character piece, its ambitions only to capture life in all its complicated shades of grey. While watching A Separation for the first time, I remember thinking to myself that director Asghar Farhadi had created an entire universe for his characters to live in. It was only when I realised that that universe was the very same one that we’re living in now that I realised how truly special it is. It’s a film about an incredibly specific situation that touches on something universal, and while we in the West may not be able to relate to an awful lot of what happens to these people, the emotions that run through the film resonate far beyond the characters’ where and whats.

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12/12/11 MostlyFilm’s Best of 2011 – Submarine

by Paul Shuttle

In the largely subjective realm of film criticism, there can be few more useful barometers of quality than whether you were moved to again return to a film once your review had been filed. The process by which a critic arrives at their film of the year may be a tortuous one  but such retrospective analysis tends to lionize the important over the good. Rather than succumbing to the futile cross-referencing of colour coordinated lists, perhaps a critic should instead consider just one question: which film do they feel most compelled to watch right now? For my part, the answer has been the same for almost every day that has passed since I first saw it. The answer is Submarine.

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