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MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

May 8, 2012 One face, a thousand lives: Cindy Sherman at MoMA

by Ann Jones

I can never quite decide about Cindy Sherman. I’ve seen countless photographs of her but none that really counts as a portrait; all I really know about her is that she’s a very good actress. I know roughly what she looks like of course, but as she’s something of a chameleon even that knowledge is woefully approximate. Sherman has made plenty of work that I really love but in amongst the great stuff there’s also plenty that leaves me cold, and even the work I like has a habit of downgrading itself in my head when it’s out of sight so that I always suspect I’m misremembering it. All this is probably why a couple of months after seeing her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I’m still working out quite what I want to say about it and simultaneously thinking I really should have written about it sooner. Hmmm.

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May 4, 2012 The Back Page – May 4 2012

Paul Gleason would have been 73 today, so let’s celebrate his life with a picture of him and that kid with the perm on the set of Ewok spin-off film Battle for Endor. Because, you know. May the fourth and… and all that… God, I’m so sorry. It was Audrey Hepburn’s birthday too, and I went with this? SACK MOTH!

Trailer for this week? How about Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri?

Because there’s nothing like a bit of the ol’ ritual disembowelling to set you up for a Friday. This being Miike, I expect if the suicide does go through we won’t be spared the detail.

Link of the week is this Vanity Fair oral history of The Sopranos a set of screen tests for Gone With the Wind. You may consider yourself forewarned of future MostlyFilm content with that, too. Oh, yes.

Existing MostlyFilm content, which you may have missed:

Mostly Pop April 2012, snarky singles reviews.

Comics to Screen: Marvel Avengers Assemble, a look at comic book translation.

LOLs of Arabia, another gonzo Monoglot Movie Club entry.

Safe, Jason Statham kicking all kinds of bottom.

Join us next week for art! Theatre! film! A bank holiday!

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May 3, 2012 Safe

by Indy Datta

Jason puts a brave face on the loss of a nice toasted hazelnut latte.

The new Jason Statham vehicle, written and directed by Boaz “Remember the Titans” Yakin, starts with not one but two solid premises.  In one plot strand, we meet Statham’s character Luke Wright – a NYPD detective turned binman/cagefighter – who angers the boss of a Russian gang by failing to throw a fight. These Russians have a taste for drama, so rather than killing Luke, they kill his wife, and promise him that anyone else he gets close to will get the same treatment, condemning him to a life of itinerant solitude.  Meanwhile, somewhere in China, the mathematical genius and eidetic memory of an 11 year old schoolgirl called Mei (newcomer Catherine Chan) catch the eye of New York City’s Chinese gangsters, who put her to work as the ultimate unhackable mob-accounting computer and Johnny-Mnemonic style data courier. In the early stages, as the film cuts restlessly back and forth between the two storylines before bringing them together, you might wonder if all this isn’t a bit overcomplicated for a Jason Statham movie – if it isn’t all going to rather get in the way of the simple business of lining up as many people as possible for The Stathe to kick in the head or shoot in the bollocks.

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May 2, 2012 Monoglot Movie Club: LOLs of Arabia

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

Some countries make this job easy. When I’m travelling, I usually have to rely on a combination of Google Movies and individual cinema websites to get a decent idea of what local films are playing. Time Out Abu Dhabi, however, does all the work for you: its film listings allow for filtering by cinema, genre and language. So all I need to do is ask the site to show me the places and times where Arabic language films are being shown, and I’m home and dry.

Unfortunately, that’s where they stop making this job easy.

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May 1, 2012 Comics to screen: Marvel Avengers Assemble

by Matthew Turner

Warning: This post contains SPOILERS for Marvel Avengers Assemble (or The Avengers, if you live anywhere other than Britain) and is intended to be read after you’ve seen the film.

With the recent release (and what already looks like phenomenal box office success) of Marvel’s The Avengers, it seems only fitting to mark the occasion with a final Comics To Screen post. This will examine how writer-director Joss Whedon, closely supervised by Marvel Studios, has blended the now established movie universe (referred to, annoyingly but conveniently, as the Marvel movie-verse) with the classic comics themselves. Arguably, with the enormous success of the  three key movie franchises (Iron Man, Thor and Captain America), it’s no longer really that important to cater to old-school comics fans, but it’s nonetheless interesting to look at just how much of early Avengers history survives into the new movie and to see which elements have been drawn from elsewhere.

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April 30, 2012 Mostly Pop – April 2012

by Mr Moth

Mid-slap, K'Naan realises that he's going to need a bigger hand.

Keane – Silenced by the Night.

Apparently, Keane have been releasing records fairly regularly since they stunk up the airwaves back in 2004 with Somewhere Only We Know. Amazing. A band who have risen without trace, they’ve had three number one albums. Seriously, what? Anyway, in a country where Adele’s 21 outsells Michael Jackson’s Bad, this will probably be another number one album. Which is a shame.

For one thing, I think – I think – we’ve already heard the Killers’ second album, which is what this song could be taken from. Not the video, though, because it’s, er. Actually, no, replace dish-faced Tom Chaplin with a scraggy-bearded Brandon Flowers and it is a video from the Killers’ second album. Which would be fine if the Killer’s second album was worth copying, which it clearly isn’t. Also, also, also, this video has my LEAST FAVOURITE video cliché, when the protagonists turn up where the band were, but – ooo-eee-ooo-eee – they’re not there! Just their instruments! Oh wow, spooky doo!

Anyway. I look forward to Keane turning up in a couple of years with big feathery shoulder pads.

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April 27, 2012 The Back Page, April 27 2012

Yeah yeah, it was Tuesday, but Barbra Streisand turned 70 this week and today's best birthday is Jack Klugman. Who is super cool, but doesn't do good photos. So here's Babs, in a photo I simply couldn't not use.

Trailer-wise, well, there’s this, I guess. I don’t go for these pretentious arthouse flicks, but etc etc joke’s been done, man.

I’m not going to lie – that trailer could’ve made the concept of a bunch of superheroes kicking almighty amounts of ass more exciting. At times it’s a bit like ‘And then, oh, I dunno, Robert Downey Jnr turns up’, which is not really that amazing, unless you’re really into RDJ. I guess there is an emphasis on the Whedonian talky-talkiness, which is BALLS in a trailer. Start with a joke or a sententious bit of scene-setting, blow things up,  have buh-boom, buh-boom fade ins and outs, end it on a line whispered over silence, url, done.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of arguing on the internet recently, and this is an invaluable guide to logical fallacies. Win every time! In your head.

OR! You could read a MostlyFilm post you may have missed this week:

La Grande Illusion – Renoir’s overlooked masterpiece, out on Blu Ray this week.

Making Music – a nostalgic ramble across the sacred turf of the romantic mixtape.

Mostly Records – a roundup of the best and not so best albums of the year so far.

Il Boom – Vittorio De Sica’s film about debt in times of economic prosperity.

Join us next week for: an actual opinion on Avengers! Pop pop pop musik! More Monoglot Movie Madness! THE STATHE!

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April 26, 2012 Il Boom

By Neil Hargreaves

There is a scene in Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom where a number of well-to-do Italians dance to a band who are performing the tackier sort of early 60s pop song. The lyrics are sung in English. That same quality of a cheap import is imbued in the title of the film. Whereas most European countries created a label in their own language to denote their rapid, post-war economic growth (it is hard to think of a word less German than Wirtschaftswunder), the Italian media co-opted their term from English. ‘Il Boom’ has connotations of something messy and uncontrollable, while at the same time seeming voguish and silly, perhaps even meaningless. Such associations suit De Sica’s satire – which is interested in showing us the empty spaces that might be concealed by the ostentatious sixties prosperity.

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April 25, 2012 Mostly Records – April 2012

by Jim Eaton-Terry

Is that some kind of ostrich?

One of the few certainties with Mostly Records is that, whatever date we schedule it, something absolutely fascinating will be released either the day before or the day after.  That’s my excuse for not having more than a cursory “sounds great, more next time” about Jack White’s solo debut. He’s the single best rock star working today, though, and if you’ve not heard Sixteen Saltines,  it could be the single of the year:

First, though, because this is somehow the first MR of the year, I wanted to rattle through some of the records I’ve missed in the first quarter of the year.

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April 24, 2012 Making music

by MrMoth

I saw a woman on the train with an iPod cover imitating a cassette. This is, I think, poor form. Like the chief of some ancient tribe wearing the head of a defeated tribe’s chief as a hat, it seems unnecessarily boastful of one’s victory. The mp3 player is, of course, smaller, more convenient, with better sound quality than the traditional Walkman. The boxy, (literally) clunky beast was limited to one album at a time, too, and if you wanted variety you needed to carry round a small satchel full of tapes. Or listen to a mixtape.

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