Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out thirty years ago today. Blake Backlash suggest you read what he wrote about it… or Anything Goes.
Continue reading Not Sinking But Crashing: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
All posts by Blake Backlash
Glasgow Film Festival 2014
This year Glasgow Film Festival was ten years old. We asked five writers to tell you about a film they saw during the Festival that matters.
Phantom of the Paradise
Brian de Palma’s cult musical – a riff on Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Faust – is reissued in a typically spiffy new Blu-ray edition by Arrow Films today. Blake Backlash takes a look.
Annus Mirabilis as seen from the back row
Blake Backlash takes Philip Larkin’s declaration that ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’ as point-of-departure to explore cinematic depictions of sex in early ‘60s British cinema. Or maybe he just watches some old films and tells you about the dirty bits.
Obscure Gems 3: Back From The Dead
Ah, Easter! Who among us does not, at this time of year, find their mind turning to thoughts of resurrection? To things which are lost and which, one day, might see the light of day once more? Inspired by such musings, several MostlyFilm contributors have, as they have time and again, written about those forgotten films and telly programmes which, having once been crucified on the crucifix of obscurity, we would like to see rise once more from the cave of time. Come with us now, as we roll back the stone of memory and share with you, our disciples, these cinematic and televisual miracles.
Glasgow Film Festival 2013
Glasgow is a beautiful city that hosts a vibrant film festival every year. Three MostlyFilm writers were there this year, and they’ve written about it.
THE VETERAN’S PERSPECTIVE
BY DONNA SWABEY
I’ve been a regular attendee at The Glasgow Film Festival for the past five years or so, and this is the first time I decided to take the duration of the festival off work and jump in with both feet. Apart from emerging chair-shaped and half blind, I had a great festival. My method of choosing films is always somewhat erratic, and I tend to be heavily influenced by the blurb in the programme. I enjoy seeing classics on the big screen, but like to take a chance on films never likely to be screened again in the UK. All in all I had a fairly good hit/miss ratio this year. And I only turned up at the wrong cinema once.
Casque d’Or
by Blake Backlash
To start with, things are idyllic. The opening shot of Casque d’Or finds us watching from a river bank as two boats are rowed towards us. The passengers are singing. They disembark and, as they race each other to an open-air dance garden, we can see by their clothes that this is the end of the 19th Century. The screen is alive with sunlight and laughter.
Continue reading Casque d’Or
Hell is a City
by Blake Backlash
That title seems emblematic of film noir. In so many noirs the city is a malevolent presence, a place that seems both to warp and to be warped by the tortured psyche of the protagonist. If you had to send a telegram summarising the message of most film noir, the curt, four word missive: Hell Is a City, would be a pretty good way to get the job done cheaply.
But a part of what makes this film interesting are the other, non-noir traditions it draws upon. It’s British but it’s a markedly different work than the films I discussed in my MostlyFilm article on Brit Noir, back in March. Significantly, the three films I looked at then are set in London and the South. By contrast, Hell Is a City is set in Manchester. That shift north also brings with it a shift from a heightened reality to an emphasis on veracity. And along with that comes a more serious attempt to more authentically depict the lives of the British working-class.
Carnival of Souls
Carnival of Souls is 50 years old this month. Here’s a birthday tribute from Blake Backlash.
When Herk Harvey, the director of Carnival of Souls, was asked why he only made one film he is supposed to have replied that he made over four hundred. You are unlikely to have seen any of the others, unless you grew up in Kansas in the middle of the last century. Harvey was an industrial and educational filmmaker and his films were mostly about how to operate farm machinery or the importance of personal hygiene – y’know, the kind of thing you often see parodied in early Simpsons episodes.
You can see how well such an apprenticeship served Harvey in Carnival of Souls. It goes some way to account for just how good the film is – a talented filmmaker can’t shoot that much film without learning a lot. You notice it in the way he always seems to know the right place to put his camera: occasionally he moves it, but the film’s most striking moments tend to come from how he uses the frame. His shots are as rigorously composed as good photographs.
Enraptured by the details: a Billy Wilder double-bill
by Blake Backlash
It can be difficult to know how to begin. The attempt to come up with a first line for his novel about alcoholism sends Don Birnham, the protagonist of The Lost Weekend, into a bout of sweaty self-doubt. The fear of the blank page is enough make him abandon the manuscript of The Bottle to go searching for an actual bottle.
If Billy Wilder ever experienced such creative uneasiness himself, it doesn’t show in the films. The openings of The Lost Weekend and Double Indemnity are both memorable because of the strikingly assured way they immerse us quickly into their narratives. We watch Fred MacMurray stagger into an office in the wee-small hours and start to dictate a memo, in which he confesses to murder. And we watch Ray Milland through a window, as he packs a suitcase and casts nervous glances towards the bottle of whisky we can see dangling on a rope that hangs out of that window. The endings of both these films will, in different ways, return us to these opening images – this is a pattern that Wilder used most famously in Sunset Blvd, which opens with William Holden’s corpse floating in a swimming pool, as William Holden starts to tell us how he came to be floating there.
Continue reading Enraptured by the details: a Billy Wilder double-bill
MostlyFilm 