All posts by Indy Datta

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About Indy Datta

Indy's opinions are not those of his employer, your mum, or Sir Van Morrison.

Mostly Links – 17 February 2012

Links

by Indy Datta

Gosh, The Simpsons is 500 episodes old (and marking the occasion with an episode featuring antipodean secret-spiller Julian Assange), whodathunk, etc? There have been grand claims made for the cultural significance of Matt Groening’s  creation – although such claims have decreased in frequency as the quality of the show has, so the consensus has it, declined. That consensus may be considered harsh, but if you were to ask people for their favourite episodes, few would come from the last ten years.

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Mostly Links – 10 February 2012

Links

by Indy Datta

Ewan McGregor and Eva Green in “Perfect Sense”, released in America today

Mostly Links is a bit jetlagged this week, so is outsourcing the first part of this week’s blog to a joke-generating bot, which has been programmed to deliver witticisms about this week’s 3D-retrofitted re-release, on both sides of the Atlantic, of Star Wars Episode I: the Phantom Menace:

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L’Atalante at the BFI

Classic Films

by Indy Datta

Jean Vigo turned in the first rough cut of L’Atalante from his deathbed: over the gruelling winter location shoot the young film maker – already frail, tubercular – had fallen fatally ill with pneumonia and septicaemia. He would do no further work on the film, or ever see it again, and would die at 29. The studio, Gaumont, took the film, re-edited it, and rescored it to prominently feature a popular song of the time, Le Chaland qui Passe – The Passing Barge – which also became the film’s title. Initially a critical and commercial failure, the film remained obscure for a decade and more, before its rediscovery and adoption as a formative inspiration by the critics and film makers, most notably François Truffaut, who would go on to form the French new wave.
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Mostly Links – 13 January 2012

Links

by Indy Datta

I don’t have any opinion on the substantive (let’s be polite)  issue, as I haven’t seen The Artist, and probably wouldn’t have recognised the love theme from Vertigo anyway (what? It’s hardly the theme from Jaws), but it’s good that Kim Novak has learned the most important rule of making public statements in the early 21st century – nothing must ever be rhetorically compared to rape, under any circumstances.

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MostlyFilm’s best of 2011 – Margaret

Best of 2011

by Indy Datta

The annual end-of-year ritual of anointing the year’s best films is probably as old as film criticism itself – there was probably some contrarian who thought Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat was overrated, and not as good as Dancing Darkies. I’ve been thinking about how different things must have been, though, in the pre-internet world, where the average film buff might only know what Barry Norman thought was the year’s top ten, or Time Out, or the Guardian (or if they were really fancy, Sight and Sound, or if they were fancy-shmancy, Cahiers du Cinema). And while Bazza probably chatted to Derek Malcolm or Alexander Walker about films they’d seen when he bumped into them at screenings, I have to assume that film critics talk to each other a lot more about films these days. They’re right there in my Twitter timeline doing it all the time, for a start. And they’re also talking about films to people who wouldn’t have been part of the conversation a few years ago – on Twitter but also in the comments sections of newspaper film reviews, and on blogs, and even on the BBC’s Film programme. It’s clear that the internet has made a difference to the culture of film criticism, but has it been a positive one?

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Mostly Links – 25 November 2011

Links

by Indy Datta

Mostly Links is unwell. Mostly Links would quite like to be somewhere where the sun is shining, or failing that, seven years old, with its mum bringing it a boiled egg and soldiers on a tray. Mostly Links can’t even summon up the energy this week to sign a petition asking film studios not to stop renting out 35mm prints of their archive. Mostly Links should really stop talking about itself in the third person, like, now.

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The Best of 2011 – MostlyFilm Needs You

Announcements

by Indy Datta

“Tied to a Chair” – according to Metacritic, the worst film of 2011

Yes, again!

After what I feel was the resounding success of my public call for submissions for the London Film Festival,  which led to some great writers writing for us for the first (but hopefully not the last) time, we’re doing it again as we look towards the end of the year, a time when most film blogs will be looking back at their favourite (and least favourite) films of the year.

This is what we’re going to do. For ten days in December,  one writer will get the blog to themself each day to write about their favourite film (or, if you really prefer, TV programme, show, play, record, game, you know the kind of stuff we cover) of the year. You could be one of those writers.

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Mostly Links – 11 November 2011

Uncategorized

by Indy Datta

“The Little Movie that Could”

Movie awards season has started, then, with the announcement over the last couple of weeks of the nominations for the British Independent Film Awards and the European Film Awards. Pretty much every week between now and the Oscars in February will bring more awards season news, and Mostly Links will be there on the spot, bringing you the latest, until it gets too boring. Talking points from the BIFAs included the freezing out of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea, and the sweep of nominations for StudioCanal’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Far be it from Mostly Links to note that, if Tinker Tailor is considered a valid nominee for an indie film award, presumably anything short of the new Harry Potter is eligible. On the EFA side of things, is the best picture nomination for The Artist just the start of its triumphant march towards Oscar, or is it more notable that it didn’t get nods for direction or screenplay?

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London Film Festival 2011 – the Afterparty

Film Festivals, London Film Festival 2011

Indy Datta

The night bus home after “Target” took its sweet time

And so it’s over for another year. I think I’ve banged on myself quite enough over the last couple of weeks, so I want to largely hand this wrapup piece over to our other contributors, and also to some regular MostlyFilm Contributors who weren’t able to chip in during our daily reports.

There were a lot of abandoned kids in this year’s programme, most of my top films either tried to honour the power of love to rescue the forsaken, or the bleak possibility that they might encounter evil rather than love. It might just be me, but it started to feel like a theme, wrapped up in the larger theme of the atomised consciousnesses of people in the modern world, seeking some kind of connection with each other, or just with reality. My top films of the festival: Snowtown, I Wish, The Giants, Alps, The Kid With a Bike.

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