Have you tried the brisket yet? We’re back, with part 2 of our review of the 2013, with thoughts on some of the year’s best music from Mr Moth (on pop singles), Matt Poacher (on the underground scene), Jim Eaton-Terry (on all the stuff in between), and Spank the Monkey (taking a break from watching movies in languages he doesn’t understand, on the 32nd year of his traditional year-end compilations).
Welcome to MostlyFilm’s review of 2013, which we like to think of as pleasingly eccentric, rather than randomly boshed together. We’re here all week (try the brisket). We kick off with a review of the year in TV, with musings from Ricky Young on zombies, The Tramp on Elementary, Sarah Slade on the reality TV successes of the year, Viv Wilby on a reality near-miss, Ron Swanson on US comedy and drama, and Indy Datta on web TV.
Sam Clay, as a huge fan of the original, takes a look at the long-awaited sequel to Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and finds himself wanting less.
Paul Duane takes a look at Emmanuelle V, a late film by one of one of cinema’s strangest and most specific auteurs, Walerian Borowczyk, for Shadowplay’s Late Films Blogathon.
Ron Swanson
This year’s London Film Festival put together the best programme of films I can remember in my ten or so years of attendance. It delivered some brilliant films with huge reputations from festivals earlier in the year, but also a fair few new discoveries for me, and a handful of well-crafted crowd-pleasing films, which are the lifeblood of any festival. Continue reading London Film Festival: Festival Wrap-Up
The Invisible Woman (Ralph Fiennes, 2013)
Ralph Fiennes’ second outing as director, following Coriolanus, sees him shift from one of the traditional choices of the serious thesp-turned-filmmaker, Shakespeare, to the other – costume drama. An adaptation of Claire Tomalin’s biography, The Invisible Woman is the story of Nelly Ternan, the actress who for many years was the mistress of Charles Dickens.
We initially meet Nelly (Felicity Jones) some years after Dickens’ death; now married with a family, she is directing a school production of a play by Wilkie Collins. This stirs up memories of how she first met Dickens when, aged 18, she performed in the same author’s play.
The Charles Dickens presented here is a showman who lives in the full glare of celebrity (in one scene, he is mobbed by adoring fans). He is larger than life, effusive if perhaps somewhat egotistical, and shows a warmth not generally associated with Fiennes. However, once you get over the shock that Dickens isn’t being played by Simon Callow, Fiennes is quite successful in the role; I particularly enjoyed his scenes with Tom Hollander as Wilkie Collins.
Unfortunately, I was less engaged in his relationship with Nelly, whose dilemma really should be the most interesting element of the film. Though the pair are swiftly attracted to each other, Nelly is reluctant to enter into a sexual relationship with a married man (though I was unclear exactly what she was expecting to happen). Her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) is more conflicted, concerned for her daughter’s reputation but pragmatic enough to recognise a chance for economic security when she sees it. Dickens’ behaviour is also cause for concern; in at least one instance, he treats his family in an utterly unconscionable manner.
In a film about an illicit relationship, it is odd that it’s over 70 minutes before we get any sense of passion between the two leads. Whether this sense of restraint was the choice of Dickens or of Fiennes, I can only guess; either way, it makes this tasteful, well-performed film a colder affair than you feel it should be. – Gareth Negus
The Invisible Woman is due for release in the UK on 7 February 2014. Continue reading London Film Festival 2013: Closing Day Round-Up
Want to make a film about a cult musician-turned-bank-robber who’d like to make one last record before he dies of lung cancer? Paul Duane tells you how.
When this all started I was in limbo. A documentary called Barbaric Genius that I’d given three years and a great deal of my own money to was on the verge of collapsing, leaving me in real doubt as to whether I’d be able to continue. I was able to finish that film in 2011, but at the time previously committed co-producers were melting into thin air on all sides as the going got tough, and I had taken to drinking whiskey in the office where I spent most days alone, looking out the window at the hotel opposite, feeling like some hopeless case out of an Edward Hopper painting.
I’d spoken to Jerry on the phone a few times. He’d found his way into my life via some blog posts I’d put up a few years earlier, when I was desperately trying to fund a film about the extraordinary Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson, one of the very few people I’ve ever met who absolutely deserved to have a film made about him.
Jerry had eluded me at that time – he was in jail in Florida, it later turned out – but now he’d resurfaced and I was the first ‘media’ person he contacted, and only because he wanted to get back in touch with Jim Dickinson, who was at this point (mid-2009) in hospital and seriously ill.
Then Jim died – a black day in the memories of all who knew him, though his self-penned epitaph – “I’m just dead, I’m not gone” – has proved true. And my contact with Jerry lapsed. I had many things to work on. Until, one day, I had nothing to work on, everything except the whiskey and the view out the office window had fallen away, and that was the day I heard from Joyce (Jerry’s saviour, fianceé and the love of his life, it seems). Continue reading Very Extremely Dangerous
The Sacrament (Ti West, 2013)
Ti West, the man the festival brochures like to call the king of slow-burn horror, has been promoted (possibly not the right word) from FrightFest to full London Film Festival status for his latest film. A non-supernatural cult horror largely inspired by, though not specifically based on, the Jonestown massacre, it’s a found footage film, which may have you moaning already.
The found footage is presented in the manner of The Last Exorcism rather than The Blair Witch Project, in that it’s been edited – sometimes in such a way as to suggest there were more cameramen available than the script leads us to believe – and given a suitably doomy score.
The film follows two reporters from Vice ,which I was surprised to learn is actually a real thing, into a remote hippy-ish cult, which the sister (Amy Seimetz of Upstream Color) of a friend has joined. Initially, all seems like peace and love, despite the armed guards at the gate. But things take a sinister turn once the reporters start asking questions of the cult leader, Father (Gene Jones).
I greatly enjoyed West’s last two films, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers; unfortunately, The Sacrament didn’t work so well for me. Part of that was down to my expectations – I had anticipated that Eden Parish would hold a supernatural secret, and was disappointed that the threat turned out to be more prosaic. That, of course, is my problem rather than the film’s. The real flaw is that, having arrived at the camp, the leads’ subsequent actions have basically no effect on what transpires. They run around filming, and do quite a bit of shouting, but fail to exert any influence on who lives and who dies. They can only observe, and hope not to get killed.
Perhaps that was West’s intended point, and what he saw as the true horror of the situation. It’s good to see him trying new subject matter and expand his range, but while The Sacrament includes individual moments that shock, it failed to move me as drama. Gareth Negus
The Sacrament is showing at the London Film Festival on Wednesday 16 October. Continue reading London Film Festival: Day Eight Update
Victor Field sees composer extraordinaire Danny Elfman cut loose at the Royal Albert Hall
Until Monday 8 October 2013, I’d never have thought that I’d celebrate a first at the same time as Danny Elfman, but there you are. That night was the first time I’d ever attended a world premiere concert, and that night marked the first time he’d had a concert devoted to his music for film rather than as a member of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Danny Elfman’s Music From The Films Of Tim Burton (surprisingly not sponsored by Ronseal) premiered to a packed audience at the Royal Albert Hall before going to Leeds, Glasgow and Birmingham, and hopefully the punters there had as glorious a time as most of those attending the RAH.
Ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, MostlyFilm looks over the runners and riders for this year’s Man Booker prize
This year’s Booker list is one of the most readable, if not the most exciting, lists I can remember. There isn’t a book on the longlist (let alone the shortlist) which isn’t an accessible read. At points this can lead to a lack of ambition; Alison MacLeod’s Unexploded, of which even for MostlyFilm I’m not reading more than 100 pages, is a ghastly, conceited little book which welds barely-digested research to a hackneyed plot to no real effect. I’m sure MacLeod has spent a lot of time in the Mass Observation archive, but she never manages to rise above the most trite reflections on the 1940s. MacLeod aside, though, all the longlisted novels I’ve read are well worth a look; The Kills is mostly brilliant though drifts a little to close to a Roberto Bolano knock-off in the mid-section, The Spinning Heart and Five Star Billionaire are both beautifully constructed looks at the contemporary world, and The Marriage of Chani Kaufman is fantastically entertaining.
After the break, we look in more detail at the six books on the shortlist…
MostlyFilm 