Mostly Film is off to eat turkey, play Twister and bicker with its family. We’ll be back on 2 January with a preview of 2013 by Ron Swanson.
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Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid
by theTramp
2012 in film has been the sort of year, for me, where the best films have not been the most memorable. Three films stand out in terms of memorability; TED – a one joke movie about a teddy bear that can talk and also smoke, take drugs, drink and is consistently horny, made by the makers of Family Guy and memorable mostly for two great cameos. Killer Joe – a film with so many flaws that you can list them as you watch it, but the central performances are so great that you don’t care. If Matthew McConaughey doesn’t get an Oscar nod for this then quite frankly he’s been robbed. To my mind Killer Joe is the most chilling on screen character since Mitchum’s Harry Powell and that is a comparison I do not make lightly. Finally, and the subject of my ‘best of 2012’ is The Raid.
MostlyFilm’s Best of 2012: Small Screen
After the jump, a hand-picked bouquet of MostlyFilm contributors reflect on their telly, home video and gaming highlights of the year.
Jump!
Lawrence of Arabia Competition
![larab_stl_2_h[1]](https://mostlyfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/larab_stl_2_h1.jpg?w=604)
Lawrence of Arabia is 50 years old. If you can tell us when and where it premièred we have a pair of tickets for the screening tomorrow at Empire Leicester Square at 2.30 pm. It is a 1,330 seat cinema with a high quality 56K Watt THX certified sound system, showcasing Lawrence of Arabia in the best possible setting in its original road show presentation with an overture and intermission.
To win email editor at mostlyfilm dot com before 3pm today with your answer. First out of the hat wins. There’s a clue here in our original review. Good luck!
The Turner Prize 2012
Don’t you wish you’d bet on the Turner Prize when Mostly Film predicted the winner in October?
Mostly Covers: I Put a Spell on You
by theTramp
The greatest songs will always attract cover versions; artists just can’t resist singing them, you see. I Put a Spell on You is an absolute classic of a song, which is why there are so many versions available to buy, download or view on YouTube. If you love this song as much as I do then I really cannot recommend enough spending a few hours trawling through them all and picking out your personal favourites.
Now in Mostly Covers I listen to many, many versions of a song to pick out the weirdest and most wonderful for you to enjoy. This is no exception, except for the fact that perhaps the weirdest and most wonderful is the original.
The original spell – Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
Usually it’s the cover versions that prove weird and wonderful, but not so with I Put A Spell On You. If your first brush with this song was the lyrics you might well expect it to be a soft, beautiful, bluesy jazz tune. But that’s not Screamin’ Jay’s style. Remember Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die? That’s more Screamin’ Jay. His world is weird, wonderful and just a little unsettling – the witch doctor of early rock’n’roll. He wrote I Put a Spell on You in 1956, it charted but not particularly high. So here it is, Screamin’ Jay’s bewitching, unsettling spell:
London Film Festival 2012 reviews II
Hot off the press, a fresh new batch of reviews from the London Film Festival.
Rust and Bone
Reviewed by Ron Swanson
Rust and Bone is the quintessential festival film: French, with a ‘name’ director, a rising star and an art-house darling. It’s also muscular, brutal and frequently beguilingly beautiful. Jacques Audiard’s follow up to A Prophet was conceived as a response to that film; all open spaces and romantic entanglements.
London Film Festival reviews
Mostly Film’s intrepid reviewers have been out and about at the London Film Festival. Here is the first of two reports this week of what they’ve been watching.
John Dies At The End
Reviewed by Clare Dean
During his introduction to the late night screening of John Dies at the End, director Don Coscarelli told how he was mulling over a sequel to 2002 cult hit, Bubba Ho-Tep, when he received an email from a ‘robot’ – one of those automated Amazon messages that recommends on past purchases, ‘you bought this, so you might like this’ etc. The suggestion was David Wong’s book, John Dies at the End and for once, the robot was spot on.
John Dies at the End is a fun midnight movie. Told in confessional flashback as a potential story to journalist Arnie Blandstone (Paul Giamatti), two paranormal investigators (Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes) have to save the universe from a gigantic evil demon called Korrock, helped by a mind opening drug called (and looks like) Soy Sauce. Once the Soy Sauce takes hold, nothing is as it seems. Characters develop psychic abilities and cross time and reality. The dead have telephone conversations with the living. At least, I think that’s what happens.
London Film Festival: Best of British
With the 2012 London Film Festival in full swing, Siobhan Callas of Britflicks.com looks at the British productions in this year’s programme.
It’s time once again for the UK’s biggest (and possibly longest titled) film event of the year, The 56th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express.
The festival sees a total of 225 feature films from 68 different countries playing across the capital city’s cinemas for 12 days throughout October. And much to my own personal joy, one sixth of this year’s chosen screen outings are home-grown.
American Horror Story: I’ll get the shovel, you get the bleach
by Paul Duane
Why “American”? Well, there’s nothing more American than owning property. It’s the American Dream, houses for sale Dayton, Ohio some land surrounded by a fence. Built, as in all the best haunted house stories, on an Indian burial ground. And American Horror Story, series one, is all about decades of murder on a slice of prime West Coast real estate.
I think it’s one of the most original and intriguing TV series in recent years, and one that’s come out of nowhere with a whole new way of representing the horror genre on television.
Here’s the thing: TV doesn’t like anthologies any more. The days of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents… are all over. So what do you do if you love those short, creepy stories about creeps who come to bad ends, and you work in television, and you’re coming off one of the biggest surprise hits of recent years*? You make an anthology show but disguise it as a soapy serial.
Anthologies, however, have to have some sort of a theme. Rod Serling made his shows all about paranoia and characters who discover the world isn’t as it seems. Hitchcock’s series was largely defined by its pitch black sarcasm.
The very American theme of American Horror Story, S1, is the horror of childbirth.
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