All posts by MostlyFilm

Tales from the Land of Gold: Zipangu 2012

Asian Cinema, Cult Movies, Film Festivals

Clare Dean experiences Japanarchy in the UK.

Somi – The Taekwon-do Woman

It’s Friday evening and I find myself eating Sushi in an old Lambeth workhouse.  Not something Charlie Chaplin would’ve done but then he never got the chance to go to the Zipangu Film Festival.  This was the third annual festival and the first one held at the Cinema Museum in Kennington (and former workhouse home of Chaplin when he was a small boy).

Zipangu is a different kind of festival. You might not see the latest Japanese big budget, sword fighting epic or an in-depth Ozu retrospective, but you will see something unusual or little-seen and it’s not always the traditional representation of Japan that you might expect.

Continue reading Tales from the Land of Gold: Zipangu 2012 →

Back Issues

British Film, History,

Spank the Monkey and Clio attempted to review the BFI’s new digital archive for Mostly Film. With mixed results…

An advert from the Winter 1972/3 edition of Sight and Sound.

Spank The Monkey:

I love Sight and Sound magazine, even though I hold it personally responsible for the mediocre 2.2 degree I attained at university. It’s true. Much of my final year at Manchester was spent in the campus library, desperately trying to undo the results of two previous years of hedonism largely based around the university’s excellent Film Society. But during a break in studies one day, I discovered that the library had bound volumes of Sight and Sound (and its companion review magazine, Monthly Film Bulletin) going back several decades. The study breaks got longer and longer after that, ultimately leading to the Desmond that blights my academic record to this day.

I had a massive Proustian rush when I recently visited the new library at BFI Southbank, and found those same bound volumes taking pride of place on its shelves. So imagine my delight when I discovered shortly afterwards that it was now possible to access every issue of S&S and MFB online, through the newly-created Sight & Sound Digital Archive. Well, that’s the theory, anyway.

Continue reading Back Issues →

Grimm Times

Books and Movies, Genre, Television, , , ,

TheTramp finds that fairy tales are back – and they’re grimy.

All the magic in the world couldn’t protect the cast of Once Upon a Time from the curse of Photoshop.

Once upon a time, fairy tales were Disney’s domain. They took the old Grimm boys’ stories and lightened them up a little with a combination of beautiful art work, princess dresses to die for, Technicolor and happy ever afters. Publishers followed suit, updating the fairy tales we all know and love – like Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast – and creating pretty illustrated books that children could read with their parents and enjoy the pictures to help aid sweet dreams.

Readers of the Grimm tales will know they’re not designed to aid sweet dreams. They are social lessons and morality tales. They make it quite clear that the world is full of nastiness and only the smart, the cunning and the manipulative will survive. There may be dashing princes, but don’t rely on them ladies – what if you find yourself with a wolf and there’s no prince in sight?

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Now on the Big Screen in colour!

British Film, New Releases, Television, ,

As the Nick Love-directed remake of The Sweeney reaches British cinemas, Dene Kernohan looks at the history of British TV in the cinema.

The subgenre of films based on British TV series is one I have a great deal of affection for, even if critical acclaim has been limited.  And it’s one which has been around almost as long as commercial television itself.  The earliest example seems to be I Only Arsked!, a 1958 Hammer comedy in which Bernard Bresslaw reprised his role of Pte “Popeye” Popplewell from Granada Television’s national service sitcom The Army Game.

Continue reading Now on the Big Screen in colour! →

MexFest!

Film Festivals

Clare Dean takes on Mexican cinema, and wins

La Nave de los Mostruos

MexFest, which took place earlier this month, was a spillover from the cultural events accompanying the Olympics this summer: a 3 day festival of film, music and visual arts at London’s Rich Mix arts centre in Shoreditch , organised by the British Council, along with the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts.

Partnered by the Moreila International Film Festival, Ambulante Documentary Film Festival and CANANA (the production company founded by Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna and producer Pablo Cruz), the hectic programme included recent features and documentaries, shorts and 4 Mexican sci-fi classics on 35mm.

The recent fiction features strand showed some great contemporary Mexican cinema from the last 6 years, including Abel, We Are What We Are, Deficit, I’m Gonna Explode and Revolución. All good films, but I wanted to see something I hadn’t seen before.  So I stuck with the short films, and the rare 1960s sci-fi screenings -and yes, I couldn’t help myself, the exhibition of photo portraits of Mexican wrestlers from the 1980s to the present day.

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There’s nothing wrong with my face – I got character

Actors

There’s something very special about a great character actor.  I don’t mean the Steve Buscemis or Phillip Seymour Hoffmans of this world, ugly film stars who coast along on mere talent and charisma, I mean the people playing third henchman in a DTV knock-off of Heat starring Andrew McCarthy in a rabbit mask (this is an actual film I once saw on a coach in Indonesia, and the guy who played Mr Pig was pretty good).  I’m talking about Martin Kove, who parlayed appearing in the credits of Cagney and Lacey into an IMDB page listing 175 films including “War Wolves”, “Savage” and “Ballistica” – all in 2009.

So here is MostlyFilm’s tribute to the grunts in the trenches of cinema.

Continue reading There’s nothing wrong with my face – I got character →

Enough with the Penguins, Already

Children's Films, Classic Films
“No, really – Puss in Boots is surprisingly good!”

Parents! Do you dread the moment when your kids demand that you watch Madagascar, for the thirtieth time? Do you never want to hear another word from them about that squirrel and his flipping acorn? But are you worried that they will shun anything not already marketed to them through tie-in Happy Meals? MostlyFilm feels your pain, and has tasked its more fertile contributors with trying out some children’s and family classics on their broods, taking inspiration from the BFI’s list of the 50 films you should see before you’re 14, and Mark “The Story of Film” Cousins’s similar list. This is bound to go well, right?

Continue reading Enough with the Penguins, Already →

Nitin Sawhney’s The Lodger OST

British Film, Classic Films, Music

by Victor Field

As anyone who’s seen silent movies on Sumo TV can tell you, vision without some kind of sound only works in small doses. So providing brand-new accompaniment for the newly spruced-up print of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger is the perfect way to keep audience attention, and with Nitin Sawhney being a fan of Bernard Herrmann we have… history sort-of repeating itself. See, The Lodger is a film about a serial killer running amok in London, and Frenzy – also about a serial killer running amok in London – also wound up getting new music when Hitch became the only director to ever throw out a score by Henry Mancini (Ron Goodwin replaced him).

Continue reading Nitin Sawhney’s The Lodger OST →

Less is More

Announcements
Five posts good! Three posts better!

We’ve been putting out this blog most weekdays for over a year now, and it’s been great. But we won’t lie to you, it’s also been hard. And because we want to keep putting it out for a long time yet, we’ve come to the conclusion that it would be better for us to post (slightly) less frequently, and spend (slightly) fewer of our evenings wrestling with WordPress.

Don’t panic! We’re going to publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (public holidays excepted), and we’re hoping to have three proper posts a week – rather than four proper posts and some space-filling whimsy on Fridays.

We reserve the right to resort to space-filling whimsy.

Another thing: one of the best things about doing this for the last year and change has been how many writers we’ve had come in from outside the talkboard group that started the blog, some of whom have written some of our best stuff. We’d like that to continue. If you’ve written for us before, we’d love to have more from you (yes, even you), and if you haven’t, we’d love to hear from you even more. Drop us a line at editor@mostlyfilm.com.

And we’re always delighted to see new posters on the talkboard as well (you’ll need to register before you can post).

We’ll be back next week with a post from Philip Concannon on the short films commissioned for the Cultural Olympiad, and the promised reports from the Edinburgh International and London Indian Film Festivals.