All posts by MostlyFilm

Introducing the Mostly Film Book Club

Books and Movies
'An age of remorseless whoredom groping for its god? What does that mean?'

Mostly Film is taking a short break for a UK bank holiday, but we’ll be back on Tuesday with a new feature: the Mostly Film Book Club. The idea is simple. Every two months we choose a book about film, we give it a brief introduction, and over the course of the two months we discuss it here. Then we do it again with a different book.

First up is Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, her soup-to-nuts account of the making of Brian De Palma’s titanically unsuccessful “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. Shudder as Bruce Willis is cast instead of John Cleese! Wonder why Alan Arkin is ditched in favour of Morgan Freeman! Boggle at a ten-second clip of a runway that took five cameras and $80,000 to shoot!

We have other books lined up for future months, but we’re hoping Mostly Film readers will have ideas of their own and can step up with suggestions. The brief is as plain as can be: it can be any sort of book as long as it’s centrally about film and film-making. Biography, tutorial, novel, criticism – anything. Let us know your ideas in the comments section.

Also coming up next week, pieces on why Michael Bay is like Osama bin Laden (only alive), the life and work of the jailed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and the usual helping of much, much more.

Mostly Film Recommends – Obscure Gems

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Welcome to the first in an occasional series, in which we will collect lovely little bundles of themed recommendations from Mostly Film contributors. To kick the series off, we asked them to recommend a film that they were pretty sure none of the rest of us had ever seen (as it went, few managed to get that obscure).

“Larger than Life” by CaulorLime

Asked to write about an obscure gem it would have been easy to write about Satyajit Ray’s Big City or something old, silent and Japanese. Easy, and wrong. Anyone can explain the appeal of a lost classic, but a failed studio comedy from 1996? That’ll take some energetic shilling.

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Keep Your Eyes Wide: Dylan on Film at 70

Cult Movies, Music, , , ,

Bob Dylan is 70 today. To mark the occasion, four Mostly Film contributors write about Dylan’s many faces on film and wonder whether any of them is his own.

Niall Anderson on “Dont Look Back”

There are probably worse introductions to Bob Dylan than Dont Look Back, but alas it was mine, so I find it hard to believe. Before I saw DA Pennebaker’s film I only knew the inescapable Dylan: the strumalong homilies, a famous line here or there, the placard-flashing promo for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, and the fact that he was considered a genius. I was seventeen and I don’t know what I expected genius to be. I mostly expected it to be obvious. Not necessarily direct or easy, but in some way lividly apparent. I didn’t expect this.

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The Last Communist

Asian Cinema, Cult Movies, ,

by Jeremy Tiang

I wanted to write a book about the Malayan communist insurrection of the 1950s, so I took a bus to the jungles of Southern Thailand, where the former guerrilla fighters all live these days. In the town of Betong, I went up to people in the street (fortunately, everyone in Betong speaks Chinese, so I didn’t need my Thai phrasebook, which is shockingly lacking in communist vocabulary) until I found someone willing to take me up the mountain on his motorbike. He didn’t have a spare helmet, but on such a steep mountain road a helmet probably wouldn’t have done me much good.

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Odd Future

Music

by Alex Hartland

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (more often known as Odd Future) are a group of ten or so foul-mouthed young rappers and musicians based in Los Angeles but incorporating members from New Orleans, Florida and Canada. Judging by their prodigious recorded output of 12 albums in 14 months, they spend most of their time making music but there are also videos of them skateboarding and goofing around on YouTube.

In February Hodgy Beats and group leader Tyler, the Creator made their TV debut on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. For the previous 12 months they had been steadily building an underground following through free albums and mixtapes of innovative, profane and often profoundly unpleasant hip hop via their tumblr site. But after the wild performance of these two then-19 year olds, backed by the Roots and, apparently, Sadako from Ringu, the profile of the group was raised beyond all measure. Following sold out shows at South By South West and much media hype, Tyler will tomorrow release “Goblin”, his second solo album and the group’s 13th in total. But how did these apparently repulsive records made by a bunch of upstarts build such a following in so short a time?

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Game of Thrones

Television

by Yasmeen Khan

HBO’s new adaptation of George RR Martin’s novel “A Game of Thrones” begins by opening a gate onto one of the most memorable sights in the Seven Kingdoms – the Wall. We’re led into this new world by the men of the Night’s Watch. They take us through a cramped tunnel, lit only by the flames of their torches. When the panoramic view of the bright, ice-blue Wall opens up, the contrast makes its vastness all the more impressive. (I have no intention of calling this a birth metaphor, don’t worry). Later we’ll see the Wall in different weather, different moods, but for now, it’s an icy blank, a manmade glacier stretching across this new world.

The opening tells us what this story is about – the grand sweep of the landscape and the tunnels of detail human activity makes within it. The whole of the prologue is almost wordless, and almost monochrome – snow and trees, ice and black robes. Blood is black. Even the eerie blue of the wights’ eyes is a subtle contrast, rather than a glaring one. The otherworldly is part of this world. No need to draw attention to it. You’re in good hands, the opening says. Hands that have the confidence to show and not tell, that expect us to be intrigued and hooked by the setting alone. It’s a promising start. And an appropriate one. Weather is integral to the story of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, as the characters’ repetition of the words ‘Winter is coming’ will constantly remind us.

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3D Meets the Arthouse: Pina and Cave of Forgotten Dreams

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A conversation between Philip Concannon and Niall Anderson

Philip Concannon: Over the coming months the cinema release schedules will be dominated by summer blockbusters, and most of these movies will be in 3D. After false starts in the 1950’s and the 1980’s, it appears that 3D is now here to stay, becoming an increasingly integral element of studio filmmaking, but perhaps the most interesting experiments in three dimensions are taking place outside the multiplex. By a fortunate coincidence, two new 3D features from respected German auteurs are hitting UK cinemas in the space of a month. In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog utilises this newfangled technology to explore the primitive artwork buried deep within the Chauvet Cave in France, while  Wim Wenders’ Pina uses 3D to pay tribute to the late dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. While most 3D films thus far have been the result of studio-imposed conditions, these films are passion projects from idiosyncratic directors, and both attempt to express the simple beauty of their chosen subject through three dimensions.

The question is, have they succeeded? Does Herzog’s camera bring the 30,000 year-old paintings to life, and does Wenders’ use of three dimensions capture Pina’s dancers at their best? Finally, what do these films say about the future of 3D as a viable filmmaking tool outside of the mainstream? In the following conversation, Niall Anderson and I will hopefully answer these questions as we examine and compare both Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Pina.

Niall, perhaps you’d like to begin by sharing your views on 3D in general, and as you saw both documentaries this week, who is your victor in this Teutonic 3D duel?

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