By Niall Anderson
The listings for the London Film Festival went up this week. I looked, as I always do, not for films that might actually be good, but for the things that look like the biggest pile of wank. Continue reading Mostly Links – 9 September 2011
By Niall Anderson
To finish Cinema Week on Mostly Film, here is a list of cinemas in the UK threatened with closure or outright demolition. Most of them have action groups or accounts you can donate to. If you’re in the area affected, or just concerned about the preservation of cinemas in general, please consider yourself invited to contribute any way you can: Continue reading Mostly Links – 26 August 2011
By Niall Anderson
Mostly Film noticed a few years ago that a lot of what was coming into the cinema and onto TV was strongly retrospective in tone. There were lots of beards and frock coats. There were a surprising number of films (well, two) about fin de siècle magicians. There were violently bollocky reworkings of ancient history (300, Apocalypto). Period dramas – from Far From Heaven up to Mad Men – became lavishly bourgeois and finicky: the pleasure was in the detail or nowhere at all. We had just begun a new century and here we were, as a culture, looking back all the time.
2011 has been a kind of apotheosis of this trend. You can hardly move for birth-of-a-civilisation type films: whether in the fantastical mode of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, or the metaphysical mode of The Tree of Life. And you can hardly breathe for idle, bean-flicking examinations of the recent bourgeois past – like the Spielberg pastiche of Super 8 or one of this week’s big hitters, One Day. Remember when life was, like, innocent?
by Niall Anderson
“YO! Hold up! Time out! TIME. OUT. Y’all take a chill. Ya need to cool that shit out. And that’s the double truth. Ruth.”
Niall Anderson looks at the knotty history of sex and nudity on television
Note: This article contains spoilers for The Wire and The Sopranos
In an earlier life, I used to catalogue DVDs. My duties were to look at the contents of the box, view the contents of the disc, and make sure the details matched. I’d check the technical specifications (region code, aspect ratio, audio set-up) and enter all the details in the catalogue. I never had to watch a whole film, and only ever did on flat Fridays or when I wanted to waste time.
Quite a number of these films – say 5%, conservatively – were pornographic; usually the semi-hardcore things you find gummed to the front of skin mags (which I was also cataloguing). These films feature real sex you can never quite see. There is a lot of sound, and circumstantial evidence of fury, but they signify literally nothing.
I bring this up because whenever I came to match the contents of the pornodisc with those of the pornobox, I could almost never do it. If the box promised you ten chapters, you’d only get five. If the box promised you a certain performer, it was touch and go they would actually appear. On one occasion, only a few weeks apart, I saw the same porno under two different titles with completely different listings for cast and crew. From this I learned that almost everything to do with filmed sex is based on lies. Continue reading Sauce for the Gander
By Niall Anderson
MOSTLY LINKS was chided recently for the persistent inaccuracy of its views, previews and reviews of the week’s films. His name’s not Oliver! The film’s not really about killing: it’s about identity theft! That’s not a bromance or, indeed, a gross-out comedy. What can we say? We are humbled by others’ greater grasp of the press release. Our only defence is that sometimes we like to imagine films as they could be, in a better world. Like Wes Anderson’s Spider-Man, for instance. Or the unmade films of JG Ballard.
We also like to imagine happier endings, happier middles and happier beginnings. In this spirit we bring you Marlon Brando playing the ukulele and dancing with his wife in Tahiti in 1967. If Apocalypse, Now had only ended like this. Continue reading Mostly Links – 5 August 2011
By Niall Anderson
“Next time you see a Spitfire in a museum, run your fingers over its skin… you might be touching a vanished masterpiece.”
When producer Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire stock of film negatives was melted down and turned into waterproof resin for military aircraft. Many of these negatives were unique, and some 80% of all British films from 1901 to 1929 were lost forever as a result. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema is Matthew Sweet’s attempt to reconstruct this forgotten history, and the other forgotten histories of British cinema: the artistic, industrial and folkloric achievements that always seem to get overshadowed by those in Hollywood. Continue reading CAMERA OBSCURER: The Return of the Mostly Film Book Club
By Niall Anderson
As every Cineplexer knows, summer is the season of revamps and remakes, and this summer is as full of them as any. But there are revamps and then there are revamps. Choose, for example, from the following: Continue reading Mostly Links – 22 July 2011
By Niall Anderson
If last week was the week of dodgy cover-ups, then this has been the week of big revelations. We now know, for instance, that Spike Lee has been confirmed to direct that remake of Oldboy, where before we could only speculate. But does the confirmation honestly make you feel any better? Sure, we can now anticipate seeing Denzel Washington eating a live octopus and developing an unhealthy crush on a waitress young enough to be his daughter (Jaden Smith), but is that really good news? Continue reading Mostly Links – 15 July 2011
BY NIALL ANDERSON
This week has been thronged with things coming to light that somebody, somewhere in a position of power, knew about already. Things they didn’t want us to see. No, not just Ben Miller’s Huge. Not even Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme. I’m talking about important things. Things like how Marlon Brando patented his own tuneable congo drums. Or that Spike Lee is in talks to remake Oldboy. Surprising things that make you wonder what kind of world you’re living in. Continue reading Mostly Links – 8 July 2011
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