Category Archives: Best Of

Edinburgh Film Festival 2013

Awards, British Film, Film Festivals, , , , , ,

Gareth Negus, Matthew Turner and Sam Osborn report from the 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Leviathan
Leviathan

Gareth Negus

The 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival followed a successful first year for Artistic Director Chris Fujiwara.

Perhaps I ended up seeing the wrong films (with 100+ features and short programmes, it really wasn’t possible to see everything) but I felt the programme was a slight disappointment after last year.  A lot of this was down to the underwhelming opening and closing films.  It’s clearly not easy to select the perfect films for these slots: they need to balance commercial appeal with star quality for the red carpet press photographers, while maintaining a degree of artistic credibility.  So Breathe In, the opener, probably seemed like a good bet: co-star Felicity Jones available for pictures, from the director of the well-reviewed Like Crazy, and an accessible subject matter. Unfortunately, though well photographed and nicely played by Jones and Guy Pearce, the story – middle aged musician and family man finds his mojo revitalised by a younger girl – was a very familiar one, and the film did nothing new or interesting with it.

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Monoglot Movie Club: The Guldbagge Variations

Awards, Monoglot Movie Club, New Releases, ,

Part of an occasional series in which Spank The Monkey travels to foreign countries, watches films in unfamiliar languages, and then complains about not understanding them

A Guldbagge Award, yesterday
A Guldbagge Award, yesterday


Sweden! Land of Bergman, Garbo and Abba The Movie. There are some countries where I struggle to find local films in the cinemas, but not here. Stockholm in January 2013 was packed full of ‘em: from the family-friendly fun of Sune i Grekland, to a theatrical outing for a Wallander that’ll probably be on BBC Four by 2014. All I needed was a way to filter out the good stuff from the bad.


By chance, I found that way on my first night in the country, as I turned on the telly to discover live coverage of the Guldbaggen, Sweden’s own film awards. (That golden bug thingy at the top of the page is the actual award itself.) Perfect! All I needed to do was grab the list of winners, pick the most interesting-looking ones, and get myself down to a cinema to see them. Unfortunately, everyone else in Stockholm appeared to be doing the same thing in the week after the Guldbaggen, with screenings of Swedish movies selling out all over the place. As a result, I couldn’t always see my first choice of film.

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			Mostly Film goes back to the Oscars
		

		
		

			Live blog, The Oscars, 					

	


		

		
After the ROARING SUCCESS that was last year’s Mostly Film Oscars liveblog, we’re back in a revised and updated incarnation, consisting of last year’s bloggers Concetta Sidoti and Laura Morgan, with bonus Y chromosomes provided by Victor Field and MF regular Niall Anderson. We’ll be providing incisive and penetrating commentary on the red carpet, the candidates, the ceremony and everything in between, always assuming we manage to stay awake. We have popcorn, beer, jelly beans and chocolate-covered raisins and right now we’re raring to go, so join us back here from 11pm for all the Oscars coverage you could possibly need, as long as all the Oscars coverage you could possibly need consists of commentary from four people watching on a slight delay.


Your hosts for tonight:


Concetta Sidoti is a journalist who tweets as @concettasidoti. Victor Field is 43 years old, not looking forward to seeing Adele’s mug all over the tabloids if she wins, and tangling with a bizarre attraction to Jessica Chastain. Laura Morgan tweets as @elsie_em and blogs at gladallover.net, where she has recently made her own Oscars predictions. She rather likes Adele’s mug and is looking forward to seeing it later. Niall Anderson is a drinker, a good fellow, a story-teller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.


Once again we’ll be playing Oscars Bingo, and this year we want one of each of the following:


    

  • A woman in trousers
    • 

  • A man in anything other than a black tux
    • 

  • A crazily awkward red carpet moment
    • 

  • A cutesy shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Quvenzhané Wallis together
    • 

  • A winner crying on stage
    • 

  • A losing nominee smiling unconvincingly
    • 

  • The Samuel L Jackson award for the first clearly pissed off losing nominee
    • 

  • The most clearly unwelcome long acceptance speech from a winner in a technical category
    • 



We’ll see you back here later. Now go and stock up on snacks.


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			Eat My Shorts!
		

		
		

			Short Films, The Oscars					

	


		

		
Best Animated Short

by Spank The Monkey


adam-and-dog-post-4


About a week and a half ago, I spent a delightful Sunday morning at the Watershed in Bristol, watching a programme of the nominees for this year’s Best Animated Short Oscar. It’s a service provided in cinemas across the globe by the good people at Shorts HD. In preparation for this article, I did a quick check online shortly after the screening, and was delighted to discover that four of the films were viewable for free on YouTube, with the fifth only available via a dodgy streaming site I’d never heard of before.


One week later, three of those four YouTube links were dead. Could this have anything to do with Shorts HD’s plans to make their Oscar programme available for sale on iTunes? Possibly. It just means I’ve had to dig a little harder to find copies of the nominees for you to watch. They’re irritatingly embedded in all sorts of other pages, and I can’t guarantee how long they’ll be around for. Hurry, hurry, hurry.


 Continue reading Eat My Shorts! →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			The MostlyFilm Best of 2012
		

		
		

			Awards, Best of 2012, MF Recommends, , , , , , 					

	


		

		
I AM ACTUALLY HAVING A HEART ATTACK CALL 911


Hello. We sometimes mention that MostlyFilm is built on a forum, and every so often that forum’s bones poke above the smooth, silky skin of the blog. Since the year 2000, we’ve voted for our favourite films released January-December in the UK, and this year we thought we would share the results with you. Why are we doing this in February? Because we give people a sensible amount of time to catch up on possible contenders and vote with consideration. So up yours, everyone who published their best of results in January.


After the jump are the results, some comments from the forum and, eh why not, the results from previous years. All of this data is compiled and collated by one dedicated forum user, nac1. We applaud his effort.


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			Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid
		

		
		

			Asian Cinema, Best of 2012, Uncategorized					

	


		

		
The-Raid4


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.


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			MostlyFilm’s Best Of 2012: Pamyu Pamyu Revolution
		

		
		

			Best of 2012, Music					

	


		

		
We’re gonna need a bigger head


by Spank The Monkey


Even an old fart like myself can appreciate the sterling work that Mr Moth has been doing for Europe’s Best Website with his Mostly Pop pieces. He’s got a genuine appreciation for the genre, and it comes across even when he’s slagging it off. But pop is like heroin: after a while, you come to realise that the regular stuff simply doesn’t do it for you any more. One day, Moth will look at his Girls Aloud records, sigh, and realise that he needs something stronger. He needs to go to Japan, basically.


J-Pop is the crack cocaine of popular music. Any impurities and unnecessary material have been refined out of it by years of scientific research involving men in lab coats. You know that old joke about why they don’t make planes out of the same material they use to make the black box recorder? J-Pop is the answer to the equivalent question about why they don’t make pop music entirely out of hooklines. It breaks down your natural resistance: once you’ve been exposed to it, nothing of standard strength has any effect on you ever again.


I’m a 49-year-old man, and my favourite record of 2012 is a J-Pop album by a 19-year-old girl called Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. STOP JUDGING ME.

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			MostlyFilm’s Best of 2012: Dredd
		

		
		

			Best of 2012, Genre, , , , , 					

	


		

		
by Indy Datta


dredd-movie


In 1995, the first movie outing for taciturn dystopian-future law enforcer Judge Joseph Dredd – a Sylvester Stallone vehicle directed by Danny Cannon – was released to scathing reviews. Although comic book adaptations were, even then, big box office (Joel Schumacher’s  grating, garish Batman Forever, released in the same year, was as big a hit as the two Tim Burton movies that preceded it), the sales pitch for Cannon’s film was all about Sylvester Stallone, still at that time one of the most bankable international movie stars. To the chagrin of the hardcore fans, the 1995 version of putting the money on screen meant putting all of Stallone’s face on the screen, even though Dredd’s face had in the pages of 2000 AD, jutting chin apart, been kept from view beneath his helmet since his first appearance in 1977. In the name of commerciality, the film traduced the source material in numerous other ways, big and small – from giving Dredd a love interest to, unforgivably, retaining the services of Rob Schneider as a comedy sidekick. Despite all the cynical pandering, Judge Dredd bombed. Fast forward to 2012, a world where comic book movies are the mainstream, with the latest incarnation of Batman not only hoovering up ridiculous amounts of cash, but demanding to be taken seriously. The makers of Dredd looked like they were doing everything right – the helmet would stay on, hiding star Karl Urban’s face throughout; Dredd’s creator John Wagner would be part of a creative  dream team including Danny Boyle’s go-to screenwriter Alex Garland; the violence wouldn’t be watered down to garner a kid-friendly rating; Rob Schneider (or his 2012 equivalent, Rob Schneider) would remain uncontacted. Despite all this, Dredd bombed.


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			MostlyFilm’s Best of 2012: Theatre
		

		
		

			Actors, Best of 2012, Theatre, , , , , , , , , , , , 					

	


		

		
AnneBoleyn


by Lissy Lovett


Looking back over the plays I’ve seen this year, English Touring Theatre’s tour of Shakespeare’s Globe’s Anne Boleyn has been my stand out favourite. It’s just the kind of play I like – funny, well acted, tightly scripted, with moments of sadness and surprise, all woven around an historical story which by the end makes me feel  like I might have learnt something – in this case a tiny bit of the events and philosophising that led England to become a Protestant country instead of a Catholic one. The writer, Howard Brenton, wears his historical research lightly, I’m sure it all must have been more complicated than is presented here on stage, but he gives a good flavour of the issues, illustrated nicely with details – the battle between the Jesuits and Puritans over altar rails is particularly good. The cast, containing some changes from those who performed the play at the Globe itself back in 2011, were superb. Due to my job, I was fortunate to see the play at many venues on its tour, like some kind of Tudor /Stuart groupie, and it was exciting to see them develop their performances more at each venue and respond to the different audience reactions in each place (2012’s best audience award by the way goes to the audience at Hall for Cornwall in Truro – they were amazing.)


 Continue reading MostlyFilm’s Best of 2012: Theatre →