Category Archives: Cult Movies

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Ranger

Cult Movies, Directors, New Releases

The Lone Ranger was a megaflop almost before it hit the screen, but Gareth Negus still lives in hope it might actually be good. 

'Why the long face?'
‘Why the long face?’

You can see how it must have looked like a good idea.  Resurrect a semi-superheroic duo – The Lone Ranger and Tonto – familiar to a couple of generations.  Get the team behind Pirates of the Caribbean to make it.  Throw a ton of money at the screen.

But Disney’s reinvention of The Lone Ranger opened to disappointing ticket sales in North America, becoming almost as big a flop for the studio as John Carter last year.  It’s perhaps the highest profile would-be tentpoles that have underperformed domestically this year, joining After Earth, White House Down, Pacific Rim and The Wolverine.  It’s not unusual for one of the year’s megabudget productions to disappoint the studio accountants, but it’s less common for a whole string of them to meet with audience indifference, while more frugal productions like The Conjuring enjoy a healthy return. Some of these films may yet be saved by their international take, but until that happens there’s a temptation to think that audiences are finally tiring of formula filmmaking. It’s more likely, however, that there are just too many of these things being released in a short space of time . It’s hard to look like an event movie when you’re offering the same pleasures as three or four other things playing in the same multiplex.

The omens were there: westerns aren’t exactly big box office these days (but then, neither were pirates before Pirates).  The Lone Ranger is a famous character, but does anyone much under 40 really know or care who he is?  (A problem that also affected John Carter).  And the idea of Johnny Depp playing Tonto did feel slightly odd, even if Depp is part Native American, sort of, possibly (in the film’s production notes, he hedges “I was told at a very young age that we have some Indian blood in our family… who knows how much — maybe very little, I don’t know.”).  There was also a level of weariness at the prospect of another mannered, deliberately eccentric Depp performance, the freshness of his first appearance as Jack Sparrow having lost its shine after three dull sequels and the flop of Dark Shadows.  But is The Lone Ranger just suffering from the competition, or is it actually a bad movie? Continue reading The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Ranger →

Out of my cold, dead hands

Classic Films, Cult Movies, History, Politics, Television

In the last part of Extremists Week, our fearless correspondent Kiwizoidberg looks at the favourite films of the gun lobby

“I am COMPLETELY out of ammo. That's never happened to me before.” Michael Gross in Tremors
“I am COMPLETELY out of ammo. That’s never happened to me before.” Michael Gross in Tremors

Amat victoria curam: victory favours the prepared. When SHTF and it’s TEOTWAWKI, will you be ready? Will you grab your bug-out bag and head for the hills, or retreat to your fortified bunker? And how are you going to defend yourself from everyone else who ignored your warnings and thought you were crazy?

Welcome to the world of the Doomsday preppers. This group of people is made up of individuals, families or even communities who are preparing for the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI). They may be crazy, but their paranoia has driven them to take action. They have stocked up on water and tinned food and developed skills that they believe will help them survive whatever the world may throw at them when the shit hits the fan (SHTF). How they think the end comes about varies, but preppers are planning to survive and are willing to defend themselves by any means necessary. When this includes firearms, we have the makings of a gun-nut. The term can be interpreted as pejorative or affectionate, depending on your point of view.

When I see or hear the term ‘gun nut’, I imagine someone like Burt Gummer in Tremors (1990). Burt and his wife have a respectable arsenal in their cellar which comes in handy when the graboids invade their town. Back when the film was released, Burt seemed a likeable enough kind of crazy. Nowadays, you are unlikely to find any charming gun-nuts in film. Instead, you get characters like Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) in the basement scene from the War of the Worlds (2005), someone out of touch with reality; unstable and highly dangerous.

What is this fear that drives the preppers, and what role has film or TV played?Disaster movies are almost as old as cinema. When the genre hit its absolute peak in the 40s and 50s, it did so when WWII was a fresh memory, and when fear of nuclear weapons and Soviet infiltration were at their height. The Roswell Incident of 1947 led to sightings of UFOs everywhere – not least on celluloid. Pretty soon the latent paranoia of Hollywood B-movies was reflected on TV through shows like The Twilight Zone. Prepper lists of favourite films tend to include ‘Panic in the Year Zero’ from 1962, which tells you something about the longevity of this particular cultural crisis, and maybe why we’ve seen so many disaster movies recently. Continue reading Out of my cold, dead hands →

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.

Comedy, Cult Movies, Directors, New Releases, Uncategorized

The Tramp looks at the apocalyptic conclusion of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’.

Why stop at one Cornetto?
Why stop at one Cornetto?

In the USA everything is bigger. The landscape, the buildings, the food portions… I think the sheer size of everything in the USA creeps into the conception of Hollywood films. (Well, that and the deep pockets of the studios.) When zombies invade, they invade a shopping mall the size of a small town, or a lone house surrounded by cornfields so vast that they reach to both ends of the horizon. The police are always pitted against villains with more hardware than the army, while not being short of a rocket launcher or two themselves. When aliens land, they choose to dramatically level large national landmarks carved into mountain ranges or hide below ground in those vast cornfields I mentioned earlier, insidiously taking over townsfolk and rolling out their secret invasion via trucks large enough to make a Routemaster look tiny.

This sense of vastness somehow manages to cover up the inherent silliness of an awful lot of Hollywood movies. Or if not cover up precisely, at least provide some form of legitimacy to them. In scrunched-up old Blighty, however, big themes are more difficult to pull off – hence the risky tendency to come at these themes (and Hollywood plots in general) by means of send-up and leg-pull. But it’s in precisely this risky area that Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright have succeeded. It started in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead, in which a zombie apocalypse is experienced from Crouch End’s best pub. It was followed in 2007 by Hot Fuzz, in which a Big City cop blows shit up in a small sleepy village. Now, to complete the trilogy, comes The World’s End, in which aliens infiltrate the cultural wasteland of an English New Town. Continue reading Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline. →

Come See The Paradise

Cult Movies, Film Festivals, Future Releases, New Releases, Uncategorized

Niall Anderson looks at smaller festivals and special screenings coming up this summer

'Is that the Lord in your eyes or are you just happy to see me?' Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
‘It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since my last confession.’ Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc

Film festival season begins every year in January with Sundance, proceeds to Berlin for February, and advances to Cannes in early May. Somewhere in the middle the Oscars happen, and then the heavy-hitters take a breather till August and Venice. In the meantime there are countless smaller festivals, special one-off screenings, and various blink-and-you’ll-miss-em appearances of directors and films you might like to see if only you knew they were happening. So welcome to the Mostly Film Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Em round up for summer 2013.

First up, because it’s genuinely first up, is a special showing in London’s Union Chapel of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. A critical classic almost since it first appeared, and renowned for the savagely self-exposing turn of its star, Maria Falconetti, The Passion has inspired countless musical interpretations and post hoc soundtracks. The one you’ll hear at the Union Chapel is by Irish composer Irene Butler, scored for soprano, organ and electronics. Part of the Union Chapel’s Organ Project season, the piece will be performed on July 17th only. If you’d like free tickets, there will be a competition on MostlyFilm’s twitter account – starting NOW. Continue reading Come See The Paradise →

Smiley’s People

British Film, Cult Movies, Directors, Home Video, New Releases, Television

Emma Street explains why Ben Wheatley’s new film is – and isn’t – like The Breakfast Club

Image
Michael Smiley in A Field In England

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England was released last Friday across all platforms with the possible exception of kinetoscope. Viewers were offered the option of watching the film at the cinema, on DVD, via digital download or by tuning in to Film4 at 10:45 where the whole thing broadcast without ad breaks.

I dipped my toe in the multiple release formats experience by watching it first on television on Friday night and then seeing it on the big screen on Sunday at the ICA. This showing was followed by a question and answer session with director Ben Wheatley and actor Reece Sheersmith, who stars in the film and is better known as one of the League of Gentlemen. In this session Wheatley discussed how he chose to shoot the film chronologically in order to allow the actors the opportunity to grow with their characters. He also shared his thoughts on the cinematic advantages of shooting in black and white – how it prevents viewers becoming distracted by attractive scenery or costumes and focuses attention on character’s faces. Black and white footage, he says, also highlights dirt and grime.

In which case, he certainly achieved the look he was going for. The images that remain with you after watching A Field In England are the moods, reactions and suffering written on the protagonists’ faces  and the grubby muddiness of their surroundings. Continue reading Smiley’s People →

Firebombs and Broomsticks

Animation, Asian Cinema, Children's Films, Classic Films, Cult Movies, Directors, Home Video, MF Recommends, New Releases

Indy Datta takes a look at the new BluRays of Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies and Kiki’s Delivery Service.

grave-of-fireflies-2_web

After the recent theatrical run for the 1988 Ghibli double bill of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro and Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, today sees the release of a slew of Studio Ghibli titles in DVD/Blu-ray dual format editions. I was lucky enough to score review copies of Fireflies and Miyazaki’s follow-up to Totoro – Kiki’s Delivery Service. Thoughts on the films and the discs after the jump.

Continue reading Firebombs and Broomsticks →

A Truth About Hal Hartley

Cult Movies, DVD, Home Video, New Releases, , ,

by Mr Moth

hartley top

A man in a dark suit escaping a criminal past. An woman giving up everything for the dream of another life. Deadpan dialogue. Low key drama in the shabby outskirts of New York and Long Island. Welcome to the early work of Hal Hartley. Take a seat. Don’t look at me, gaze out of the window. I’ll talk to you. You talk to the air. The blank space between us says everything else.

Continue reading A Truth About Hal Hartley →

Before Midnight

Cult Movies, New Releases, , ,

By Gareth Negus

1995
1995

“How long has it been since we just wandered around bullshitting?” wonders Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in Before Midnight. The correct answer, though it doesn’t come, is nine years: the period of time since we last saw Jesse and Celine (Julie Delpy) in the 2004 film Before Sunset. Before that, it was nine years again, when the couple first met in Before Sunrise (1995).

It’s a long way from being the year’s biggest threequel, yet in some circles, Before Midnight is surely the most anticipated.  Directed, like its predecessors, by Richard Linklater, co-written by the director and his two stars, it now completes one of the most satisfying trilogies in cinema.

Continue reading Before Midnight →

For Love’s Sake

Asian Cinema, Cult Movies, Directors, DVD, Music,

By Spank The Monkey

For Love's Sake

At the Cannes festival last month, you could see – and hear, thanks to some conspicuous booing – the breakdown of the love-in between Western critics and Japanese director Takashi Miike, as his latest thriller Shield Of Straw got very short shrift indeed. Does this mark the end of Miike’s career as the go-to director for Asian weirdness? I suppose it depends on whether you trust the judgment of the sort of wankers who think that yelling at projected images will improve them.

Perhaps it’s the end of the respectable phase of Miike’s career – after a couple of years of working on the sort of serious drama that attracts festival programmers, he’s going back to just doing whatever takes his fancy. That’s not to say the boo-ers are wrong, though: in a career that’s getting close to hitting the 100 feature mark, he’s made a couple of undeniable stinkers. But no single film in his canon gives you any idea what the ones either side of it will be like. We can go back in time just one year – to June 2012, and the Japanese theatrical release of For Love’s Sake, now available in the UK – for a good example of that.

Continue reading For Love’s Sake →

Firing into a continent

Classic Films, Cult Movies, Directors, ,

By Viv Wilby aguirre_cannon

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing happened.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Aguirre: the Wrath of God is one of those movies that has almost become more famous for what happened on the set than what happens on screen. The tempestuous relationship between the young German director Werner Herzog and his wildman star Klaus Kinski is notorious and the story of how Herzog ended up threatening Kinski with a gun to get him to behave has been well rehearsed; there’s little point in going over it all again here.

Of course the parallels are irresistible: Europeans struggling to adapt to the tropical terrain; a mission hijacked by an insubordinate madman; problems communicating with the locals; logistics from hell. We could just as easily be talking about the making of the movie as the movie itself. Continue reading Firing into a continent →