Category Archives: Links

Mostly Links – 3 February 2012

Classic Films, Links

by Mostly Film

Meeting people is easy: Mostly Links on his monthly outing

Contrary to what you might expect, Mostly Film has a life outside blogging. Disguised as a perfectly normal human being (only a bit squintier), Mostly Film sometimes even leaves the house to meet other people, and has tea with them, or dinner, or a drink. You may even have sat next to Mostly Film on a bus and not realised it.

Mostly Film also has opinions about things that aren’t film or telly. They aren’t always grown-up or fully formed opinions – they tend to involve the words ‘aspect ratio’, whatever the topic – but they’re definitely opinions. Just ask, next time you’re sitting on a bus next to a perfectly normal human being (only squintier).

For instance, yesterday Mostly Film heard US Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney say that this year’s election run-in is going to be “the most vitriolic, spiteful campaign in American history.” Now, is that a threat, a promise, or a plea for mercy? Might it even be a request for advice? Mostly Film has chosen to believe it’s the last option, so this week’s Mostly Links is all about the dirtiest elections in screen history. Continue reading Mostly Links – 3 February 2012 →

Mostly Links – 13 January 2012

Links

by Indy Datta

I don’t have any opinion on the substantive (let’s be polite)  issue, as I haven’t seen The Artist, and probably wouldn’t have recognised the love theme from Vertigo anyway (what? It’s hardly the theme from Jaws), but it’s good that Kim Novak has learned the most important rule of making public statements in the early 21st century – nothing must ever be rhetorically compared to rape, under any circumstances.

Continue reading Mostly Links – 13 January 2012 →

Mostly Links – 25 November 2011

Links

by Indy Datta

Mostly Links is unwell. Mostly Links would quite like to be somewhere where the sun is shining, or failing that, seven years old, with its mum bringing it a boiled egg and soldiers on a tray. Mostly Links can’t even summon up the energy this week to sign a petition asking film studios not to stop renting out 35mm prints of their archive. Mostly Links should really stop talking about itself in the third person, like, now.

Continue reading Mostly Links – 25 November 2011 →

Mostly Links – 30 September 2011

Links

By Niall Anderson

If we only really see the big Oscar contenders in December and January, then this is the period in which we begin to see the outliers and the chancers: the films that need a strong headwind and decent box office in the Anglosphere to compete.

This is particularly true of non-English language films and films where the star wattage comes from a single obvious source. We saw this last week with Drive, where the appeal of a stellar cast (including the prettily robotic Ryan Gosling) is balanced against the rather less obvious draw of director Nicolas Winding Refn, previously known only to suburban misanthropes with violent dreams. Continue reading Mostly Links – 30 September 2011 →

Mostly Links – 26 August 2011

Links, Places

By Niall Anderson

Ideas for a brighter tomorrow.

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 →

Mostly Links – 19 August 2011

Links, New Releases

By Niall Anderson

Evolution or the first flatscreen TV?

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?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ewuxRh0es

Continue reading Mostly Links – 19 August 2011 →

Mostly Links – 5 August 2011

Links

By Niall Anderson

"It's okay kid. They haven't seen the films you haven't seen either."

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 →