The MostlyFilm gang would like to send best wishes to X founder and drummer Yoshiki, who is undergoing surgery to treat damage caused by years of frenetic drumming.
Don’t know what we’re talking about? Take a look at Spank The Monkey’s review from earlier this year of the documentary about Japan’s most unGoogleable rock band. Continue reading We Are X
On 7 November New Wave Films are releasing Cemetery of Splendour, directed by Apichatpong Weeresethakul, who won the Palme d’Or with his earlier film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Continue reading Cemetery of Splendour
Gareth Negus watches the TV series of Wolf Creek.
Spank The Monkey looks at Criterion’s new release of a neglected landmark in Japanese cinema.
Musashi Miyamoto is the Samurai. No, scratch that: Musashi Miyamoto is the Samurai. For generations of Japanese, this 17th century wandering swordsman has been the ideal representation of the country’s warrior class. A painter, an author, and a swordsman who won over sixty duels: if he didn’t already exist, someone would have had to invent him. And even though he did exist, people have been inventing him anyway: for centuries Japanese culture has repeatedly taken the bare bones of his story and manufactured new myths out of it. Continue reading The Samurai Trilogy
Sarah Slade looks at a beautiful retread of an old theme.
There isn’t much that is new about Departure. An English family rattle around their French holiday home, replete with colour-washed walls, Le Creuset everything and a lovely collection of china. An enigmatic stranger appears and there is a sexual awakening. Everybody goes home, wiser, sadder and ready to face the future. It’s a theme that has been explored in many ways, by many film makers over many years. You could even say that middle-class angst in Aude is quite a safe topic for first-time director Andrew Steggall, but that would detract from what is a rather beautiful, sensitively acted film. Continue reading Departure
Britain’s finest ever zombie biker movie has come back from the dead, courtesy of the BFI and Scalarama. Spank The Monkey takes a ride with the Death Wheelers.
If you had to identify the best-loved post on MostlyFilm – and I mean properly loved, rather than merely popular because it comes high on a Google search for ‘young boy handjob’ – then I suspect that Ricky Young’s four-part series If My Calculations Are Correct would be a prime candidate. It acknowledges that we don’t watch films in a vacuum: the circumstances of their viewing are as important as the films themselves. IMCAC isn’t just about a collection of science fiction classics – it’s about young Ricky encountering them every Tuesday teatime on BBC2, and having his mind opened to a whole genre of cinema. Continue reading Psychomania
Niall Anderson discovers God alive, unwell and living in Brussels in Jaco Van Dormael’s new comedy
Gareth Negus learns to stop worrying and love the bomb, with the new Criterion Collection blu-ray.
Philip Concannon on a new Blu-ray edition of the complete Buster Keaton short films, on general release today.
Continue reading Silents Is Golden: The Complete Buster Keaton Shorts
It’s 1986 week here at MF Towers, where sometimes the present day is too grim to contemplate and we allow ourselves a period of reverie in the past. The fun kicks off with Indy Datta on today’s anniversary re-release of Cocoon.
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