Category Archives: DVD

A VERY BRITISH ACTOR

Actors, Classic Films, DVD, History

Need a solid, British character who can display authority with a hint of vulnerability in a changing post-war landscape? Viv Wilby recommends Trevor Howard.

From criterioncollection.blogspot.com
Major Calloway wondered if this was a good time to take up aromatherapy…

Were he still alive, Trevor Howard would have turned 100 yesterday. One of the striking things about the DVD boxset released to mark his centenary is the extent to which it confirms his own observation that he spent most of his career playing ‘number two’.

Five films are collected here, and only in two does he really have anything like a clear claim to the leading role. Supporting actor, co-star on occasion, but rarely is he asked to carry a film. Even where he arguably gets the main part — The Heart of the Matter and Outcast of the Islands in this collection — there’s a meaty supporting cast buoying him up and it’s still no guarantee of top billing. Yes, Brief Encounter is here, of course, but Brief Encounter is really all about Celia Johnson. She is where the emotional heft of the film resides. Trevor’s just there to look good and give her someone to play off. He’s a consort, a co-lead.

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Hannibal, Redux

Actors, DVD, Television

by Stephnie JamesHannibal

Part of a series of Hannibal illustrations. Stephnie says: ‘Most of the art I’ve seen in connection with the show depicts young Hannibal in a variety of gruesome acts (eating family pets, etc.) but I thought it might be funnier to show him as a miniature version of the dandy we see on Bryan Fuller’s show.  In this illustration he is somewhat disappointed with the juvenile fare his mother has presented him with, although it has got him to thinking …’

Stay tuned for more Hannibal stuff very shortly. http://www.stephniejames.blogspot.ie

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.

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Tabu: A Story of the South Seas

Classic Films, Directors, DVD,

Fiona Pleasance watches Eureka’s new DVD release of Murnau’s classic.tabu1

Tabu (1931) is a film which inhabits boundaries.  The crossing of social and religious barriers drives its plot.  Originally conceived as a colour picture, Tabu was released in black and white.  Despite appearing four years into the sound era, it is silent, albeit with a synchronised music score.  It is a fiction film containing documentary-like sequences, originally conceived as an investigation into the encroachment of modernity onto the traditional Polynesian way of life, but ending up as a melodrama straight from the Hollywood mould.  Independently (self-) financed in the first instance, the film was effectively bailed out when Paramount bought the distribution rights.  It was planned as a collaboration between two of the most important directors of 1920s cinema, but one took over and the other departed the project; film historians have been arguing about the relative influence of each ever since.

And, saddest of all, Tabu turned out to be the final film made by its credited director, F. W. Murnau, who died following a car crash one week before the film’s New York premiere.

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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.

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“Count to five and tell the truth”

Books and Movies, Classic Films, Comedy, Cult Movies, DVD, MF Recommends

Laura Morgan watches the 50th-anniversary reissue of John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar

billy1
‘Genius – Or Madman?’ Billy Fisher as Hero of Ambrosia

There are lots of good things about going to the cinema alone. You can go and see anything you like without justifying your choice to someone else, and you don’t have to tell anyone what you thought of the film afterwards. You don’t have to share your snacks, or miss parts of a trailer – or, worse, the movie itself – because someone wants to have a conversation with you. Going to the cinema alone is a selfish and glorious way to spend a couple of hours. The only downside to it is that when a film makes you laugh until you weep – not the silent shoulder-shaking kind of laughter that you could just about get away with, but the hooting, spluttering kind that marks you out as a genuine lunatic – when that happens, being by yourself only makes matters worse. Fortunately for me I have only done this once: the first time I saw Billy Liar. Continue reading “Count to five and tell the truth” →

Pan Am – The Mile-High Flub.

DVD, Television, , ,

by KiwiZoidberg

When ABC’s Pan Am crossed the Atlantic in the fall of 2011, a Radio Times cover asked us if we were ready for the mile-high Mad Men and, in a move that her character Maggie would have frowned on, Christina Ricci invited us to fly her. On the face of it, there are some similarities with Mad Men: both shows are set in the 1960s with high production values and attention to period detail, but that is where the similarities end.

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Chained

DVD, New Releases, ,

by Susan Patterson

It’s difficult to know what to say about Jennifer Lynch’s Chained, beyond I didn’t like it. I really, really didn’t like it. I don’t like graphic violence, I don’t like the serial killer genre, I don’t like kidnapping stories: the odds were stacked against Chained but I understood that it was trying to say something different about serial killers, so I thought that it deserved to be seen through to the end.

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Competition time: Samsara

Competition, DVD

You may remember Indy Datta’s review of Samsara back in August (please do check out the images and the stunning trailer embedded in that review, it’s pretty amazing) which concluded with the opinion that ‘Samsara’s images themselves are consistently glorious’ and that the Blu-Ray ‘is destined to become a preferred demo disc of home cinema nerds everywhere.’

Well, nerds, I have good news! The dual-play Blu-Ray will be out on Monday and we have a copy to give away. Give away! Like some kind of competition! Sweet.

1000 Hands Dance, Beijing, China

All you have to do to win this eye-meltingly beautiful film is email me* with the answer to this question by midnight on Sunday 13th of January:

What is the name of the seminal 1982 ‘visual documentary essay’ Samsara director Ron Fricke worked on as cinematographer?

I will accept slightly misspelled answers. Usual exclusions apply to MostlyFilm contributors, their families and indentured undead servants.

*solemn promise that we will not ever spam you.

Saved From the Flames

Classic Films, Cult Movies, DVD, Uncategorized, , , , ,

by Fiona Pleasance

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc), was made in 1928, and is set almost exactly five centuries earlier. At the film’s core is a display of raw human emotion quite unlike any seen in the cinema before or since, its visceral nature expressed in tears, in spit and in blood, taking in faith and torture, and ending in confusion, in fire and in death.
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