by Mr Moth
Before we start, I’d just like to check that everyone waited patiently for the Icona Pop single to complete its extraordinarily long transit through the guts of the pop animal and bought it the moment it came out. I recommended it back in, like March. That’s all. OK, on with the reviews!
Emma Street explains why Ben Wheatley’s new film is – and isn’t – like The Breakfast Club
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
Indy Datta takes a look at the new BluRays of Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies and Kiki’s Delivery Service.
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.
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
You’re so sadly neglected
And often ignored
A poor second to Belgium
When going abroad
Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I quite want to be
– Monty Python, Finland
Quick! Name a famous Finnish film director. I’ll give you bonus points for lateral thinking if you said Renny Harlin, but arthouse cinema fans will probably have plumped for Aki Kaurismäki. Sadly, I didn’t get to see any of his movies on my recent visit to Helsinki, but it’s hard to avoid the man’s presence, particularly if you’re the sort of person that eats food. The Belated Birthday Girl and I kept ending up in restaurants that were either patronised by the director (the menu at Kosmos includes ‘Pike perch with Lobster Sauce and Crayfish Tails au Gratin à la Aki Kaurismäki’), or owned by him. Of the latter, Zetor is probably the best one to go for, with its tractor-heavy décor and its patriotic blueberry pie served in a tin mug, as seen above.
Still, you have to assume that Finnish cinema doesn’t begin and end with Kaurismäki. So I made it my mission, as ever, to track down a couple of the latest domestic releases, and attempt to watch them without the benefit of English subtitles. Good news for all you lovers of schadenfreude: one of these turned out to be Monoglot Movie Club’s first complete failure. Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: A Poor Second To Belgium
by Mr Moth
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.
Fiona Pleasance watches Eureka’s new DVD release of Murnau’s classic.
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.
By Gareth Negus
“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.
Indy Datta only saw the new Superman film last night, so this review will be small, and we can’t promise it will be perfectly formed.
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is, in almost every way, the epitome of the contemporary fantasy comic-book blockbuster, assembled with enormous skill and craft – but also witless, repetitive, thoughtlessly cacophonous, artlessly pretentious. There’s an hour of throat clearing exposition before anything of any interest happens. The plot, on pretty much every conceivable level, makes no sense. Film and director seem needlessly cowed by the source material (the crazy Snyder grandiosity of 300 and Sucker Punch is entirely absent, and yeah, I miss it), yet also simultaneously Nolanishly embarrassed by its inherent silliness (the one time a character says the word “Superman”, it’s an inadvertently delivered punchline). Henry Cavill, in the lead, is given little scope to be anything more than a sixpack on a stick.
Not unusually for superhero movies, it’s down to the villain to save the day.
By Spank The Monkey
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.
by Indy Datta
Imagine what Jack Vance could have done with this. The main action of After Earth is an inverted planetary romance – the father and son team of Cypher and Kitai Raige (Will and Jaden Smith respectively) marooned on a future earth abandoned by humanity and now purportedly transformed into a world as thrillingly alien as any other, a world they must negotiate and conquer in order to survive. The scope thus given for a writer to reimagine our familiar world is endless, that act of imaginative transformation as close as anything can be to the very essence of science fiction. But, like so many ostensibly science fictional films, After Earth does nothing more than borrow genre clothes as a kind of drag: and it has no wonders to show us because its mind, such as it is, is on other things.
MostlyFilm 