Blake Backlash takes Philip Larkin’s declaration that ‘sexual intercourse began in 1963’ as point-of-departure to explore cinematic depictions of sex in early ‘60s British cinema. Or maybe he just watches some old films and tells you about the dirty bits.
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MostlyFilm’s Preview of 2014 – Part 2
The hot MostlyFilm on 2014 action continues as Philip Concannon looks ahead to his most anticipated films of the year.
I Will Not Forget One Line Of This
As The Doctor faced up to fifty years in the spotlight and the end of his regeneration cycle, the BBC went on an all-out Who binge. Ricky Young picks the bones out of the buffet.
MostlyFilm’s Review of 2013 – Movies
The last part of our review of the year looks at, well, Film. Top ten lists, musings, and ramblings follow after the jump from Matthew Turner, Laura Morgan, Gareth Negus, Ron Swanson and Indy Datta. If you want to know which one of them actually chose Run For Your Wife, you’ll have to go past the jump. Try the Pavlova.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Your next box set? Philip Concannon spends a weekend with Fassbinder’s epic television masterpiece.
“I’ve never expected metal ships!”
Indy Datta takes a look at the top-notch new Blu-ray of Philip Kaufman’s remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, released by Arrow Video on Monday.
San Sebastian Diary 2013
Matthew Turner went to the San Sebastian Film Festival in 2011 and has vowed to return every year until death. Well, so far, so good.
Thursday 19th September – Day One
Arrive in San Sebastian the day before the festival begins. Check in at the lovely pension I stayed in last year (Pension Edorta, pension fans – in the old town and very reasonable at 60 Euros a night) and immediately head to the press centre in the Kursaal to pick up my accreditation and the screening schedule. My girlfriend is with me for the first five days so I’m having to choose the films very selectively rather than basically see everything. Sit down in wi-fi equipped Cafe Kursaal to start going through the schedule (cross-referencing with the LFF guide) but get distracted by the arrival of friends and next thing you know, it’s 2am and several cañas (beers) later. Decide cross-referencing of screening schedule can wait. Continue reading San Sebastian Diary 2013
It would be, it would be so nice
MostlyFilm writers pick their favourite holiday films
Boat Trip – Mrs Mills
In 1997 Cuba Gooding Junior won an Oscar for his role in Jerry Maguire. Five years later he starred in Boat Trip, as Jerry, a man with a comedically inept best friend and a love life that has hit the rocks. The romantically desperate duo decide to take a holiday, a cruise, a nice boat trip where they can meet women. Only the cruise turns out to be a gay cruise and herein lieth the comedy. Yes that’s right, two straight men on a gay cruise is the comedy set up, sounds bad doesn’t it, and it is and yet….
Can a film with a breakfast buffet featuring a giant ice sculpture of a penis following the line – “It’s breakfast, how gay can a breakfast buffet be?” – be all bad?
Can a film featuring Roger Moore as an elderly, lecherous, Bond-like gay lothario with an eye for Mr Gooding junior be all bad? Saying lines like “Would you like a bite of my sausage?”<Bites sausage saucily> “In England we call them bangers.” – not have moments of comedy gold?
High art it is not. A good film it is not. But I laughed, I laughed a lot, a lot more than the film deserves truth be told, and here I am recommending it. Not to everyone perhaps, but to anyone who is intrigued by the above, or who finds Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler movies a guilty pleasure – to you, to you I recommend it. Meanwhile Cuba looks on at his Oscar and wonders where it all went wrong.
Continue reading It would be, it would be so nice
His Words Have Impact
Beginning Extremists Week on Mostly Film, Sarah Slade looks at the musical output of the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard
Say what you like about Scientology, but L. Ron Hubbard’s sci-fi belief system has attracted some pretty talented musicians. Beck; the late, great Isaac Hayes; Chick Corea and…er…Leif Garrett have all taken the wisdom of L. Ron into their lives and, who knows…maybe even jammed with the great man. You see, Ron’s musical talent is an aspect of his life that I had never heard of before, but there it is, on his website – Ron, the Music Maker. I wish I had the time to read Ron’s words on Country Music, an analysis of Rock Music, Composing on The Road, or even Space Jazz, but I think we’d be better off cutting to the chase, and listening to the man’s music.
Thanks to some bloke off the Internet, you can download and experience the full majesty of the 80s classic Road to Freedom yourself, but, to spare your engrams, I’ve done it for you. Continue reading His Words Have Impact
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline.
The Tramp looks at the apocalyptic conclusion of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s ‘Cornetto Trilogy’.
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.
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