Category Archives: Uncategorized

Come See The Paradise

Cult Movies, Film Festivals, Future Releases, New Releases, Uncategorized

Niall Anderson looks at smaller festivals and special screenings coming up this summer

'Is that the Lord in your eyes or are you just happy to see me?' Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc
‘It’s been seven hours and fifteen days since my last confession.’ Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc

Film festival season begins every year in January with Sundance, proceeds to Berlin for February, and advances to Cannes in early May. Somewhere in the middle the Oscars happen, and then the heavy-hitters take a breather till August and Venice. In the meantime there are countless smaller festivals, special one-off screenings, and various blink-and-you’ll-miss-em appearances of directors and films you might like to see if only you knew they were happening. So welcome to the Mostly Film Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Em round up for summer 2013.

First up, because it’s genuinely first up, is a special showing in London’s Union Chapel of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc. A critical classic almost since it first appeared, and renowned for the savagely self-exposing turn of its star, Maria Falconetti, The Passion has inspired countless musical interpretations and post hoc soundtracks. The one you’ll hear at the Union Chapel is by Irish composer Irene Butler, scored for soprano, organ and electronics. Part of the Union Chapel’s Organ Project season, the piece will be performed on July 17th only. If you’d like free tickets, there will be a competition on MostlyFilm’s twitter account – starting NOW. Continue reading Come See The Paradise →

The 2012 London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film

Film Festivals, Genre, Uncategorized, , , , ,

by Indy Datta

Best Friends Forever
Best Friends Forever

Or, as festival director Louis Savy, or one of his good-natured and indefatigable team will inform you before almost every screening, Scifi London for short. I’ve been going to the festival since its inception in 2002; reviews after the jump of the films I managed to see this year.

Continue reading The 2012 London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film →

Adventures in Nollywood

Uncategorized

By CaulorLime

Demon in Law
Patience, I think.

So, it’s been a while. How’s it going? All good? Excellent. Yeah, no change here. Except I had a baby, quit my job and moved my family to sub-Saharan Africa. No, for real. It’s all here if you’re really interested, and by “all” I mean “almost nothing.” I’m Harry, by the way, the pseudonym thing seems a bit unnecessary now that I’m beyond the reach of your petty laws.

Malawi, where I now live, is the third (or eleventh, depending on who you ask, never in between though) poorest nation on earth. I’m not sure where’s poorer, but there must be a whole country living in a cardboard box somewhere, because this place is pretty damned poor. The life expectancy is shockingly low. The country has the one of highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world with a miserable chance to find a STD testing center. There are near constant power cuts and water shortages. You live in constant danger of malaria, bilharzia, meeting Madonna or plague. The real problem with Malawi, though, is that there is no way to watch the Junior Apprentice, nor whatever witless crap Jamie Oliver is currently foisting, with wet-lipped enthusiasm, on the peoples of the rest of the world. In short, this place is a cultural desert. My having no access to bad television, and therefore nothing to say on these pages, was an unintended consequence of our move to the Dark Continent, but it seemed to be an unavoidable one. At least, I thought so, until I stumbled across Demon-in-Law.

Continue reading Adventures in Nollywood →

The Music of James Bond

Books and Movies, Music, Uncategorized, ,

by Victor Field

There are very few screen productions to have had entire books written about their music; Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings,Tim Burton’s Batman, Star Trek (but not Star Wars or Doctor Who, ha ha). The Music Of James Bond sees the world’s most famous spy added to that short list.

The appropriately initialled Jon Burlingame (no stranger to writing about spy music following his liner notes for FSM’s excellent The Man From U.N.C.L.E. albums) covers Commander Bond’s musical history from the late ‘50s US TV version of Casino Royale* to almost the present day – press deadlines mean Thomas Newman and Adull (er, Adele) don’t get a look-in with Skyfall – with a minimum of musicological textwork and a maximum of revealing information. Just as Burlingame’s TV’s Greatest Hits is an essential for anyone interested in small screen music, this is a must for those who have every Bond soundtrack from LP to download.

Continue reading The Music of James Bond →

Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid

Asian Cinema, Best of 2012, Uncategorized

The-Raid4

by theTramp

 2012 in film has been the sort of year, for me, where the best films have not been the most memorable. Three films stand out in terms of memorability; TED – a one joke movie about a teddy bear that can talk and also smoke, take drugs, drink and is consistently horny, made by the makers of Family Guy and memorable mostly for two great cameos. Killer Joe – a film with so many flaws that you can list them as you watch it, but the central performances are so great that you don’t care. If Matthew McConaughey doesn’t get an Oscar nod for this then quite frankly he’s been robbed. To my mind Killer Joe is the most chilling on screen character since Mitchum’s Harry Powell and that is a comparison I do not make lightly. Finally, and the subject of my ‘best of 2012’ is The Raid.

Continue reading Mostly Film Best of 2012: The Raid →

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.
Continue reading Saved From the Flames →

American Horror Story: I’ll get the shovel, you get the bleach

Uncategorized,

by Paul Duane

The cast of American Horror Story, season 1.

Why “American”? Well, there’s nothing more American than owning property. It’s the American Dream, houses for sale Dayton, Ohio some land surrounded by a fence. Built, as in all the best haunted house stories, on an Indian burial ground.  And American Horror Story, series one, is all about decades of murder on a slice of prime West Coast real estate.

I think it’s one of the most original and intriguing TV series in recent years, and one that’s come out of nowhere with a whole new way of representing the horror genre on television.

Here’s the thing: TV doesn’t like anthologies any more. The days of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Alfred Hitchcock Presents… are all over. So what do you do if you love those short, creepy stories about creeps who come to bad ends, and you work in television, and you’re coming off one of the biggest surprise hits of recent years*? You make an anthology show but disguise it as a soapy serial.

Anthologies, however, have to have some sort of a theme. Rod Serling made his shows all about paranoia and characters who discover the world isn’t as it seems. Hitchcock’s series was largely defined by its pitch black sarcasm.

The very American theme of American Horror Story, S1, is the horror of childbirth.

Continue reading American Horror Story: I’ll get the shovel, you get the bleach →

Through the Keyhole

Directors, New Releases, Uncategorized,

Indy Datta reviews the new film from Guy Maddin, Keyhole.

The avant-garde Canadian film maker Guy Maddin has worked a consistent seam – in his narrative film work and as an art film maker – since before his first feature, 1986’s Tales From the Gimli Hospital. Fans will know what to expect from Keyhole, his latest narrative feature, and their expectations will be met, as Maddin serves up an instantly identifiable brew of early film pastiche, wild cut-up surrealism and endearingly lowbrow comedy.  And beyond the surfaces of his films, the personal nature of Maddin’s sensibility is also an identifiable thread running through his work, and one that is arguably getting stronger with time.  Maddin’s last feature, the sly, wry cinematic memoir of his youth and hometown that was My Winnipeg, was probably his most accessible work to date, and Keyhole is in many ways another return to the film maker’s roots – a riff on Homer’s Odyssey (crossed with classic Hollywood gangster films) set entirely in a Winnipeg home very like the one Maddin grew up in.

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The Passionate Christ

Books and Movies, Classic Films, Cult Movies, Directors, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

By Philip Concannon

Martin Scorsese has famously described cinema as simply being “a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out,” but when The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, very few were willing to consider the film on those terms. This adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel remains one of the most controversial films ever released by a Hollywood studio. It sparked protests, threats and even physical attacks, with a cinema in France being firebombed by a group of Christian fundamentalists for daring to screen the film. The charge was blasphemy, with the biggest bone of contention being a much talked-about sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The fact that few of those criticising The Last Temptation of Christ had seen it, or had any intention of doing so, was apparently beside the point. Continue reading The Passionate Christ →