Category Archives: World Cinema

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.

Continue reading For Love’s Sake →

Blue is the Warmest Colour

Film Festivals, French cinema, , , ,

‘Ron Swanson’ reports from the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

cannes poster

The 66th Cannes Film Festival ended just less than a week ago. In that time, I’ve attempted to clarify my feelings about what I thought, as I left France, was the strongest festival I’ve attended so far. It turns out that I agree with my younger self. This year saw three absolutely exceptional films, as well as a handful of other superb efforts. To clarify, the three best films I saw, The Past, The Great Beauty and Blue is the Warmest Colour elicited the strongest reaction from me since A Separation, which I believe is the best film of the past ten years or so.

Continue reading Blue is the Warmest Colour →

Vulgaria

Asian Cinema, New Releases, , ,

By Spank The Monkey

VulgariaMules

You may be familiar with the cinema technology known as D-Box – a small number of screens in the UK have already been fitted with it. It’s one more way of reducing the film experience to a theme park ride: a cinema rigged with motion control seats that shake, tilt and vibrate in ways defined by the movement on screen. Generally, it’s used to add realism to action movies, wobbling the viewer as things crash and explode in front of them.

Later this year, a Hong Kong studio is set to release the first 3D pornographic film using the D-Box process. This should tell you everything you need to know about the territory’s attitude to sex on screen. Even more so when you discover that the film in question is 4D Sex & Zen, the latest entry in a franchise previously discussed in these pages. As I suggested back then, you get the feeling that erotic film in Hong Kong hasn’t really grown up yet. So when you discover that one of the biggest local hits of the past few years has been a bawdy comedy called Vulgaria (just released on home video in the UK), you begin to fear the worst. But you shouldn’t.  Continue reading Vulgaria →

Monoglot Movie Club: The Guldbagge Variations

Awards, Monoglot Movie Club, New Releases, ,

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

A Guldbagge Award, yesterday
A Guldbagge Award, yesterday


Sweden! Land of Bergman, Garbo and Abba The Movie. There are some countries where I struggle to find local films in the cinemas, but not here. Stockholm in January 2013 was packed full of ‘em: from the family-friendly fun of Sune i Grekland, to a theatrical outing for a Wallander that’ll probably be on BBC Four by 2014. All I needed was a way to filter out the good stuff from the bad.


By chance, I found that way on my first night in the country, as I turned on the telly to discover live coverage of the Guldbaggen, Sweden’s own film awards. (That golden bug thingy at the top of the page is the actual award itself.) Perfect! All I needed to do was grab the list of winners, pick the most interesting-looking ones, and get myself down to a cinema to see them. Unfortunately, everyone else in Stockholm appeared to be doing the same thing in the week after the Guldbaggen, with screenings of Swedish movies selling out all over the place. As a result, I couldn’t always see my first choice of film.

 Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: The Guldbagge Variations →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			A Liar’s Autobiography
		

		
		

			Animation, British Film, Comedy, New Releases					

	


		

		
by Emma Street


Liars Autobiography


A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman  is based on Graham Chapman’s fictionalised autobiography which was first published in 1981. Chapman recorded an audio version of his book and this voice recording is used as the soundtrack to the film along with new voice recordings from John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. Eric Idle is the only no-show from the Monty Python team.








Fourteen different animation studios worked on the project, animating separate chunks of the film. “Creatively, the different styles reflect the stages in Graham’s life.” said one of the directors, Jeff Simpson, in an interview “Also, it saves us a lot of time.”


Chapman died at the age of 48 from throat cancer. The other members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus have forged successful careers as directors, Hollywood A-list actors and the like while Chapman never had much chance to establish a career post-Python. What with being dead and all.


 Continue reading A Liar’s Autobiography →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			Once Upon A Time In Japan
		

		
		

			Asian Cinema, Film Festivals, New Releases					

	


		

		
by Spank the Monkey


Once Upon A Time In Japan


This year’s Japan Foundation film season – entitled Once Upon A Time In Japan, and touring the UK’s arthouse cinemas from today – has a historical flavour to it. All of the films are period pieces of one type or another, showing how Japanese filmmakers use stories of the past to say things about the present day.


Much of the programme hasn’t been seen in the UK before, unlike last year, so I can’t give you quite as comprehensive a preview as I did in 2012. We can’t discuss Hula Girls, the latest example of the Japanese genre in which young people bond during unfashionable physical activity. (See also: Waterboys, Swing Girls, Tits Volleyball.) We have to pass over Kaidan Horror Classics, a portmanteau film featuring big name directors like Hirokazu Kore-eda and Shinya Tsukamoto. Most regrettably, screeners were not available for Bubble Fiction: Boom Or Bust, in which Hiroshi Abe tries to solve Japan’s economic crisis with a time-travelling washing machine. How can the other seven films in the programme stand up against a synopsis like that? Well, let’s find out.


 Continue reading Once Upon A Time In Japan →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			Monoglot Movie Club: Stupid Sexy Flanders
		

		
		

			Dutch Cinema, Monoglot Movie Club, New Releases, , , 					

	


		

		
by Spank The Monkey


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


Feels like I'm wearing nothing at all!


What could be more Christmassy than Brussels? I’m talking about the European city, of course, not the green bollocky things that take up space on the dinner plate which could be more usefully occupied by turkey. The markets, the gluhwein, the 25 metre high installation in the Grand Place that was referred to in some circles as Tree 2.0: a evening stroll through the streets in December will soon leave you with a warm festive glow. (Though that’s probably mainly the gluhwein.)


But inevitably, when The Belated Birthday Girl and I spent Christmas 2012 running round the key cities of northern Belgium, we took occasional breaks from the festivities to catch some of the local movies: two in Brussels, and one in Bruges (though not In Bruges). The locations are important – Monoglot Movie Club is all about celebrating the language problems you encounter with other nations’ domestic cinema, and we ended up with three entirely different sets of problems this time.


 Continue reading Monoglot Movie Club: Stupid Sexy Flanders →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			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 →

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			Lawrence of Arabia Competition
		

		
		

			British Film, Classic Films, Competition, 					

	


		

		
larab_stl_2_h[1]


Lawrence of Arabia is 50 years old. If you can tell us when and where it premièred we have a pair of tickets for the screening tomorrow at Empire Leicester Square at 2.30 pm. It is a 1,330 seat cinema with a high quality 56K Watt THX certified sound system, showcasing Lawrence of Arabia in the best possible setting in its original road show presentation with an overture and intermission.


To win email editor at mostlyfilm dot com before 3pm today with your answer. First out of the hat wins. There’s a clue here in our original review.  Good luck!

	

	
	


							


	

		
				

			Partners in Crime
		

		
		

			Books and Movies, Comedy, French cinema, New Releases, , , , , , 					

	


		

		
crime_1


by Susan Patterson


Partners in Crime (Associés Contre le Crime... ) (2012) is Pascal Thomas’ third adaptation featuring Agatha Christie’s detective duo Tommy, renamed Bélisaire for a French audience, and Tuppence, going by her full name of Prudence.  Christie’s introduced the couple in 1922 in the Secret Adversary.  They were a frothy, cheerful couple, who reappeared in Partners in Crime in 1929, a collection of  short stories, and a further three novels, the couple ageing with the time passed between the books.


 Continue reading Partners in Crime →