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Weekly Rundown 10-16th December

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Seeing as I never have time to write about half the films I’d like, I thought I’d try keeping a weekly list of all the films I’ve watched during the week – mostly first time views with the occasional old favourite, plus anything else that crops up. I’ll just write a few words about each of them and expand some into full reviews.

Pickpocket

BFI – Passport to Cinema screening

I haven’t made things easy for myself have I? Bresson’s tale of redemption through love reads like a mid twentieth century French Crime & Punishment but is full of Bresson’s usual spiritual complexity. The pickpocketing scenes take on a sort of balletic quality and almost glamourise the crime being committed but leave the audience in no doubt that it is also a violation. Elusive but essential.

The Family Friend

L’amico di famiglia

Curzon on Demand

Not as beguiling as The Consequences of Love or as studied as Il Divo, Sorrentino’s The Family Friend is a modern day fairy tale with a central character so loathsome it’s difficult to see how the audience is expected to endure a whole film in his company. Certainly a very strange film but very Sorrentino and all the more welcome for it.

Battles Without Honour and Humanity

Jingi naki tatakai 仁義なき戦い

MOC DVD

An out and out classic, Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity is a landmark Yakuza movie that shows the gangster lifestyle for what it really really is – senseless violence fuelled by pride and greed. It was so successful it spawned FOUR sequels (and I can’t wait to watch them all)!

!I’m sorry about the weird aspect ratio and the German subs but it seems like there’s no other footage around!)

The Hobbit

Odeon Leicester Sq, HFR 3D

Full review already up, short story – eh, it was OK.

Life of Pi

Odeon Covent Garden

I’d heard really mixed things about Ang Lee’s latest but actually I was pleasantly surprised. Nowhere near as profound as it seems to want to be but the visuals are truly astounding. Look out for a full review soon.

Magic Mike

Mubi

Came up as Mubi’s film of the day and having heard quite positive things about it I decided to give it a go despite my misgivings – unfortunately my I should listened to my intuition, this film did nothing for me and I’m baffled by some of the critical praise.

Thermae Romae

HK Blu Ray

Hilarious movie about a Roman bath architect who accidentally time travels to modern Japan, steals all their modern bath technology and so ends up having to design baths for Hadrian and some of his cronies. Full review coming soon but this is so much fun!

35 Shots of Rum

35 Rhums

Channel 4 HD

Claire Denis’ homage to Ozu’s Late Spring set in a French lower class tower block – to quite as moving as Ozu’s film but brings its own lyrical sense of transience with perhaps more of a political component than you would generally find in an Ozu film.

Midnight Express

Film4

An oscar winner much trumpeted in its time that helped to jump start Alan Parker’s career but more than thirty years on it’s starting to feel its age and its extremely harsh view of the Turkish people is quite difficult to take.

The Keep

Film 4

Apparently the full version of this film was close to three hours long but studio execs were so unhappy with it they hacked it down to 90 minutes! It’s quite obvious a lot of material is missing and the film doesn’t really make that much sense but then how much sense do you really expect a movie about a strange rubbery monster accidentally let out of its cage by a bunch of greedy nazis to make?

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

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There’s no denying Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth has had its fair share of problems. Indeed, Jackson himself did not intend to direct, but following the high profile departure of (the extraordinary) Guillermo Del Toro reportedly unwilling to waste his talent waiting for the project to finally get going Jackson took up the reigns again. The Hobbit though is not Lord of the Rings and its now de facto position as a movie prequel is an awkward one. A comparatively slim volume aimed at a younger audience it obviously lacks the epic nature and imposing grandeur of the trilogy; it’s whimsical, playful even with its bumbling hobbit and perpetually singing dwarves where LOTR is heavy and melancholic – a world in danger of collapse. Jackson has, however, made the incongruous decision that The Hobbit will also be a trilogy of films and so has bulked out the Hobbit’s more meagre storyline with supplementary material which often foreshadows its bleaker successor. This first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, alone runs to a whopping 169 minutes. Can such small and comparatively simple book really fill almost nine hours of screen time?

On the basis of part one, the answer has to be almost certainly not. Of the many things that could be said of An Unexpected Journey, the least disputable is that it’s too long. It isn’t just a little bit too long either, to paraphrase (if you’ll forgive me) – it feels thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. There are obvious set pieces and then there are the great gaping gaps between them. The pace is undoubtedly slow with occasional dead stretches which only seem to exist only to offer some clumsily delivered exposition more relevant to the opus as a whole rather than the film, or even films, themselves.

However, the parts that are good are very good. The encounter with the trolls is every bit as frightening as it seemed in childhood while the escape from the orcs and stone giants are undoubtedly exciting; the stand out scene though is of course the ‘first’ encounter with Gollum. Technology has moved on significantly even since LOTR was completed and Andy Serkis’ motion captured/CGI rendered Gollum is ever more convincing. The interplay between Freeman and Serkis sparkles along with a real sense of danger interspersed with wit.

When it comes to the film as a whole the unevenness of the tone is not so well managed. There’s still a kind of childlike simplicity to the telling of the tale – the dwarfs are kind of idiots, constantly messing everything up and falling into certain death situations only for Gandalf to show up at the last minute and and do something flashy with his wand to sort it all out for them. Despite this, and you’ll forgive me the slight spoiler, they all seem to inconceivably survive completely intact like some kind of invincible cartoon character. Yet we have this tone of seriousness and melancholy which seems to have one eye on later events – yes it’s funny now but everything’s going to go bad in sixty years time so you’d better not laugh too much. Ultimately it can’t quite decide what it wants to be  – whimsical farce about a group of displaced people trying to get home or weighty precursor to a dark tale that tries to prove that the seeds of the present are sown in the past. Jackson’s (understandable) attempts to tie The Hobbit more closely with the celebrated trilogy in terms of sensibility only serve to undermine the the original tales biggest selling point – its lighthearted questing.

There is, of course, the question of the technical sides of this film – the decision to film in 48fps 3D. There have been varying opinions as regards how well this has worked for this particular film and how it might work in general but, having seen an HFR 3D presentation the overriding impression was something like that of watching a Hallmark Movie. Suddenly everything looks cheap or artificial, a higher frame rate might more accurately represent reality but is reality what we really want from cinema? For extreme close ups and shallow static shots it seems to work very well, but anything with extensive background action ends up looking curiously amateurish. Perhaps some will prefer a harsher, less cinematic aesthetic that more closely resembles TV but audience members more accustomed to a traditional film look will likely find The Hobbit, at least, visually less palatable. It would be wrong to write off 48fps filming on the basis of how it’s been used in one film (and it isn’t as if other filmmakers haven’t experimented with frame rates before) but hopefully this experimentation is something that can be learned from and, perhaps, improved in years to come.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is, therefore, something of a disappointment. It isn’t a bad film but neither is it the film many people were looking forward to. Bloated and confused it falls between two stools attempting to stay true to both its literary roots and cinematic brethren. Hopefully the next two instalments will have a little more to offer us.

Secret Cinema, 4th November 2012 – The Shawshank Redemption

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2012-11-04 13.48.23

First off, apologies for the lack of decent photographs (not that my previous efforts were even approaching ‘decent’). The specificities of this event meant I couldn’t figure out a way of taking my camera – though no one seemed to mind people snapping away on mobiles so I managed to sneak two or three of those in during lapses of security (the phone I did have to secrete about my person though).

To begin at the beginning – I had a harder time guessing this title than previous Secret Cinema events I’d been to. The clues leading up to the event were more general and didn’t really connect with the way I see the film, or at least I was expecting something more heavyweight. References to truth and justice seemed to point to a crime and punishment theme but the more philosophical offerings  seemed to place this on a grander scale, as if it were to be about the nature of such ideas possibly related to one person’s spiritual journey. The references to ‘hope’ and ‘storms’ should probably have been more of a clue but both were more literal when I’d been thinking metaphorical and I failed to connect them completely to Shawshank. I did consider the film a few times but each new clue seemed to rule it out. However, when the dress codes and identities came through – all male identities from different ethnicities, home towns and occupations – a prison theme presented itself and along with the folksy American tone one of the messages and time frame Shawshank was looking probable.

Donning the required long-johns and man’s suit, and with my valuables discretely about my person, I made my way to Bethnal Green Library. After waiting some time after the start time it transpired there’d been some kind of technical hitch – the doors to ‘the court’ were locked and we couldn’t get in. I’m not sure what exactly happened, I presume the people who’d been allocated the following time slot began to arrive and the queue got too long but at any rate those of us at the front of the queue were denied our due process and marched straight onto the prison bus without any kind of hearing at all. From other people’s reports I gather that we were meant to be sentenced by the judge and given our papers with the identities the online system had set up for us with our various crimes and sentences laid out. Therefore when we got to the prison we had no such papers.

Whilst on the ’50s style minibus we were briefed about our new lives – in short, that we were damned and condemned to hell and it was all our own fault for having committed such terrible crimes against the State of Oak Hampton. As the bus approached the prison we were heckled by inmates already lurking in wait for fresh bait. We then were made to run through them and up steps to a higher floor where we assembled in three groups according to height/shape. Being distinctly on the smaller side I was a few places back in the leftmost queue. The leading guard then barked at as that we had 15 seconds to grab a bag and get back in line or there’d be trouble. After we’d verified that the numbers on the clothes matched the bag and the suit was complete we were ordered to remove our shoes and socks. After this we inevitably had to strip down to the undergarments we’d been instructed to wear as part of our outfit. Some poor people had neglected this instruction and therefore had less to guard their modesty. More running again, with the suit, bag of old clothes and our shoes we had to run down through the yard again (yes, it was cold, the ground was wet under our bare feet and I almost slipped a few times) heckled by inmates and eventually passing through the showers and a man unconscious and bleeding on their floor.

Having handed in my old clothes I was ushered into a cell, alone, except for the crazed psychopath who already occupied it. He made various lewd remarks and assured me that everyone would treat me nicely once they knew I was his guy. Yes, he wanted to make me his bitch – I ignored him and pretended not to know what he meant. All those hours watching OZ finally paid off obviously*. Once I’d gotten into my new attire there seemed to be some commotion outside. Due to the position of my cell I couldn’t see anything but I could hear a guard shouting, someone screaming and the sound of something being hit very hard. The occupant of the opposite cell informed his charges that that’s what happens if you don’t shut up when they tell you.

Next was the canteen where we were treated to a delightful meal of a tiny portion of cold baked beans. Two inmates then came rushing in shouting about a terrible incident which caused our guard to go off and investigate while the two enterprising gentlemen took the opportunity to sell us all sorts of contraband like beer and whiskey. When the guard finally came back we were on laundry detail and had to haul up the fresh bags of outfits for the next batch unfortunates. After that we began to explore.

In the library we could listen to records and write letters to political prisoners (for real, this seemed to be part of the PEN scheme to write to foreign embassies on behalf of those incarcerated on political grounds). There was a choral group singing in the chapel and later Brooks’ letter was read out. I was roped in to do some embroidery at one point which was apparently going to be sold for charity. After that I ended up making Potpourri in a shed outside. Re-entering the main building I found myself up for parole where despite vowing never to commit my heinous crimes again and avowing my acceptance of Jesus Christ in my heart (but slightly embarrassingly having sworn to reading my bible every night I had to answer ‘no’ to the question can you quote me something from the bible – perhaps I should have had a go? Would he have known if I made it up?) my parole was shockingly rejected! Oh well. I then ended up in the nurses office, which was secretly a bar, where I had to have my picture taken (why?) and then an examination room where I was evidently used as some kind of test subject without my knowledge or consent!  Honestly this prison malarky’s not all it’s cracked up to be!

A while later there seemed to be some commotion; I couldn’t get very close because some people were blocking the way but then someone ran past shouting ‘Tommy, they got Tommy’ and the whole place went into lockdown. ushered back up to the cells where I’d originally been we waited until an announcement was made that Tommy had been killed due his own poor behaviour. There was much rattling of the railings and for a minute it seemed like a riot might break out. However a man then stepped forward and began to sing a hymn which everyone then joined in. Things didn’t completely calm down however as sounds of a storm could be heard and a guard rushed up and pinned my erstwhile cellmate to the wall demanding to know where Andy was. The prisoners then began to exclaim ‘Andy got out?’ and we were ordered to proceed to the assembly point for counting with hands on our heads. Once sitting in the screening room we were told we were about to see footage of everything that had happened so far in order to jog our memories and aid the officers in their investigation of the escape! The film was, of course, Shawshank Redemption but our surprises weren’t over yet as we were each handed a free beer during the film’s rooftop scene!

After the film there was a bit of a queue to get our belongings back and the process seemed quite chaotic. After we’d re-dressed we had to get our parole documents before exiting, however, I now had no idea where I was! Fortunately there was a small map on the back of my parole book but it really was very small and difficult to read in the dark. I was in Hackney and the thing to do seemed to be to find the bus stop that would take me to Mile End tube – something which I failed spectacularly to do! Luckily I managed to spot a taxi and I was free at last!

Battle of Algiers is still my favourite Secret Cinema event for its sheer power and audacity and although I enjoyed Shawshank Redemption it didn’t quite live up to the other events I’ve attended. It might be partly that we skipped the opening procedures or that I part missed the beginning of the climactic events but I feel both as if I didn’t find as much to do but also that I missed too much! Perhaps I was just unlucky and in the wrong places at the wrong times but this one didn’t feel quite as exciting somehow. Still it was another stellar effort from SC and I can’t wait to start the guessing games all over again (no costume changes though please, and let me bring my bag!)

*oh how I loved OZ, best show HBO ever made. Except that last series though, it went downhill there, should have ended a series earlier.

The Good News or the Bad News? Stoker, the Grandmasters and Show Box Media

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I’m an efficient sort of person generally (not that you could tell from this blog), so I like to start with good news – after all good news doesn’t usually require any further action than being pleased, does it?

With that in mind, it seems there’s a new UK specific poster for Park Chan-wook’s upcoming English language movie Stoker

Stoker UK poster

 

We’ve still got the pencil work from the earlier poster, which I loved, plus a strangely creepy headshot of Wasikowka. What is that reflected in her eyes? someone standing in front of window/doorway/unexplained bright lights? I’m really looking forward to seeing this film – I’d be looking forward to the new Park Chan-wook anyway but this seems very promising to me especially as it’s inspired by one of my favourite Hitchcock movies – Shadow of a Doubt.

If you’ve never seen Shadow of a Doubt I’d really recommend you check it out; it seems to fall into the lesser known Hitchcocks for some reason – well the middle group, it’s much better known than something like MR& Mrs Smith but it’s not quite up there with Vertigo and Psycho when people think of his films. Joseph Cotten is really fantastic in it and it’s kind of an early look and the evils lurking in suburbia. Here’s a trailer for those still unconvinced

 

Now, I warned you, there are some clouds on the horizon. I leave the bad news until last so that I can figure out what to do about it right away but all I can do now is feel sad, it’s a zero sum game this time round. As I speculated here Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmasters is indeed delayed once more and will now move its opening date to 8th January from 18th December. Oh well, it wouldn’t be a Wong Kar-wai movie without several thousand delays – we all just have to prove how worthy we are by being willing to wait, yes?

and your final bit of bad news? It appears Showbox media, who own CineAsia – primary distributor for Asian action cinema in the UK, have gone into administration. The warning signs were there, they seemed to have stopped communicating and updating their websites and had yet to announce any future release plans for the next few months/next year; they’d also apparently dispensed with Bey Logan whose commentaries on CineAsia’s releases had been a big selling point for UK fans. This has happened before and a solution was found, so maybe it’s not quite over yet but it certainly doesn’t look good. From the above report it seems their strategy of throwing everything they had at the supermarket buyers, licensing films which were likely to appeal to that market at those prices, was not as sustainable as some people had believed. Here’s a trailer for one of my favourite CineAsia releases – Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Whatever happens let’s just hope films such as this can still find their way over to the UK market!

For Love’s Sake (Ai to Makoto) – LFF 2012

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Please click through to read my review of Ai to Makoto on uk-anime-net

I know, two links in a row, I’m so sorry! More original content coming soon, I promise (probably). The movie’s awesome though, a total delight!

Festival Round Up – LFF 2012

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As I’ve now seen my final film in this year’s festival a run down seems to be in order:

  • Doomsday Book (Korea)
  • The Samurai That Night (Japan)
  • For Love’s Sake (Ai to Makoto) (Japan)
  • Helter Skelter (Japan)
  • Memories Look At Me (China)
  • Dreams For Sale (Japan)
  • A Liar’s Autobiography (UK)
  • In Another Country (Korea)
  • The Red and the Blue (Italy)
  • Romance Joe (Korea)
  • Caesar Must Die (Italy)
  • Seven Psychopaths (US/UK)
  • The Manxman (UK)
  • Dormant Beauty(Italy)

That’s only 14 films which is a big drop off on last year’s total. Partly this is because the festival itself is a few days shorter but also I was busier and the schedules didn’t work out as well for me as they have done before. I have to say although I enjoyed all of the films I saw (at least a little, I flat out hated none of them) this year’s festival experience wasn’t as exciting as other years. It was though much better organised and I never once found myself wandering round outside trying to find the way in and having to ask unco-operative security people where to go! Most of the films seemed to start about ten minutes late but I suspect this must have been built into the schedule as nothing over ran and delayed the next film. Oddly then even though the programme seemed less exciting (or I picked the wrong films) the experience as a whole was much better. I got so sick of the ident though, my goodness.

Top pick of the films I saw would have to be Ai to Makoto – a really riotous, outrageously fun seishun eiga musical that exceeded all my already high expectations. I also really loved Seven Psychopaths even though I’d been seeing quite negative things online it turned out to be exactly my kind of thing and more in keeping with what I love about McDonagh’s stage work. The only real disappointment was A Liar’s Autobiography which failed entirely at what it was trying to do but did have moments brilliance scattered amongst the tedium. Memories Look at Me wasn’t my sort of film and I can’t claim to have enjoyed it very much but there are a lot of people who do really like that kind of thing.

There were lots of films I’d have liked to see but couldn’t. Luckily a lot of those films are out on general release fairly soon/already anyway – Frankenweenie, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Rust and Bone among others. Matteo Garrone’s Reality has apparently been picked up for release and Amour is screening at the BFI next month. Key of Life is the only one I’m missing where there might not be another opportunity.

All in all I’m very happy with how it all played out, I guess that’s it until next year – feeling a bit deflated. Oh well, hopefully I’ll be able to see few things in the Korean Film Festival, right? Ah London, you’re such an enabler!

 

Seven Psychopaths – LFF 2012

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I won’t lie – I almost didn’t go to this screening as I’d seen a lot of ‘worst film I’ve even seen’ comments coming in from various festivals and then from the LFF press screening and I wasn’t sure I was definitely going to be able to make it. However being a huge fan of McDonagh’s stage work (I count the original production of The Pillowman at the RNT one of the theatre going highlights of my life) there was no way I was never going to see this film. Although I wasn’t as enamoured with In Bruges as many people were – mostly because I missed the sense of anarchy from his stage productions – I’d been looking forward to his next film for some time. Seven Psychopaths plays out almost like a big screen version of Lieutenant of Inishmore only it’s a missing dog rather than a cat and psycho crook rather than a guy who was thrown out of the IRA for ‘being too mad’ with a whole load of metatextual commentary  going on. Oh and bloody violence, lots of that, alongside totally absurd, jet black humour – yep, that’s a McDonagh script!

Marty (Farrell) has some problems. The first of which being that he’s way behind on a screenplay he’s supposed to have delivered already – in fact he hasn’t even started it, well he has the title ‘Seven Psychopaths’. Only he’s only come up with the one – a Buddhist psychopath but he can’t work out how all the homicidal mania and enlightenment go together. Besides which he really wants to write a film that’s not all guns and violence, one that’s about peace and love and humanity. His second problem is drink, which is possibly part of the cause of his first problem. His third problem is a incredibly poor choice in friends – i.e. an out of work actor, Billy Bickle (Rockwell), who makes his money through a dog kidnapping scam and thinks a really great way to help with the psycho problem is to take out an ad asking for the biggest psychos around to call Marty’s own number and offer their stories for the film. One day however Billy and his friend Hans (Walken) are going to mess with the wrong guy’s dog and drag Marty into a whole world of psychopathic violence and general existential despair.

Yes, like its filmic counterpart the Seven Psychopaths that we are watching is a film about humanity and friendship and art that ended up having lots of guns and violence and blood in it anyway. There’s a great moment near the beginning where Billy and Marty are discussing the screenplay problem whilst sitting in a virtually empty cinema watching Takeshi Kitano’s Violent Cop and Marty insists he doesn’t want the film to be all about guys with guns in their hands. The violence is inevitable though as the two tussle over how the film’s going to end – in a hail of bullets or with a fireside heart to heart.

You might think so far so nineties Tarantino with its long stretches of stylised dialogue and classic/cult film references but it’s much less alienating than Tarantino’s approach and somehow manages to be both reflexive yet unpretentious. It’s much all less obvious and if it’s winking at you it’s doing it without looking you in the eye and certainly without waiting for you to wink back. The absurdity of the piece feels totally natural and effortlessly constructed so that all the crazy goings on just seem to roll together with a feeling of ‘of course, it must be so’.

Seven Psychopaths is a totally insane thrill ride of a movie – the sort of film where you feel like jumping up with arms stretched out to the sky and shouting YES! as soon as it’s finished. It’s a fair assumption that a lot of people won’t like this film, it strikes a very specific tone that you either go with or don’t and even those who admired In Bruges might find themselves lost in this film’s comparative lack of control. However, Seven Psychopaths is a hilariously funny black comedy that’s also very smart in its criticism both of itself and of cinema in general. Destined to become a cult classic this is one film too much to miss!

Koji Wakamatsu dies following collision with taxi

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News reaches us that veteran director Koji Wakamatsu has died following his accident with a Tokyo taxi last Friday. Never afraid to court controversy, Wakatmatsu had directed over one hundred films since beginning his career in the avant-garde political pink film genre. His career had been experiencing something of a resurgence of late with new films at Cannes and Venice and the director had, in fact, only just returned from Busan where he was awarded the Asian Filmmaker of the year award. It is certainly very sad indeed that we shall never see where his career might have take him next.

A Liar’s Autobiography – LFF 2012

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A few years before he died, Graham Chapman recorded a a kind of audiobook detailing some of his experiences embellished with flights of pure whimsy. Now, in 2012, these recordings have enabled Chapman to become the star of a new animated feature attempting to bring some of his story to the big screen. Starting with an audio clip of Chapman asking for his thirty seconds of abuse, it then moves to a sort of framing device in which he forgets his lines on broadway, promptly collapses and hits his head provoking a surreal odyssey through his life so far. Boasting three director credits (one of whom being Bill Jones – son of Terry) and the work of fourteen different animation studios the film uses many different animation styles and techniques.

It is perhaps a matter of aesthetic taste but some of the animation styles serve their subject matter better than others. The seeming lack of motivation for the switching between styles lends the film an episodic felling which prevents it gaining any real traction and is often more of a distraction than something that brings any kind of artistic contribution. Undoubtedly, much of the animation is good, solid work but taken as a whole it fails to come together in any meaningful way.

It also doesn’t really help that it ends up being fairly light on the autobiographical detail so that anyone with even a cursory interest in all things Python or even just having been raised in the UK over the past thirty years isn’t going to hear anything they didn’t know already. Even the darker elements of Chapman’s life are glossed over in an ‘all jolly good fun, ho ho ho’ sort of way rather than engaged with any kind of insight.

Thirdly, it really just feels as if it’s trying way too hard. Unfortunately it misses the effortless silliness of Monty Python that’s the best example of English whimsy and winds up feeling by turns juvenile and laboured. Crushingly, it’s sometimes as if the animation seems superfluous where Chapman’s voice alone might have done the job better as the animation just isn’t really adding anything into the mix. Slightly gimmicky things like casting Cameron Diaz as the voice of Sigmund Freud initially scream ‘genius!’ but prove too on the nose and collapse under the weight of their own absurdity.

That’s not to say it’s a total disaster – it is moderately enjoyable and at times quite funny, just not quite as much as it seems to think it is. It felt very much like the sort of of British grown up animation that was commoner in the ’90s but forced into the biopics mode that’s really popular with BBC4. Possibly, it may have worked better on the small screen in one of the lighter documentary spots but as a big screen experience it fails as either a documentary or an entertainment film. Diverting rather than a must see.

At the European gala screening we were treated to a few actors playing various Graham Chapman roles such as King Arthur/Brian beforehand and a pop up (literarily) performance from the London Gay Men’s choir during the film’s musical interlude. Something of a curate’s egg but worth seeing.