By Danielle Gibson
March 14, 2013
Hackney Picture House (presented by Heavenly Films) is starting a brand new monthly night of much-loved rarely screened gems from April 4th. The opening night celebrates the tenth anniversary of Finnisterre, directed by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, which premiered at the Onedotzero film festival in April 2003. … Continue Reading
June 22, 2010
Vampires are the latest craze to strike the entertainment industry, so it’s only natural that they have now infiltrated the music business. Hunter S. Thompson famously called the music industry a “cruel and shallow money trench” for “thieves” and “pimps”, but today it’s being portrayed as a home to thirsty bloodsuckers. … Continue Reading
Thirst
No one would expect restraint from the man that brought us the ‘Vengeance’ trilogy, but having said that, Park Chan-wook’s latest is really not for the squeamish. Like recent HBO sex-fest True Blood, both the characters and their director have a fascination with bodily fluids. Apart from the oodles of blood, guts and pustules, it is the aural rather than visual aspect that is the most obvious. Whilst the violence might occur offscreen, the soundtrack is loud and explicit. Each bite, suck and scream is lovingly detailed, and the kiss of the vampire is as tantalising as it is threatening. While being repulsed by the cannibalistic aspect of the monster, it is absurdly easy to be drawn in by the menace and allure. And indeed, he is mostly a him. Whether it’s Heathcliff, Satan or Edward Cullen, there is something predatory and seductive about these boys of ‘Byronic’ character. Thirst is still a love story though, but a by-product of its gothic bent means that it is a love story refreshingly tethered to the fleshy, gritty reality of that love – the sounds, the smells, the blood and the body.
Jennifer's Body
In 2008, an ex-stripper won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. She probably wasn’t the first ex-stripper to win an Oscar… but it was a bit of a change for the sometimes conservative Academy to award one if its prestigious gongs to a woman who wasn’t afraid to be provocative and whose name means Devil in Spanish.
(500) Days Of Summer
‘Offbeat’ romantic comedy, (500) Days Of Summer serves as a kind of catharsis for writer Scott Neustadter, following the dubious maxim quoted in the film, that ‘the best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature.’ The quote is actually one of modernist author and notorious bastard, Henry Miller, and the film opens with a rather aggressively Miller-ish disclaimer that flashes up on screen: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely co-incidental… Especially you, Jenny Beckman… Bitch.”
Bombastically proclaimed by the Daily Mail as “the greatest revenge in the history of cinema”, the film is a dance back and forth throughout various days in the year long relationship and subsequent emotional fallout of Tom Hanson and Summer Finn, a couple in their mid-twenties, employed at a greeting cards company in LA. Pastel animated scenes (of a gradually withering tree – bleurgh) act as chapter headings in the narrative – Day 340, Day 20, etc – letting us know which of the ‘days of Summer’ we’re in. “Tom, I know you think she was the one, but I don’t,” says Tom’s sage-like younger sister, Rachel. “Next time you look back, I think you should look again.” This ‘looking back’ is the film – a retrospective on a relationship.
The film opens as Rachel Hanson jumps off her bike, walks into Tom’s apartment (where Tom stands, smashing crockery on a sideboard with a blank look on his face), and says, ‘Right, start from the beginning’ (which obviously he does not). ‘The beginning’ alone however, is enough to give anyone cause for concern. Tom and Summer are riding a lift together at their work, when her reaction to hearing ‘Boy With The Thorn In His Side’ blasting out of Tom’s headphones, is to sing a couple of lines of the song and yell at him, “Oh yeah, The Smiths. I really like The Smiths.” Tom’s reaction is, “HOLY SHIT.” This, in itself, spells trouble. Honestly, who does that? And who gets that excited about someone liking The Smiths?
As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall (to which (500) Days owes a great debt) whilst sifting through the pieces of his own failed relationship, ‘I have a hyperactive imagination. My mind tends to jump around a little.’ Tom Hanson’s memory is also rather subjective. Thus, the film is able to (despite being lauded as ‘realistic’ by critics with a bar undoubtedly lowered from the week The Ugly Truth and The Proposal came out) escape the restrictions of a realistic narrative, and show its audience Tom’s warped reminiscence of the failed relationship he obsesses over. As a result, his post-coital morning walk to work become a Gene Kelly-esque musical number, high-fiving passers-by and being carried through the park on the shoulders of euphoric supporters, and his crushing post-breakup lows see him casting himself as the moody hero of Godard and Bergman-esque, black and white French films. These odd little vignettes are interesting enough to draw away from the MIND-NUMBING BANALITY of their karaoke/Ikea/job/bar day-to-day.
Summer is underdrawn (as you would expect from a film penned by ‘the ex’), and Tom is, to be honest, a bit whiny. Someone once said that the act of reminiscence involves a necessary splitting of the self, which becomes both the person in the memory, and the person doing the remembering. Unfortunately for Scott Neustadter and Tom Hanson, two parts of the same whole, both these people are tools. Funny at times and gratingly annoying at others, the film is redeemed by its inventive direction and the almost disturbingly likable Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The soundtrack is deftly used, and as indie as you would expect, including standard ‘quirky couple necking to Feist’ scene, and montages so cutesy they could be an extended advert for mobile phone tariffs.
In contrast to which, The Time Traveler’s Wife (sic) consists of a film that tries its darndest to murder some excellent subject matter. Having been described variously in the film press as ‘sentimental slush’ and ‘a bulletproof concept’, this rather cack-handed film is carried by what is a fantastic skew on the traditional, linear romance – a familiar concept in unfamiliar surroundings. Rather than a relationship retrospective like (500) Days, Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire find themselves in the unfortunate position of having a kind of ‘future memory’ of their life together, due to Bana’s character’s genetic abnormality, ‘chronic impairment’, as in his liability to spontaneously time travel at any moment – a bit of a pain in a marriage.
Henry’s time travel is involuntary, and he becomes ‘unstuck’ in time, jumping back and forth between moments in the course of his life with Clare, played by a doe-eyed Rachel McAdams. Clare, it should be explained, acts as a kind of metaphysical anchor for Henry’s jumps – she is the place (and time) that he always returns to. The effect is that the couple (and the audience), experience the relationship out of sequence, but whereas in (500) Days, this was a knowing, formal device designed to emphasise various ironies and flaws in Tom’s relationship, in Time Traveler’s Wife it goes some way towards making the whole thing more poignant. The couple’s wedding for example, that Henry disappears from, missing the ceremony but returning just in time to slow-dance to a waltz version of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (sung by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew for some reason, who winks at the camera before presumably wandering off to collect his ‘random cameo’ award). Or the traumatic experience of gestating a child liable to time-travel out of its mother at any moment. … Continue Reading
Scooby Doo: The Mystery Begins
I suppose you could see this as a companion piece to my ‘Phantom Menace’ review, another prequel no-one asked for. I’m not really sure anyone asked for ‘Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed’ either; one of the most unpleasant cinematic experiences I can recall in the past ten years. It was everything bad. I know that’s not a sentence, but it was all kinds of proper bad; insincere, illogical, condescending, and it haemorrhaged money all over the screen.
It was with some trepidation that I approached a return to the live-action Scooby Doo universe. And, surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. You could probably stop reading the review right there. But no, there’s more. It was, in fact, OK. I might even up that to a pretty good. Ask me in a few weeks.
The plot concerns the creation of ‘Mystery Inc,’ and the tale of how an awkward teenage boy found his perfect match, in the form of a dopey (talking!) dog. Oh, and the school, ‘Coolsville High,’ was built over another school which was destroyed by a flood many years ago. So obviously there are ghosts. Obviously.
Dorian Gray
Out: September 9, 2009
Okay, so I love Oscar Wilde. I love his put-downs, his witticisms, his lurid sex life and his writing. This, of course, includes his one and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890 to great notoriety and criticism. If the Victorians were shocked by the debauched acts of the novel’s eponymous anti-hero, a modern-day readership is probably just as shocked that it’s not nearly shocking enough.
But forget reading, we’re here to talk about films, and a new adaptation of Dorian Gray (they’ve dropped the prefixing three words) is hitting the big screen.
Starring Ben Barnes as the beautiful Dorian, the story – in a nutshell – follows young Dorian after he moves to London to inherit his late uncle’s house. Entering onto the social scene, he encounters two gentlemen who become his friends and initially exert the biggest influence over him: artist Basil Hallward (Ben Chaplin) and aristo Lord Henry Wotton (Colin Firth). Both enamoured with the gorgeous young man, they devote their time taking him under their wing. Basil decides to paint his portrait and once Dorian sees it, realising his incredible beauty for the first time, he makes a pact that instead of himself growing old and decrepit, the picture will ensnare his soul and suffer instead – he will remain forever young. Lots of debauchery and crime ensues, with Dorian not ageing a day, whereas the picture becomes uglier and uglier with every sin committed (sprouting maggots at one point – lovely). … Continue Reading
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
It’s the day before the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but do we care? Apparently so. We have a film section y’know! Here’s some thoughts from our filmxpert, Maria…
Released: July 15, 2009
Dir. David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon
Confession: I’m not a big Harry Potter fan. I’m not even a small HP fan – to the chagrin of many of my friends, I’ve only read the third book and the last ever chapter (but that’s enough right?).
However, I’ve still seen all of the film adaptations and get a tingle of excitement every time I hear the familiar, magical few notes of John Williams‘ score that introduces each new film. As hard as I resist, it draws me back in…
And now we’ve come to the sixth installment. Harry and friends are 16-years-old, maturity and hormones a-raging. Literally. There’s action of the romantic kind in this action adventure film – but more on that later.
The Half-Blood Prince is probably most famous in being the ‘one where *somebody* dies’. Oh and being darker than everything that’s come before, which it certainly is. The first couple of scenes are of a grim-skied London being terrorised by Death Eaters, destroying the Millennium Bridge while they’re at it. (Tut.) This early onslaught sets the tone for a HP film that seems to be getting to the core of the evil that Harry must ultimately face. … Continue Reading
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