Month: April 2017
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The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki: Just lovely
See, just when I was getting disillusioned a good film about straight people comes along. Maybe there is some worth in them. A Finnish film about a 1960s boxer’s training in the lead up to a world championship bout stealths its way into being the best love movie in a while. Mainly because what the…
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Letters From Baghdad: Lady Lawrence
There’s this amazing bit in the story of Gertrude Bell when, on one of her Middle Eastern expeditions she runs into a young man working as an apprentice at an archaeological site. And she tells him, ‘Hey dude, I know you’re just starting out, but you’re digging all shitty. We’re trying to preserve history here,…
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The Sense of an Ending: This fucking guy
I’m sure The Sense of an Ending is a very accomplished film. It looks pretty and has a bunch of good performances. Jim Broadbent, looking more Jeremy Corbyn than ever, is more than believable in his role, a creaking aging man wiling away his retirement in a specialist camera shop which keeps its Yale lock…
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Their Finest: Its own propaganda
Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk is coming out later this year. I hope it’s good. The film websites are already full of the news, Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, manhandling the IMAX camera to capture war’s viscera. The trailer for it actually was played before my screening. Maybe we’ll someday get a film about its production…
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Lady Macbeth: No, not that one
I caught a preview of Lady Macbeth at the Watershed, Bristol, accompanied by a Q&A by director William Oldroyd. The film releases to UK cinemas on April 28. She’s not that Lady Macbeth. Not the famous one. Not the, ‘Out, damned spot!’ and the ‘Come, you spirits/ that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/…
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The Weekly Roundup: 23/04/17
Sundays are for relaxing in the setting sun doing your best not to eat the whole cheesecake. Don’t eat the whole thing E. Well, that and grinding all that internet content you’ve missed out on, unprocessed meat for your opinion hamburgers. I finally caught up on my backlog with The Lost City of Z and…
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The Handmaiden: Lesbian movie night
The Handmaiden is like the purest film. It’s a violent, kinda screwed up, crime thriller but, underneath all that surface there it has this wonderful innocent heart. Maybe I’m saying that because it’s a costume drama about queer women, which I am all about, but equally they are women whose queerness does not express itself…
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Fast & Furious 8: I don’t care what you Americans call it.
It’s called Fast & Furious 8 here in the UK. Seems to be Fate of the Furious in other markets. Misleading; there don’t seem much fateful or furious about this joint. We open in Cuba, I guess the lifting of the embargo has made it the new hot place for films to visit. It is…
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Looking at: How fantastical identities help our culture approach real ones
Following up on a previous article on the works of the McElroy brothers I’m today writing about another of their podcasts, The Adventure Zone. If you are intrigued you can find the series here, I would strongly advise listening from the beginning; maybe then this whole piece might sound a little less like garbage. To…
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Some Cold Takes: The Lost City of Z and Ghost in the Shell
The Lost City of Z Patriarchy’s one hell of a drug innit? Percy Fawcett can just go off to Bolivia, searching for his lost city, neglecting his wife and children who carry on in England without him. Whiteness is toxic. He tries to disrupt paternalistic eurocentrism by searching for civilisation in Southern America, yet neglects…
A Grand Quiet 