Scratchpad

Sorry for my late reply, very busy lately and the regular time for our playlists fits not that well in my schedule. I will be able to attend now and then, but probably not regularly, so hosting isn’t a good idea because I can’t really make any commitments. At the end of the year it should be better, once we’ve moved to our new house and me and my gf start living together (a LAT relationship is a pain in the *ss sometimes).

A few quick reviews of films watched on holiday this last week. Some I would never have thought to watch myself, but the wife had decision making input as well. Radioactive (2019) dir Marjane Satrapi A biopic of Noble prize winning physicist Marie Curie, played by Rosemund Pike. With her husband Pierre they pioneered the study of radioactivity in late 19th / early 20th century Paris. It's a good story but not told very well. It doesn't really explain what it was she and her husband did that won them Nobel prizes. The consequences of their work, positive and negative, are shown in kind of strange, flash-forward, almost docudrama-like scenes. These are scenes that occur decades after the main character's deaths, e.g. they show a boy in 1950s USA undergoing radiotherapy treatment for cancer, they show the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. It just doesn't flow that well and seems a bit amateurish at times to me. 4/10 Sense and Sensibility (1995) dir Ang Lee Director Ang Lee and writer Emma Thompson's adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name. Obviously if Jane Austin and similar costume drama's are not your thing, then you are probably not going to watch this. But I think it's a brilliant film and is one of my all time favourites. It won an Oscar for Emma Thompson's script plus multiple other nominations (best picture, leading actress for Thompson, supporting actress for Kate Winslett, costume, cinematography and score), plus a similar set of nominations, with more wins, in the Baftas. Like all Jane Austen stories it set in early 19th century England about middle class women and their search for suitable husbands. Mrs Dashwood and her 3 daughters, Eleanor, Marianne and Margaret are left 'almost penniless' after the death of their husband / father who's entire estate, due to the laws of the day, is inherited by their half-brother. His greedy wife convinces him he does not need to offer his step mother and step sisters any financial assistance. Of course compared to most people at that time the Dashwoods are wealthy, but compared to what they are used to and what society expects of them, they are not. It has a magnificent cast with excellent support from Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, James Fleet, Harriet Walter, Gemma Jones, Tom Hardy, Greg Wise, Imelda Staunton. Plus in an early straight acting, as opposed to comedy, role, Hugh Laurie as Mr Palmer (the husband of the daughter of the mother-in-law of the cousin of the Dashwood's who eventually rents them a house on his Devon estate). He does not have many lines, mostly his character just tries to ignore his silly, over fussy wife, but when he does it's brilliant. There are some stunning scenes of the English countryside and some great little bits where I am not sure if it was the director or the screenwriter who was responsible, quite possibly both. 10/10 Mr Holmes (2015) dir Bill Condon Ian McKellen plays a very elderly Sherlock Homes, retired from detective work, coming to terms with his old age and reminiscing on his last case. He lives with a housekeeper and her young son who shows an interest in the great detective's cases and shares his current interest in bee-keeping. And to be be honest I don't really remember that much more about it. It did not hold my interest. It's not based on any of Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels and I'm not quite sure what it was the writer was trying to do. 3/10 Pride (2014) dir Marcus Warchus A great, heart-warming film based on a true story. In mid 1980s London, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) was watching news coverage of the strike by British coal miners (a strike that would last about a year). He sees scenes of police brutality against the strikers that he, as a gay man, was all too familiar with. Following that year's London Gay pride march he sets up the LGSM (l*sbian and Gays Support the Miners), and starts raising money for the striking miners and arranges to donate the cash to Welsh pit village. There is inevitable opposition from many of the miners, whose homophobia makes them unwilling to accept any assistance from the LGSM. But through a couple of miners, played by Paddy Considine And Bill Nighy, and some of their far more open minded wives (Imelda Staunton, Jessica Gunning and others) they eventually win most of the village over. It's set against a backdrop of the homophobia and anti-labour attitudes of Margaret Thatcher's government and much of the mainstream press, plus, in the 1980s, of course, AIDS. One of the LGSM, played by Dominic West, was based on the second man in Britain to be diagnosed as HIV positive, Mark Ashton would die from the disease a couple of years after the story. But in the main it's just a great story, nothing too over-dramatic, about two groups of people overcoming their own prejudice (and that went in both directions to some extent at first) to realise they had something in common and wanted to help each other. It end's a year after it began. The miners strike was then over and hundreds of Welsh miners arrive in London to lend their support to that years Gay Pride and march at the front alongside their new allies. 9/10

What I Watched This Week #25 (June 18-24) Day of the Fight dir. Stanley Kubrick/1951/13m The first film Stanley Kubrick ever made was this short documentary following middleweight boxer Walter Cartier throughout the day of his fight against Bobby James on the 17th April 1950. While Kubrick shows signs here of his undoubted genius in the composition and editing, I have a big problem with how this film is presented, which is in the style of a news reel. We only hear a narrator tell us how Walter is thinking or feeling, not from the man himself. This disconnect stopped me from being very invested in Walter or his fight. The fight itself is also quite anticlimactic, ending after a couple of punches and all shot from a distance. It's interesting in the way that first works by great artists always are, but beyond the curiosity factor I can't really recommend this. 5/10 Le quattro volte (The Four Times) dir. Michelangelo Frammartino/2010/1h28m Deep in the Italian countryside an elderly farmer is living the last days of his life. He dies and a goat is born. We follow the baby goat for a while before it becomes separated from his herd, lost in the forest. The goat, starving and freezing, nestles in the roots of a tree and dies. We now witness the tree, its bark, its foliage, its commanding height towering over the entire forest. It is cut down for a ceremony in a nearby village and afterwards it is cut into logs. We watch it be made into charcoal. We now follow the charcoal as it is delivered to a house in the same village, the village where the old farmer lived. Smoke rises from a chimney. This film about reincarnation and the soul and the afterlife is truly unlike anything else I've seen. Told without dialogue it is a visual poem. The tenderness with which Frammartino shoots really makes you care about the abstract idea of a soul. When the tree was cut up and unceremoniously dumped off of the back of a truck I was genuinely upset. Show this tree some respect! I'm not a religious person in any way, but the final shot of white smoke rising up from a chimney really hit me hard. I don't know if I was upset or elated. My only negative is that the first twenty minutes or so are pretty slow, even by my standards, but other than that this is an incredibly beautiful film. 9.5/10 Lime's Film of the Week! X dir. Ti West/2022/1h46m In 70s Texas a group of out-of-town aspiring p*rn actors shoot a film in a barn. But when the elderly couple who own the farm, Pearl and Howard (Mia Goth, Stephen Ure), find out what they're up to, they decide to murder them because they're Christian conservatives from Texas. I like the style of this film. There's a pissy yellow filter to the light that is very Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the costume design is great. Sadly that doesn't stop this film being unrelentingly dull. I was expecting a grimy, sleazy grindhouse style film, something that makes you want to have a shower after watching it, like Driller Killer. What we got is just safe. It's a standard run of the mill slasher film but worse because the antagonists are not at all threatening. Also, they didn't actually hire real old people, they use awful looking old age make prosthetics. And for some reason Mia Goth not only plays Pearl, the old woman, but also Maxine, one of the group of p*rn filmmakers. No connection or relationship between the two characters is ever even hinted at. The thing I liked most is the performance by Kid Cudi as the brilliantly named Jackson Hole. I've seen a load of really positive reviews for this and I just don't get it. If you've seen it @Con I'd love to know what you think as a horror expert. 4/10 Two short films by Daniels (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert) Dogboarding 2011/2m Interesting Ball 2014/12m Two early shorts from the directing duo Daniels (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert), the guys behind my film of the year so far (and I don't see anything coming close to it in the next six months), Everything Everywhere all at Once. The first, Dogboarding, does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a skateboard video but with dogs instead of skateboards. There's really not much more to say about it. It's well shot and the effects, for such a small budget, are well executed. I think what this shows most is how Daniels are able to take a ridiculous idea and make it work. That is evident in both their feature releases, EEAAO and Swiss Army Man (also well worth watching). Interesting Ball is much more like their feature films; a ridiculous concept that has a very deep and emotional message behind it. A red ball bounces down a road and onto a beach. We see small slices of life of all the people the ball bounces past and how their lives are affected by the ball, some more than others. Daniels actually appear in this themselves as roommates who become very close when one gets their foot stuck up the other's *ss. Again, this ridiculous moment is just the beginning of a genuinely tender moment. Interesting Ball is the seed that EEAAO grew from and it is fantastic. Dogboarding 7/10 Interesting Ball 9/10 The Vast of Night dir. Andrew Patterson/2019/1h31m In small town 50s USA a local radio presenter Everett (Jake Horowitz), and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) become obsessed with a strange signal they pick up one night. Over the course of the evening they try to find out what it is and soon start to realise that we may not be alone. There is a framing device to this film in that it starts off with a 50s television set showing an intro to a Twilight Zone style show, with tonight's episode being “The Vast of Night”, but this isn't really taken any further, and more than an homage to shows like The Twilight Zone, it seems more like an homage to radio dramas like Orson Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast. There are times, especially when Everett's show gets a call from Billy (Bruce Davis) who may know what the sound is, when the film cuts to black and we're left with just their voices. With the film being all dialogue and having excellent sound design, you could experience this as a radio play. That's not to say this doesn't look good, it looks great. There's a real texture to it that's bought out beautifully with all the different blues, both natural and unnatural. The two leads are good in their roles, and have a playfully antagonistic relationship. My slight negative is with the ending where we actually see the UFOs; I feel like it would play better if we never actually see them, maybe just see the character's reaction to them. But this is still a strong debut film from Patterson, and I look forward to what he does next. 8/10 Berberian Sound Studio dir. Peter Strickland/2012/1h32m In the 1970s an English film sound designer is hired by an Italian company to work on a horror movie. While working on the film and watching scenes of horrific torture day after day, Gilderoy (Toby Jones) becomes more and more affected by what he sees (much like Prano Bailey Bond's recent Censor, an excellent film, but about a film censor not sound editor). While there is nothing overtly hostile happening to Gilderoy, Strickland does an amazing job of ratcheting up the tension through his direction and the editing. He never shows us the film Gilderoy is working on, its all played out in his performance and his work – the scene of him violently stabbing a cabbage was incredibly unnerving, and the editing work of the scene where two watermelons are smashed by hammers while we hear a woman screaming for her life is terrifying. Jones is perfect for this role, his hangdog expression conveying a life of being put upon by everyone, and now he's getting it in a language he doesn't understand. No wonder he loses his f*cking mind. While this is a great film I prefer In Fabric, though the two are quite similar stylistically. But just from those two films Strickland is quickly becoming one of my favourite working directors. 8.5/10 Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter dir. David Zellner/2014/1h40m Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a lonely, depressed young woman in Tokyo who becomes obsessed with a battered old VHS copy of the film Fargo. Thinking that it's real (Fargo does start out with the statement “this is a true story”, even though it isn't) she becomes obsessed with the hidden stash of cash that's buried under the snow next to a fence somewhere in North Dakota. Stealing her bosses credit card, she heads to America to find the treasure. Reading a short synopsis like that you may be expecting something light-hearted, a comedy even. I was. What this is is a touching and sympathetic portrait of depression and the need for something to live for, and what happens when you find out that that doesn't exist. The lead performance from Kikuchi is brilliant, eliciting empathy from the audience without begging for it. A real tender and humane film, plus I love her pet rabbit Bunzo, so cute! 8.5/10

Changed the format 🥳 might be fixed now.

I can't see the videos you have posted 😞