Amazing performances by real-life firemen (and non-actors). How they forget the camera almost, the banter, the relation between everyone in the station. Also the way the fire services work, everyone doing their job, all cogs in a machine/cause bigger than themselves.
Finally got round to watching the Lindsay Anderson-approved "poet" of British cinema. The first, a propaganda film made as part of the Crown Film Unit is indeed a remarkably allusive, montage-influenced gem, constructing through the build up and juxtaposition of images a picture of a Britain soldiering on, and in so-doing creating a piece of propaganda that is both obvious and subtle. Helpfully, here's the whole thing:
The second, made over a period of months as the war ended was less adventurous and less interesting, but one thing it had that the previous didn't was a voice-over written by EM Forster and read by Michael Redgrave, in that way that some old British film voice-overs do where a rather stiff-upper-lipped man attempts to come across as kindly and caring toward the new baby of the title but just sounds creepy and threatening.
Absolutely stunning, incredibly moving story of a group of monks in a monastery in Algeria, trying to decide whether, in the face of a swaith of Islamic extremist violence, to leave the village where they've set up a clinic and have a real relationship with the villagers, or to stay and face whatever comes. If they stay are they martyrs, if they leave, are they cowards?
Eerie, at times terrifying mix of supernatural chiller and police procedural drama. Amazing special effects and many portentous lines, given the year it was made.
Scary film interesting primarily for its exploitation of the "acousmatic voice", the voice the source of which cannot be identified, which is almost by definition terrifying.
Very well done adaptation of Georges Perec's novel. Speaking of philosophically interesting, this is a film that manages, within its tight conceit and formal constraints, to provide a fantastically acute analysis of late capitalist societies. Lil loves it for its use of language, and whilst I cannot comment fully, there were some wonderful alliterative passages.
Not as mind-boggling as reviewers would have you believe. Still interesting, and depending on your viewpoint, philosophically brave/exciting - for a Hollywood film. Indie actors - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page - steal the show from a somewhat subdued Leonardo di Caprio, although he's a hugely interesting actor - an important one of his generation, certainly, along with Matt Damon.
Interesting, if, in the end, a little disappointing. A truly irritating, morally dubious central character, played well by Isabel Huppert, but a strange atmosphere. Potentially iffy politics too, with the vast majority of speaking parts those of white parts/actors, with the many black actors and parts generally silent. If they're the real subjects of the film, why not focus on them, rather than the plantation owner who's a throwback to colonial times?
Utterly surprising, wonderful film about Aboriginal teens in the middle of Australia in love and running away to the nearest city. They hardly talk to each other, communicating in looks.
Amazingly, it manages to make the "white man's world", as one hobo describes it, look utterly alien. There's a scene where the girl (who is never named, but we assume she's called Delilah) watches to blonde-haired, blue-eyed teen schoolgirls sitting on a park bench talking on their mobile phones, and Thornton manages to make these two normal girls look so strange, so odd, it's unbelievable - the film is so entirely through and from the perspective of S & D that everything that isn't their world seems part of another planet altogether.
She's a total hero too, especially for the last third of the film where in a leg brace (after getting run over) she carries logs for firewood, kills and cooks dinner, makes a shack into a home, starts up the pump for the water, all whilst he lolls around in gas-fume-enduced oblivion (by this point he is going through cold turkey). She has such a wonderfully understated expressive face that she can communicate love, slight irritance and amusement all at once.
Can't get past the oafishness of Depardieu. Although it was interesting to see Isabelle Huppert young - I've only ever seen her in recent films from the 2000s.
Surprisingly good - once you settle into it, the strange mix of social-realism, camp and Oprah-tackyness becomes rather wonderful, if flawed. But then the flaws are part of the wonder.
James Stewart in top form in the gripping yet hilarious court-room drama. I don't think Stewart has managed the line between his corny country bumpkin persona and the more cynical lawyer/policeman type quite as well as he does here. He even sends up his Mr Smith Goes To Washington scout leader country type in a great little play to the judge, where he claims "I'm just a country lawyer, trying to mix it with the big shot city types". He's playing the judge, who he's figured thinks of himself as a country type himself, but he's also playing us, he knows what we think his persona is, and how this part in particular skirts close to it. Great film.
And there's a Duke Ellington score and an appearance from the man himself! And great Saul Bass titles!
I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
