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Showing posts with label LFF 2014. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LFF 2014. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
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Recorded live at the British Film Institute’s HQ, Dom, Liam, Dr Lindsay Hallam, Emily Estep and myself chit chat about the best, the worst and the weirdest that the London Film Festival had to offer.
Gabbin' about The Imitation Game, The Keeping Room, Electricity, A Blast, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Man in the Orange Jacket and many many many more.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Saturday, October 25, 2014
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Apparently, The Man in the Orange Jacket is Latvia’s first ever horror film. The country may be late to the party, but boy oh boy they’ve come out swinging. Clocking in at a fat-free 71 minutes, this nearly dialogue-free psychological slasher goes for the throat early and often, treading into territory so pitch-black that it caused a couple of walkouts at the London Film Festival. What atrocity was it that disgusted these people so much? Well, let’s see…
Within the first couple of minutes of the film we’ve seen a brutal double murder. A capitalist fatcat boss is sat in his plush bedroom, explaining to his trophy wife how laying off so many workers has stressed him out. She reassures him that a sunny holiday in Italy will wash those worries away. Then she screams. There’s a man sitting in the room, and he’s wearing an orange jacket.
He wordlessly approaches the terrified couple and pulls out a hammer. *THWACK!* The rich man’s mouth flaps like a fish out of water as he collapses onto the silk sheets, blood gently pooling behind his head. The orange jacketed man then stands up and listens for the pitter-patter of feet on the marble floors. He pursues her through the house and just as she thinks she’s out of danger… *THWACK!*
★★★★
Friday, October 24, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
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"A vampire in a hijab is such a provocative image that I’m surprised it’s never been used before. This mashup of predatory, sexually charged vampire imagery and the hijab’s minimizing of a woman’s personality, body and mobility makes for a cracking incongruity that director Ana Lily Amirpour exploits to the max, turning a clumsy mass of heavy black cloth into her vampire antiheroine’s bat-wings.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in Bad City, located in a bizarre future Iran. The streets are largely devoid of life and the inhabitants all housebound drug addicts or walled-in rich. The camera pans around the empty city, casually showing us a river bed full of rotting corpses. What the hell has gone wrong in this world?"
★★★
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
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It'd be a shame if the London Film Festival were entirely pretty actors in expensive clothes prancing around on a drizzly Leicester Square red carpet. Sometimes you want to dig a little deeper. That's where 70 year old Czech born German experimental documentarians come in. Screened as part of the Experimenta strand, the late Harun Farocki's Parallel I-IV is a series of short documentaries that explore the politics, imagery and narrative limitations of videogames.
I enjoy the odd videogame but I have no illusions as to their worth. Maybe one day they will evolve into a worthwhile activity, but as it stands they're glorified Skinner boxes designed to dole out doses of emotion. The most powerful illusion that a videogame creates, the barometer by which we measure their quality, is the creation of a false sense of accomplishment (popularly known as 'gameplay'). Whether it's becoming a champion race car driver, winning the world cup or becoming the top crime boss in a city, what videogames ultimately simulate best is success.
In this regard the best videogames act as opiates, granting the player a temporary tingle of fake happiness that quickly fades, needing to be supplemented by another fix. And then another, ad infinitum. There's a reasonable argument that other media offer the same thing; the adrenaline rush of a good action movie or the shiver down the spine when those star-crossed lovers finally smooch. But whilst other media are often able to make you more intelligent and give you new perspectives on the world, videogames tend to make you dumber through a seductive narrative of individual empowerment.
With that in mind, the key to the Parallel series success is exploring videogames from an outsider's perspective. Harun Farocki, having no emotional attachment to the medium, comes at it with a clean mind, free from preconceptions as to how games work or what conditions of 'good play' are. What interests him is the idea of poking at the edges of virtual worlds, observing behavioural algorithms and examining methods of representing reality.
An aspect of games that's often overlooked is the accepted boundaries of behaviour for a player. Experienced players know the ropes, for example, they instinctively grasp the boundaries of a level and capabilities of their avatar and, so, over the course of normal play, won't try to squeeze through barriers that demarcate where the game world 'ends'.
In footage from L.A. Noire we follow a policeman around an impressively rendered 1940s Los Angeles, the only obviously unrealistic thing the impassable roadblocks preventing the player from leaving the city. A seasoned player wouldn't give these a second thought, yet Farocki drives his virtual cop car directly into them over and over again. We see a similar process in Red Dead Redemption, a cowboy meanders his way across an epic prairie, only to plunge to his death when he crosses a certain, unmarked point on the map. Open world games sell themselves on player freedom, yet Farocki exposes that freedom as strictly defined.
Farocki shows us repeated clips the player behaving in ways that expose the limits of the game. The most striking are his manipulations of NPC behaviour. In Mafia 2 he leads the player character towards an old woman who's smoking a cigarette, standing directly in front of her and blankly staring. In the course of normal gameplay we'd hear a short voice clip from her telling us to get out of her way and we'd move on. In Parallels she begins cycling through repetitive voiceclips and animations, smoking an infinite cigarette. There's a performative aspect to videogames that often goes overlooked; the player encouraged not to shatter the illusion of the gameworld by playing their role as the designer expects.
Examples like these expose the ideological limitations of the medium, which arise from the basic need for the player to be at the centre of events. This means the vast majority of games present a solipsist world in which the player is God (even games with thousands of simultaneous players tailor the experience of each player to tell them they're 'the chosen one'). Players thus become immortal and nearly omniscient - everything in the gameworld designed to entertain them and them alone.
Given that hardcore gamers immerse themselves for endless hours in worlds where they are the centre of attention is it any wonder that their identities become warped? In the ongoing #Gamergate farrago, self-styled 'gamers' have reacted with astonished horror at their pastime being exposed to cultural analysis, reading criticism of their entertainment products as criticism of themselves. They are trapped in a confused loop: "The feminist says the game is sexist, which means that I am sexist, but I know I am not sexist, therefore the game is not sexist. If the game is not sexist then the criticism is false, therefore the feminist is a liar therefore she is a whore therefore fuck u whore i will rape u so hard."
Reactions like #Gamergate show us the extreme consequences of videogames' operant conditioning, the player's personality becoming accustomed to an endless cycle of masturbatory, egocentric wish fulfilment that's easy to achieve in the virtual world but impossible in reality. Farocki's film scratches at the surface of this, but it only takes the tiniest effort to peek beyond the veil and expose videogames as a medium with an inherently limited scope.
Consider this: after 35 years of cinema we had the formal experimentation of Eisenstein and the narrative and technical genius of Welles' Citizen Kane. After 35 years of videogames we are still largely mired in corridors full of people to shoot with guns and B-Movie narratives. Graphics have approached photorealism but we haven't progressed beyond Space Invaders with its waves of slowly approaching targets to eliminate. Perhaps the medium will eventually take a great leap forward (games like Minecraft present promising, if embryonic, possibilities), but from a 2014 perspective that leap feels a long way away.
In footage from L.A. Noire we follow a policeman around an impressively rendered 1940s Los Angeles, the only obviously unrealistic thing the impassable roadblocks preventing the player from leaving the city. A seasoned player wouldn't give these a second thought, yet Farocki drives his virtual cop car directly into them over and over again. We see a similar process in Red Dead Redemption, a cowboy meanders his way across an epic prairie, only to plunge to his death when he crosses a certain, unmarked point on the map. Open world games sell themselves on player freedom, yet Farocki exposes that freedom as strictly defined.
Farocki shows us repeated clips the player behaving in ways that expose the limits of the game. The most striking are his manipulations of NPC behaviour. In Mafia 2 he leads the player character towards an old woman who's smoking a cigarette, standing directly in front of her and blankly staring. In the course of normal gameplay we'd hear a short voice clip from her telling us to get out of her way and we'd move on. In Parallels she begins cycling through repetitive voiceclips and animations, smoking an infinite cigarette. There's a performative aspect to videogames that often goes overlooked; the player encouraged not to shatter the illusion of the gameworld by playing their role as the designer expects.
Examples like these expose the ideological limitations of the medium, which arise from the basic need for the player to be at the centre of events. This means the vast majority of games present a solipsist world in which the player is God (even games with thousands of simultaneous players tailor the experience of each player to tell them they're 'the chosen one'). Players thus become immortal and nearly omniscient - everything in the gameworld designed to entertain them and them alone.
Given that hardcore gamers immerse themselves for endless hours in worlds where they are the centre of attention is it any wonder that their identities become warped? In the ongoing #Gamergate farrago, self-styled 'gamers' have reacted with astonished horror at their pastime being exposed to cultural analysis, reading criticism of their entertainment products as criticism of themselves. They are trapped in a confused loop: "The feminist says the game is sexist, which means that I am sexist, but I know I am not sexist, therefore the game is not sexist. If the game is not sexist then the criticism is false, therefore the feminist is a liar therefore she is a whore therefore fuck u whore i will rape u so hard."
Reactions like #Gamergate show us the extreme consequences of videogames' operant conditioning, the player's personality becoming accustomed to an endless cycle of masturbatory, egocentric wish fulfilment that's easy to achieve in the virtual world but impossible in reality. Farocki's film scratches at the surface of this, but it only takes the tiniest effort to peek beyond the veil and expose videogames as a medium with an inherently limited scope.
Consider this: after 35 years of cinema we had the formal experimentation of Eisenstein and the narrative and technical genius of Welles' Citizen Kane. After 35 years of videogames we are still largely mired in corridors full of people to shoot with guns and B-Movie narratives. Graphics have approached photorealism but we haven't progressed beyond Space Invaders with its waves of slowly approaching targets to eliminate. Perhaps the medium will eventually take a great leap forward (games like Minecraft present promising, if embryonic, possibilities), but from a 2014 perspective that leap feels a long way away.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
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Within the first ten minutes of The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom, you realize that you’re going to have to seriously recalibrate your cheese tolerance levels. An adaptation of a Chinese novel, the film quickly introduces an apparently endless parade of bearded, angry men in elaborate armour who smirk at the camera like 1950’s serial villains. The rest of the movie is devoted to a super-saccharine, vaseline-on-the-lens love story that comes with a strong whiff of Twilight.
Before I summarize the plot, I should confess that I didn’t understand most of it. The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom is a pretty well known story in China, being a smash hit novel first and having been adapted to cinema multiple times. So, Jacob Cheung’s film assumes you’re going to know who’s who before it even begins, a tactic that might save on exposition for Chinese audiences but spells bewilderment for everyone else.
★★
A homicide detective is having a very bad day. Internal affairs are ransacking his desk, his daughter is demanding chocolate cake, he’s been pulled over for a DUI and he’s got a body stashed in his boot. And he’s on his way to his mother’s funeral! And his damn phone won’t stop ringing! And his shoelaces have snapped!
No wonder he’s frazzled.
Detective Ko Gun-soo’s (Lee Sun Gyun) litany of disaster begins with a hit and run. To his credit, his first instinct is to report it, but just as he’s dialling the emergency services his his daughter calls with demands for cake. He’s in shock and mildly freaked out by the sight of a cop car heading his way. Then he makes the first of several bad decisions; dragging the bloody body off the road, wrapping it in a sleeping bag and bundling it into the trunk of his car. Now he has to get rid of it – but how? Well, his mother is being buried today and her coffin is awfully roomy…
★★★
Monday, October 20, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
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Even
now, after Simon Pegg has conclusively 'made it', the
sight of him on the big screen feels a bit mischievous. For many he'll always be Tim from Spaced, the sight of him conjuring up happy memories of late night Channel 4 and feeling like you're part of a secret gang for knowing about the show. This vague feeling of possessiveness towards him can swing both ways: on one hand his screen
presence comes preloaded with an enormous amount of audience
goodwill, on the other when he's in a bad film you feel a bit let down.
Kill Me Three Times
isn't a bad film. But it's not very either. Pegg plays Charlie Wolf, hitman extraordinaire. He dresses in black, wears a handlebar moustache and drives a muscle car crammed with high powered weaponry. Wolf is essentially a cartoon assassin; his style influenced by European spy comics and pulp cinema. He's also completely amoral; willing to take any dirty job as long as there's a hefty payday at the end of it.
As Wolf puts it; "I don't die. I thrive!", which'd be an upbeat philosophy if he wasn't at that very moment dying on the sunny West Australian coast. The question is, how did he get there. The answer proves to be a complex web of murder, adultery, blackmail, idiocy, insurance fraud and, most interestingly, dental record falsification. Traversing this knot of a plot are stone-cold psycho Lucy (Teresa Palmer), her incompetent, gambling addict dentist husband Nathan (Sullivan Stapleton), the scummily violent bar owner Jack (Callan Mulvey), his adulterous wife Alic (Alice Braga) and hunky but dim mechanic Dylan (Luke Hemsworth).
Like a snowball growing in size as it tumbles down a mountain the body count quickly racks up. In fact, by the time the snowball crashes into the base it's stained crimson red and has legs, fingers and bits of ragged scalp poking from the top of it. This is a filmic universe where the Grim Reaper has finely honed senses of comic timing and dramatic irony. That, in combination with a cast of self-important scheming bunglers puts us firmly in wannabe-Coen brothers territory; the plot playing out like an antipodean spin on Fargo.
If you're going to stick closely to an established tone, you could pick far worse directors to ape than the Coens, but Kill Me Three Times feels like a bargain basement DVD ripoff of them. The main problems are with the lacklustre writing; each character has a one-note personality (bumbling, violent, scheming, protective etc) that gets hammered on relentlessly until the character pops it (sometimes by actually being hammered on).
 |
| Looking a touch Zardoz there. |
This isn't helped by dialogue that's serviceable at best. Characters state their intentions and then carry them out, leaving precious little room for performative nuance. Teresa Palmer does a decent job of combining slightly shopworn beauty with homicidal ambition and makes an effective bully of Sullivan Stapleton's moronic dentist. There's a few weak links; but Alice Braga can be forgiven for being stuck in a part that gives her zero interesting qualities and Luke Hemsworth cements his status as a lesser Hemsworth (how many more damn Hemsworths are there anyway?!).
There's a similarly slack approach to the visuals; though the scenery is often quite beautiful it's shot in a perfunctory way. The general tactic is to impress with a postcard perfect establishing shot, then revert to a bog-standard framing technique that drains these otherwise rather scenic locations of any verve. The interiors fare a bit worse, overlit and with a whiff of cheap soap opera to them.
The one thing that makes this experience even vaguely worthwhile is Pegg, obviously relishing playing an out and out bastard. He plays Wolf as a normal guy who's watched a few too many movies; pretending (even to himself) that he's really a sinister, ultra-competent omniscient badass while actually being a bit dim and extremely lucky. At the very least Pegg is having fun and it's difficult to begrudge him choosing to spend two weeks in a sunny Australian paradise playing a comedy hitman.
That aside there's very little to recommend about Kill Me Three Times. It doesn't ever tip over into terribleness but coasts along in a mediocre, passionless gear until the credits finally roll. There are worse ways you could spend your time, but there's also far better ones too.
★★
Syllas Tzoumerkas’ A Blast tracks the fallout of the Greek economic collapse on an average middle class family. Or at least I think it does. You see, A Blast has been shoved through a wood chipper and what comes out is an enigmatic nonlinear narrative that confuses much more than it intrigues.
Our focus is the fragmented and chaotic wife/daughter/mother Maria (Angeliki Papoulia), a woman standing squarely in the eye of an economic storm. Maria is smart, beautiful and ambitious, with high hopes and genuine prospects. We first meet her the day she’s been accepted to study law in Athens, and the family hums with jubilation. Her elderly father hugs her, her mother gives her an envelope of cash as a present and she bickers pleasantly with her younger sister. Underlying all this is a passionate relationship with the hunky Yannis (Vassilis Doganis), with the two indulging in lengthy bouts of sweaty sex. This is contrasted with herky-jerky cuts that reveal some indeterminate future where she’s on the verge of complete breakdown.
★★
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
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"I’ve never had a fit, and to be honest, it’s not high on my list of things to do. But after watching Bryn Higgins’ Electricity, I feel like I’ve got an inkling of how horrible it is. This tightly focused character drama puts its audience in the shoes of Lily (Agyness Deyn), a cool, smart and attractive young woman with debilitating epilepsy.
As we open in the Yorkshire seaside town of Saltburn by the Sea, we meet Lily working the change counter in a seafront amusement arcade. Today she’s having some fun flirting with a customer, teasing him as he clumsily chats her up. But he’s nice enough, so the two swap numbers and make a date. Later, dressed to the nines, she walks down the seafront, spots him and waves. Then the world ends. Shooting sparks of colour tear apart the frame and the world heaves, swells and distorts. Blackness."
★★★★★
"The Keeping Room is ‘past-apocalyptic’ cinema. We like to imagine the end of the world coming with nuclear war, asteroid collision or alien invasion. Here, however, we see it as history, a terrifying world as cruel as The Road or Mad Max, where mankind can only crawl among the ashes, a world that’s already happened.
This particular apocalypse is the American Civil War, and its desperate survivors are three Southern women: sisters Augusta and Louise (Brit Marling and Hailee Steinfeld) and their former slave, Mad (Muna Otaru). With the sister’s parents dead, the women are left to scratch an existence in an empty, isolated farmhouse. Their world is one largely devoid of human life, as nearly every man has become gristle for the Confederate war machine and the women have fled in terror."
★★★★
Monday, October 13, 2014
Monday, October 13, 2014
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"Realising you’re about to watch a new movie by the director of Point Blank, Deliverance and Zardoz is an odd experience. In his 81st year, we find John Boorman in a reflective mood, gazing into his own past and trying to assemble fragmented memories into a coherent whole. The result is Queen & Country, a loose sequel to his award-winning 1987 classic Hope & Glory.
That film followed Bill, a fictionalised childhood analogue of Boorman, through the chaos of London Blitz. Queen & Country picks up his story a decade later in 1951. Bill (Callum Turner) has just turned 18, making him eligible to be conscripted for two years of national service. Though just six years since VE Day, the mood in the country has shifted; the vague rumblings from Korea feeling inconsequential in comparison to the previous threat of wartime bombardment."
★★
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"Prior to Mr. Turner, I’d assumed J.M.W. Turner was some upper-class dork with a silly accent, spending his days flouncing around a field somewhere (probably wearing a stupid old-timey hat). I dutifully trotted around the Turner Collection at Tate Britain and appreciated (rather than enjoyed) his paintings, but to be honest, landscapes aren’t really my cup of tea. I figured Turner was just one of those artists you’re expected to like, an institution rather than something that speaks to the heart.
After watching Mike Leigh’s biopic, however, my thoughts have changed. Turner, as seen through the lens of Mike Leigh and the performance of Timothy Spall, is a weirdly primal, sexually charged pig man who spits on his canvases, responds to questions with bestial grunts and is tangled up in some compulsive quasi-BDSM relationship with his housekeeper. From the moment we first see him silhouetted against the horizon, we’re gravitationally drawn to a man who’s sometimes a miserable old arsehole, sometimes sweet and romantic, but always fascinating to watch."
Read the rest here at We Got This Covered.
★★★★★
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