Cría Cuervos

Cría Cuervos - a film by Carlos Saura

This film was selected by Richard @ Caravana de Recuerdos as part of Spanish Literature month so I decided that I would try to get my hands on a copy in time to watch it. However, it was not to be. I found that it was to be released in a few months (it dates from 1976). However, having some time to myself last night I decided I would see if I could view it online and lo and behold, it seemed that I could. And so I settled down to watch.

..CONTAINS SPOILERS.. and much frustration.

Punk Britannia - Pre Punk 1972-1976

Punk Britannia - Pre Punk 1972-1976
Some loose thoughts and Youtube surfing inspired by watching the first episode of BBC4's Punk Britannia. This is more a string of impressions and opinions than a review.

(Q!uotes are approXXXimate, OPinions are my own!! even if they are others also!!! RIGHT!!!!)

"People would ask me what does it mean? is it a love song? The best answer I have is that New Rose is about the punk scene.." - Brian James, The Damned

The Conformist

The Conformist - Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

I'm currently falling further and further behind on my reading targets for the year so thought I would at least make an attempt to hit my target of reviewing a decent amount (six or seven) films for the Foreign Film Festival at Richard's Caravana de Recuerdos and simultaneously, for Caroline's World Cinema Series at her blog Beauty is a Sleeping Cat. Two birds with one stone, I like it.

Once again ignoring the piles of unwatched DVD's scattered around the house I made use of my Netflix account and so watched Bertolucci's The Conformist on my laptop, probably not optimum conditions to watch one of cinemas acknowledged visual classics. I was also tired so had to rewind on a couple of occasions when my attention headed for my own dream landscape, and away from Bertolucci's.

Very Extremely Dangeous

Very Extremely Dangerous - une film de Paul Duane

The trailer for Paul (Barbaric Genius) Duane's new documentary on the very extremely dangerous Jerry McGill. It is currently doing the round of film festivals. Watch the trailer right to the end, where we here Paul's laconic cool shatter as he sees his final end and cries out like a Yankee -  "Jesus Christ, Jerry!"

Looking forward to seeing the whole film.

Little Dieter Wants to Fly

Little Dieter Wants to Fly - Werner Herzog

Dieter has a story. As a boy he watched fighter planes swoop over his small hometown in Germany. Seeing the pilot in a cockpit almost close enough to touch exploding into and out of his vision was an epiphany for him. He would fly.

Post war Germany is brought to life in a quick sketch - footage of sausages in a window being stared at by passers by accompanies Dieter's memory of seeing a sausage for the first time three years after the war ended - but nobody could afford it. It would have been better than boiled wallpaper though.

Bicycle Thief

The Bicycle Thief - Vittorio De Sica

Inspired by the serendipity of a free month on Netflix and a 'foreign' movie reviewing meme on a couple of good blogs I follow (here & here) I decided I would watch some films and write something about them. I thought that I would pick a 'classic' I had never seen to start the ball rolling.

The classic is The Bicycle Thief (a.k.a. Bicycle Thieves). The film is set on the grim streets of post war Rome. Men swarm up an anonymous looking stairs in a high rise building as the credits roll and then fallback as a cigar smoking functionary emerges, descends and calls for Ricci. Someone has to run over to get Ricci who is not paying any attention. When he gets over he is told "You'll hang posters", handed a slip and told to go to the employment office. Disbelievingly he says "My god, a job."  But there is a catch. He will need a bicycle and his is in the repair shop and money will have to be found to redeem it.

School for Books

It's time to send my books to obedience school!

Sweet Smell of Evil & Touch of Success

Original Post - Monday, August 09, 2010

The Sweet Smell of Evil

 Just watched The Sweet Smell of Success again on television last night. So good I didn’t even doze off despite it ending well after midnight when dozing is an almost unavoidable hazard.

It’s years since I saw it and I had forgotten just how good it is, particularly the translucent cinematography of James Wong Howe. The look, I have since read, was achieved in part by putting oil on the walls of the studio.

That Finnish Beat

Original Post - Monday, July 26, 2010

I’m currently reading Kerouac’s On The Road which has long been a glaring omission from the books I’ve read. I have long felt that I had missed the boat not reading it as a teenager as it has a place as a teenage rite of passage. However it’s rapturous embrace of ‘the American night’ brings back memories of  my own youth and although Dublin to Galway and back doesn’t quite match the continental scale of Kerouac’s peregrinations you make do with what you got.

I may return to On The Road in a later ramble but it was reading it that led me to see Taisto, the hero of Kaurismaki’s Ariel as archetypically beat, as I understand Kerouac to use the word. The world pisses on him but he can’t be bothered to put up an umbrella.

He loses his job when the mine he works in is closed. He then goes for a drink with his father who gives him the keys to his Cadillac convertible, tells him to leave and heads into the pub toilet and shoots himself. Like the Rain Dogs in the song by late era Beat Poet Tom Waits, he's out on the street and the rain has washed away the scent of home.

The Inspirations of George Lucas

Original Post - Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Short film George Lucas in Love creates a myth of creation for Star Wars and is very funny. It's well worth watching if you haven't seen it and have ten minutes to spare.

The reason I was reminded of this film is that I have just been reading The Witches of Karres which seems to be the likely source for a number of the elements that make up the aforesaid blockbuster.

Some musings on the Oscars

Original Post - Sunday, March 14, 2010

I feel impelled to write this blog by a sort of feedback loop being created in my head by a welter of current news stories.

The Oscar battle between Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker and James Cameron’s Avatar has been creating a big stir. Many people seem feel that Avatar deserved the award simply for the level of financial success it has achieved.

Somewhere ticking away in the background is the constant referral’s to Iran’s nuclear programme and the US Congress declaring the killing of Armenians during World War One by the Turks as genocide.

I don’t know why these keep pushing themselves to be written about (not something I do very often) but I’ll try.

YOU GOT TO GET IT IN THE BLOOD.

Original post - Thursday, March 04, 2010

Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus

I finally got around to watching this film, which has been on my list of films to watch for a few years now. As an admirer of Jim Whites delicate take on Southern Gothic and fascinated with the south of Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews this road movie through the marginalized heart of the south looked like something I would surely enjoy.  ....

It is an impressionistic journey, where roadside minstrels and storytellers pop up to sing songs or tell stories of death and redemption and other affairs of the spirit. Jim White is our Virgil in this journey, and though the journey finds hellfire it also finds the vigour and resilience of the south.....

Bearing Witness

Original Post - Saturday, June 10, 2006

United 93 - Paul Greengrass

Last night I spent a rare enough night in the cinema when I went to see Paul Greengrass' United 93 which is a powerful addition to his witness films where powerful socially emotive moments which have led to huge splits in society are reSEEN and play out as human rather than schematic dramas. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, Bloody Sunday and now United 93 concentrate on events that led to the justification of riots, murder and even war.

In a similar way to Alan Clarkes' powerful Elephant (a recreation of sectarian murders in Northern Ireland which inspired Gus van Sants' film of the same name) we see that the killing of a human being is the only real blasphemy - against any religion and against our common humanity.

Walk the Line

Review for Film Ireland - original post - Friday, April 07, 2006

Walk the Line
DIR: James Mangold • WRI: Gill Dennis, James Mangold • PROD: James Keach, Cathy Konrad • DOP: Phedon Papmichael • ED: Michael McCusker • DES: David J. Bomba • CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick

Cotton pickin' Johnny listens to June on the old radio at the end of a long day while Daddy roars Turn it off. Johnny watches his brother cut wood on a desk saw but all he wants to do is go fishing. When he leaves to go fish we know it will end in tragedy. Soldier Johnny in an airbase in Germany, Salesman Johnny with a suitcase in Memphis, Gospel Johnny draws a blank at his one chance audition so rebel Johnny appears and within months is moving up the charts and criss-crossing Tenessee with Elvis, Jerry Lee, Roy and June.

A History of Violence

Review for Film Ireland - original post - Friday, April 07, 2006

A History of Violence 

DIR: David Cronenberg • WRI: Josh Olson • PROD: Chris Bender, David Cronenberg, J.C. Spink • DOP: Peter Suschitzky • ED: Ronald Sanders • DES: Carol Spier • CAST: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Steph McHattie, Greg Bryk, Heidi Hayes

From the off, Cronenberg's cool distancing style lets us know that this isn't quite the real world, although it has many features of the real. The very accretion of realist detail becomes a distancing device by only serving notice that this is a carefully constructed artifice. The history of the title is the buried secrets that lie in Tom Stall's head until they are brought to the surface by a series of violent events.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Review for Film Ireland - original post - Friday, April 07, 2006

Me and You and Everyone We Know

DIR/WRI: Miranda July • PROD: Gina Kwon • DOP: Chuy Chávez • ED: Andrew Dickler, Charles Ireland • DES: Aran Mann • CAST: Miranda July, Tracy Wright, Hector Elias, Jonell Kennedy, Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend, Carlie Westerman, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Brad Henke, John Hawkes

As the film opens (or at least as I arrive in the cinema) director Miranda July 'does' some performance art in the persona of Christine Jesperson: voicing thoughts to her camcorder as she looks through the lens at a series of photos pinned to her wall. At the end of the sequence as she intones some poetic shtick about grace and we cut to a live bird – It calls up the scene in Shrek where the bird explodes into a ball of feathers as Jeff Buckley sings from 'Grace', but it doesn't, and that is the key motif of this film – everything is on the verge of collapse or explosion or both, but somehow something coheres. So it is, I guess, a treatise on grace, no less.

ThE MonSTer REtuRNs to HaUnt OUr DreAMs!!

Review for Film Ireland - original post - Friday, April 07, 2006

King Kong
DIR: Peter Jackson • WRI: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson • PROD: Jan Blenkin, Carolynne Cunningham, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh • DOP: Andrew Lesnie • ED: Jamie Selkirk • DES: Grant Major • CAST: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Thomas Kretschmann, Colin Hanks, Jamie Bell, Evan Parke, Kyle Chandler

ThE MonSTer REtuRNs to HaUnt OUr DreAMs!!!PeTer JackSOns' pOst MoDErn RetRo pAEan to his childhood inspiration is a thrilling rollercoaster of a movie referencing everything from Orson Welles's aborted Heart of Darkness to Bahr and Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness via depression-era montages and Jurassic Park dinosaur chases, and everything else from hEARTbrEAk through HOrrOr. Jackson has long held this project close to his heart - he first tried to make this as a nine year old, and it shows overwhelming incident and detail. You could carp about the dropped subplots and the disappearance of many interesting characters well before the end (and not always through death by misadventure), but human life is only a small thing in this movie.