Cinema | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Feb 04 2019

Cinema, Film, Medieval, Middle Ages, Monarchy, Movies, Scotland, Uncategorized, United Kingdom

Outlaw King (2018).

lead_720_405 This feature-length Netflix release garnered mixed reviews (63% on Rotten Tomatoes) but I was quite impressed by it. The film doesn’t have the romantic sweep and scope of Braveheart (1995) but it excels in details – its gritty and grim depiction of Medieval warfare and the violent politics at the heart of the Wars of Scottish Independence.

The movie is brooding and deadly serious, and, shockingly, well acted. Chris Pine might just be the only Yank capable of pulling off a half-decent Scots accent. Every previous attempt at a Scottish brogue made by an actor – save Jonny Lee Miller in Trainspotting (1996) – has been disastrous, Groundskeeper Willie in the flesh. Pine thankfully doesn’t go OTT.

outlaw-king-cut-700x321

There’s no Battle of Bannockburn (1314) here, the movie acting as a sort of Batman Begins-esque ‘making of’ Robert the Bruce, the first act of a broader narrative. It’s decent – no superheroes in capes or one-liners, just chain mail and chopped heads. Proper carnage. The Glory Days.

Tagged Edward I, King, Middle Ages, Outlaw King, Robert Bruce, Scotland, Wars of Independence, William Wallace

Jan 30 2019

Leave a comment

Britain, Cinema, Documentary, First World War, Germany, Photography, Uncategorized, United Kingdom, World War One

The Great War (1964).

60934297b9eb5b33b74ff62de4022d2a

I finally got around to viewing this epic 26-episode series from 1964. It’s an incredible compendium of WWI in all its participants’ hubris and misguided adventurism, and is majestically narrated by Sir Michael Redgrave (this bloke sounds more Laurence Olivier than Laurence Olivier himself).

This is how to do a documentary – with sweeping scope and intricate detail, no half measures. With terrifying archive footage and an expert use of primary sources read by contemporary actors, as well as interviews with those serving on the military and civilian fronts, it set the benchmark for such works, acting as a precursor to The World at War (1973).

The wonders of the Internet ensure it is free to binge-watch.

Tagged BBC, Documentary, First World War, The Great War, WWI

Jan 16 2019

1 Comment

Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

mv5bmdkzytvmzjitmdu1zs00nmu1lthlzgqtmjzmotdiztg4yzcwxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvymjk3ntuyotc@._v1_

1999 produced some truly cracking movies, dare I say two-in-one arthouse entertainments. They were from the sunny prism of the Clinton-era dot-com bubble, but laden with doom, premonitions of a darker age, and concerned with the very nature of reality itself – its comforting distractions of material consumption and conformism. 9/11 changed everything; apathy was suddenly pummeled. The Y2K bug turned out to be fuck all and instead actual shit hit the fan. These movies – American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix – capture that pre-9/11 unease with elan.

the_matrix_530

They’re films of their era yet transcend the age because of the superior artistry on display. It’s not exactly fashionable today to laud the acting chops of Kevin Spacey, but he is superior in American Beauty, middle-aged melancholy defined as he squirms his way around suburban hell. The Matrix heralded a new dawn in special effects – bullet time and all that – yet was also one of the first pictures to probe with caution the digital landscape, 20 years before possessing a talking robot called Alexa was considered a normal pursuit.

In Fight Club, peculiarly a flop at the time (the pitfalls of bad marketing, they say) we find an Americana in the throes of an existential meltdown, angst-ridden males looking for something to fight for, a purpose or quest, amidst the dreariness of normalcy. Every generation needs a war.

americanbeautyfeat

Though products of corporations, American Beauty, Fight Club, and The Matrix do not hesitate to bite the proverbial hand that feeds. There is a deep skepticism and paranoia running through them, that of the office as enslavement and deindividuation, the Michel Foucault Panopticon theme quite rampant. There’s also the sanguine at work here, that with mental and physical self-sacrifice and by disconnecting oneself from the cultural hegemony there is light, self-awareness, … happiness.

Leave a comment

Britain, Cinema, Data, Mobile phones, Movies, Technology, Uncategorized

O2 outage – premonitions of Skynet.

O2-outage-map-e1544087588224

25 million customers losing the plot over an ‘outage’ due to “faulty software”. Shit came to a standstill because we can’t function without data.

It reminded me of an episode at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange when their electronic ‘stuff’ stopped working so they had to add up drinks order prices with a calculator; it was too diabolically stressful for them and the masses were fuming.

The technology ends up, to paraphrase the movie Fight Club (1999), owning us. James Cameron was right and Skynet will be very real. Just wait until O2 becomes self-aware and hacks the nuclear codes.

1_2_G8dH3ieFWWhKjxU5QMAw

Leave a comment

Britain, Cinema, Film, First World War, Germany, Movies, Photography, Scotland, United Kingdom, World War One

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

download

Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.

Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.

And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.

Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.

Leave a comment

Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

Phil Collins is in Hook (1991).

Bf8m9XQIIAAsl2F

I am fistpumping like Nadal today because I reached the magic 10. That’s 10 folk to whom I’ve now disclosed the crucial trivia that Phil Collins is the cop in Hook (1991). It took me until the age of 28 to realise this. It was a Saul on the road to Damascus moment.

Phil Collins immediately elevates a film a couple of stars.

Tagged Hook, Movies, Phil Collins, Spielberg

Oct 09 2018

Leave a comment

Cinema, Film, Movies, Oscars, World War Two, WWII

The Thin Red Line (1998) is from another world.

Original Cinema Quad Poster - Movie Film Posters

Fuck knows what Terrence Malick was doing between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). Malick goes period again, the slaughter of Guadalcanal complete with a who’s who of Hollywood ‘big names’. One could be forgiven for thinking this a contemporary The Longest Day (1962), a spot-the-star marathon. Malick clearly used these ‘stars’ as a means for making this entirely personal ontological exercise.

The least political war movie ever, the battle starts and ends and the company depart, characters question their place in the grand scheme of things, quite the number die. The cinematography is breathtaking, the score transcendental. It’s the closest ‘commercial’ motion picture to extended movie montage, à la Koyaanisqatsi (1982). There are no stock good guys and bad guys or retreading of traditional war movie tropes.

The+Thin+Red+Line

Martin Scorsese summed it up quite well: “The Thin Red Line” is so important. You could come in the middle of it, you can watch it. It’s almost like an endless picture. It has no beginning and no end. People say, “Well, sometimes I can’t tell whose voiceover it is.” It doesn’t matter. It’s everybody’s voiceover.”

Tagged Film, Guadalcanal, James Jones, Movie, Pacific, Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line, World War Two, WWII

Sep 16 2018

Leave a comment

Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

The Predator (2018) is hell in a cinema.

I’ve had shites that were more enjoyable than The Predator (2018), and one time in 2014 in Tokyo I shat out nothing but green water for 11 straight days. How can you go from peak Arnie circa 1987 to this garbage? I thought right-wing US governments were meant to bring about a seismic change in film discourse? Like, proper satirical stuff masquerading as flag-waving propaganda. Apparently not.

This film was so fucking atrocious I fell asleep for half an hour, spilled Coca-Cola on my £11 Sainsbury’s jeans, and had a dream about Warwick Davis dropkicking Kenny Baker into the Death Star. My movie-watching colleague had to wake me up with smelling salts.

Worst film I’ve seen in years.

Tagged 80s, Arnie, Cinema, Eighties, Film, Predator, Shite

Aug 28 2018

Leave a comment

Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

Halloween (1978) at 40.

720x405x37f1e-halloween.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Y_rnjmMpBK

Halloween (1978) is always watched on Halloween in my Gorgie palace of peculiarities. It’s tradition, much like how Jingle All The Way (1996) – the best worst Christmas movie ever – is viewed on Christmas Day with a bottle of hard liquor artfully concocted in a budget supermarket car park. It’s 40 years now that John Carpenter’s revolutionary horror has been kicking about. It has unfortunately spawned an absolute smörgåsbord of pale imitators; almost every horror in a multiplex today uses Halloween (1978) as the template. This is, however, a common theme throughout genre cinema. Die Hard (1988), for example, takes the same role for action movies (Die Hard on a boat, Die Hard on a plane, etc).

The film has the creepiest atmosphere and is just masterfully shot; one gets the feeling that every single frame was storyboarded to perfection à la Hitchcock. There’s a complete lack of gore – it’s not needed, and that old cliche about imagination trumping the visceral is on full display here. And it’s that William Shatner Captain Kirk death mask. Who the hell came up with that? Michael Myers sans the mask just wouldn’t work. Mass entertainment auteur cinema, and the original ‘slasher’ if we place Psycho (1960) in the high-art basket, Halloween (1978) makes Halloween more Halloween.

Tagged 1978, Cinema, Film, Halloween, Horror, John Carpenter

Jul 03 2018

Leave a comment

Cinema, Film, Movies, Uncategorized

The Truman Show – 20 years on.

The Truman Show (1998) didn’t capture the zeitgeist; it largely predicted it. Much like how Scarface (1983) birthed glorified Gangsta rap – present hip hop artists unaware that Montana was a satire laughing at the emergence of the culture – it was the Jim Carrey ‘serious role’ vehicle which presaged the Big-Brother-by-choice bantz we now have. The eponymous ‘reality’ TV show, a zillion other ‘hidden camera’ programmes populated by tarted-up bimbos (yes, including The Apprentice), the omniscience of social media, the shameless supervision from the NSA and GCHQ. It’s as if Truman is a summation of 20 years of snooping, willfully and not, but before it happened.

I can’t even count the number of times someone has said to me they feel like they’re living a real-life Truman Show, such has been the ridiculousness of their day. Well, if directed actors and MacGuffins aren’t out there to construct the drama, you can bet you’re being watched, often by choice – think of all the selfies at crime scenes, the Snapchatting of break-ins, check-ins at weddings/funerals.

the-truman-show-anniversary-embed-03

The Truman Show nailed the lot – the shallowness, the vanity, the essential neediness of modern society to not only feign happiness in its absence but inject meaning everywhere, to create a drama when none is needed.

And that Philip Glass score lifted from Powaqqatsi (1998) is quite the cracker:

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Category Archives: Cinema

Outlaw King (2018).

The Great War (1964).

The 1999 movie vault is something special and scary.

O2 outage – premonitions of Skynet.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

Phil Collins is in Hook (1991).

The Thin Red Line (1998) is from another world.

The Predator (2018) is hell in a cinema.

Halloween (1978) at 40.

The Truman Show – 20 years on.