Film | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

Aug 08 2019

Britain, Documentary, Edinburgh, Film, Leith, Scotland, Uncategorized

Edinburgh – The Fringe is balls.

This video (gone viral) nails the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Whoever made it, kudos.

Personally, I’ve always despised the thing. It’s merely an invitation for dumb-as-a-stump tourists to clog up the streets and gaze at the castle with this eternally perplexed idiotic expression as if it were an alien spacecraft. The drinks prices go up, the shows are a shower of shit, and there’s a 400% influx in the number of scruffy art student wankers congregating on street corners like pseudo-bohemian jackals, sharing their very limited ideas (like taking a dump on a canvas) with anyone who will and won’t listen.

We don’t need them. I am not aware of anyone who lives here who actually enjoys this pish. We just tolerate the circus because apparently it brings the money in. I doubt that.

Tagged Edinburgh, Edinburgh Fesitval, Fringe, Scotland, Summer

Aug 03 2019

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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

Waterloo (1970) – nostalgia clouds everything.

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Sadly, I’ve seen this movie more times than I have Barry Lyndon (1975), and this impressive calamity (accidental oxymoron) is what is universally posited as the reason Kubrick never made his Napoleon biopic.

It’s a hell of a logistical achievement, grand scale Abel Gance-like cinema utilising an entire Soviet infantry division; the sheer fact it got made is stupefying. At the same time it’s utterly dreadful, the director wielding his camera with carefree abandon, going from one style to the next like an ADHD child with a Tyco Xmas pressie. And the performances are dire, Rod Steiger’s Napoleon especially. He is constantly bulging his eyeballs, histrionics reaching Nicolas Cage levels. Even more fingernails-down-the-blackboard cringe are his inner monologues, the wee Corsican revealing his every banal thought to the audience.

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Yet it was always on TV, strangely on Sunday afternoons. It remains ‘just one of those things’. I’ll probably see it again (I voluntarily watched it the other day), my own guilty pleasure. As Pauline Kael said, ‘You talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.’

Full horror show here:

Tagged Christopher Plummer, Film, Kubrick, Napoleon, Rod Steiger, Waterloo

Jul 30 2019

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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Technology, Uncategorized

Russell A. Kirsch and the first digital image.

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This is the first digital image ever made or seen. The bloke Kirsch, a computer scientist, converted a photo of his child into binary form with some kind of scanner.

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It’s a terrifying image. The whole affair reminds me of that baby at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

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Film, Movie, Movies, Planes, Technology, Uncategorized, United States

Maverick is back – Top Gun 2.

This came out of nowhere, YouTube losing the plot every so briefly. And it looks crack-a-lacking. Val Kilmer is so far incognito, but Wikipedia informs he does indeed feature. As nostalgia goes, this trailer is dynamite. High-concept 1986 all comes flooding back: Tom Cruise in his macho infancy, Kenny Loggins in his jammies, blokes wearing Aviator shades indoors, motorbikes, ‘inverted’ chat, and … blokes playing volleyball to … Kenny Loggins. Incredible scenes.

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Architecture, Art, Britain, Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Scotland, Stanley Kubrick, Uncategorized

A Clockwork Balgreen.

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Visions of A Clockwork Orange (1971) every time I run the Balgreen gauntlet for the tram to York Place, Alex DeLarge and his droogies bashing in a poor drunken hobo for kicks. Such ultra-violence has probably happened half a dozen times in this foreboding underpass, but without the costumes and long eyelashes.

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Tagged A Clockwork Orange, Balgreen, Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Kubrick, Trams, Tunnel

Jun 19 2019

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Britain, Cinema, Edinburgh, Film, Movie, Movies, Scotland, Tourism, Transport, Travel, Uncategorized

Mark Renton Street, Edinburgh.

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Calton Road this afternoon. It struck me today that I’ve never once snapped this Mark-Renton-gets-run-over spot, the manic laugh he offers to the driver an iconic snippet from Trainspotting (1996).

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I was an employee (an actual ‘trainspotter’, no less) of East Coast Railways a decade ago and used to sneak out the back of Waverley Station to this Renton hideaway for a cheeky fag and a can of Monster, my walkie-talkie in hand just in case my absence was noted. Come to think of it, 30% of my ‘working day’ consisted of either this filmic interlude or listening to Kanye West tunes in the ScotRail bogs.

“Where are you?”

“Just having a shite, I’ll be on the platform in a minute.”

Those were the days.

Tagged Calton Road, Edinburgh, Film, Mark Renton, Movie, Scotland, Train station, Trainspotting, Waverley

May 25 2019

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Architecture, Building, Construction, Edinburgh, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Scotland, Tourism, Uncategorized

Scott Monument, Edinburgh.

Monument final Image with adjusted curves

Took this snap with a Tesco Hudl tablet hoisted on a wee micro tripod, crawling on the floor as some tourists stood bemused at my ‘antics’. It was during this moment that I recalled a troupe of Americans got stuck in the monument’s staircase on their attempted ascent to the top. It was Edinburgh’s own version of In Bruges (2008). What a hoot.

Tagged Edinburgh, In Bruges, Princes Street, Scotland, Scott Monument, Tourists

May 12 2019

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Architecture, Art, Cinema, Construction, Documentary, Film, Movie, Movies, Photography, Soviet Union, Technology, Television, Tourism, Travel, Uncategorized, USSR

Chernobyl – TV mini-series.

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Shot in Fabijoniškės, Lithuania, this 5-episode mini-series by HBO is a cracker so far (one episode in). It puzzles me how there’s not, to my knowledge, been a major TV series or film about Chernobyl until now. One wouldn’t expect this would come from the Russian slice of the former Soviet Union, but you’d think Ukraine (its ‘western-oriented’ regions) would have put something together.

Documentaries have been galore, the main theme that the disaster was indicative of the pitfalls of communism, and a metaphor for the swift end of the USSR in the Gorbachev era of glasnost and perestroika.

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This is mind-blowing, though, a real-life 28 Days Later (2002) with wild animals replacing the ‘infected’:

I know a good lad I met in Budapest, a fellow traveller named Paul. He’s the only person I’ve met who’s wandered into Pripyat’s Zone of Alienation with a Geiger counter. I have an epic image of him strolling about in a Walter White biohazard suit, with a beer hat atop the garb.

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Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Leon (1994) is one of the best shot (no pun) movies ever made.

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Leon (1994) is a Sergio Leone aesthetic with a chunk of Lolita chucked in the works. The dodgy-as-fuck paedo spectacle aside, its images are pure art, Widescreen as perfection. Luc Besson is an aficionado for the inchoate screenplay, but as a pure thriller this really reaches the summit. And seldom has a movie set in New York City had literally nothing to do with New York City; it could be set in Marseilles, Edinburgh, Reykjavik. There’s something to be said for that, such are filmmakers’ obsession with the place. Personally, I don’t get it. I’ve been twice and wasn’t overly impressed; it felt like a cauldron of reprobates. And loud people roam the streets clutching fast food. Awful.

It’s just a cool-as-milk film, visuals off the scale. It doesn’t matter that the ‘Italian’ assassin sounds like Charles de Gaulle on methadone; it’s all about the framing. And Gary Oldman off his tits.

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Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

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Scorsese’s last movie of the ’90s is curiously his weakest work. It’s a lazy narrative that seems enamoured with MTV standards/trends of cinematography. It also suffers from ‘The Affliction’: the liberal use of popular music tracks to paper over deficiencies in the script.

It’s a promising concept: Nicolas Cage’s paramedic, physically and emotionally drained, drives around an early ’90s Manhattan – by all accounts a crack-strewn cesspit at that time – in search of the high of saving a life, and a broader redemption as he’s haunted by those he couldn’t save.

By the one-hour mark the picture sadly has nowhere to go. There are a few moments of transcendence, particularly the final shot, but it’s all rather boring, from the cartoon character supporting roles to Cage’s … bored performance. One suspects it could have worked better as a small-scale picture, Mean Streets (1973) with a defibrillator.

The life of an ambulance driver has never looked so torporific. One of the very few Scorsese pictures I’ll pass on should it ever crop up again.

Tagged Ambulance, Bringing out the Dead, Film, Martin Scorsese, Movie, Nicolas Cage, Nineties, Paul Schrader, Scorsese

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Category Archives: Film

Edinburgh – The Fringe is balls.

Waterloo (1970) – nostalgia clouds everything.

Russell A. Kirsch and the first digital image.

Maverick is back – Top Gun 2.

A Clockwork Balgreen.

Mark Renton Street, Edinburgh.

Scott Monument, Edinburgh.

Chernobyl – TV mini-series.

Leon (1994) is one of the best shot (no pun) movies ever made.

Bringing Out the Dead (1999).