Tag / review

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Ungodly (2007)

Videovista has my review of a somewhat uneven but intriguing serial killer film by Thomas Dunn.

The site also has my rather more negative review of terrible British Horror flick Tormented (2009).  A film that, I suspect, actually improves if you watch the DVD extras first as you get to see how profoundly unlikeable some of the cast members are before they are brutally murdered

that watching the extras first probably improves the viewing experience as you get to see how profoundly unlikeable the young actors are and then you get to see them brutally murderer.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Second Wind (2007)

Videovista has my review of the rather puzzling remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966).  On paper, this is a bold and interesting production : it has big names, it has striking cinematography and it has a director who is experienced enough to remember the good old days of French crime films.

The result is a film that does not quite work but it is, at least, an ambitious failure (and the story and characters are pretty much idiot-proof anyway).

by Jonathan M

The September Issue (2009) – The Lair of the Clockwork God

Due to a lack of money, a lack of time, a lack of people to impress and a lack of a body that someone would want to make clothes for, I have little interest in what is fashionable.  I dress in pretty much the same way I did when I was 14 and I think I still have some of the same socks.  As a result, you might expect me to have little interest in R. J. Cutler’s documentary about the construction of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine.  Well, you might very well expect that, but you would be utterly wrong.  It is precisely because I have no interest in what is fashionable that I find the world of fashion so profoundly compelling. Films about the fashion industry are explorations of another culture completely different to my own.  A culture with a good deal of impact upon the world that we all inhabit.  Because of its power and the strangeness of its people and institutions, the fashion industry is a fascinating subject for a film.  Regardless of whether it is explored through mockery (as with Robert Altman’s 1994 Pret-a-Porter), hagiography (as with Rodolphe Marconi’s 1997 Lagerfeld Confidential) or thinly veiled contempt (as with David Frankel’s 2006 The Devil Wears Prada).

R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue approaches the subject with a mixture of awe and mockery but, despite some initial setbacks, the film provides some genuine insight into how it is that the world of fashion functions and why it is that it has so much power over our society.

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by Jonathan M

District 9 (2009) – Stand By For Level 3

Summer 2009 saw the birth of an interesting piece of terminology.  Reflecting the success of titles such as Iron Man (2008), Terminator Salvation (2009) and the Transformers series, “robots hitting each other” has become a short-hand way of referring to the kind of shallow and crassly commercial genre film-making that is currently dominating Hollywood release schedules.  Films not merely unintelligent but actually hostile to thought.  Films designed to eliminate critical distance through the sensorial onslaught of bloated running times packed with explosions, violence and spectacle.  Films that are the cinematic equivalent to the US using loud music to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican embassy during the invasion of Panama.  Given a cultural climate in which Hollywood is essentially using psychological warfare against its own customers, it is only natural that many of us should yearn for something more.  Ever since the first trailers dropped, Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 has presented itself as a summer film with that little something extra : Science fiction that rises above robots hitting each other to become genuinely thought provoking and intelligent.  However, the reality of District 9 is that what ideas it has are used up in the first twenty minutes, after which the film collapses into a mire of clumsy metaphors, poorly written characters and the kind of plot you would find only in the most hollow-skulled of video games.

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by Jonathan M

Passe Ton Bac D’Abord (1979) – The Ordered Nature of Chaotic Lives

For his fifth feature film, Maurice Pialat returned to northern France to take a second look at the disaffected youth that inspired him to make his first full-length film L’Enfance Nue (1968).  A spiritual successor to that film, Graduate First initially comes across as a work that is almost free form.  A work that takes its pseudo-documentary, cinema verite stylings to their logical conclusion by refusing to place a coherent narrative onto the lives of Pialat’s characters.  However, as with Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972), Passe Ton Bac D’Abord is a film that draws upon a deep, narrative structure that suggests that, while the lives of these young people may seem chaotic and random, these are the kinds of lives that people have always lived.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The House by the Cemetery (1981)

Videovista has my review of Lucio Fulci’s Quella Villa accanto al Cimitero.

What surprised me most about this film was how genuinely weird it was.  By the early 1980s, the Italian film industry was doing a pretty god job of milking the ideas from successful genre films.  In some cases, they even released unofficial sequels to American films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and even Terminator (1984) – more about which can be found in the interesting if rather bizarre videologs put out by The Cinema Snob – Fulci was very much a part of this tradition and The House by the Cemetery was a part of a series of zombie films he made.  However, with little money and much repetition of subject matter, these Italian exploitation films had to find someway of getting themselves noticed and this seems to have spawned a culture of genre-bending where ideas were crammed together in interesting ways regardless of whether or not they made sense.

This hot house of creativity stands in stark contrast with the stagnant and moribund culture of gay indie cinema.  As proof, Videovista has my review of Chip Hale’s Mulligans (2008).  A review which marks round 273 in my on-going battle with TLA Releasing.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Genova (2008)

Videovista has my review of Michael Winterbottom’s Genova.

I was not entirely convinced by the film and I thought its ending was a real betrayal of the film’s otherwise interesting concept (family drifts apart after death of mother).  It was interesting to watch and write about the film immediately after Pialat’s Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble as I think Pialat and Winterbottom depict their relationships in ways that are diametrically opposed : Pialat gives us the spectacular views in a mundane setting while Winterbottom gives us the trips to the supermarket in an exotic and alienating landscape.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972)

Videovista has my review of Maurice Pialat’s splendid We Won’t Grow Old Together.

I absolutely adored this film, so much so that I went out and purchased the rest of the Pialat films that Masters of Cinema/Eureka have released.  Aside from the fantastic performances and the brutality of the relationship dynamic on display, I was also struck by how much Pialat’s style is reminiscent of that of Claude Chabrol.  Keep an eye out for more Pialat pieces in the near future.

by Jonathan M

Inglorious Basterds (2009) – Inglorious Narrative

I feel, in the words of Malcolm X as though I have been bamboozled, led astray and run amok.  I refer, of course, to the trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009).  When it first filtered out at the beginning of the summer, the Guardian devoted a blog post to it referring to it as one of the worst trailers ever made and it was difficult to disagree with that assessment at the time.  Having just got rid of a government who resorted to arguing semantics when addressing allegations of torture, it seemed tasteless in the extreme to produce a film that seemed to be all about torture.  Torture not as a necessity to save lives but torture as an expression of basic natural justice.  Torture as funny and entertaining.  The trailer even included Eli Roth, one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘torture porn’ sub-genre.  However, the film I saw is not about torture and it certainly isn’t about cartoonish violence and stylised action.  It is a film about talking.  Just talking.  And therein lies its greatest successes as well as its greatest shortcomings.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Orphan (2009)

I went to see Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan over the weekend and found it to be a huge amount of fun.  Firstly, because it has a script that is properly character-based and secondly, because it reminds me enormously of an old favourite : Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992).

THE ZONE has my review.

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