Category: Film

DocoBanksy Gets A Screening

The DocoPhone starts ringing. I dive for it, my responses hard-wired after years of loyal, unquestioning service to a playful, capricious master. 

I lift the handset, and listen while it clicks and purrs–the line connects through a bewildering array of redirects, anonymisers and scramblers. The call could be coming from the other side of the world, or three doors down. There’s no way of knowing, and believe me, smarter people than me have tried. There’s one last ear-shredding blast of modem noise and then…

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All Rise: X&HT Saw The Dark Knight Rises

Right-wing radio host and all-round screw top Rush Limbaugh thinks that the new Batman film has an explicit anti-Republican message. His reasoning? The villain of the piece is called Bane, and Presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his fortune through a company called Bain Capital. It's just all so clear and simple.

We shouldn't laugh too loudly at Limbaugh, easy as it might be. In some ways he's on the money. The Dark Knight Rises has plenty to say about power, corruption and lies. But as with all of Christopher Nolan's films, things are never as straight-forward as they appear.

The spoilers after this point are numerous and mighty. Be warned.

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A Swinging Time: X&HT saw The Amazing Spider-Man

Comics are soap opera. Characters don’t change. If they die, it’s hardly ever permanent. Their origins are constantly retold, reinforced, raked over for any new tiny scrap of resonance. Some critics have griped that The Amazing Spider-man, the fourth movie about Peter Parker and his penchant for going out in red Underoos, is a rehash of Sam Raimi’s 2002 film.

They’re missing the point. This kind of thing happens in the funny papers all the time. 

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Sheets For Screens: A Night At The BraineHownd Awards

Mark Brown paces around outside the Hideaway Bar. The brim of his trademark fedora is low, but the shadow it casts can’t disguise the worried look on his face. His go-to guy has bailed on him at short notice. Which means that, if the emergency back up plan doesn’t pan out, he’s going to have to find a way of running his popular film night without a projector. 

He glances back at the rapidly filling bar behind him. He’s had better days. 

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Three Flash Film Reviews

I spent my Jubilee bank holiday in the most appropriate way possible: avoiding any and all Jubilee celebrations. I think the flotilla might have been on in the background while I was running a salsa playlist through Spotify. At least, I seem to have a memory of a very damp choir and a lot of boats moving extremely slowly down the Thames. Must have been riveting.

Anyway. As a result of successful avoidance tactics, I spent a lot of time in the cinema this week. Rather than drag out three long posts (in one particular example it would be very easy indeed to spin off into major rant mode) I thought I’d do a more condensed version. Three films, 200 words a piece. Here we go.

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The View From the Marché

The announcement of the winning films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival left me as ever with the feeling that an opportunity had been missed. There was no sense of excitement about the event. Prizes went to delicate two-handers filmed in single rooms, or wry Scottish comedies. Where was the thrill of cinema, the transgressive, the sheer lunacy? 

Fortunately, those of us who have been to the Festival know that the big premieres at the Palais only tell a small fraction of the whole story, and the underbelly of the Festival is ripe with oddities. 

In the first of our exclusive Cannes reports for Excuses And Half Truths, Stuart Wright shows us his picks for the films that will be lighting up the Croisette this time next year. 

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Fairytale Of Le Havre

Sometimes, it’s tough not to come across as a film snob. I try to be inclusive and open – honest, really, I do. But in a pub earlier this week with MovieBrit Kate, I found myself uttering these immortal words about Aki Kaurismäki’s latest film, Le Havre: “I thought it was great. But you’d hate it.”

In my defence, I know Kate’s tastes. She has no patience for subtitled misery, and my delight in depressing foreign movies usually ends up with me on the wrong end of the finest display of lip-curling this side of Elvis.

But I do think I’m on safe ground when I say that Kaurismäki’s films are not for everyone. They’re deadpan, deliberately paced (oh, alright, slow) and deal with small stories set in poor locations acted out by sad, ugly people.

Tempted?
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Introducing The Band: Against The Auteur Theory

When you start making film, you come to realise very quickly (or at least you do if you have the faintest scrap of self-awareness) that the auteur theory is bullshit. The very idea of a film being “by” one person is simply untrue.

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Gods And Monsters – X&HT Saw Avengers Assemble

Superheroes are mythology. They stand above us, their concerns otherworldly, epic. The fate of worlds rests on their shoulders. They have little time for us, the people they pledge to protect. We get in the way. We’re cannon fodder. However much they claim to care, superheroes pledge their fealty to larger concepts than we can embody. They owe allegiance (and often claim ownership) to flags, cities, whole worlds. The people that give life to those ideals are messy little details, and boy does it ever get annoying just when you’re about to deliver the coup de grace to Dr. Villain and all of a sudden there’s a bus full of schoolkids that’s about to drop off a cliff.

And heaven help any mortal that a superhero chooses as a companion. A life of peril and an early, messy death awaits. The flimsy protection of a secret identity is no help once the mask inevitably comes off. I could reel off a loooong list of companions, wives and lovers that have lost their lives while their super-powered paramours have wept a single, perfect tear and moved on to the next battle.

And goddamit, Avengers Assemble does nothing to break that poisonous cycle.

 

(Are there spoilers after the cut? Are there EVER, True Believer!)

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