Category: Film

The Word is Out On Frightfest From The Gruesome Twosome

This weekend is one of the most important in the horror calendar. The August Bank Holiday is home to Frightfest, the five-day smorgasbord of shivers, the feast of fear, the cornucopia of chills that sits at the bleeding heart of London’s Leicester Square.  

Frightfest the 13th is bigger than ever, with nearly 100 films spread over five days and three screens. So the question is, how by all the nether gods do you navigate all that? What’s your gameplan, pilgrim?

Fret not, fear fan. There is a way.

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Happy Families: X&HT Saw Splice

Coincidence fascinates me. I mean, I don’t believe there’s anything in it. It’s clearly just my brain mapping meaning and pattern onto unrelated events. But it’s still fun when it happens.

As a serial procrastinator, it’s taken me the best part of six months to get engineers out to look at the stuttery HD playback on our plusbox. When I finally did so, it took less than five minutes to sort, and I was left with a more open schedule for my day than I’d planned. So, I had a bit of a browse on our newly sprightly V+ feed, and found a block of free movies, including one I’d missed on its limited UK release–Vincenzo Natali’s bio-sci-horror Splice.

The coincidence kicked in as the credits rolled and I realise that the film starred Sarah Polley, director of the most excellent Take This Waltz that I raved about earlier in the week. The two films could not be more different. Take This Waltz is a delicate, precise parody of chick flick clichés. Splice is… Well, it’s bugshit crazy, in a very good way indeed.

Continue reading Happy Families: X&HT Saw Splice

This Is Not A Love Song: X&HT Saw Take This Waltz

In a lot of ways, romantic fiction is all about making excuses for infidelity. There are no end of stories out there that feature a main character trapped in a loveless marriage, only to be swept off her feet and out of the door by a dashing hero archetype. The spineless schlub of a husband shrugs, smiles and lets her go, content to let the caged bird fly. She's a free spirit and she deserves more than he can offer because… because she's the heroine, OK?

Sarah Polley's amazing new film Take This Waltz applies an overdue stress-test to the cliches, with a simplicity and honesty that's rare in the chick-flick world.

Continue reading This Is Not A Love Song: X&HT Saw Take This Waltz

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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