“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” – Ingmar Bergman.
“I have always admired him, and I wish I could be a equally good filmmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience.” – Steven Spielberg
Okay, “Elephant” is a film inspired by the Columbine shootings, and shows a regular high school day ending in a similar harrowing incident. The film is shot beautifully, with some huge (and technically amazing) tracking shots, that follow several different students on their individual journeys throughout the school. They serve to build up a picture of a vibrant high school full of life, and really put you in to the shoes of some of the characters.
The fantastic Warp Films has brought us some more goodies with a fantastic new(ish) music video and more promised to come. Richard Ayoade (who acted in and directed the hilarious and underrated “Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place”) directs an awesome video for the Arctic Monkey’s “Fluorescent Adolescent” in which a gang of clowns and some East End gangsters beat each other up in a burnt out industrial estate. There is something poetic about slowmo violence, particularly when it involves clowns.
Kind of reminded me of those classic Trigger Happy TV sketches with the guys dressed as dogs who beat each other up. Absurd Violence.
Tatsuyuki Tanaka is a big animator in Japan – he worked as a key animator on Akira (pretty much the biggest Japanese animated movie ever), and has done work on music videos, short films and adverts.
Prewarning: This article contains spoilers for the film “True Romance” – watch the film before reading this, as obviously seeing the scene within the context of the entire film is very important. Also this movie uses some fairly strong racist language (much of which is within this scene) but is not, in any way, racist (the context, and reasoning for the language is revealed in this scene analysis if there were any doubts!). If you’ve already seen the movie then great – give the scene a rewatch and lets have a closer look at what makes it so great.
The upcoming adaptation of “Beowulf” is easily my most anticipated film of the moment. For a start it is about time this story had a decent adaptation, a major feature production that ISN’T rubbish. Decent adaptations of the classic Old English saga have been very thin on the ground – the only one I remember enjoying was the “Animated Epics: Beowulf” version for TV. But it was a TV short, not a feature. Beowulf is dark, epic fantasy before fantasy even existed, and it has heaps of potential to be an all round awesome feature film (potential that has not yet been realised). It also looks like they are including the third act of the story, a section that has been frequently omitted from past adaptations, which is great, as cutting it out is like cutting out the last book of “Lord of the Rings”.
“Imprint” is Takashi Miike’s entry to the “Masters of Horror” series that ran in early 2006. His entry was banned in America, but aired over here in the UK on a little channel called Bravo - however not wishing to line Rupert Murdock’s pockets (and not being able to afford to, even if I did) I missed it. Finally, and with great anticipation, I managed to seek it out.
John Woo’s “A Better Tomorrow” is one of my favourite films, while it may not be the best example to illustrate his action artistry it illustrates his skill as a filmmaker and storyteller perfectly. The story itself is a classic emotional tale of gangster redemption: Mark and Ho are partners in crime, gangster bosses and best friends. Life is great (Ho even managing to conceal his profession from his cop brother Kit) until one day a job goes foul, Ho is banged up in prison and Mark gets crippled trying to avenge him. One prison montage later and Ho is released to find his father topped by rival gangsters, his brother hates his guts, and his best friend Mark is working for peanuts downtrodden by the same gang he was once a boss of. Now the two of them must get out and play it straight, but will the gang let them go and will Kit ever forgive Ho?
