Cine Fantastique
It’s the Bradford Film Festival and I’ve been to a few things this week.
Hohokam: Basically a low budget film which wants to be French, in that nothing happens. But it doesn’t happen in stylish and significant ways… unfortunately they’re not French, the story is set in Arizona.
Shotgun Stories: Excellent Arkansan revenge drama, a vendetta that has a surprising and pleasing denoument.
Sounds For Silents (Un chien andalou and The Finishing Touch) Silent films with live accompaniment are great: even mad Spanish surrealist eyeball slashing madness. Laurel and Hardy formed a great, weird second half. The music was composed by students from the Royal Academy.
Brazil: I’m so glad I’ve seen it on the big screen. Prescient, scary, relevant and Gilliam-strange. Braaaazillll…. da da da dee da da da deee….
Cthulu: Well we’re gonna do the Lovecraftian Horror, but the protagonist is going to be gay. And we’ll steal the plot of the wicker man, well we would if we could afford it. Some nice touches, genuinely creepy until the hordes of cthulu stumble onto the beach to claim the world as their own (my gran could have outrun them: and she died a long time ago).
Redacted:Brian de Palma goes all experimental using ‘found footage’ to create a bleak but gripping Iraq story.
XXY: Fifteen year old hermaphrodite struggles with more than the usual teenage sexual issues. Ricardo Darin sleepwalks through the movie, but he’s Ricardo Darin, so he’s still cool.
This is Cinerama: Bill Bryson raved about Cinerama. Frankly, I was bored. Maybe it’s the 50′s Americana, or maybe it was the 20 minutes of Aida that was so static it felt like 2 days. Still the screen’s good.
2001: A Space Odyssey: Being a young’un I hadn’t seen this in the cinema before so the 70mm print, on the massive curved screen of Pictureville (it’s behind the usual screen and is a good third wider) with the sound turned up to 11 was brilliant.
Highights so far: 2001 and Brazil. Lowlight: noticing that so many of the attendees were balding fat men who looked like they should be writing train numbers down and realizing that these are the sort of people who go to the daytime showings in the film festival, and the creeping sensation of ‘one of us, one of us, one of us’ that followed.
Tags: film
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Sometimes I worry about you John…”One of us….”
What do I mean – “sometimes”???
Am off to Sweden for a year – yu both might enjoy a visit – morer details to follow!
Why aren’t you somewhere else by now…..cos you really need to keep out of those “matinee” afternoon! Phil says Hi!!
Carrie B – the wanderer!! xxx