TELEVISION REVIEW | 'THE UNLOVED'
Channel 4
Lucy (Molly Windsor) doesn’t say much, because she is too busy watching. She has learned to keep her own counsel, to follow closely what is happening around her and to pay attention to all the clues she can pick up. She lives with her father (Robert Carlyle), who clearly loves her but who equally clearly isn’t a good dad. When she comes back empty-handed from an errand, he beats her with his belt. We hear the beating, but don’t see it — but we do see Lucy lying in a stairwell for a night and a day, unable to move. Once she recovers, Lucy has the composure to go to school, sit through classes and eat a hot lunch before telling her teacher what has happened.
Continue reading “Not a Care in the World” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chevolution (2009)
Fortissimo Films
Everyone knows the image this film is about. Everyone might not know who he is or when or where the photo was taken, but he or she knows what the image means. It’s cool, edgy and rebellious. It’s got that little frisson that moves it beyond just another photograph to one of the most reproduced images of all time. It’s so famous that blind items can run in the gossip press about starlets getting their tattoos of it removed. In a London restaurant restroom, a mash-up of the image and the Mona Lisa hangs on the wall. And from its first appearance, it took very little time to morph into shorthand for — well, whatever you want it to mean.
Continue reading “A Warholian Mosaic of an Iconoclast” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Echoes of Home (2007)
Polyfilm Verleih
Folk music has a difficult time of it in this modern world. There’s the need to preserve the old sounds and traditions, but also the need to make them relevant to people now. Without contemporary interest, the music is reduced to museum status and the performers to archivists, but when the music is moved forward into a modern style, it becomes something new and more uncategorizable.
“Echoes of Home” is about three Swiss musicians who are caught between these two conflicting needs. The traditional music of Switzerland is yodelling – the perfect way to ensure sounds and messages are carried across the enormous mountain ranges, and up and down the valley. But this specific need of theirs speaks to something wider within their culture. As demonstrated by the eager mature students featured in an evening class, yodelling seems to be an excellent way for the proper, polite Swiss to really let rip.
Continue reading “Yelp It From the Rooftops” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Disappeared (2009)
Lost Tribe Productions
Johnny Kevorkian’s debut feature is an eerie cross-genre thriller-horror that is sadly let down by its muddled final act. The puzzling denouement is a genuine shame, as for the first hour, Mr. Kevorkian delivers a gritty and intelligent study of the themes of loss and isolation. Matthew (a hugely impressive Harry Treadaway) returns home having been in psychiatric care following the disappearance of his younger brother Tom, and frictions soon arise between him and his father Jake (Greg Wise) as old wounds resurface and the blame game begins. As Matthew digs up the past after hearing Tom’s ghostly voice on a video tape of a police appeal, his world soon begins to unravel.
Continue reading “Keeper of Phantom Brother” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Grocer's Son (2007)
Film Movement
Suddenly we can’t turn around for French paeans to rural life. In 2008, not only did a comedy called "Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Welcome to the Sticks)" smash box-office records to become the most successful French film ever, but "Modern Life" won the Louis Delluc Prize for being the year’s best French film. And now "The Grocer’s Son," which mines what is apparently a very deep vein. It has enough panache that it doesn’t feel past its sell-by date.
Continue reading “Prodigal Son Takes Over Mom-and-Pop Grocery” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Delta (2008)
The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival
When the young female lead in a film is introduced wearing an apron splattered with pig’s blood, it is a sure indication that the next 90 minutes are not likely to send you out of the cinema wiping tears of mirth from your cheeks. So it is with “Delta,” an on the whole downbeat experience, but a very rewarding one for those willing to make the effort.
Continue reading “Forbidden Fruit in the Cement Garden” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chosyu Five (2006)
「長州ファイブ」製作委員会
Japan – a country which fiercely guarded its international isolation until 1852 – has, 160 years later, become a member of the G8, at the top table of nations worldwide. Its genius with software technology, cars and entertainment is feted globally, with products from Walkmans to Game Boys now ubiquitous in Western culture. This success is all the more amazing when we consider modernity was only introduced to Japan sporadically after 1852, with more rapid technological expansion only arriving after 1945. To be alive at this time in Japan was to live through a whirlwind of change, and not just in how Japan managed the outside world. The feudal system was still in place in the 1860s, with clans of samurai controlling different regions similar to Italy’s city-states, and local conflicts breaking out all the time.
Continue reading “Young Men Risk All to Go West” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Now, I… (2009)
chiyuw
In Japan, these young men are called hikikomori. They barricade themselves in their rooms, forbidding other family members from entering, leaving only late at night to use the bathroom or raid food from the fridge. Perhaps they’ll go outside, but only at a time when they’ll run into as few people as possible. The word means “acute social withdrawal” and is a trend that seems to be on the recent increase across Asian Pacific. It seems to affect mostly young men who are disinterested in the pressure cooker of the educational system, but too intelligent to be happy working the unskilled jobs left over for the dropouts. In Britain, such young people are called NEETs (not in education, employment or training), but this doesn’t imply being a shut-in as well. Yasutomo Chikuma certainly has tapped the zeitgeist by choosing this as the topic for his first film, "Now, I…"
Continue reading “Permanent House Arrest With No Conviction” »