Films you've seen lately

[Flosshilde]

. The rules keep morphing, so future guidelines may not seem bizarre to you.

Oh, I'm sure they will be.

[Anna]

Here in the sticks we don't get Mr. Turner until the end of the month. They are anticipating the popularity as on the last day of screening it's being shown three times! Has anyone seen Effie Gray? Tomorrow will be my last chance if I decide to go.

[aeolium]

We liked Mr Turner, very much.

... and this despite too many enthusiastic reviews and breathless poster quotes (“supremely enjoyable!”) and my default dislike for "our smuggest director", Mike Leigh. It really is splendid, a properly adult film.

I actually saw this film yesterday and also greatly enjoyed it, perhaps helped by knowing very little about the artist's life beforehand. There were some wonderful supporting performances especially by Marion Bailey as Mrs Booth and Leigh-stalwart Ruth Sheen as Turner's first mistress Sarah Danby. Poor old (or rather young) Ruskin took a bit of a pasting.

There is a dissenting opinion here. I suppose Leigh would argue that he was making a film, not a documentary, and that watching the painstaking work of an artist labouring over a work for long periods does not make for great cinema.

I also thought Leigh's other foray into period biography, Topsy-Turvy, was really enjoyable*. Perhaps, for his next project, he should have a go at Dickens (Allan Corduner in title role?)

*Edit: apparently Leigh will be directing The Pirates of Penzance for ENO next May

[rauschwerk]

Here in the sticks we don't get Mr. Turner until the end of the month. They are anticipating the popularity as on the last day of screening it's being shown three times! Has anyone seen Effie Gray? Tomorrow will be my last chance if I decide to go.

I saw a good few films last month and enjoyed this one a great deal. Only A Most Wanted Man gave me more pleasure.

[Honoured Guest]

Nightcrawler, anyone? By the way, it's not a biopic of Matthew Sweet.

[Belgrove]

I rather enjoyed Mr Turner. (Was Timothy Spall cast on the basis of his adverts for Wikes?) I'm not sure it contains any great insights into what made Turner tick, but it's splendid Dickensian fare, populated by caricatures and grotesques, but a tad too 'heritage' for my taste.

In answer to Honoured Guest, Nightcrawler is a much more interesting and resonant movie with an astonishing performance from Jake Gyllenhaal, part ambulance-chasing ghoul, part idiot savant, with a dash of sociopath thrown in. It's a queasy satire on the barrel-scraping end of TV news coverage in LA. Like Network for the 21st century. The humour is as black as pitch. Prepare to be offended.

[muzzer]

I've just seen Birdman

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2562232/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 

, which I was expecting to find completely OTT but really enjoyed. Out at home early Jan, stick it in the diary.

[Belgrove]

Insofar as Christopher Nolan's Interstellar makes numerous visual, plot and thematic references (and straight rip-offs) to Kubrick's 2001, it is that film with which it is best compared, for it is insufficiently different to be considered of itself. It falls short despite the superior technology that can be employed nowadays. Interstellar uses its actors in a more emotional and less analytical way than did 2001, indeed there is an awful lot of weeping going on among the principals, but I found Matthew McConaughey's Texan drawl difficult to discern above the monotonous, minimalist and intrusive score of Hans Zimmer, whose dull music is all over movies like a rash (there's a clodhoppingly unsubtle reference to Also Sprach... ).

I guess the thread running through each of the film's three sections is the consequences of separation, both physical and emotional, and how the protagonists can get back in touch, albeit through the relativity of space and time. This is interesting and makes for an intriguing number of twists, not least on the paranormal. Where it does succeed is in conveying the desolation of the universe, and the extent to which Earth is a very special island refuge from that emptiness. There are some genuinely startling visuals, the most astonishing being the interior of a black-hole, where space and time are distorted into some construct of Escher as viewed through an infinitely regressing hall of mirrors.

It's a long movie but has enough ideas, thrills, spills and wonders to keep one constantly engaged. The uncredited star of the movie is gravity, indeed it could have been titled such had not the vacuous and feather-lite offering of last year pipped it to the post. Wondrous though Interstellar is, it does not have the wonders, the cool intellectual rigour and visual majesty of 2001, and that had much better music too.

[bb]

We are still trying to work out what 2001: A Space Odyssey is about!



Is it you on the laptop, or behind, or more likely, in front? Winter Sleep is brilliant, the sort of film you think that it would be impossible to make! Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s extraordinary Palme d’Or-winner blends a daringly digressive and extended narrative with the uneasy intimacy and incisive bite of a Bergman chamberwork. Retired actor Aydin (Bilginer) lives with his young wife Nihal (Sözen) and divorcee sister Necla (Akbag) at his boutique hotel in remote Cappadocia; generally preoccupied with committing whatever comes into his head to a local newspaper column, he leaves any business with his late father’s tenants to his manager. Then a boy hurls a stone at his car, upsetting his routine... Ceylan has long been an insightful and honest observer of the male psyche, and his clear-eyed dissection of Aydin’s capacity for apathy, self-deception and passive aggression is as illuminating, witty and Chekhovian as ever. But Ceylan’s also pushing himself: availing himself of more dialogue than hitherto, and manoeuvring the marital, familial and other tensions so skilfully that the cosily lit interiors become almost claustrophobic, he leads us through a long, wintry night of the soul towards a revelation as pleasingly tentative as it is profoundly affecting.



BFI - Nuri Bilge Ceylan

[aeolium]

I haven't seen the new Paddington film, but I liked this "review" of it:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/12/immigration-lawyer-reviews-paddington

[jayne lee wilson]

Guardians of the Galaxy!


is...
1) Not quite a great film...
2) But it is great fun!
3) Everyone loves Rocket the Racoon! (and his overgrown (geddit) sidekick Groot)

[johncorrigan]

Guardians of the Galaxy!


is...
1) Not quite a great film...
2) But it is great fun!
3) Everyone loves Rocket the Racoon! (and his overgrown (geddit) sidekick Groot)

I loved it Jayne - I used to read the comic, and thought that once they'd sorted out the back story turned it into a fine, funny and intelligent effort - best Marvel film I've seen...and Groot was truly wonderful indeed.

[Nick Armstrong]

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar

...numerous visual, plot and thematic references (and straight rip-offs) to Kubrick's 2001

... a long movie but has enough ideas, thrills, spills and wonders to keep one constantly engaged.

... Wondrous though Interstellar is, it does not have the wonders, the cool intellectual rigour and visual majesty of 2001, and that had much better music too.

We were lucky to be able to see Interstellar at the IMAX cinema at the Science Museum yesterday. (A wonderful venue ... to walk past a real lunar landing module from the Apollo missions, and then to see a model of it play a rôle in the film, gave a frisson...).

I've never been a fan of 2001 and so missed many of the references I think(apart from the two obvious repeated references to the opening of 'Zarathustra' in Zimmer's score, which I liked more than you did, Belgrove).

There were one or two silly plot points, and I parted company with the 'ethos' of the film towards the end, whatever the cinematic splendours.

But the 2h 50m sped by, it was frequently gripping and visually vertigo-inducing on the mega screen. And I don't have a problem with McConnaughey's accent (just watched all of True Detective - maybe I'm acclimatised!) and I find his performances totally involving and convincing. Much better computer/robots than any other film I've seen, too!

Not sure what it added up to though, as with all Nolan's stuff.

[Nick Armstrong]

I haven't seen the new Paddington film, but I liked this "review" of it:

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics...ews-paddington

Loved the film, save for one thing - the need to apply a Hollywood, 101-Dalmatians-Cruella-like uber-villainess plot on the myriad micro-plots of the Michael Bond novels. But the detail and the wit of the film were delightful.

[muzzer]

I loved Paddington. Not words I thought I'd ever type tbh. Two things jarred. The comedy calypso band, not in the books I understand, and Mr Gruber the comedy Jew. Complete with holocaust reference conflated with P's own "journey". Clumsy notes IMHO. Else I loved it.