Films
Films are like waking dreams. I choose them depending on my mood, looking for something that will match whatever is in me that needs to come into the light. The best ones, like books, I can watch at different times in my life and get different things from them. They are also experiences that I can call upon in my writing. The images, dialogue and soundtrack of a film bypasses any defences I may have and goes straight into my brain. That means they matter enormously, and I try to avoid cinematic junk food. I also avoid television. There just isn’t enough time.
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Adieu, 2022
31 Dec 2022, 10:47
It’s been a year of three big creative adventures: getting a new job (first in fourteen years); a family holiday in France (first to Paris for a week, then to Morzine in the French Alps); setting up my Patreon (experimenting ...
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Films, dreams, fiction and writing
22 Jan 2022, 18:18
I’ve come to think that films are intrinsically linked to my writing practice, but I’m worried my film-watching habit is more of a distraction than an inspiration. Films are like dreams, and the good ones are endlessly interpretable vessels for ...
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Farewell, 2021
30 Dec 2021, 21:15
As 2022 comes into view upriver, the final days of 2021 flow past, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to reflect on what I’ve read, watched and written this year. (Okay, reflect is a strong word, but it’s been ...
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In the Earth (2021)
31 Oct 2021, 18:28
And so we arrive at the final film of my 2021 #31DaysofHorror, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth. Wheatley is always interesting, and Kill List is a masterpiece, so I was happy to see him return to folk ...
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Ghostbusters II (1989)
30 Oct 2021, 20:47
To finish my parade of eighties sequels, I went with Ghostbusters II, which I can remember seeing in the cinema with friends back in the day. My father took me to see the original Ghostbusters, at Swansea Odeon, when ...
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Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)
29 Oct 2021, 07:33
The #31DaysofHorror train keeps chugging along with my exhausted corpse tied to the front. Friday the 13th Part 2 is many peoples franchise favourite, and I bought it for three quid a couple of years ago, so if ...
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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
28 Oct 2021, 09:16
I heard someone on a podcast say Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was their favourite of all the Halloween sequels. I was never a sequels guy growing up, these films were never on television in the UK, ...
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Halloween II (1981)
27 Oct 2021, 07:13
The original plan was to watch Halloween Kills in the cinema, but the reviews were so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go. Instead, I went for the original sequel, Halloween II. I was surprised to see Dean ...
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Planet Terror (2007)
26 Oct 2021, 07:01
If Killer Klowns is lovingly sewn together by your coulrophilic neighbour (wait, no…), Planet Terror is a grindhouse pastiche ruthlessly tailored by a master craftsman. It’s ridiculous fun, and as much as I am not an admirer of style ...
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Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1987)
25 Oct 2021, 07:03
Clowns on screen have never frightened me, not even Pennywise, although on the page he was a different proposition. Killer Klowns from Outer Space isn’t a film that’s trying to scare you. It’s more of an adult cartoon playing ...
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Scream 4 (2011)
24 Oct 2021, 06:30
The original Scream changed the course of horror cinema, but I didn’t enjoy Scream 2 or 3 half as much, so when Scream 4 came out to mixed reviews, I skipped it. That was a mistake. Scream 4 is ...
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Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021)
23 Oct 2021, 07:20
I started this journey with an adapted video game, and nearing the end I find myself watching an adapted amusement park ride—Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion meets the Disney-owned Muppets to create Muppets Haunted Mansion. The first period of The Muppets, ...
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Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)
22 Oct 2021, 06:30
I can’t decide if I’m enjoying these borderline gialli. Sergio Martino knows how to build tension, as characters roam the rooms of a massive run down mansion in the Italian countryside, and it depends if I’m in the mood for ...
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Censor (2021)
21 Oct 2021, 06:58
Censor has been on my radar all year, since I heard about it, partly because it was set in the era of video nasties, and partly because it seemed to speak to the whole experience of watching horror films. ...
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La Llorona (2019)
20 Oct 2021, 07:17
Some subjects are horrific enough without the added charge of being in a horror film, so I had been avoiding watching the much lauded La Llorona. It’s about the aftermath of the trial of a general who ordered the ...
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Dawn of the Dead (2004)
19 Oct 2021, 06:50
This time last year, I took a chance on George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, and in the summer I believed the hype and watched Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. I must have a hunk of ...
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Night of the Demons (1988)
18 Oct 2021, 06:47
I might have been too harsh on Saw, but it can take it, and this is the eighteenth film of my #31DaysofHorror. I’m in a dip. To lift my spirits, I wanted a palate cleanser, but rather than go ...
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Saw (2004)
17 Oct 2021, 07:50
I really, really didn’t enjoy Saw. Perhaps it’s because Triangle was so good, or my age, or the film’s reputation, although this first one is considered by many to be a bit of a horror classic. Two men wake ...
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Triangle (2009)
16 Oct 2021, 07:21
One of the reasons I do #31DaysofHorror is to catch up on my ever-growing list of films to see in the hope of finding one that blows me away. Triangle is this year’s first such nugget of gold. ...
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The Crazies (1973)
15 Oct 2021, 07:04
It’s hard to know what to make of this period of George A. Romero’s career. He was experimenting, I guess, because how else does an artist follow up a debut like the seminal Night of the Living Dead? He made ...
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My Bloody Valentine (1981)
14 Oct 2021, 07:02
My Bloody Valentine is one of those films that is talked about with reverence in horror circles, but until I got back into horror in 2017, I’d never heard of. In Valentine Bluffs, Canada, twenty years previously, the mining ...
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The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (1971)
13 Oct 2021, 06:57
The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail involves Lisa Baumer, whose husband is killed in a mid-air plane explosion, and her inheriting from him a million dollars. They had an open marriage and lived in separate countries, and soon people ...
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Nosferatu (1922)
12 Oct 2021, 07:09
I wanted to see the original Master, so I put on the oldest unseen film in my collection, Nosferatu. I appreciated the original Dracula and Frankenstein, but they were pretty dry in places. Nosferatu is ten years ...
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Salem’s Lot (1979)
11 Oct 2021, 06:30
Salem’s Lot has a special place in my heart. It was the first scary book I ever read. The film is the two part miniseries I remember from the eighties stitched together. It smartly does away with the ...
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Nightmare Beach (1989)
10 Oct 2021, 07:39
It’s the late eighties, and it’s Spring break, somewhere near Miami, Florida. Thousands of young people are in bars and cars all along the seafront, drinking, sunbathing and having sex. A biker gang has a vendetta against local police chief ...
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A Quiet Place (2018)
9 Oct 2021, 07:25
My brain combined The Thing and The War of the Worlds to suggest to me A Quiet Place, one of many recent horror blockbusters I hadn’t seen. A family are trapped in their valley by blind alien creatures with ...
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The War of the Worlds (1953)
8 Oct 2021, 06:52
I recently watched the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, which I found surprisingly bleak, so I thought I’d go back to the original 1953 adaptation, The War of the Worlds, to see what that was like. That was also ...
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The Thing (1982)
7 Oct 2021, 06:49
I’m breaking one of my #31DaysofHorror rules with The Thing, because I saw it almost exactly five years ago. It was a key film in getting me into horror movies again after a fifteen year hiatus. The chance ...
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The Thing From Another World (1951)
6 Oct 2021, 06:51
After Shadow in the Cloud, I wanted a calmer, less frenetic experience, but to also feel like the next film flowed from it naturally, so I chose The Thing From Another World. It’s set not long after the end ...
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Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
5 Oct 2021, 06:50
Horror stretches across many genres, and you can’t always know in advance how horror-y a film is, so with Shadow in the Cloud we are in war-action-horror territory, in that order. Maude Garrett arrives at an about-to-takeoff B-17 in ...
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Lisa and the Devil (1973)
4 Oct 2021, 06:42
Lisa and the Devil lives in one of the lesser-known corners of the Mario Bava-verse. Telly Savalas as the possible devil Leandro is an amusing presence, and if he is not particularly devilish, the dream-like plot definitely is. Lost ...
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The Addiction (1995)
3 Oct 2021, 07:28
After two quite light films, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction is a hard turn downwards into the circles of hell. Kathleen is studying for a doctorate in philosophy in a grungy, black-and-white New York, where the streets are lined with ...
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Jakob’s Wife (2021)
2 Oct 2021, 07:08
The irrepressible Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden star in this story of a woman’s mid-life crisis being super-charged by an encounter with a vampire. Anne lives a quiet life as the wife of minister Jakob, who is a pillar of ...
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Werewolves Within (2021)
1 Oct 2021, 07:01
To kick off this year’s #31DaysofHorror I chose Werewolves Within, a comedy-whodunnit-horror based on a Ubisoft video game. I heard screenwriter Mishna Wolff (perfect name) and director Josh Ruben talk about making it, and it sounded like ...
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Horror AND sex!
11 Sep 2021, 15:49
Here we go again, with my fourth #31DaysofHorror extravaganza/exhaustathon. This year I just want a reason to watch a lot of horror films. Here are the rules I’m playing by:
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Intent
9 Sep 2021, 19:29
Time isn’t real. The future is an abstraction. So says Alan Watts. I do rush things to get to the end of them—not always, but often enough for it to be a thing I’ve noticed over and over again throughout ...
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Auguste
1 Aug 2021, 15:55
The Three Colours trilogy marked my move from July into August, and amusingly the fledgling judge in Red is called Auguste. I don’t know why I chose Three Colours: Blue—actaully, I do remember. I ordered my iTunes movies by ...
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Inland Empire (2007)
30 May 2021, 19:02
In Inland Empire, which is also a massive region of land with nebulous boundaries east of Los Angeles (just saying), married actress Nikki Grace wins a part in a film opposite known philanderer Devon Burk. On the first day ...
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Mulholland Drive (2001)
29 May 2021, 12:41
The pattern David Lynch tends uses in his more archetypal work is again on display in Mulholland Drive – events organically unfold, the images are striking, the narrative is confusing, characters are not who they seem to be, and ...
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The Straight Story (1999)
27 May 2021, 20:46
If David Lynch were trying to somehow redress all the darkness of his earlier films in one go, then he would make The Straight Story. Like The Elephant Man, it’s straightforward and forgoes the dreams, fantasy sequences and excess ...
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Lost Highway (1997)
26 May 2021, 19:12
Lost Highway is a puzzle. It opens with a jealous husband who thinks his wife is having an affair, and ends with a deadly resolution, but what happens in between is ambiguous and complicated. There are unsettling video tapes ...
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Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
24 May 2021, 13:59
A howl of pain from Laura Palmer, the murdered girl that opened the TV series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is difficult, heavy, hard to watch in places, and grapples with incest, rape, drug-taking, murder, domestic abuse, and ...
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Wild at Heart (1990)
18 May 2021, 18:41
After Blue Velvet, Lynch made the first season of Twin Peaks, then pivoted into Wild at Heart. It’s a series of deliberately melodramatic, hyper-violent and sexual scenes stitched together into a road movie, with a tenuously-made connection to ...
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Blue Velvet (1986)
12 May 2021, 16:02
I was nervous going in to Blue Velvet, more so than any horror film. It has a fearsome reputation but is also culturally beloved. Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance has become iconic, and its themes foreshadow those in the massively ...
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Dune (1984)
9 May 2021, 21:10
I went into Dune thinking I would see something the critics were missing – I mean, how could the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man direct a complete dud? – and… it’s so over-the-top, it manages to not be ...
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The Elephant Man (1980)
6 May 2021, 19:40
The Elephant Man is as traditional and straightforward as Eraserhead is surreal and obtuse. Both are black and white, and Lynch does use some dream imagery in The Elephant Man, but they’re at opposite end of the narrative ...
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Eraserhead (1977)
2 May 2021, 14:35
It’s surprisingly hard to see David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the UK, which means it is easy to avoid. To me the title was abstract and off-putting, as was its reputation as one of Lynch’s most experimental, gruesome works. The ...
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Swimming with David Lynch
23 Apr 2021, 13:46
Spring arriving has given me a creative kick. April has been pretty meta literature-wise. I’ve been reading about reading, reading about writing, writing about reading and, of course, of course, writing about writing. It’s all good. The novel is taking ...
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Giallo January
23 Jan 2021, 19:43
Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is one of those books I keep coming back to, this time to stimulate my first draft writing gland and get my novel moving again. I’d run aground at twenty thousand ...
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Slippery surfaces
17 Jan 2021, 10:15
I started the week with Blade Runner 2049. I was frustrated with it in 2017, but watching it over three nights at home, I’m more forgiving. It’s way too long. It looks beautiful, and it has some fascinating ideas, but ...
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Autumn and The Long Goodbye
9 Jan 2021, 15:26
In Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), when discussing a piece of art, Daniel Gluck asks the young Elisabeth, ‘And what did it make you think about?’. I love the openness of that question. Interpreting art is about making connections. There is ...
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Language muscles
26 Dec 2020, 17:04
Having watched so many films this year, next year I want to get back to reading novels. Films do play into my writing practice. They show me patterns of story, character arcs, themes and dialogue, as well as feed my ...
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Why do I write here?
22 Dec 2020, 21:42
I’ve written more posts on my blog in 2020 than ever before. It was tricky to start with — I had to find a new voice and get in a groove. As the year ends, and I begin to think ...
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She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
15 Dec 2020, 20:55
This isn’t a horror film, though it is marketed as one. The camera is often still as figures move towards us, faces blurred by lights or shadows, and this does create a sense of dread. Much more of the film ...
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To the Ends of the Earth (2019)
10 Dec 2020, 20:46
I couldn’t resist another film by my new favourite director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, care of my Mubi subscription. Knowing a film I fancy is going to disappear in a few days makes me create the time to watch it. It’s an ...
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A Short Film About Love (1988)
3 Dec 2020, 21:42
Tomek is nineteen, lonely and living with his possessive godmother in a Polish apartment block. Every evening he learns languages in his room until Magda, the woman he is spying on through his telescope, comes home from work. She is ...
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Creepy (2017)
27 Nov 2020, 13:50
The films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa were a revelation to me in October. I started with Pulse (2001), then went back to Cure (1997), and both were masterpieces. Twenty years after Cure, Creepy (2017) is in a similar mould, playing ...
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November culture
25 Nov 2020, 15:25
It’s good to play around with your projects and try new things. I still suffer from a degree of imposter syndrome, and I probably always will. That’s partly a working class thing, but it’s also because I didn’t study literature ...
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Creativity 2.0(.21)
14 Nov 2020, 12:46
I’m in a fallow period, pottering around, looking for the next thing. I started a jigsaw, read a novel, watched the first half of Homecoming (Season 1, with Julia Roberts), listened to podcasts on my walks, and wrote in my ...
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Doctor Sleep (2019)
31 Oct 2020, 08:00
Danny Torrance is an alcoholic, but finds a place of peace and sobriety in New Hampshire, where he uses his psychic power, which he calls the shine, to ease the deaths of the elderly people in a local hospice. Death ...
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The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
30 Oct 2020, 08:00
The Bride of Frankenstein contains some of the most iconic images in cinema, but it opens with a scene I really didn’t expect — Lord Byron and Percy Shelley praising Mary Shelley for her book, Frankenstein. In a bold move ...
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The Exorcist (1973)
29 Oct 2020, 08:00
The Exorcist is a cultural behemoth. It’s my twenty-ninth film in this year’s #31DaysOfHorror, and I’m feeling horror fatigue. The film has a weighty reputation — I’d seen clips on television, of Regan vomiting on Father Karras, and turning her ...
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Tenebre (1982)
28 Oct 2020, 08:00
Tenebre is set in Rome, but we could be anywhere, because the story stays in hotel rooms, suburban streets and modernist buildings made of concrete and glass. There are artfully sculpted gardens of stone, water and trees. These locations lend ...
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
27 Oct 2020, 08:00
People in the background of shots look directly at the camera. Matthew’s windscreen is a web of cracks that we struggle to see through. The score is spidery and jarring, and the camera is often off-kilter. You are not paranoid ...
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Land of the Dead (2005)
26 Oct 2020, 08:00
I’d been so careful choosing films until last night, and I thought I’d take a chance on this because it’s directed by George Romero. It felt like a safe bet, but I was wrong. This film made me angry. I ...
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Christine (1983)
25 Oct 2020, 08:00
Stephen King is brilliant at weaving vivid teenage experiences into his novels. Christine was one of the formative books of my childhood. The film doesn’t have time to go as deep as the book into the love triangle of Arnie, ...
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Prom Night (1980)
24 Oct 2020, 09:00
Like Scream’s Ghostface, the killer in Prom Night can be dodged and knocked over. This is not Michael Myers. There is a lot of disco. Jamie Lee Curtis is a fantastic dancer — this role for her comes straight after ...
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A Cure for Wellness (2017)
23 Oct 2020, 09:00
An ambitious young executive, Lockhart, is sent to a Swiss sanitorium to bring back his company’s rogue CEO, Morris Pembroke. The head of the spa, Dr. Heinreich Volmer, drips bad guy charm, but is also the voice of scientific reason. ...
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The Dead Center (2019)
22 Oct 2020, 09:00
In a Nashville morgue, an unnamed man comes back to life and escapes. Sheriff Edward Graham investigates the missing body, but across town, psychiatrist Daniel Forrester checks the now unresponsive man into a ward at the psychiatric hospital. These two ...
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It Follows (2015)
21 Oct 2020, 09:00
The film opens with a wide shot of a leafy suburban street, and we look closely for whatever we think the director wants us to see. Like Jay, we are trained from the start to scan the horizon for trouble. ...
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The Beyond (1980)
20 Oct 2020, 09:00
Returning to Fulciland, The Beyond is more coherent than City of the Living Dead, but of course, it’s still driven by images. Like The Amityville Horror, there is a portal to hell in the basement, and people get mysteriously hurt ...
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#Alive (2020)
19 Oct 2020, 09:00
After Fulci’s barely moving undead, the running zombies of #Alive are a bit of a shock. Technology is an ally here, which is refreshing in a horror film, although at the start, Joon-woo seems to be in a semi-infantile state, ...
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The Mummy (1932)
18 Oct 2020, 09:00
The original Universal horror films are a bit of a blind spot for me. They weren’t on TV in our house, so I have no childhood affinity to them, and once my parents let me watch horror, I was straight ...
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City of the Living Dead (1980)
17 Oct 2020, 09:00
Zombies really bothered me as a kid. Seeing the insides of the human body spill out was as pure a vision of horror as I could imagine. Guts should not be outside of your body, full stop. I only watched ...
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Blade (1998)
16 Oct 2020, 09:00
The opening sequence is brilliant. A woman lures a man to a party in an abattoir. It’s an aggressive crowd, and when the fire sprinklers come on, it’s not water but blood, and everyone around the man turns into a ...
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Cure (1997)
15 Oct 2020, 09:00
How much control do we have over what we do? What do we ever choose to do in full consciousness? Takabe, a detective in Tokyo, investigates a series of murders, each by a different killer, but all carving a cross ...
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Spring (2014)
14 Oct 2020, 09:00
If Guillermo del Toro shot a film scripted by David Cronenberg, based on a story by HP Lovecraft, then had it edited by Richard Linklater, you would get Spring. I thoroughly enjoyed Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s time-puzzle film, The ...
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Jacob’s Ladder (1991)
13 Oct 2020, 09:00
Jacob’s Ladder treats the subject of the Vietnam war with a little more respect than Piranha. Jacob is beset by visions and fever dreams. We constantly switch between realities, from the Vietnamese jungle, to his home in New York City, ...
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Noroi: The Curse (2005)
12 Oct 2020, 09:00
Kobayashi has such a soft face, and is kind, but he is also dogged and brave. We know from the start things will go badly for him, but we still hope he will be okay. It isn’t clear for some ...
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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)
11 Oct 2020, 09:00
Another horror film that divided people, and another edge to the horror film landscape. Renowned film sound technician Gilderoy is a fish out of water in a remote Italian sound studio. He thinks the film he’s agreed to work on, ...
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Piranha (1978)
10 Oct 2020, 09:00
Being nibbled to death by a swarm of piranha is a different agony, I imagine, to being bitten in half by a great white shark. The standard issue opening victims, David and Barbara, go swimming in a pool at a ...
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Fascination (1979)
9 Oct 2020, 09:00
Fascination is set in France, 1905, and has a fairy tale vibe, with misty countryside, a splendid French chateau, and a protagonist, Marc, who at the start steals a bag of gold. He hides at the chateau to escape his ...
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Vampyres (1974)
8 Oct 2020, 09:00
I chose Vampyres, the first of my #31DaysOfHorror choices this year that I would say is exploitation cinema, naturally, because of the cover art. After the pitch perfect seventies homage of Knife+Heart, I wanted to ...
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Knife+Heart (2018)
7 Oct 2020, 09:00
Knife+Heart (Un couteau dans le cœur) is a modern giallo film that plays out in a gay porn production company in the summer of 1979. Anne runs the company, and has broken up with her long-term partner and film editor, ...
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Death of a Vlogger (2020)
6 Oct 2020, 09:00
Today, cameras are our eyes in the world, and they are no guarantee of the truth. Webcams are ubiquitous. We can all see others and be seen. Social media not only allows that, but quantifies it, and worse, monetises it. ...
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Pulse (2001)
5 Oct 2020, 09:00
The Tokyo in Pulse is empty and eerie. People are lonely and disconnected from each other. The characters are all young and, in one way or another, alone.
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The Crow (1994)
4 Oct 2020, 09:00
The montages, quick cuts and heavy metal of The Crow is a bit of a shock after the more sedate charms of The Fog. This is a none-more-gothic revenge story to complete my revenge triptych.
Eric and his fiance Shelly ...
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The Fog (1980)
3 Oct 2020, 09:00
I was always going to watch The Fog at some point in these #31DaysOfHorror, but I didn’t expect it to be so soon. It was meant to be a comfort pick for later, when things usually are a little more ...
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Atlantics (2019)
2 Oct 2020, 09:00
For the second film in my #31DaysOfHorror I wanted something recent — from something old to something new. Atlantics had been on my Netflix queue for months. I knew it was a ghost story, and that it won the 2019 ...
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Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)
1 Oct 2020, 09:00
I wanted to start this year’s #31DaysOfHorror with a classic. I’m trying to watch only films I haven’t seen, with one or two exceptions, and when I sorted my iTunes movie library by release year, Creature From the Black ...
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October beckons
30 Sep 2020, 00:00
I love October. I love September too, but October is the favoured child. Since rediscovering my love of the spooky, eerie and horrible, I relish the enthusiasm people have this time of year to cherish the darker paths of the ...
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31 Days of Horror, 2020
6 Sep 2020, 00:00
With 2020 being a demented shitshow, I did fleetingly wonder if I wanted to do #31DaysOfHorror again this year, but then I remembered why I love horror films — they are an escape from reality; they are an outlet ...
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Reality Bites
12 Jul 2020, 00:00
I first watched Reality Bites when it came out in 1994, the summer of my final year at university. I’d finished cramming for my exams and it was obvious I wasn’t going to be an ...
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Anomalisa (2015)
3 Feb 2019, 18:12
Everyone looks the same to Michael Stone. He is in Cincinnati to give a talk at a conference and is staying at the Hotel Fregoli. After failing to make a connection with an ex-lover, he becomes fascinated by an antique Japanese sex toy. He seems unable to make a connection with anyone.
Then he hears a voice through his hotel door. Anonymous Lisa. Anomaly Lisa. Lisa’s voice and face are different, so Michael becomes enraptured by her. His interactions with Lisa in his hotel room are sweet, if a little manipulative. He is desperate for something real in his life, an authentic person who is not like everyone else, something that he hasn’t fucked up. The scene where they make ...
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Point Break
20 Aug 2018, 00:00
It’s tricky to find films that my fifteen-year-old son will want to watch with his forty-something parents, but this seemed to sit in the sweet spot — surfing, armed robbers, a cocky young hero, skydiving, a love interest and lots ...
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
19 Aug 2018, 11:15
Siblings Sally and Franklin come to a remote part of Texas to make sure their relatives remains haven’t been dug up from a local cemetery in a bizarre, gruesome local crime. But Franklin’s curiosity goes much further and he wants ...
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Exhibition (2013)
15 Aug 2018, 21:35
This one lingers still in my mind. The married couple, D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) have created their own emotional ecosystem, balancing intimacy and distance, in a big modernist house somewhere in Central London. She is an artist and he is an architect — both work at home, but in their own offices on different floors, talking to each other sporadically through an internal phone system. It’s an unusual setup that has worked for them for years, but comes under strain when they decide to move home.
Neither actor has acted before, which is remarkable to me, and makes sense given the naturalistic rendering of their relationship. They are completely believable as an averagely neurotic middle-aged couple. The ...
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A Ghost Story (2017)
3 Aug 2018, 20:17
I thought the film would be mostly Rooney Mara moving slowly around her house with the ghost of Casey Affleck watching her. I was wrong. Halfway through the film goes in a different direction, and it really does become the ghost’s story. Once Mara leaves the film there’s a long stretch where it’s just a person under a sheet and I was worried it wasn’t going to recover from that, but it pulls something interesting and unexpected out of the bag in the final quarter.
There is a scene early on where we see Mara eat an entire pie that a friend has brought for her to eat because she is mourning and needs pie support. While she forks pieces ...
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Still Night, Still Light (2016)
1 Aug 2018, 20:01
I signed up for Mubi to try and find a different approach to choosing what films I watch. Sophie Goyette’s Still Night, Still Light caught my eye because it promised dreams, a slow pace and something restorative. My mind felt blasted from years of pushing and pulling and grappling with all that is out there. I was hopeful for this film.
Before it, I watched two other shorts films on Mubi. Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is a triptych of three-minute film portraits of three film artists. It was light viewing, spending time briefly with each person. More heavy was The Hymns of Muscovy, twenty minutes floating through an upside-down Moscow listening to electronic versions of the Russian national anthem. It ...
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Jaws (1975)
31 Jul 2018, 20:23
Nostalgia. This film is forever linked to my childhood and watching it over and over again, recorded from TV on a battered VHS tape. I wanted to watch it with a 55” television in HD, to see what these old films look like now.
And it’s astonishing. The locations come to life in new ways, the actors faces sparkle and glisten — it’s like stepping back into the actual seventies. The water and sky, which are shot with great care, take on new life. It was always a classic story told in a dynamic new way, but the details HD throws up on a decent-sized screen, man, it’s probably better quality than seeing it in the cinema in 1975. The ...
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The Ghoul (2017)
9 Jun 2018, 21:56
Okay, this is a new thing for me. I’m going to write my thoughts as if I’m saying them, like it’s a podcast, so I don’t get hung up on editing each sentence. Otherwise this becomes just another piece of work instead of a release.
So, the film The Ghoul has layers, which automatically makes it rare these days amongst the films I manage to watch. And it has psychotherapists in it, which is almost unheard of. And it’s a thriller of sorts, although being complicated I’m inclined not to try to put it in a box. As Patrick Swayze says, nobody puts Baby in a corner.
The protaganist, Chris, is babyish, in a way. At the start he’s a ...
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Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
28 Apr 2018, 19:00
I was excited to see Avengers: Infinity War. Early online reviews seemed enthusiastic. The manager of the coffee shop I go to had a kind of glazed awe on his face when he spoke about watching it on the opening night in a full cinema, everyone laughing and gasping at the same points in the story. I enjoyed Black Panther, even if it had a heaviness to it that wasn’t all the good type. Thor: Ragnorok was a lot of fun. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was surprisingly affecting. You get my drift. I’m reasonably invested in these characters.
I saw it at seven-thirty on a Friday night in the largest screen of the Darlington Vue. Because modern multiplexes have ...
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High Rise (book and film)
3 Mar 2018, 21:09
I read several Ballard books in the late nineties — my mid-twenties — starting with short stories, before being entranced by the original shiny silver paperback cover of Super-Cannes, and then going back to his earlier work. When I saw there was a film of High-Rise being made I believed I’d read it, but when I bought a copy, apart from the general sense in most of Ballard’s stories of things being on the edge of primal chaos, I didn’t recognise the story or characters at all. I’d read so many of his book shop blurbs they had all blurred together. In my twenties I didn’t read with much real attention either so it was quite possible I had read ...
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It Follows (2014)
8 Dec 2017, 21:14
I avoided watching It Follows because the idea was so unsettling. Like most unpleasant things avoided, the reality was nothing like as bad as I imagined. It’s actually genius — a really great film. Not flawless, but an impressive mix ...
