Hiatus!

Sad news folks! Starting today I will taking a short hiatus from the blog to move house. It could take as long as a month to get the internet back but I will still be posing at Yellow Bunting. I will try and post sooner if I can find somewhere with an internet connection!

Review: Brave and The Bourne Legacy

HAPPY 50TH POST!!!

To celebrate (and for reasons to elaborate on later) there are two reviews!

OFFICIAL: Citizen Kane is only the SECOND greatest film ever made...

Poor Orson Welles, turns out he has been beaten by ol' Alfred Hitchcock, specifically Vertigo.

Movie journal Sight and Sound, published by the BFI have released its 2012 list of the greatest films. It looks surprisingly like its other lists pun
blished every ten years.

However, Citizen Kane has finally been knocked off the top spot by Vertigo.

Film School Rejects has the complete list and where to see them. Have a watch, sit back and feel cultured.

Or you could go watch what you want and revel in being a populist.

Photo from here

In all seriousness, it can seem sometimes that lists like these can be detrimental to potential audiences. On the one hand we need to revere old classics and it can only be good thing for audiences to have these made available. On the other hand the thrill of new techniques and systems of filmmaking is not only engaging for the viewer but like everything, improvement comes from growth and adaptation. 

The problem is when you come down firmly on either side of this argument instead of finding a common ground. Not one film on the list was made in the last twenty years when arguably we have seen the greatest leap forward in filmmaking practises since the introduction of sound. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, and Sight and Sound regularly features modern films within its pages, but we need to keep in mind that the classics of tomorrow will be the films of today and their value, while not immediately quantifiable, should be kept in mind.

Whether you want to see it as an issue of high or low culture or amateur and academic critics, I feel that what this shows is that there is always a need to compartmentalise the culture we consume, to deem some 'worthy' and by that act deem the rest as somehow less. I for one think there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure, merely work that appeals to different facets of pleasure.

Fortunately for us the world is awash with list of the greatest and the best and they are as diverse as the film featured in them.

A further example of why Superhero films are awesome!

Hero Story was Film School Rejects's short film of the day on 1st August:

I love it. I love the gentle cheesiness and the obvious love the genre that Kaylon Hunt (who also play Neuro) has. Mostly I love the slightly DIY feel that still manages to retain classiness.

The film has its own site here complete with tonnes of behind the scene goodies!

(Slightly Late) July Round Up

It is a little hard this month as I've fallen behind on watching and reviewing but here it goes:

Best: Of course its The Dark Knight Rises!

Worst: Frailty, the ending just didn't do anything for me

Looking forward to in August: I'm interested in seeing how the reboot of the Bourne franchise is going to go. Plus it comes out on my birthday...

No roles for women? Write your own...

Check out this interview with Rashida Jones who has just finished work on the film Celeste and Jesse Forever which she not only stars in but co-wrote! It is released in the US today but no word on a UK release.

"Not be reductive but isn't everything harder for women?  Isn't it just harder to be alive and be a woman?  We carry this tacit burden of being more empathetic -- again reductive -- of keeping the peace, getting paid less, getting less acknowledgment.  And being nurturing as well as being powerful. It's a high responsibility and I do think that I am very grateful for the feminist movement and it's really put us ahead and has empowered us in a way that is daunting for men.  They don't know how to fit in, they don't know how to deal with it and I think that to publicly still be the "big guys" makes them feel better.  That is the one thing they still have control over.  They can still feel like they are balancing it by being in charge"

Jones goes on about how she wrote the role because of a lack of engaging and dynamic female characters and I think there's a lot to be said for women filmmakers making films and writing stories about a more diverse set of female characters.

"Seriously, that's the ending?" and other reactions

A while ago I watched Bill Paxton's 2001 film, Frailty, a story of religious fanaticism, a highly dysfunctional family and an unreliable narrator. It's twisty-turny kind of a plot but its the ending I really want to talk about, it reminded me of another film. This one, released in 1998, is Fallen, a supernatural thriller and like Frailty it leaves the viewer somewhat...deflated. Needless to say there are spoilers ahead.

Poster from IMDB