wizzardSS Reviews

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

2022-04-07T08:00:00.103+01:00

I know people who literally count down the days until the next installment in The Fast and the Furious franchise is released in cinemas, much the same as how fans of the MCU wait for their next kick, albeit in a world where spoilers are actively praised. Personally, this is my first encounter with the fuel-filled mayhem.

Like many teenage boys, growing up I dreamt of the cars I had driven in video game franchises such as Need for Speed or Burnout. It led to rancorous debates between me and my brother about whether a Subaru Impreza was better than a Mitsubishi Evo (#TeamBlue) and hours of tinkering the settings to get that perfect balance between drift and drag.

Keen to get behind the wheel, we both ended up passing our driving tests in our late teens and began our petrolhead journeys... with a couple of one litre hatchbacks. Still, his had red leather seats.

Midway through 2 Fast 2 Furious I did get the feeling of nostalgia and being transported back to those testosterone fills days of yore. Unfortunately, most of that was brought on by the dreadful CGI.

I was unsurprised to learn after watching it that 2 Fast 2 Furious is regularly the lowest scoring film in the franchise. Most scenes excruciatingly handhold you through the wafer thin plot lines as viewers salivate for the next early 2000's souped-up car race.

To be honest though, reviewing a film like 2 Fast 2 Furious is pointless. You know what you're getting and if you like the franchise you'll still sit through it and enjoy it. Girls, check. Cars, check. Lack of clothes, check. Questionable road safety, check check and check.

I didn't mind the film overall; as it slowly descended into a meme of itself, it became quite enjoyable.

1 star

Back To The Future: Part II (1989)

2022-04-02T08:00:00.092+01:00

Continuing from where the original leaves off, Back To The Future: Part II sees Doc (Christopher Lloyd) returning from the future in order to warn Marty (Michael J. Fox) that there is trouble ahead for him. They head off - with Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) to the very futuristic year of 2015(...) where skyways are common.

To the uninitiated - including myself before writing this review - it would be easy to believe that Back to the Future was always designed to be a franchise, but it wasn't until the rip-roaring success of the first film that a sequel was commissioned.

Robert Zemeckis (Director) and Bob Gale (Screenwriter) were both quickly back on board, now having regrets about the "joke" of the flying car ending from the first movie, realising that they would have to write in Jennifer for the sequel.

Broadly the story follows the same arc as its predecessor - shoehorning in many of the same jokes but updating them to the new 2015 timeline. It is perhaps this reticence and recycling that caused contemporary critics to be slightly less praiseworthy.

Despite that, Part II has in many ways surpassed the success of Back to the Future, with scenes such as the hoverboard and self-tying shoes becoming famous even for those not familiar with the films. It also expanded on the concept of a split timeline (though don't expect much in the way of science) - something with modern audiences are experiencing again with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Both Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd continue their fine performances and quirky chemistry, backed up with the slapstick humour of Thomas F. Wilson.

It never quite reaches the charm and originality of the original - but is a fine film in its own right.

4 stars

American Pie 2 (2001)

2022-04-01T08:00:00.115+01:00

In a rare show of rebellion, a few weeks after my 14th birthday I went to the cinema to watch the 15 certificated film American Pie: The Wedding. My upbringing wasn't deliberately sheltered, but holy moly were my eyes opened to a world of teen angst that I had yet to experience.

Naturally, the first two parts in the franchise were on my watch list fairly swiftly afterwards (err, for "completeness") and thus, with my first three tastes of Pie, my childhood innocence was broken.

American Pie 2 follows the four lovesick friends - Jim, Kevin, Finch and Oz - as they come back from their first year of college and decide to head to a beach house to throw a massive party to end the summer. Each has their own love problem - Jim hears old crush Nadia is coming to visit, Kevin lusts after ex-girlfriend Vicky, Finch can't forget that night with Stifler's Mom and Oz's girlfriend Heather is studying abroad. Meanwhile, to help pay the rent on the house, the group invite Stifler along for the ride.

There are a great many teen films that rely heavily on vulgar humour for cheap laughs - and look no further than when the series became American Pie Presents... - and while American Pie 2 has elements of that - especially in Seann William Scott's "Stifler" - it never feels as through it crosses a forbidden boundary.

That's not, by any means, to say the film is completely innocent. By the very definition of a "teen comedy" it is impossible to ignore that the women are objectified. However, it is also true that the women have their own backstories and their own personal problems, but that the story is just focusing on sex and relationships.

While I've clearly grown up in the 21 years since this film was released, as a nostalgia trip revisiting and identifying with the characters and music that I grew up with, American Pie 2 will always have a special place in my heart.

4 stars

Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (1913)

2021-04-30T10:00:00.151+01:00

Within Chinese language cinema, there are three primary leaders within the industry. Most obvious are the People's Republic of China (China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan), but historically the most successful export of Chinese language cinema has come from the former British colony Hong Kong.

At its peak, Hong Kong was the third largest producer of films in the world, after India and the United States, and produced stars such as Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat. Perhaps because of its history with the United Kingdom, Hong Kong has been able to successfully bridge the gap between East and West and identify films that work well in both regions.

Like its other Chinese language counterparts (and to an extent, European films), Hong Kong cinema took its roots from theatre and especially Chinese opera which was historically the dominant form of entertainment in China.

The first film to be released in the colony was the short Stealing A Roast Duck but, like many films in the era, was likely later destroyed for its nitrate by the Japanese to make bombs in World War II. In fact, so little is known about the film that some believe it never existed, but there is some evidence that it had a showing in Los Angeles, which would also make it the earliest Chinese film with a foreign release.

Despite being filmed and released in Hong Kong, Stealing a Roast Duck was actually made by Asia Film Studio in Shanghai, a Chinese studio founded by an American called Benjamin Brosky. Brosky would then go on to found the first studio in Hong Kong, Huamei, in 1913 with a Japanese born, Hong Kong raised man called Li Minwei.

Huamei's first film was also Hong Kong's first feature length film (two reels), called Zhuangzi Tests His Wife, based on a Chinese opera. The film was directed by Li Minwei's brother, Li Beihai (who had starred in Stealing a Roast Duck), and the two brothers take on the two lead roles. It tells the story of Zhuangzi (Li Beihai), who fakes his death to test his wife (Li Minwei). The wife soon takes a lover, and is dismayed to find that it is none other than her husband. Li Minwei, as the wife, is the person photographed at the top of this article.

Before the film's release, Brosky took the film to America, closing down Huamei in the process. Thus, Hong Kong's first feature film became the only film from Hong Kong's first movie studio and was never shown in the colony, instead being screened to Chinese communities in America.

After World War I, Li Minwei would go on to found China Sun Company, the first Chinese-owned studio in Hong Kong, finally kickstarting the Hong Kong movie industry and earning Li Minwei the title of "father of Hong Kong cinema".

No copies of Zhuangzi Tests His Wife are known to exist today.

Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919)

2021-04-29T10:00:00.001+01:00

The importance of film in seeding propaganda in times of war has long been established, but The Great War was perhaps the first opportunity for filmmakers to push political points of view in order to further - or mock - war efforts.

One of the most famous pieces of American propaganda for World War II is Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), where the actor breaks from his traditional silent comedy to portray both Hitler and a Jewish barber.

However, during World War I, Chaplin had only just began his acting career, having been given his screen debut by "King of Comedy" Mack Sennett in Making A Living (1914). It is perhaps only fitting that Sennett himself released a famous piece of comedy propaganda during this period.

Yankee Doodle in Berlin was Sennett's highest budget film to date on release in 1919 (missing the end of the war) and tells the story of an American pilot who disguises himself as a woman behind enemy lines in order to carry out espionage. As is typical with Sennett's comedy style, the film ended up becoming more of a farce - even going so far as to depict Kaiser Wilhelm himself as someone taken in by the charade.

The aviator was played by Bothwell Browne, making his only film appearance. Browne was an openly gay Danish immigrant to the US and had developed a celebrated vaudeville act as a female impersonator and was known for performing both sexy and highly controversial shows.

In a strange mirror to Browne's life, while he was the biggest name in female impersonation in the US, he had a European rival, Julian Eltinge, who had emigrated from the US and starred in a similar propaganda film called The Isle of Love.

Browne continued acting in vaudeville throughout the 1920s - at one point in his career he was part of a double act with male impersonator Kathleen Clifford - before retiring and opening a dance school.

You can watch Brown's performance in Yankee Doodle in Berlin in full below:

The X-Rays (1897)

2021-04-28T10:00:00.017+01:00

Building on the work of Alfred Clark's The Execution of Mary Stuart, illusionist George Albert Smith (who would later exhibit the first colour film) created a film containing two jump cuts.

The X-Rays has a man courting a woman (played by Smith's wife Laura Bayley) before the film comedically jumps to "x-ray vision" and later switching back. It has been described by the BFI has one of the first examples of special effects in Britain.

While The X-Rays is not the first example of a jump cut, Smith did pioneer another type of special effect - the superimposition - in the (lost?) 1898 film The Corsican Brothers, the first film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's novel of the same name. Superimposition meant exposing the same piece of film twice, allowing Smith to create a ghostly hologram within another scene.

Another interesting fact about The X-Rays is that x-rays themselves had only been discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen less than two years before the production of Smith's short film, displaying the contemporary fascination with scientific advancement.

You can watch The X-Rays in full below.

What Happened to Mary (1912)

2021-04-27T10:00:00.013+01:00

While the dawn of streaming has tended to allow people to watch what they want, when they want, popular TV series will still occasionally release a new season of episodes weekly, enticing the audience to tune in next week to resolve the latest cliffhanger.

This technique of drawing an audience back for more dates back to the 1910s, with the advert of serial films. However, rather than tuning in from the comfort of your sofa, you would have been expected to get out to the cinema to catch the latest episode of your favourite serial... and if you missed it, good luck finding a re-run.

Serial films were likely first conceptualised in Europe, perhaps with the 6-episode Nick Carter run from 1908. It is thought that the introduction to the US was with What Happened to Mary in 1912.

What Happened to Mary tells the story of a young girl (called Mary) who is abandoned at birth and left in the care of Billy, a shopkeeper, who is promised $1000 if he marries her to a village boy. Fast forward to Mary turning 18 years old, and Billy tries to cash in on the promise, only for Mary to set forth on several adventures.

The serial was created after the editor of The Ladies' World, Charles Dwyer, met the manager of the Thomas Edison studio. Together they created the 12-part serial which was released alongside a supporting magazine.

The popularity of serials exploded over the next few years, including one, The Hazards of Helen, which reached 119 episodes over its two-year release cycle from 1914. The cost of producing serials increased considerably during the sound era, before the advent of the television era finally saw the end of film serials.

At least seven of the episodes of What Happened to Mary survive, but are held by the Museum of Modern Arts and Library of Congress and certainly not widely available.

However, What Happened to Mary also produced a sequel in 1913, Who Will Marry Mary?. While most of this serial is thought to be lost, EYE Film Instituut Nederlands uploaded its copy of episode one, A Proposal from the Duke to YouTube in 2013. You can watch this below.

Source: Titlecard image from Wikimedia

A Visit to the Seaside (1908)

2021-04-26T10:00:00.076+01:00

"Old" films often have two things in common; they are silent and film in black and white. While the first commercial "talkie" sound film was released in 1927, the concept of colour - even commercially - in film pre-dates this significantly.

The concept of colour in film is often attributed to Technicolor, in part because they were the go-to company in Hollywood between 1922 and 1952, during cinema's transition to the mainstream.

However, it was in 1899 when colour was first added into a motion picture. By adding a rotating disk of three colour filters, Edward Raymond Turner was able to sequentially film filtered images onto black and white film. When played back, he projected three frames in a row using different filters to create the illusion of a single coloured image.

Turner died in 1903 at the age of just 29, with his work passing to George Albert Smith. While Smith could see the benefits in Turner's methods, it was common that the three frames did not quite line up (having been filmed sequentially), leading to jumbling of the image.

Building on Turner's work, Smith would go on to create the first successful and commercially viable colour film process, Kinemacolor, in 1908. This technique would be replaced by Technicolor around ten years later.

A Visit to the Seaside was the first motion picture exhibited to utilise Kinemacolour. It depicts a day at Brighton beach. Unfortunately I've been unable to find the full 8 minute picture (I assume it is a lost movie), but fragments remain and can be watched below.

An Unseen Enemy (1912)

2021-04-24T10:00:00.093+01:00

While film was becoming ever more popular by the 1910s, "flickers" were still seen as a simple and ordinary form of entertainment compared with the stage. Therefore, well-known and highly talented actors were reticent to make the transformation to the silver screen.

So, when Lillian Gish, who had made her name with her sister Dorothy on stage, decided to take the leap of faith to step in front of the camera, the move was not without its risks.

Her first film was An Unseen Enemy, directed by arguably the biggest director of the early silent era, D.W. Griffith. Lillian and sister Dorothy play recently orphaned girls. Their inheritance is locked away in the family's safe, but the housekeeper enlists an accomplice to try to steal it while holding the girls at gunpoint.

Lillian Gish would go on to star in a number of other Griffith films, including the highest grossing movie of the era, Birth of a Nation. In 1924, Vanity Fair described Gish as "the surest artist of her generation" in a piece titled A Critical Appreciation of the First Lady of the Cinema.

Gish's on-screen career continued for another 75 years, concluding at aged 93 in the 1987 film The Whales of August alongside another early cinema giant, Bette Davis.

You can watch An Unseen Enemy in full below:

A Trip To The Moon (1902)

2021-04-23T10:00:00.097+01:00

A Trip to the Moon tells of six astronomers on an expedition to the the moon who are met by several alien beings. It is widely regarded as the first science-fiction film.

Heavily influenced by contemporary fascination with space and the accompanying rise in prominence of science-fiction novels - espeically Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon - Georges Méliès' 1902 film was a lavish French theatrical production that was a popular success on release.

Méliès was interested in stage magic from an early part of his career, but it was a demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph in 1895 that piqued his interest in film. Despite having his offer to purchase a cinematograph declined, Méliès bought a competing projector, the Animatograph, from Robert W. Paul the following year and modified it to be able to produce his own movies.

Many of Méliès sets take inspiration from his background in theatre, and his fascination with magic led to very experimental camera trickery. In A Trip to the Moon he splices the film to give the appearance of an object appearing or disappearing. He also utilised innovative methods of zooming into objects; rather than unsteadily move the camera, he created the set so that it could be moved towards the camera.

While space travel continued to be a fascination for humanity after A Trip to the Moon, it would take another 67 years for Neil Armstrong to land on the moon. This film really was one small step for Méliès, one giant leap for mankind.

You can watch A Trip to the Moon in full below.

The Shape of Water (2017)

2021-04-22T18:00:00.001+01:00

If you take the titular characters from Amelie (2001) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), set them against the art style from The City of Lost Children (1995), sprinkle on The Little Mermaid's story, and have it led by the director of Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and you get some idea of what The Shape of Water is all about.

When mute cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins) discovers a classified experiment in her work at a military research facility, she starts to form a bond with the strange amphibious humanoid. Elisa is horrified by the treatment of the creature and, undeterred by warnings from her colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), hatches a plan for its escape.

In describing The Shape of Water there are no words that can really do it a true justice, save for comparing it to those pieces of work that it so clearly takes influence from.

Taken on face value, the storyline itself makes little sense. In normal circumstances the idea that a cleaner could get solitary access to a highly valuable military asset is laughable, but to call The Shape of Water a Cold War drama is a complete misnomer. Indeed, it is a story that transcends its setting in time and needs to be viewed through the same lens as one would a fable or fairy tale.

But equally, its status as a fable-esque romance should not lull you into believing that it is just full of perfidious love. It has both a depth and a choreographed art to the intimacy and Hawkins' ability to convey the full range of Elisa's emotions without speaking is simply sublime.

There is an undertone in the whole film which hits on a moral level as well. While there is never really any fear because of the creature's actions, we are often reminded that the creature is neither - or both, depending on your point of view - a domesticated human nor a wild beast. Squeamish animal lovers be warned; this is not the film for you.

With all that said, it's easy to understand why The Shape of Water has its negative critics. Everything from the cinematography and music to the acting and direction is designed to be looked at as more of a piece of artwork than narrative fiction. But, as he did with Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro shows that films open to critical interpretation don't have to be unwatchable to the masses.

5 stars

The Sprinkler Sprinkled (1895)

2021-04-22T10:00:00.088+01:00

The Sprinkler Sprinkled (or, L'Arroseur Arrosé in its original French) is a fairly unassuming clip of 19th Century life. However, this short film is possibly the first example of both a fictional film and a comedy film, and there is one other very important first associated with this film.

As early pioneers of cinema, the Lumière brothers are, themselves, also responsible for a number of firsts within cinema. Having been directed and produced by Louis Lumière, The Sprinkler Sprinkled was the second film shown in one of the earliest known paid screenings, which was presented by the brothers on 28 December 1895.

Promotion for screenings was fairly commonplace by this time, with numerous posters in the 1890s to advertise the time and date of showings. However, The Sprinkler Sprinkled was the first film to have a poster which promoted an individual film.

The poster depicts a shot of the movie in the background with the audience in uproarious laughter in the foreground. As a poster, it was able to be much more easily coloured, but the film is still shown with its grainy monochrome.

Posters would go on to become more commonplace at the start of the 20th Century and today original historic posters are collectors items, occasionally fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction.

You can watch The Sprinkler Sprinkled in full below:

Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

2021-04-21T10:00:00.024+01:00

Filmed using a single roll of film in Roundhay (near Leeds, England), by Louis Le Prince, Roundhay Garden Scene shows Le Prince's family and friends walking in a circle.

As an early pioneer of photography, Le Prince experimented with "motion" photography and his first techniques echoed Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion (1878), where multiple lens captured footage at slightly different times before being pasted together to form a perceived moving picture.

Roundhay Garden Scene is believed to be one of the first films caught using the same lens on celluloid film, and therefore the same perspective. However, Le Prince would never watch his film, disappearing shortly before its first public screening in 1890.

One of the "actresses", Sarah Whitley, was Le Prince's mother-in-law. She was born in 1816, the year after the Napoleonic Wars, and is believed to be the oldest person to be featured in a surviving film.

You can watch Roundhay Garden Scene in full below.

Queen Elizabeth (1912)

2021-04-20T10:00:00.111+01:00

Of the original modern day "big five" film studios, only Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. survive as major studios. The other original three, have either become smaller (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and RKO) or been taken over as a subsidiary of another studio (20th Century Fox).

Like Universal, Paramount Pictures was founded by a theatre operator. Adolph Zukor was a Hungarian born immigrant to the United States in 1891, who began working in the country as an upholster and furrier before taking on business under his own name.

As Zukor began to start to make money, his cousin, Max Goldstein, approached him for a loan in 1903 to invest in a chain of theatres running vaudeville shows in New York City. On 8 May 1912, with the financial backing of theatre giants the Frohman brothers, Zukor founded The Famous Players Film Company.

Meanwhile, in France, a small production company called L'Histrionic Film was working on Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (The Loves of Queen Elizabeth). After the L'Histrionic Film was forced into liquidation by Pathé Frères, Zukor picked up the film's US release, making Queen Elizabeth the first film distributed by The Famous Players Film Company.

In some ways, Queen Elizabeth was a risky film to release, being of a considerable length for the era at over 45 minutes long. However, it became a quick success, helping Zukor to convince other studios that longer format films were the future. That being said, its quality pales in comparison to films made just two or three years later.

Zukor echoed the model adopted by Universal, promoting the stars roles in the films, which convinced many early stars such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to sign for his company. This, in turn, led to Zukor holding a dominant position in the industry by the late 1910s, made famous for its "Paramount Pictures" which were released from 1917 onwards. He was able to convince theatre chains to take block bookings - whereby they would commit to a series of Paramount films - leading to a series of antitrust cases by the Government.

In 1927 the company would become the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation before reorganising in the 1930s to become Paramount Pictures, Inc. The rest, as they say, is history.

You can watch where it all began - Queen Elizabeth - in full below:

Pauvre Pierrot (1892)

2021-04-19T10:00:00.135+01:00

Back in 1995, Toy Story became the first entirely computer animated film to be released, paving the methods and techniques for nearly every modern animation film today.

Before this, it was typical to draw a series of still images and then place them sequentially to create the illusion of movement. What is particularly fascinating about this is that it requires no fancy machinery and can be done as simply as sketching a stick figure inside the pages of a novel to create a flip book.

However, without the specialist equipment that was brought along primarily by the popularisation of film, it was not possible to project these images to a mass audience. But one French inventor - Charles-Émile Reynaud - opted to shun convention, inventing and patenting a method of projecting his animations, in a move that predated the "official" birth of cinema by several years.

Reynaud was not new to animation. After the phénakisticope - a circular device which when spun gave its printing the illusion of movement - was invented in 1833, it was upgraded almost immediately by a cylindrical device known as a zoetrope. These devices were still just seen as curiosities, and the zoetrope was commercialised as a toy by Milton Bradley in 1866.

In 1877, Reynaud released an upgraded version of the zoetrope, which he called a praxinoscope. This manipulated light using mirrors, providing a brighter and less distorted image. In the patent for his device, he made mention of a method of projecting this image, and displayed one such device in 1880. However, the praxinoscope still suffered the same issue as the original phénakisticope in that it was limited to the images that were printed on the device itself.

Throughout the 1880s, Reynaud made further improvements to his device, including adding two neighbouring cylinders to the praxinoscope to spool images onto and off of the device before and after they have been projected. This meant the images would need be placed on a flexible band with perforated edges to allow it to feed - and is perhaps the earliest example of what one might recognise as "film strip" today. Reynaud patented his new Théâtre Optique in 1888.

Théâtre Optique was opened at Musée Grévin in Paris in 1892 with Reynaud operating the equipment himself to show his new series of animations called Pantomimes Lumineuses. Opening the show was Pauvre Pierrot, a love story with elements of Romeo and Juliet, which can claim to be the first publicly projected animation and first film to use perforated edges.

Reynaud continued to show his Théâtre Optique at Musée Grévin until 1900, enticing half a million people to his shows, before other devices such as the cinematograph overtook it in popularity. By 1910, devoid of fame and penniless, Reynaud famously destroyed much of his work and threw it into the River Seine before, sadly, fading into obscurity.

What remains of Pauvre Pierrot you can watch below (note how the hand-drawn nature of each frame allows for a colour image!):

The One-Man Band (1900)

2021-04-17T10:00:00.075+01:00

With older films, the skill of directing and producing them can often only be appreciated when we have an understanding of how the various techniques would have had to have been used.

In The One-Man Band, Georges Méliès is both the director and only actor in a cast of seven. He arrives on screen and multiplies himself to create a band made up solely of himself, before utilising other techniques to make the chairs appear and disappear.

In order to create the illusion of multiplying himself, Méliès would have recorded one version of the film, then wound back the film and recorded another version over the top of the original... seven times. This risks the film becoming over-exposed because part of the film would have been exposed at least seven times longer than normal. While Méliès keeps this under control the difficulty is evident by the subtle change in brightness of each iteration.

In addition, a certain amount of luck is required so that the film doesn't tear, meaning it would have to be re-recorded from scratch. Finally, the timing of each iteration needs to be accurate to ensure the band plays, stops and bows at the same time needs to be accurate seven times in a row. The result, with all this borne in mind, is truly extraordinary.

This technique was later copied and utilised in a comedic storyline by one of silent cinema's greatest stars, Buster Keaton, in the first act of his film The Playhouse (1921).

Not content with multiple exposures, Méliès spends the second half of the film adding in jump cuts to make himself and other objects appear and disappear.

The One-Man Band is truly a film visionary at the top of his game pioneering all of his skills, wrapped up in less than two minutes.

Green Book (2018)

2021-04-16T18:00:00.102+01:00

The early 1960s were a period of societal change in the US. Following John F. Kennedy's election in 1961, the blocks imposed by segregation would slowly begin to fall away, pushed along by Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech in 1963.

Green Book is set right in the middle of all this change and tells the story of Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his concert tour through the Midwest and Deep South of America. He hires bouncer Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), a brash Italian American with own in-built prejudices, to act as his driver, bodyguard and personal assistant.

It is fitting that Green Book takes place primarily as a car journey as it takes you along for the ride. As the trip into the South descends further into the racism rabbit hole, the scenes become more and more harrowing. However, despite this, Green Book provides genuine laugh-out-loud moments and - I found at least - a true tear jerker ending.

It would be easy to celebrate Mahershala Ali's performance as Don Shirley as he struggles to maintain his composure against the increasing tide of racism, and he does provide some of the biggest jerks of emotion in the film. However, Viggo Mortensen is the real hook of the film. Tony Lip begins as a man who is, often unconsciously, institutionally racist and in some ways the villain of the film, and Mortensen never tries to hide this. Instead, he plays on Lip's redeeming features as a loyal family man so that we go from laughing at his racist ignorance to adoring his redemption arc.

In truth, the film's story is fairly predictable but it doesn't matter because it's packaged and acted impeccably, turning what could be a preaching film about racism into a story about friendship.

5 stars

The Night Before Christmas (1905)

2021-04-16T10:00:00.000+01:00

Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas had a huge influence over the modern perception of Christmas and gift-giving, perhaps kick-starting the commercialisation of the festive period and the revival of the figure of Father Christmas.

Santa Claus appeared in film shorts as early as 1897, and the first Christmas film, George Albert Smith's Santa Claus followed a year later. Despite being only a minute long, Santa Claus features a number of clever special effects, including a picture within a picture, and was one of the most sophisticated films of the late 1800s.

In 1905, Edwin S. Porter decided to adapt Moore's poem for the Edison Manufacturing Company in what would become the first film adaptation of the famous verse. He named his film The Night Before Christmas, after the poem's opening line.

Porter's film validates the mythology of Santa, and opens with him tending his reindeer on Christmas Eve before switching to a family unit putting up their stockings - a scene which would have been instantly recognisable as Christmas in the early 20th Century.

The film is broken up with intertitles which quotes lines from the poem as an introduction for the next scene. Not to be outdone by the effects seen in Santa Claus, Porter included an intricate diorama showing Santa's journey to the family's home and after coming down the chimney there is a smooth jump cut as Santa works his magic on the Christmas tree.

The film ends - perhaps unsurprisingly - with Santa wishing a "Merry Christmas to All | And to All a Good Night".

You can watch The Night Before Christmas in full below:

Parasite (2019)

2021-04-15T18:00:00.001+01:00

In 2020, the Academy Award for Best Picture was given to a non-English language film for the first time. Parasite is a South Korean black comedy that studies class inequality.

The Kim family live in a half-basement, scrounging off their neighbours and local businesses while working low paid temporary jobs. When their son Ki-woo learns about a job tutoring Da-hye, the daughter of the affluent Park family, the Kims recommend each other in turn to take over as servants of the Parks, revelling and savouring the luxury.

Parasite is an enigma. Oscar winners often deal with societal issues by sensitively having the oppressed rise up and make the best of their situation (12 Years A Slave, Slumdog Millionaire, Green Book). However, in a black comedy, nobody wins.

It is easy to point at the Kims, the impoverished have-nots, as the oppressed rising up against their rich oppressor, but we also learn that the Parks have their own problems to deal with; oppressed, perhaps, by their responsibilities to each other.

Dong-ik, the father, cannot decide whether he loves his wife. Yeon-gyo, the mother, is often bored but has little interest in her daughter. Da-hye, the daughter, wants to be a normal teenager but is irked at her brother monopolising her mother's attention. Da-song, the son, is ignored by the family and valid points of discussion are dismissed as mental disorder. Meanwhile, the Kims are a harmonious family, united by their more obvious physical plights.

The film itself doesn't shy away from the bleak existence of basement dwelling and of comparing the haves to the have-nots, making for a very solid film. However, as the black comedy remains a consistent undercurrent it does take away slightly from its legitimacy - often portraying slightly more of a farce than it should.

But, in any case, it is a worthy social commentary and an entertaining watch.

4 stars

Making A Living (1914)

2021-04-15T10:00:00.106+01:00

Towards the end of the 19th Century, a new form of entertainment was born in France. As a lighthearted version of comedy, without moral intentions, vaudeville became immensely popular in the US from the 1880s as a form of stage-bound circus.

By the 1910s, these actors were starting to find their way onto film, paving the way for slapstick comedies. In 1912, actor, director, and - later - the "King of Comedy", Mack Sennett set up Keystone Studios, which was arguably the most successful studio in the 1910s for bringing this form of comedy to film.

Sennett created his famous Keystone Cops (or Kops) which were fictional incompetent policemen that often served as part of the background ensemble in many of Keystone's films.

In 1913, Keystone hired a young vaudeville actor, Charlie Chaplin. While Chaplin's "The Tramp" character would make his first appearance in Kid Auto Races at Venice on 7 February 1914, Chaplin actually made his film debut with Keystone in Making A Living, released five days earlier..

Chaplin's physical appearance in Making A Living is not dissimilar from that created for The Tramp. He wears a moustache, possibly as a result of Sennett thinking Chaplin looked too young, as well as having a top hat and cane. He plays a swindler who is always on the lookout for ways to make money regardless of the morality. He inevitably ends up in trouble with the Keystone Cops, in what would be one of the few films where they appear with Chaplin.

Like many films from this era, Keystone's popularity waned with the introduction of sound and talkies. The studio would become defunct by the mid-1930s, leaving the enduring memory of both the Keystone Cops and the first introduction of Chaplin to film.

You can watch Making a Living below.

The Lonedale Operator (1911)

2021-04-14T10:00:00.003+01:00

This year marks 110 years since the release of one of D.W. Griffith's lesser known films, The Lonedale Operator.

After her father is taken ill, a girl takes over the running of a telegraph station, only to find herself harassed by two thieves.

While Griffith was a lauded director of the era, known for his lengthy epic A Birth of a Nation, he was also a pioneer of cinematography.

A Lonedale Operator flits over several genres in its short runtime, from setting the scene with romance, slowing building up tension and then releasing it as action. Finally, a light-hearted comedy scene brings the film to a close.

In addition to featuring several different scenes, and a large number of cuts between them - both of which was fairly uncommon at the time - The Lonedale Operator is one of the earliest films to feature the use of a close-up.

You can watch The Lonedale Operator, in full, below.

The Kiss (1896)

2021-04-13T10:00:00.025+01:00

As well as pushing technological boundaries in the early years of movies, filmmakers have been pushing social acceptance boundaries as well.

In 1896, William Heise directed a re-enactment of the final scene of the stage musical The Widow Jones. This scene was a kiss between the two main actors May Irwin and John Rice.

Despite being just 20 seconds long, the film is renowned for being the earliest example of a call for censorship, with the Roman Catholic Church said to be shocked as kissing in public could lead to prosecution at the time.

As if in defiance of this outrage, The Kiss became the most popular film produced by Thomas Edison's company that year, and many theatres showed it at the end of every show.

You can watch The Kiss in full below - if you dare!

Jean and the Calico Doll (1910)

2021-04-12T10:00:00.091+01:00

Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller, Lassie, Hooch, Beethoven, and even Bolt and Slinky. Film is full of famous dogs, and the media industry loves to use them as mascots. HMV, the British music and film retailer even has a famous dog, Nipper, as part of its logo, having been adopted from an 1898 painting of the terrier listening to His Master's Voice on a gramophone.

In film, the dog to start it all was a female collie called Jean, who was more popularly known as the Vitagraph Dog. The founder of Vitagraph Studios, Albert Edward Smith, had a specific story in mind featuring a dog that was able to act beyond doing simple tricks.

When Laurence Trimble, a young writer of stories featuring animals, heard of Smith's predicament, he became determined to find and supply the correct dog. The story goes that in order to prove his worth as a dog trainer he found a stray on the parking lot and, after spending an hour coaxing it out, was able to train it to perform the action required by Smith's script.

The next day, Trimble arrived at the studio with his own dog, Jean. Impressed by Trimble, Smith asked him to direct Jean in the picture, which would become Jean and the Calico Doll. Jean plays the role of a family pet who alerts her owners to their daughter's accident.

Also making her screen debut in Jean and the Calico Doll was actress Helen Hayes, whose own career spanned 80 years, who would later remark that she was thrilled to star in support of Jean.

Jean would go on to star in 25 films in her 5 year career before her death in 1916. Laurence Trimble would continue to direct films, especially other canine stars including a German Shepherd called Strongheart, before eventually retiring in 1926 to concentrate on training dogs for the blind.

Most of Jean's films are now considered lost. However, her second film, Jean the Match-Maker (1910), survives. You can watch that in full below:

In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914)

2021-04-10T10:00:00.137+01:00

A potlatch is a gift-giving feast and is practised by many of the Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States and in 1885 was prohibited by the Canadian Government in what many people saw as a way of forcing European culture into aboriginal subjects.

So, there is a certain irony that when Edward S. Curtis approached the Kwakwaka'wakw people from the Pacific Northwest coast, to act in his film about their culture, they were expected to perform rituals that had been banned for over 25 years. To further compound the irony, Curtis widely known at the time for his views on the indigenous people being a "vanishing race".

Curtis requested the assistance of George Hunt, who was a renowned ethnologist and speaker of both English and Kwak'wala, having been born to an English father and a mixed race mother from the neighbouring Tlingit people. He married into, and became adopted by, the Kwakwaka'wakw people.

Hunt appears to be fairly instrumental in asking the Kwakwaka'wakw people to embrace the opportunity to share their culture, and perhaps took liberties with Curtis over how far he'd go to create an accurate representation. War canoes were repainted, ceremonial masks were carved, and totems were rebuilt. The Kwakwaka'wakw people went so far as to insist that only those who had earned certain masks could wear and act in them.

Hunt's youngest son, Stanley, plays Motana, the hero of film. Motana dreams of a beautiful girl called Naida, who is also coveted by the Sorcerer. Naida's father prefers Motana as a suitor, and Motana's father orders an attack against Sorcerer's clan. But, while their attack is successful, Sorcerer's brother Yaklus, a feared character, vows revenge.

While there are elements of the film that are considered fictionalised - Curtis included a scene of whale hunting, which was never part of Kwakwaka'wakw culture - such was the accuracy of the depiction, and the ambiguity by Curtis, that when it was released it was seen as both a documentary and a fictional reconstruction.

In the Land of the Head Hunters was also the first film shot in British Columbia, and is the oldest surviving feature film made in Canada. It was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1999.

In the Land of the Head Hunters was restored and released on DVD (Milestone Films). A 40-minute version - down from the original 65 minutes - is available to watch below:

If you're here because of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge 2021, please stop by the theme reveal page which has a full list of all films used in the challenge.

Spotlight (2015)

2021-04-09T18:00:00.115+01:00

There's an elegant symmetry with films based around journalism; as the characters build up their story we share their knowledge as it is learned, allowing us to feel part of the same team as we uncover misdemeanours with them.

However, journalism films are also a very difficult watch as they deal with often very sensitive topics. In Spotlight we are taken back to the 2002 Catholic Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal and the investigation published by The Boston Globe. Its subject matter is deeply unsettling; even more so when it is considered that while there is some artistic license, it is a generally accurate representation of the events of less than 20 years ago.

The term "spotlight" comes from the investigative journalism team in The Boston Globe and they are Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), Matt Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James) and headed by Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton). They are charged by new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), to undercover the reasons behind why a priest who had been accused of child abuse was being moved between parishes rather than being struck off.

Where Spotlight really shines is that is does not hold back in the testimonies, with its - rightful - insistence that the survivors go into more graphic detail rather than using collective terms such as "molested". And, it continues to build, never seeming unable to find more levels to shock you on.

Similarly there is never a preaching righteousness about what the paper was doing was for "the right reasons". There is an admission that, throughout all elements of society, we are all responsible in some way for turning a blind eye.

Overall, gripping and unrelenting - a worthy Academy Award winner.

5 stars