idFilm

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:37:00 +0000

MP here Martha Marcy May Marlene is a tonally downbeat and ultimately evasive study of Martha (Elizabeth Olson), a young woman at odds enough with the social fabric around her to have once fallen for the intrigues of a cult physically and emotionally removed from it; with her inherently and increasingly disturbing time with the cult told in prompted flashbacks, the "present" unfolds as Martha spends time with sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their holiday...

The Descendants (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:04:00 +0000

MP here To some extent, it seems redundant to criticise a film for not being something it didn't set out to be. But at some point, one must ask: in what ways could this work and its drama have been improved? Unfortunately for The Descendants, the answer is: many. Particularly for a film that has, as its potentially fruitful fundamentals, a familial - and familiar - drama foregrounded against the social transformations resulting from the selling of land inherited down the generations,...

idFi...ction?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:38:00 +0000

MP here 2012 has so far been a year of words. I've spent much of it writing what amounts to over 15,000 of them, for both this place and Front Row Reviews as well as academic assignments, and much of what remained reading more than that - research for the just-mentioned, alongside a pebble-dash of books recommended me in working towards a PhD proposal I've since postponed, not to mention making what I can of the access attained by obscene tuition fees to the untouched shelves of marxist...

War Horse (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:26:00 +0000

MP here As noted here last week, War Horse is an amiable enough film, for which director Steven Spielberg and writers Lee Hall and Richard Curtis, following the success of a 2007 stage production, adapt Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel into a balanced and digestible blend of warming schmaltz and frontline horror. Its ultimate appeal might be determined by the viewer's love for anything equestrian - my own interests do not transcend this fictional account - but the film boasts some stunning...

More pics of anamorphic flicks

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:40:00 +0000

MP here As a follow-up to this post, here's a video of some examples of how the Anamorphic format looks on-screen. Originally uploaded by ARRI, it came to me just now via Ambrose Heron's FILMdetail, whose Twitter you can and should follow here.

AV Festival 2012: a preview

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:15:00 +0000

Double Tide MP here In a bout of double procrastination - I have two assignments due in this Friday, while a long-neglected review of Spielberg's amiable enough War Horse is on its way - I thought now's as good a time as any to write a few lines on AV Festival 2012, the fifth edition of the ever-expanding biennial festival of contemporary art, technology music and (of course) film. Usually a ten-day stint, this year's festival - titled "As Slow As Possible" after a 1987 composition for...

Shame (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 02:47:00 +0000

MP here If you're inclined to read about films before seeing them, few pieces will prepare you for a work as well as Reverse Shot co-founder Michael Koresky's review of Shame, Steve McQueen's follow-up to his 2008 debut feature, Hunger. That film was a minimalist and curious de-politicisation of a highly charged subject matter, namely Bobby Sands's 1981 hunger strike. Co-scripted with McQueen by Abi Morgan - who also worked on The Iron Lady - Shame concerns Brandon (Michael Fassbender), an...

The Artist (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:40:00 +0000

MP here Beginning in 1927, The Artist's story unfolds over six or so years as Hollywood makes its transition from silent productions to full-on talkies. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, the film itself is a "silent", shot in loving black and white, replacing dialogue with intertitles and so on. Less authentic reproduction than knowing homage, the film's makers content themselves with a sincere enough feature-length pastiche. Beyond such mimicry, it struggles to be of further significance,...

Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:49:00 +0000

MP here Within the first few shots of the latest Mission: Impossible film, IMF agent Trevor Hanaway (Josh Holloway) leaps off the roof of a building to evade two armed assailants pursuing him. The subsequent shot follows Hanaway in medium-close-up, back to the ground as he hurtles towards it, only for a device he dropped prior to jumping to inflate quick enough into an airbag large enough to absorb his impact. It's an exhilarating moment that sets the tone and pace for the film as a whole....

Visual pleasure and the male... glare

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:12:00 +0000

MP here The last film I watched in 2011 was Die Hard. The film made the Top 100 I posted in September, but I think it'll be even higher if I revise that list in 2012. For university a few months ago, I had to read an article in the journal Film & History by Paul Cohen, titled, "Cowboys die hard: real mean businessmen in the Reagan-Era Blockbuster". Naturally, of course, you'll have to pay to access this piece, which offers some analysis of Die Hard and has it down as a conservative...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and some further thoughts on 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:06:00 +0000

MP here When David Fincher was announced as the directorof the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, one might have recalled his 2007 masterpiece Zodiac and expected - with some excitement - an emphasis on the original's murder mystery elements, on the investigative process by which protagonists Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander hunt the presumed killer of a girl who went missing decades previously. It's disappointing, then, that even if...

The Silence (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:04:00 +0000

MP here Directed and scripted by Swiss filmmaker Baran bo Odan from Jan Costin Wagner's 2007 novel, The Silence stylishly blends mystery and drama as it evokes two different timeframes in rural Germany: a hot, 1986 summer, in which a young girl named Pia is raped and murdered whilst riding her bicycle through a wheat field, and, 23 years later, when another girl goes missing in identical circumstances. Told from the point of view of perpetrators, investigating detectives and the parents of...

Hugo (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:07:00 +0000

MP here As soon as I came out of Hugo on Tuesday I sent the following text message to several friends: "HUGO is unbearably long, sugary, romantic, fantastical, and terribly written. It has certain appeals but little edge. I saw it in 2d, and am not interested in a dramatically weak exercise to showcase how good '3d can be'. A celebration of [Méliès]'s kind of cinema, it betrays something we've known about Scorsese for years, namely that he has little to say about the world, and fancies...

The Turin Horse (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Srini) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:01:00 +0000

Srini here Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s (supposed) final film, The Turin Horse, fulfilled my expectations of it in many ways. Of all the films of his that I have watched, I keep returning to the seven hour epic, Sátántangó (1994) the most. Not so much in terms of number of times I have watched the film, but in terms of how often I think about it. The Turin Horse has many things in common with that film thematically and aesthetically, but there are significant differences. Tarr...

#FF @winter_reading

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:42:00 +0000

Christmas rush: The French Connection, 1971 MP here If I may begin with a cliché, it seems only five minutes ago when I saw The Tree of Life; it doesn't seem much longer than that when I saw The King's Speech. Early July and early January were the corresponding dates respectively - and now December is upon us! That means I'm preparing an end-of-year editorial for Front Row Reviews to accompany its writing staff's Top Ten. As idFilm has developed over the year, I've had less means and...

A double barrel of laughs: Snowtown (2011) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:20:00 +0000

MP here Reading up on the actual events depicted in new Australian film Snowtown should shake anyone; the film itself makes a virtue of barely resolved, grimly detailed horror, and it's on these genre terms that it works best, even if it is overlong and overwrought. (As a "pre-script", I'll note in passing that almost every other scene in the film involves food in some way.) In early 1990s (working-class, critics stress) suburban Adelaide, single mother of four Elizabeth Harvey (Louise...

"Communism is dead"; long live communism!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:12:00 +0000

MP here Yesterday evening - in, as I wrote the day before, the sixth week of a master's degree - I attended a lecture designed to introduce fellow students and myself to a selection of "theoretical frameworks", to give an overview of film theory, its aims and its uses. I'd encountered all of these theories before at undergraduate level. I find a lot of them (psychoanalysis, for instance) are prone to what may be truisms, overemphasised by the field so as to appear radical and written so as...

Some ruminations on things, related or not

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:32:00 +0000

MP here I saw 33 films in October; so far this month, I've seen one. Following an expensive weekend in London (MF Doom and Ghostface Killah's gig in Camden was a bit disappointing), I enter the sixth week of a master's degree, so there's other business to attend to, and after my local independent cinema decided to book in The Black Power Mixtape for an extravagant two screenings against 19 and counting of The Help, I've given up on theatrical releases for the time...

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:17:00 +0000

MP here Lynne Ramsay chose to direct her adaptation (co-written with Rory Kinnear) of Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin with an intentionally grating texture of recurring visual and aural motifs and a great deal of heavy symbolism. The result is an effectively claustrophobic and unsettling film. But what else? Eva (Tilda Swinton) and Franklin (John C. Reilly) are financially comfortable parents to son Kevin, and later a daughter, Lucy. The film focuses primarily on...

Two more "Treasures from the Archives" at this year's London Film Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:52:00 +0000

MP here You know the drill. A short write-up of The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Cry Danger (1951) can be found here from earlier in the week. Without further ado, I'll write a little on last Sunday's films, which, like the two preceding them, screened at the Southbank as part of the LFF's Treasures from the Archives strand, programmed by Clyde Jeavons. Elia Kazan adapted America America (above; also known as The Anatolian Smile) in 1963 from his own book, an account of the journey made by the...

Contagion (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:54:00 +0000

MP here There are a lot of interesting elements to Contagion, but as a film about the communal, societal and finally global dangers of viral contamination, it was doubly interesting to see it in a pretty packed multiplex theatre with fellow audience members coughing, sneezing, picking their noses (trust me, I saw), and so on, things to which my attention was inevitably drawn due to the film’s own commentary on them; indeed, at one point, one character – concerned about the spread of germs –...

Two "Treasures from the Archives" at this year's London Film Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:45:00 +0000

MP here Over the weekend I caught four of the films programmed by Clyde Jeavons - whose reliably knowledgeable and succinct introductions to each film infect you with that immediate sense of passion and history - as part of the Treasures from the Archives strand at this year's London Film Festival: The Caine Mutiny (1954), Cry Danger (1951), America America (1963) and Bye Bye Birdie (1963). Some observations on the first two follow, and there'll be a second post later in the week... The...

Drive (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 16:08:00 +0000

MP here Drive - which was almost ruined by someone munching in the fourth row - is a stylish and stylised pastiche of films such as 1978's The Driver and 1985's To Live and Die in L.A., and even perhaps 1981's Diva. Its first half is a sparse mood-piece low on incident and dialogue, as Ryan Gosling's Driver falls for neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan); the return of Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) from prison propels the film into its more action-packed second half, with slow-motion...

Catering for all tastes... at the expense of the film

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:16:00 +0000

MP here A seminar reminded me earlier this week of the importance of cinematic sound. It's a more subliminally consumed element than the image, but it's no less important. While we tend to think of filmic sound as complimentary to what we see, that doesn't necessarily mean it's synchronous - in fact, a lot of the time, what we hear doesn't in fact relate directly to what's inside the frame. I'm not here to give an overview of the various uses of sound in film, though. There are plenty of...

Tyrannosaur (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Pattison) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:32:00 +0000

MP here At no point in Tyrannosaur, the directorial feature debut by Paddy Considine, does the film do anything - either narratively or visually - that you didn't expect it to. A toothless and redundant expansion of Considine's already overrated BAFTA-winning short Dog Altogether (2007), the film is an ugly and strained drama, complete with contrivances, caricatures and, whenever its story hits an editorial dead-end, plenty of acoustic guitar that heightens its mannerist...