The calm before. The first four shots of Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) set an ominous tone. Empty landscapes in rural America, dwarfed by the sky above, darkness closing in. A gentle evening punctuated by the chirps of crickets. The fading remnants of the day’s sunlight slowly smothered by clouds. There are no people in sight, just their creations: a small farm and a pumpjack, a truss bridge across a river, a barbed-wire fence; each designed to give man some kind of hold over nature: to farm it, to traverse it, to segment it. And then, finally, a shot of the cloud-filled sky above a distant row of trees. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, unknowable. A constant, looming presence, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And then a crash of lightning tips the scales. Man has conquered the land and the threat now comes from above. The wind starts howling and the calm is over.
Sunday 21 July 2024
Saturday 27 April 2024
Challengers | Luca Guadagnino, 2024
Sunday 24 December 2023
2023 in Cinema
Tuesday 28 November 2023
The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958
Friday 6 October 2023
The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985
New Order: The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985
It would be tempting, perhaps seductively so, to shoot a Talking Heads live show from multiple angles and train every camera on David Byrne. His sudden jerks and lurches and twitches never fail to catch the eye, as they should, but with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme is solely interested in capturing the totality of this performance, and this band, and these songs, and these people. Byrne’s unstoppably jagged charisma is a huge part of this, running laps of the stage, dancing with a floor lamp, performing in an enormous grey business suit, but it’s just one layer of dozens, each happening at the same time in the same place in total harmony. The alchemy of live music. Even split into its constituent parts and pieced back together, it’s impossible to see how it all comes together.
A year later, Demme took a similar approach with his music video for New Order’s single The Perfect Kiss, shot in the band’s practice room in Manchester as they perform the song from start to finish. The video cuts between close-ups of each member individually, either playing their instruments or waiting to play them, with the camera mostly trained on their faces. Demme isolates each person in a frame of their own and emphasises their individual contribution to the song: Bernard Sumner singing and playing guitar and hitting a cowbell; Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris turning the dials and pressing the keys of various synthesisers; Peter Hook playing a bass riff and hitting some drum pads. Each close-up underlines a certain sound visually as a single layer among dozens of others, created by one of four people and their instruments, and by focusing on the means by which these layers are constructed, Demme finds the same thing he found in Stop Making Sense: that music is alchemical. It’s water into wine, lead into gold. It’s a thousand individual noises thrown together to create something dense and magic and unknowable.
Sunday 24 September 2023
Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988
Monday 28 August 2023
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 | #1
Tuesday 8 August 2023
Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan, 2023
Thursday 15 June 2023
Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952
Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952
Wagons in the mountains. Two men whose reputations precede them in certain circles are thrust together by chance on the trail, far from home, each looking for a new life somewhere else. McLyntock is leading a group of farmers to Oregon to build a new town, and Cole is travelling to California in search of gold. Cole tags along for a while and a kinship emerges between the two ex-raiders. Their journey is tough. Distance is marked by days and the wagons are fragile and the sun is hot and the horses are tired and the trail is jagged and steep and fraught with dangers, and yet they go on. The dream persists. Meanwhile, gold is found nearby and the world changes in a season. The clash of ideals between these men, previously unspoken and undisruptive, is projected untenably onto a once quiet town poisoned by new money. The old deals are not today’s deals. Nobody is safe without a gun and bargains are made with money and without trust. But distance is still measured in days. The trail is still fraught with dangers. For men like Cole, the risks taken for riches are worth the reward, no matter the cost. For men like McLyntock, nothing has more value than one’s word to other people. Like the trail, that hasn't changed. And so the dream persists.