Sunday 29 January 2017

Accident | Joseph Losey, 1967

Accident | Joseph Losey, 1967

"There is nothing to keep her here."
"She loves me."

Rooms darkened by overflowing bookshelves, tables alongside tables, and mantelpieces loaded with ornaments, ashtrays, lamps, glasses and bottles; an enclosed tennis court surrounded by overgrown flowerbeds; the claustrophobia of an overturned car. Joseph Losey's Accident is designed to push people close to one another and make them fight for limited space. One idyllic summer afternoon, a professor is invited on a boat ride with two of his students: a beautiful “Austrian princess” and her high-achieving boyfriend. He jumps in next to her and his eyes soon dart around her body: legs, chest, neck, face. He’s enthralled by her, and is emboldened to impress her by swinging from a tree overhanging the water. But, of course, he falls in. Her boyfriend, propelling the punt with a pole, laughs, his show of strength having defeated his professor's. Humiliated and soaked through, the professor bashfully returns to his office to change clothes as his students walk hand in hand behind him. The failure to understand that physical closeness doesn’t equate to intimacy will always be the undoing of men.

Sunday 22 January 2017

Flags of our Fathers | Clint Eastwood, 2006

Flags of Our Fathers | Clint Eastwood, 2006

"Looking at it, you could believe the sacrifice wasn't a waste."

A dessert served at a fundraising dinner held in honour of the three surviving subjects of Raising The Flag on Iwo Jima, an iconic photograph that became a sign of hope during World War II. The horror and tragedy that surrounds this picture is lost on American soil, where the war is seen in black and white and the blood is away from the headlines. But for these men, stolen from the front-line to become poster boys of war bonds, the blood is vivid red. As they're paraded around the country, their friends die on the battlefield. They're more valuable as symbols than as soldiers now, but, to them, their absence is the same as blood on their hands. And the photograph keeping them from war is now served to them on a plate, smothered in blood-red strawberry sauce. Symbols mean more than men. Images mean more than reality.

Sunday 8 January 2017

Scarface | Brian De Palma, 1983

Scarface | Brian De Palma, 1983

Paradise as wallpaper to die in front of; the world is yours.

Tuesday 3 January 2017

Chocolat | Claire Denis, 1988

Chocolat | Claire Denis, 1988

The unburdened perspective of a young child meets the entrenched entitlement of French colonialists in Cameroon, mystified by the idea of an off-handed comparison to Nazi soldiers.

"I want a variety of French food!" 
"I sleep better with a gun under my pillow."