born Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Bambi:
a Tale of Life in the Woods
(Bambi,
l’histoire d’une Vie
dans les Bois)

Director – Michel Fessler – 2024 – France – Cert. PG – 78m

*****

The woods. A faun is born, looked after by its mother, and learns to fend for itself – remarkable live action adaptation of Bambi, shot with real live animals, is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 15th

It’s inevitable that any film adaptation of Austrian writer Felix Salten’s novel Bambi: a Tale of Life in the Woods will conjure the spectre of Disney’s groundbreaking, animated Bambi (David D. Hand, 1942). However, this French live action film (which opened in that country last year) takes interesting decisions from the get go. For a start it’s live action, so straight away we’re in the quasi-documentary area of animals being photographed, and it’s unclear to what extent these performers or their environments are being augmented by computer animation. (A couple of wide, establishing drone shots in the opening minutes, too far away to show animals, looked to this writer to incorporate CGI. But perhaps that’s just my imagination, and there’s little or perhaps no computer animation here.)

Then we have the addition of a narrator (this is the English language version, so the narrator (NAME) speaks in English – one would hope that the French soundtrack with on / off-able subtitles would be included on any forthcoming Blu-ray or DVD release, which perhaps might even have an option to switch the voice-over off altogether and just play the sound effects and the music, or even better, have a music only track available as well.)… Read the rest

Sleep
(Jam, 잠)

Director – Jason Yu – 2023 – South Korea – Cert. 15 – 95m

***1/2

A pregnant woman becomes convinced that her husband is possessed when he starts sleepwalking and otherwise behaving oddly in his sleep at night – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 12th

One night, a wife wakes up and looks at her husband. He’s sitting on the end of the bed and says, calmly, “someone’s inside”. She hears banging. She gets up, and we see she is pregnant. Fearing an intruder, she goes into the next room, household drill in hand. It’s the door to the verandah banging, wedged open with his flip-flop. She finds their dog, Pepper, a Pomeranian, hiding behind the box container with the laundry liquid. Returning to the bedroom, she sees him wearing one flip-flop.

Sleep is a horror thriller about both a sleep disorder and intermittent possession by a ghost. The wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) is a former film executive, the husband Hyun-Su (Lee Sun-kyun) a struggling actor in whose career she believes. On their wall, a wooden plaque proclaims, “Together, we can overcome anything”. Their new downstairs neighbour Min-jung (Kim Guk-hee), who moved in after the difficult old man who used to complain to the couple about the noise moved out, pops round to say hello and complain about the banging that’s been going on for the last week.… Read the rest