Tag: broken

Little Shrew
(Snowflake)

Director – Kate Bush – 2024 – UK – Cert. PG – 4m

*****

As modern warfare decimates a landscape, a shrew crosses countryside and town as a small, spirit-like light falls towards it – short accompanies the UK cinema release of From Hilde, With Love on Friday, June 27th

Musician / songwriter Kate Bush originally recorded the song Snowflake, which appeared on her album 50 Words for Snow (2011), in part to record her young son Albert’s voice before it broke. The creative process is such that people don’t always know exactly why they do what they do, and that is clearly the case with this song, since Kate has returned to it after the event to direct an animated film around it. Animation being a painstakingly slow production process, the soundtrack for the short is an edit of the song, pulling it down from almost 10 minutes to 4 minutes. The 4-minute edit is surprisingly coherent and seems to distil the essence of the piece.

Most of the lyrics are sung by Albert, yet Kate sings the haunting refrain:

The world is so loud

Keep falling

I’ll find you

It’s impossible to listen to this without thinking she is the mother somehow waiting for her falling son, whatever that means.… Read the rest

Tags 2024, 50 Words for Snow, aircraft, Alan Henry, Albert McIntosh, animation, animation compositor, animator, atmospheric sfx, awareness, background artist, battlefield, beams of light, black and white, black pollutant, blast, block of flats, bomb blast, broken, cathedral, cloud formation, comet, creative process, dead soldier, decimate, decimated by a bomb, detritus, drone videographer, Earth’s atmosphere, edit, egg, emotion, environment, exploration, fall, falling, feelings, flying, Gayle Martin, guided missile, gun, hope and drone animation, illustrator, Inkubus, James Clifford, Jim Kay, Jon Carin, Kate Bush, killed by Russians, landscape, life force, light, Little Shrew, Lorenzo Cenci Di Bello, loud, loudness, Maksim Levin, miniature, missiles, modern warfare, mothers and sons, moving illustration, musician, nebula, need, Nicolas Loudot, Nicolette Van Gendt, nowhere to go, outer space, pair of spectacles, panning, panning shot, photographic naturalism, pocket, pollution, producer, production process, refrain, rendering, Reuters, running, safe haven, scamper, shark, short, short film, shrew, smoke, snarling mouth, Snowflake, son’s voice, song, songwriter, soundtrack, spasms, sperm, spirit, target, telegraph pole, terror, Tomato Twist, tree trunk, twisted metal, Ukraine, voice breaking, war, war-torn, weaponry, womb, wonder, world-building

Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Contestant

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 29 November 2024
No Comments on The Contestant
Sticky post

Director – Clair Titley – 2023 – UK – Cert.12a – 90m

*****

How a man’s incarceration in a room, broadcast on TV, became a media sensation in Japan– out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th

Before The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), which would be released later the same year, a couple of years before Big Brother and the start of the UK’s reality TV phenomenon, a Japanese TV show breaks new boundaries. A man is put in a room where he had to earn a million yen in prizes from magazine competitions before being released. The facilities are basic – there is a sink unit and a gas ring, but no cooking utensils. The whole situation is filmed by two cameras. The man in the room, Nasubi, knows it is being filmed, but has been told by the producer that most of it will be thrown away. He is completely unaware that this setup is being edited into a weekly, six-minute TV spot and going out on the weekly, magazine format, endurance TV show Denpa Shonen.

The Denpa Shonen show is the brainchild of TV producer Tsuchiya, who for this segment auditions a dozen or so male hopefuls and chooses one of them, Nasubi, by lottery.… Read the rest

Tags abuse, air ticket, audience, bag of rice, BBC, BBC Tokyo, Big Brother, broadcast, broken, bullying, censorship, childhood friend, Clair Titley, climbing Everest, complicity, cook, correspondent, dance around the room, Denpa Shonen, diary, door isn’t locked, earn from prizes, earthquake, edited out, eggplant, embarrassed, endurance TV show, euphemism, exhaustion, feelings, filmed, Fukushima, gas ring, genital area, goal, hunger, incarceration, internet, interview subjects, isolation, Japan, Japanese TV, Japanese TV captions, joy, Juliet Hindell, livestreaming, loneliness, lottery, luck, magazine competitions, magazine format, manipulation, mental struggle, million yen target, modesty, mothers and sons, mountain guide, Nasubi, no cooking utensils, no saucepan, play along, press conference, producer, ratings, reality TV phenomenon, release, remove clothing, self-mounted challenges, shame, share, shock, sink unit, solid black circle, South Korea, television persona, The Contestant, The Truman Show, Tokyo, Tsuchiya, tsunami, TV producer, UK, walk out, weekly, weekly TV spot, wiling participant, win a prize

Features Live Action Movies

#Manhole
(#マンホール)

Director – Kazuyoshi Kumakiri – 2023 – Japan – LEAFF Cert.15 – 99m

***

A man falls down a manhole following his stag night and turns to social media to get help and, hopefully, escape – plays in the Official Selection at the 2023 London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) which runs from Wednesday, October 18th to Sunday, October 29th.

The opening minutes of #Manhole resemble any number of Japanese movies you can think of as Shunsuke Kawamura (Yuto Nakajima) attends a surprise party put on by work colleagues at his local watering hole. It’s a good night, suggesting he’s well loved (albeit on a fairly superficial level) and he leaves extremely drunk, briefly saying goodbye to best mate Etsuro Kase (Kento Nagayama from Love Life Koji Fukada, 2022; Villain, Lee Sang-il, 2010) whose well-intentioned present – a lighter – may not be so much use to Kawamura now that he’s given up smoking. Or so it would seem at that point in the proceedings.

Kawamura must have drunk a good deal more than he realised because as he staggers home, he falls down a manhole off of which someone, by accident or design, has left the cover. His upper leg is badly cut.… Read the rest