Tag: windscreen

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Features Live Action Movies

The Body
(2024)
(Il Corpo)

Director – Vincenzo Alfieri – 2024 – Italy – 115m

*****

The body of a rich industrialist’s wife vanishes from the morgue after her death – stylish giallo premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

An unashamed genre piece, The Body is a giallo – an Italian crime and murder mystery named after the yellow book covers of their literary equivalents. While it absolutely fits into that very specific Italian genre, it’s actually the fourth remake of Spanish murder mystery The Body (Oriol Paulo, 2012) following remakes in India (twice, as Game, A.M.R. Ramesh, 2016 and The Body, Jeethu Joseph, 2019) and South Korea (The Vanished, Lee Chang-hee, 2018).

The current version juxtaposes stock elements from gialli and popular fiction with some highly original ideas which may or may not have been used in the earlier versions as yet unseen by this writer. The stock elements include: the womaniser suspected of murdering his wife, the hard-bitten inspector investigating the case, the man who has married into wealth, and the university professor having an affair with a student. The highly original ideas: a man running out in front of a car, a corpse disappearing from a morgue, and a married woman who is also a practical joker.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Boonie Bears Time Twist
(Xiong Chu Mo
Ni Zhuan Shi Kong,
熊出沒·逆轉時空)

Director – Lin Huida – 2024 – China – Cert. PG – 105m

***1/2

The Boonie Bears’ friend Vick is tricked into giving up his memories of the bears in exchange for working at an office job far away in the city – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, September 13th

Although it works perfectly well as a standalone film, Time Twist is an odd place to start for anyone new to China’s long-running Boonie Bears franchise because the Boonie Bears are here relegated to secondary character status in a story about their friend Vick (once again voiced in the English language version by Paul ‘Maxx’ Rinehart). Here he’s introduced as ‘the logger’ who first fell in and became friends with the Bears (in what those already familiar with the franchise will know as their Pine Tree Mountain forest / national park home) before becoming, as a slogan hand-stamped on the image puts it, a ‘Certified Loser’.

He boards the bus to nearby Shen City, after momentarily looking wistfully at a flier on a telegraph pole reading ‘Lumberjacks / Hiring’. There, he picks up a job as an intern in an office, where his computer keyboard skills and overall ingenuity get his ‘intern’ tag replaced by one for ‘engineer’.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Dead Calm

Director – Phillip Noyce – 1989 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 96m

*****

A bereaved couple taking time off on their yacht answer a distress call from another boat and become embroiled in a game of cat and mouse – out in UK cinemas 1989

Royal Australian Naval Officer John Ingram (Sam Neill) arrives home in Oz to discover his beautiful wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) has been involved in a car accident which was fatal for their young child. She’s in the hospital in critical condition; the camera descends into her eye. She remembers with horror her child fatefully undoing his seat belt before being thrown through a windscreen.

Having thus traumatised the audience, this then jumps to the couple on their yacht, the Saracen, where they are getting away from it all for several weeks. The weather is as flat as the title suggests. Rae bathes in the sea like an initiate in some baptismal rite awaiting a fresh start – until another vessel turns up – the Orpheus, with its one survivor Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane) claiming the rest – including several nubile, “open-minded” young women on a “photographic assignment” – have died of botulism from tuna that Hughie didn’t eat because he hates the stuff.… Read the rest