Month: April 2023

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Director – Stephen Nomura Schible – 2017 – Japan – Cert. PG – 100m

*****

Review originally published on All The Anime ahead of UK release on Friday, June 29th 2018; published here following Sakamoto’s death on Tuesday, 28th March 2023 – screening on MUBI as of Thursday, April 13th

Portrait of the artist at age 66. A new documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda finds musician Ryuichi Sakamoto working on a new album following a third degree throat cancer diagnosis and time off work for treatment. At the same time, it presents a select chronological appraisal of his career from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence up to the present day.

Like Sakamoto himself, Coda starts and ends with the piano. But not just any piano. Sakamoto had heard of one that survived the 2011 Fukushima tsunami and wanted to find out for himself what it sounded like. He is shown a tidemark on a curtain “up to which the piano floated” and another tidemark on the piano itself indicating its journey. He’s impressed with its sound…

[Read the rest at All The Anime…]

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies Music

R.I.P. Ryuichi Sakamoto

Written a few days after his death on Tuesday, 28th March 2023.

I’m actually quite shocked by this news. There’s a story here… It’s been a long time since I interviewed film people: these days it’s mostly reviews and a few features. Ryuichi Sakamoto was the very last person I interviewed face-to-face, in 1999 around the time of his BTTB and Cinemage albums. (I have since been privileged to write a piece about him again on the film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, 2017).

Before the interview took place, there was one huge problem: his interview schedule was full. “But don’t worry”, said the publicist looking after him, “if you can get yourself over to the BBC Studios in Maida Vale for 4pm, Jools Holland is due to interview him – and Jools Holland is always an hour or so late. So if you’re prepared to do that, you’ve got him for an hour or so.”

On this occasion, I knew I had the interview placed in Manga Max magazine (sadly, long since gone) via its then editor Jonathan Clements, so I went for it. Sure enough, Jools Holland wasn’t on time and I had a fascinating interview with Ryuichi Sakamoto for about an hour covering various aspects of his career up to that point in time, including his film soundtrack work and, among other things, the multimedia opera Life he’d recently been working on.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Three Colours: Red
(Trois Couleurs: Rouge)

Director – Krzysztof Kieślowski – 1994 – France – Cert. 15 – 99m

*****

An up-and-coming model strikes up a friendship with a retired judge after her car accidentally runs over his dog one night – 4K restoration is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 14th

This represents the third part of a trilogy based on the three colours of the French national flag, with each film representing one of that nation’s three values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood). I interviewed Kieślowski for this back in 1994, the second time I’d interviewed him. The first was in 1993 for Three Colours: Blue.

Like Three Colours: Blue and Three Colours: White before it, Three Colours: Red is about human connection or lack of it. As if to underscore the point, it starts off with an international phone call which fails to connect. In a nod to Dial M For Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953) where a phone call is shown via images of telephony, little mechanisms springing into brief action to make a phone call happen, Kieślowski has his camera race along telephone cables on the ground, at one point following them down a beach into the sea and out again onto land on the other side of a lake or ocean.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Krzysztof Kieślowski
talks about
Three Colours: Red

Transcript of interview from 1994 when Kieślowski was promoting Three Colours: Red. At the time, the other two films in the trilogy had by then been screened to press.

You intend to make no more films after Red. So what do you plan to do now?

“I want to live.”

What about artistic – or other – work of any sort?

“No, I can’t say.”

When we spoke about Blue, you told me how in many ways you found literature more interesting than film making. We discussed Blind Chance in terms of the conditional imperfect tense. Red seems similar out of the whole body of his work – closer to Blind Chance than anything else.

“Yes, maybe, in a certain general way of thinking, in construction.”

Not in the sense of three parallel “what if?”s, but more – if one comes at Red from a literary perspective – as a conditional tense.

“No, I don’t think it’s conditional. In fact I think it would be quite difficult to find a literary explanation there. That sort of thing I think has been tried out and discovered by the cinema rather than literature. Of course, it has been used in literature, but it’s a very much more suited to film than it is to fiction.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Suzume
(Suzume
No Tojimari,
すずめの戸締まり,
lit. Suzume’s
Locking Up)

Director – Makoto Shinkai – 2022 – Japan – Cert. PG – 122m

***1/2

Aided by a man turned into a mobile, talking, three-legged chair, a schoolgirl must prevent giant, freak weather ‘worms’ from devastating Japan with earthquakes – anime feature is out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Prompted by a question from a man she meets on a road in her hometown, 17-year-old schoolgirl Suzume visits an abandoned hot springs facility in which is situated a door in a free standing door frame. She opens it only to find she can’t enter. Shortly after this, in school, she notices smoke in a gigantic, red and black worm-like form rising from the hot springs facility.

At the same time, everyone around her receives earthquake warnings on their smartphones, but no-one else can see the rising form. She goes back to the facility to find the man she met trying to close the door and cut off the incoming smoke, something she helps him to do. They do not close the door in time to prevent the red and black form falling onto the land and an earthquake resulting. The man locks the door using a key on his person.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Cairo Conspiracy,
(original title:
Boy From Heaven,
Walad Min Al Janna,
صبي من الجنة)

Director – Tarik Saleh – 2022 – Sweden, France, Finland – Cert. 12a – 126m

***

A naive, young, Egyptian student at a top Islamic university is recruited as a spy for the secret police – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a bookworm born and raised in rural Egypt where he works as a fisherman like his father before him, visits the local mosque where his trusted Imam gives him a letter informing him he’s been accepted into Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar University, the top seat of Sunni Muslim learning and thought. He’s worried his widowed father won’t let him go, but his father fatally accepts it as the Will of Allah. In his university dorm, Adam finds his bed taken by fellow student Raed (Ahmed Laissaoui) and winds up in the bunk below. (The university is for men only: no women. At least, we see none here.)

Unexpectedly, the Grand Imam, the head of the university, dies and a successor must be chosen. At the security forces building, the General (Mohammad Bakri) listens to the analysis by Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares) of the possible candidates, throwing all files on the floor except one – the one with whom the President’s views align, the candidate who must win.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Renfield

Director – Chris McKay – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 93m

**

Guided by American self-help industry ideas of escaping toxic relationships with narcissists, Dracula‘s servant Renfield wants out of his relationship with his master – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 14th

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) has had enough of working for his boss, Count Dracula (Nic Cage) who gives him the ability to manifest great power from eating insects in exchange for his tending to Dracula’s every need, the main item on which list is a supply of fresh, virtuous humans on who to feast. As here portrayed, Renfield is an honourable Englishman who has changed the rules: he goes out and brings back a never ending supply of one sort or another of less than virtuous people for the Count. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really fit the bill.

Enter pampered gangster boy Tedward Lobo (Ben Schwartz) who, whilst trying to find the people who double-crossed him in a drugs deal, stumbles on the Prince of Darkness and, impressed, resolves to introduce the vampire to his ruthless crime boss mother Bellafrancesca Lobo (casting coup Shohreh Aghdashloo) to help him in his newly-formed goal of world domination.

Meanwhile, traffic cop Rebecca (Awkwafina), the only cop not on the take in the corrupt local precinct, otherwise bought to a man by the Lobos, is determined to get the evidence to put the crime family behind bars.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Three Colours: White
(Trois Couleurs: Blanc)

Director – Krzysztof Kieślowski – 1994 – France – Cert. 15 – 92m

****

A Pole down on his luck and facing legal proceedings from his French wife, smuggles himself on a plane from Paris to Warsaw in order to get his life and dignity back – 4K restoration is out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 7th

This represents the second part of a trilogy based on the three colours of the French national flag, with each film representing one of that nation’s three values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, brotherhood). Or perhaps it’s not as straightforward as that – at least, that’s what actress Julie Delpy suggested when I interviewed her about the film in 1994.

There are some curious editing decisions at the start – bits of stories told in fuller detail later on, such as shots of a suitcase on an airport conveyor belt, and a glimpse of a happy bride (Julie Delpy) in her white bridal dress leaving the church building for the fresh air and bright sunlight outside to meet waiting guests as, in front of her, a host of pigeons take off, an image to which the editing returns several times during what follows.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Julie Delpy
talks about
Three Colours: White

Transcript of interview from 1994 with actress Julie Delpy on Three Colours: White. She plays the short but pivotal role of the main character’s ex-wife, whose appearances bookend the film. At the time, the third film in the trilogy had yet to be screened to press.

She was based in LA., on which subject our conversation started:

“I’m doing everything. Both European and American films. My project there is similar to what I was doing before – American films and European films and co-productions, whatever. I’m not trying to see where I should be, I’m just trying to find something that I like to do. It’s a bigger choice when you’re over there.”

Three Colours: White is very much a European film – not a film set in any one country but partly in Paris and largely in Poland. How did she get involved?

“I knew Kieślowski, I met him a few times, he’s a friend of Agnieszka Holland with whom I had worked on Europa Europa. I had tested on The Double Life Of Veronique, but knew that I wouldn’t get that part because he told me before the casting began that I wasn’t right for it, but he wanted to audition me because he was thinking of something else later.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Monty Python’s
Life Of Brian

Director – Terry Jones – 1979 – UK – Cert. 12a – 93m

****

An absurdist comedy about of Brian, Jesus Christ’s next-door neighbour, who falls in with left-wing activists, develops a religious following and ends up crucified – back out in UK cinemas in Glorious Standard Definition on Friday, April 7th

Like The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), a Biblical epic made by a New Yorker who tries to bring first century Palestine to life on the screen by filling it with actors who speak as if they’re on the streets he knows, so too Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, made by the Monty Python team, nurtured first by Oxbridge student drama society culture then by British radio and television, attempts a comic equivalent of the Christian Gospel narrative by filling it with characters possessing such quintessentially English names as Brian and Reg and sporting English accents. For the Pythons and their audience, this strategy works because of its familiarity from Britain’s hugely popular Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show, made for the BBC. It’s what everyone attending the film in the UK expected.

The Monty Python team (Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle & Michael Palin) all wrote the film between them and take on multiple acting roles, with Jones also directing, animator Gilliam also taking on production design, and Chapman, who had studied medicine, also taking on the role of set medic.… Read the rest