Autumn Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Being Towards Death
(10 Jian Gan Si Dui,
10间敢死队,
lit. 10 Fearless Squad)

Director – Sicheng Chen – 2026 – China – Cert. 12a – 120m

The terminally ill patients thrown together in hospital Ward 10 decide to adopt a positive attitude towards both life and death – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 5th

This has one of those weird Oriental movie titles that doesn’t translate that easily into Western languages, the number 10 referring to the ward for terminally ill patients in a particular hospital and the rest meaning a sort of optimistic equivalent of a suicide squad, but less a military type do or die operation than a determination to live in the inevitable face of inescapable, imminent death. The translators have settled on a term borrowed from philosopher Martin Heidegger which probably works better in German than in English, in which language it feels incredibly clunky. It refers to the act of living authentically in the face of death, which is very much what this movie is about. Somewhere in the middle of the narrative, Ward 10’s occupants, who feel increasingly like a close-knit family, name themselves (in the English subtitled version) the Ward 10 Fearless Squad, which would perhaps have been a better title.

Director Sicheng Chen (Detective Chinatown 3, 2021; Detective Chinatown, 2015) opens with that old cliché, the man about to jump off the top of a building.… Read the rest

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