Tag: childcare

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

It Comes
(Kuru,
来る)

Director – Tetsuya Nakashima – 2018 – Japan – 133m

****

A monster relentlessly pursues its victims until one day it comes to take them away forever – plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2023 between Friday, 3rd February and Friday, 31st March

This is basically a monster film in which the monster is a bogeyman or evil spirit who after taunting potential victims – usually children – for a long time, then turns up and abducts them from this world into its own. You never see the monster: it’s all conveyed by preparation, suggestion and effect, and the characters’ actions and reactions.

And although the monster is apparently intent on abducting the child, various adult characters who appear to be significant protagonists suddenly get abducted by it. While it’s nowhere near the same league, in this respect, the film resembles Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) i.e. a significant character is despatched part-way through leaving another character to step into their shoes for the remainder.

The monster as such never physically appears (or, at least, we in the audience never actually see it) – its appearance is often presaged by following peculiar occult instructions, e.g. laying out multiple bowls of water on a corridor floor, or breaking all the mirrors in the house, accompanied by frenzied editing of quasi-abstract footage including camera-less animation (the sort of thing Len Lye and Norman McLaren used to make in the 1930s at the UK’s GPO Film Unit).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

One Cut Of The Dead
(Kamera
Wo Tomeruna!,
カメラ
を止めるな！)

Director – Shinichiro Ueda – 2017 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 96m

The first 37 minutes *****; the rest ***1/2

A zombie film being shot in one long, single take and set in an abandoned warehouse is attacked by zombies… or is it? – on a Hollywood Edition Blu-ray on Monday, May 31st

With a title that translates literally as “Don’t Stop The Camera!”, this is a loving homage to both the movie shot in one take and the zombie movie. Or so it appears for its first 37 minutes, after which it turns into a comic drama about film making.

Let’s start where the film does, with its first 37 minutes. Chinatsu (Yuzuki Akiyama) is defending herself with an axe from her boyfriend Ko (Kazuaki Nagaya) who has turned into a zombie. However, like the girl facing a knife-wielding maniac at the start of Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981) the actress playing her is not very good and the illusion of the film collapses much as the illusion of Blow Out does when the actress delivers the most pathetic scream you’ve ever heard.

As the film delivers its first revelation – that this is not a woman defending herself against a zombie but the shooting of a movie scene of an actress portraying a woman defending herself against an actor playing a zombie – director Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu) storms into the scene to berate her for her shortcomings.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hurt By Paradise

Director – Greta Bellamacina – 2019 – UK – Cert. 12a – 85m

***1/2

A single parent mum poet and her upstairs lodger actress pursue their dreams in London’s Fitzrovia and Margate – in cinemas from Friday, September 18th

A strangely likeable, meandering little movie, this concerns single mum Celeste Blackwood (director and co-writer Greta Bellamacina) who writes poetry from her flat in London’s Fitzroy Square, in the immediate shadow of the BT Tower. Her out of work actress upstairs lodger Stella Mansell (co-writer Sadie Brown) helps out with the childcare.

Celeste’s father left when she was five and she hasn’t seen him since. However, she has a plan to go through al Blackwoods in the telephone directory until she finds him. Stella, meanwhile, is approaching a year of chatting nightly over the internet to a man she’s never met. But, as Stella says, you can tell so much about someone from their writing.

Throughout the film, which feels heavily improvised and consists mostly of scenes with both of one of other of the women in situations with Celeste’s little boy and / or other people, like a short series of sketches. Early on, Celeste visits a publisher (Nicholas Rowe) with her poetry manuscript only to be told that poets never make any money unless they meet death in a particularly nasty way, at which point their sales go through the roof.… Read the rest