Tag: climate crisis

Watership Down
(new 4K restoration)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 12 October 2024
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(new 4K restoration)
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Director – Martin Rosen – 1978 – UK – Cert. PG – 92m

*****

When a young rabbit visionary foresees doom for those who remain, some of the rabbits leave their warren in search of a safer home, encountering many life-threatening perils along the way – new 4K restoration of animated feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 25th, following its World Premiere in the London Film Festival on Saturday, October 12th

LFF: Sat 12 Oct 12:20 World Premiere, Tues 15 Oct 12:15,
both BFI Southbank NFT1.

This opens with a mythological segment involving a powerful God, represented as the sun, and rabbitkind, specifically the archetypal rabbit El-ahrairah. It’s drawn and painted in an arresting, non-naturalistic style involving coloured lines animated against a white background to create the impression of moving, primitive drawings, due in large part to uncredited director John Hubley, whose vision for the film was at odds with that of producer Martin Rosen. The latter ended up firing the former as he wanted something grittier and less lightweight.

It’s arguable this has worked to the film’s advantage: the fable sequence works as otherworldly rabbit mythology, suggesting a race of intelligent creatures capable of constructing creation myths about their species much as human beings do.… Read the rest

Tags 2D animation, adaptation, animal tales, animated storytelling, animation, anthropomorphism, background, Black Rabbit of Death, British, cage, cat, children's film, children’s book, climate crisis, codified Disney style, coloured lines, countryside, creation myths, D.H. Lawrence, darkness, death, decadence, Denholm Elliot, despot, destination, dog, doom, drawing, drawn animation, English countryside, family film, fantasy, fresh food, God, Harry Andrews, hawk, illustration, in search of home, injury, intelligent creatures, John Bennett, John Hubley, John Hurt, journey, kingdom, leader, leave, leave home, lethal, LFF, LFF 2024, life and death, life crisis, life-threatening, London, London Film Festival, London Film Festival 2024, Martin Rosen, Michael Graham Cox, militarism, myth, mythology, natural history illustration, naturalism, nature, nature red in tooth and claw, non-naturalism, novel, painting, perils, power, predator, primitive drawings, rabbit, rabbitkind, Ralph Richardson, resistance, Richard Adams, Richard Briers, safe haven, seagull, sentimentality, snare, societal collapse, storytelling, sun, totalitarian regime, trauma, UK, violence, visionary, warren, watercolour, Watership Down, woods, Zero Mostel

Features Live Action Movies

How to
Blow Up
a Pipeline

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 21 April 2023
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Blow Up
a Pipeline
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Collaborators – Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Garber – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 103m

****

An eco-terrorism thriller based on the manifesto by Andreas Malm – out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 21st.

Credited as a film by its four main collaborators (its three writer-producers and its editor) rather than (as is the usual industry practice) merely its director Goldhaber (Cam, 2018), this is based on climate change activism apologist Andreas Malm’s non-fiction treatise which argues for the destruction of property e.g. fossil fuel industry infrastructure as part of the fight against the fossil fuel industry which is causing climate change. What the book doesn’t do is tell the reader the techniques and specifics that would enable them to actually blow up a pipeline.

Likewise, this movie doesn’t provide the viewer with the knowledge and technical wherewithal that would enable them to blow up pipelines after watching it. Like Malm, it offers moral justification(s) for the act. It shows a committed group of young people who have between them carried out extensive research into everything necessary for their planned act and reached a point of moral choice where they feel they have no other option than to carry out such an action.… Read the rest

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Fashion Reimagined

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 3 March 2023
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Director – Becky Hutner – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 100m

*****

A fledgling designer appalled by her industry’s environmental record attempts to do fashion sustainably – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 3rd

The title put me off before I even knew anything about this documentary. On further investigation, however, its subject is up-and-coming fashion designer Amy Powney who decided, in the interests of sustainability, not to do fashion as fashion industry wisdom has always done it, but rather to find out if it was possible to do fashion in an environmentally sustainable way.

We are told that if the fashion industry were a country, it would be the world’s third biggest polluter, preceded only by the US and China. So clearly, this is an industry with a problem.

Amy had always wanted to design clothes. At Kingston University, studying fashion, she got hold of and read Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist tract No Logo then felt herself increasingly at odds with the ethos of the course. Her background was a little different from most of the students: she grew up in the Lancashire countryside, off grid, on a farm with her sister and parents.

After college, she got a job sweeping the floor at small, indie UK fashion house Mother Of Pearl where she slowly but surely worked her way up to become first studio manager then the company’s creative director, clearly a very determined and driven young woman.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

I Am Greta

The Greta good

I am Greta
Directed by Nathan Grossman
Certificate 12a, 98 minutes
Released on 16 October

Greta Thunberg is, without doubt, a remarkable young woman. And this is a remarkable film, although not perhaps for the reasons you might expect.

What’s remarkable is that when the 15-year-old schoolgirl with Asperger’s started her strike for the climate outside the Swedish parliament, the documentary film-maker Nathan Grossman possessed the foresight to start filming her. He kept filming as she was invited to address organisations such as the European Parliament in Strasbourg, meet with world leaders such as France’s President Macron and speak to climate activist meetings and rallies around the globe.

You can’t get that close to a person without finding out something about them. Greta is driven by a focus on one issue. As it happens, that issue is the single most important one facing the survival of the human race and the planet. Read the rest…

I review I Am Greta for Reform.

Tags Asperger’s, climate change, climate crisis, consumption, environmentalism, Europe, France, Greta Thunberg, parents and children, Parliament, Planet Earth, school, Strasbourg, survival, Sweden