Jeremy C. Processing

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Tag: collect

Features Live Action Movies Music

The History of Sound

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 January 2026
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Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2025 – UK, US – Cert. 15 – 128m

****

A Kentucky man falls for a music professor in Boston and accompanies him on a field trip recording folk songs – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 23rd

In 1917, having grown up on a farmstead in rural Kentucky and his remarkable singing voice being noticed by a local schoolteacher, Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal from Hamnet, Chloé Zhao, 2025; Gladiator II, Ridley Scott, 2024; All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh, 2023) gets a student scholarship to Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music. One Saturday evening in a Boston pub with friends, he makes the acquaintance of David White (Josh O’Connor from La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, 2023; Mothering Sunday, Eva Husson, 2021; The Crown, TV series, 2019-20; God’s Own Country, Francis Lee, 2017) who is playing folk songs on the piano and, it turns out, is a tenured academic with an obsessive hobby: travelling around the country collecting, recording and cataloguing folk songs. David has what Lionel describes as the sound equivalent of a photographic memory: he can remember word for word and note for note, any song sung in his presence.… Read the rest

Tags 1910s, 1920s, 1980s, abusive relationship, academic holidays, army, assistant, bereavement, Boston, Briana Middleton, call up, catalog, catalogue, choir, Chris Cooper, church choir, collect, college, community, coughing, countryside, death of mother, Dion Graham, drafted, Emma Canning, England, ethnic, ethnomusicologist, eviction from the land, family farm, farm, field trip, fireman, folk songs, Frist World War, gay relationship, Hadley Robinson, hobby, indigenous, indigenous folk songs, Italy, Josh O’Connor, Kentucky, Lake District, letter, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, mail, Maine, Malaga Island, Michael Schantz, military draft, mixed black and white ethnic, Molly Price, mothers and sons, music, musicologist, negro spiritual, New England Conservatory of Music, obsession, Oliver Hermanus, Oxford University, paper candle, parents and children, Paul Mescal, performing, photographic memory: Silver Dagger, pianist, piano, police, policemen, poor people, porch, post-WW1, promote a book, pub, record, recording, relationships, Rome, rural, rural and urban, scholarship, sex, shell shock, socialite, song, song gathering, spiritual, stately mansion, student, suitcase, sweet-talking, tent, tenured academic, the happiest time of your life, The History of Sound, travelling, truncheon, tuberculosis, TV appearance, UK, US, war, wax cylinders, wax phonograph cylinders, widow, working the fields, World War 1, World War I, World War One, WW1

Features Live Action Movies

The Substance

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 20 September 2024
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Director – Coralie Fargeat – 2024 – US – Cert. 18 – 140m

****1/2

Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) hosts a network TV keep fit show, but she’s getting on in years – and so is her audience. The show’s producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) has decided that younger talent is needed in order to attract a younger audience, and gives her the elbow. By a quirk of fate or screenplay, a mailshot about something called The Substance arrives in her penthouse apartment. It’s some sort of beauty product, although the high-end design of the blurb doesn’t explain exactly what it is or what it does. There’s a phone number.

Elizabeth’s identity is bound up with the former show. She calls the number. She engages in conversation with the unseen voice on the other end of the phone. She decides to give The Substance a try. She is told to write down an address. Later, she is sent locker card key number 503 and instructed to collect her package from that address. It turns out to be a derelict entrance with a shutter that only opens part way to about a yard in height, meaning you have to duck under it.… Read the rest

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