Tag: collision

The Lavender Hill Mob

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 26 March 2024
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Director – Charles Crichton – 1951 – UK – Cert. U – 78m

*****

A Bank of England employee stumbles upon the perfect means to rob his employer of the gold bullion he transports there on a daily basis– classic Ealing comedy is back out in a new 4k restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, March 29th

Holland (Alec Guinness) has a lowly job at the Bank of England supervising the transfer of recently minted bars of gold bullion to the bank’s secure vault by security van., He rides in the back and is forever asking the harried driver to check round the corner for suspected cars lying in wait to ambush the van. He is considered an honest nobody, an appearance he has cultivated for the best part of two decades. He has a mind to rob the van, if only he could work out how to smuggle the bullion out of the country.

Fate intervenes in the form of a newly arrived tenant at the downmarket Balmoral Guest House in Lavender Hill, where he lodges. Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) runs a business selling tourist tat, including lead models of the Eiffel Tour for selling at that Parisian monument. He melts the lead down on his London premises to cast it into the models.… Read the rest

Tags 1950s, Alec Guinness, Alfie Bass, alibi, ambush, Audrey Hepburn, back projection, Balmoral, bank clerk, Bank of England employee and employer, bank vault, breathlessness incompetent police, bureaucracy, burglar, car chase, casting metal, Charles Crichton, collision, comedy, cops and robbers, crime, criminals, crooks, downtrodden, Ealing comedy, Eiffel Tower, England, English schoolgirls, evidence, factory, falling into the river, faux respectability, fugitives, gang, gangster novels, giddy, gold bars, gold bullion, Guest House, heist, honest nobody, humour, industrial process, kaleidoscopic, landlady, Lavender Hill, lead and gold, lodgings, London, melt down, mistaken for a thief; bound and gagged, mob, national newspaper stories, nursery rhyme, Old Macdonald Had a Farm, Paris, plucky little hero, police and thieves, police cars, policemen on the beat, post-war, promotion, pronunciation, pursuit, radio, rebel against the system, rescued, Rio de Janeiro, robbery, safe cracker, salacious, schoolgirls, security van, self-advancement, Sidney James, smelt, smuggle, snatch and grab, spiral staircase, Stanley Holloway, T.E.B. Clarke, the missing piece, the perfect crime, tourist tat, UK, whimsy

Features Live Action Movies

Infinity Pool

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 March 2023
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Director – Brandon Cronenberg – 2023 – Canada, Hungary, France – Cert. 18 – 117m

*****

WARNING: NSFW

A man holidaying abroad at a resort with his wealthy wife is lured into a series of crimes, punishable locally by death unless you’re rich enough to buy your way out – in UK cinemas from Friday, March 24th

An infinity pool is a swimming pool designed so that at least one edge appears to go on forever, blending into a seascape or waterscape such as an ocean or lake. It’s limitless. One character in this film once installed such a pool for a local hotel, but that’s really not the point. Which is, something that has no boundary, that appears to extend into infinity. Like the moral transgressions in this film, once the preventative edges of incurred punishment are removed from the perpetration of criminal acts, for which the idea of the infinity pool stands as a metaphor. This may not make sense now, but it will once you’ve watched the film and thought about it.

James (Alexander Skarsgärd) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) Foster are holidaying at a resort. To date, he is a one-book writer: his book was published to rotten reviews and sank without trace and he can’t seem to find an idea for the second one.… Read the rest

Animation Movies Shorts

Scenes With Beans
(Babfilm)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 20 September 2021
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(Babfilm)

Director – Ottó Foky – 1976 – Hungary – 12m

*****

A metal space bird approaches the bean planet to observe various aspects of life upon it before being discovered then shot at with a missile in this remarkable stop-frame short – out on MUBI as part of the animated shorts season Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations on Monday, September 20th

Framed by a story of a giant alien metal bird observing a planet from space, this is primarily an excuse to create numerous scenarios using animated kidney beans and butter beans to stand in as people in a 3D, model animated world. It’s the sort of film where you constantly marvel at the inventiveness of shooting scenes in a particular style of animation which, were they shots in a live action documentary, would simply appear banal – but in the form here presented prove completely compelling.

A crescent moon resembling nothing so much as a croissant floats past the planet. The approaching giant bird looks like it could have wandered in from the Clangers stop-frame BBC TV series (Oliver Postgate, 1969-72, 1974) except that it’s less a character like that show’s fabled Soup Dragon than a tech-equipped space opera craft with a visual recording device that has a calibrated viewfinder like a camera or a periscope.… Read the rest