cost of living Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – George Clooney – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 123m

*****

Based on a true story. A group of students become the rowing team who compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 12th

Washington State, the mid-1930s. Engineering student Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) can barely afford to live, sleeping in an abandoned, wrecked automobile at night and faced with University fees he can’t pay during the day. Desperate for some – any – work that pays enough to help him get by, he is encouraged by fellow student Roger Morris (Sam Strike) to sign up for the rowing team. Only nine people can ultimately be chosen for the team (eight plus a reserve), and to get there all applicants must undergo a rigorous trial process so that coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton from Master Gardener, Paul Schrader, 2022, and much else) and his team can select the best men for the job.

It’s backbreaking work, and against all odds, both Rantz and Morris make it into the team. Curiously, the film starts off as being about the two of them, but as the narrative progresses, the focus on Morris fades as the emphasis shifts both to Rantz and the whole eight-man-strong team.… Read the rest

Dogme 2:
The Idiots
(Idioterne)

Director – Lars von Trier – 1998 – Denmark – Cert. 18 – 117m

*****

A woman joins a community of free-spirited, self-designated ‘spassers’ – people who pretend to be mentally handicapped in order to free their ‘inner idiot’ – back out in UK cinemas on Friday, Aug 18^th

NSFW

After he had wowed the film world with Breaking The Waves (1996), von Trier in company with fellow Danish director Thomas Vinterberg set out the film making manifesto Dogme 95 and an accompanying ‘vow of chastity’ in an attempt to throw off the constraints and limitations with which conventional, commercial film production had become encumbered. The manifesto itself was a set of rules, or, if you will, constraints, aimed at freeing up filmmaking practice for the purposes of creativity. These included the direct recording of sound, shooting only in the Academy 35mm format, no set building or augmenting sound or image in post-production but only using locations, and no director’s credit. The vow of chastity eschewed good taste along with the idea of the ‘artist’ and their ‘work’ in favour of “forcing the truth out of characters”.

Some 35 films were shot and ratified under this manifesto between 1998 and 2005.… Read the rest