Tag: doom

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

Sting

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2024
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Director – Kiah Roache-Turner – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 91m

***1/2

A girl traps a venomous spider and cares for it as a pet, but as she feeds it, it grows… and grows… and gets out… – onto UK Home Premiere on Monday, July 15th

Helga (Noni Hazlehurst) is hearing strange noises in her Brooklyn apartment. She doesn’t remember so good, however, helpfully pinned to the wall by the phone is her name and address. So when she phones Frank the pest exterminator (Jermaine Fowler), she can read those details to him. It’s probably a rat, he tells her. Soon he is at the door of the block, asking her to buzz him in. But inside the apartment, he realises this particular bug may be more than he bargained for.

Flash back to four days earlier. A hand-sized meteor plunges to Earth to crash through a window into a doll’s house in the same apartment block. It is a tiny pod not unlike the ones in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). It opens, hatching a small spider, which looks huge until we realise it’s in a small scale doll’s house, not outside in the apartment proper. The spider is found by Charlotte (Alyla Brown from Furiosa: A Mad Max Story, George Miller, 2024) who empties out her money jar, the one with the screw lid, to make a home for it, feeding it with the roaches that infest the apartment.… Read the rest

Tags Alyla Brown, apartment, apartment block, aquarium, aquarium tank, arachnid, aunt, Australia, babysitting, bark, Brooklyn, brothers and sisters, building superintendent, cocoons, comic, crawlspace, Danny Kim, dementia, dog, doll’s house, doom, feed, first kill, fish tank, fumigate, giant redback spider, girl, grow, illustrator, income, infest, interior base rim, jar, Jermaine Fowler, Kiah Roache-Turner, lid, maze, medical experiments, meteor, miser, moonlighting, mothballs, Noni Hazlehurst, paralyse, Penelope Mitchell, pest exterminator, pet, pet dog, puppet, Richard Taylor, roach, Robyn Nevin, Ryan Corr, screw lid, second kill, sibling, Silvia Colloca, spectacles, spider, stepdad, stepfather, Sting, The Hobbit, underside, unscrew, venomous, ventilation shaft, web, Weta Workshop, working and parenting

Features Live Action Movies

Crazy Thunder Road
(Kuruizaki
Sanda Rodo,
狂い咲きサンダーロード)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 10 June 2022
No Comments on Crazy Thunder Road
(Kuruizaki
Sanda Rodo,
狂い咲きサンダーロード)
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Director – Sogo Ishii – 1980 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 97m

*****

Following on from Arrow’s superb BD of Sogo Ishii’s Burst City (1982) comes Third Window’s equally impressive BD release of its predecessor in the Ishii canon Crazy Thunder Road (1980) – on Blu-ray from Monday, February 21st 2022 and, as of January 2024, available to stream on Amazon Prime UK

This was Ishii’s Nihon University student graduation project, his first to be shot on 16mm rather than Super 8, which somehow got picked up for distribution by major Japanese Studio Toei which led to their giving him a budget for Burst City. Tom Mes, who as with Burst City supplies a commentary for the film, describes Crazy Thunder Road as “one of the Holy Grails of Japanese film releases if not the Holy Grail.”

When Toei presented Ishii with what seemed like astronomical funding for Burst City, it led him to overreach himself. In retrospect, he considers Burst City unfinished… [Read the full review at All The Anime]

Crazy Thunder Road was out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, February 21st, 2022 and, as of January 2024, available to stream on Amazon Prime UK.… Read the rest

Tags 16mm, 1970s, 1976, Adam Torel, amateur, amateur film, amateur film movement, anti-establishment, army, aspiring filmmakers, Autonomous Film, barmaid, bike, biker, bikers, bookend, camera spin, car, commentary, concrete, defence, defend, destruct, doom, enthusiasm, entry points, eruption, film club, film production, funding, Gakuryu Ishii, gang, gang leader, gangster movie, gone soft, graduation, Holy Grail, improvisation, independent, Japan, Japanese film production, Jasper Sharp, Jishu Eiga, Kinji Fukusaku, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, leader, listings magazine, maboroshi, microbudget, Naomi Kawase, nationalist, Nenji Kobayashi, Nihon. student, no money, on your own terms, p, paramilitary, performance, phantom, Pia, Pia Film Festival, production, project, punk, punk ethos, rage, raining, renegade, right-wing, script, Shinya Tsukamoto, shooting at different speeds, Sogo Ishii, stopped hiring, Super 8, Tatsuo Yamada, Time Out, Toei, Tokyo, Tom Mes, UK, unfinished, university, university film club, volcanic ash, volcano, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, YIDFF