Tag: excess

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Features Live Action Movies

Babylon

Director – Damien Chazelle – 2022 – US – Cert. 18 – 188m

***1/2

The rise and fall of stars and other talents navigating the excessive lifestyle and work ethic of the silent era US movie business – out on Digital on Tuesday, March 21st and on 4K Ultra HD™, Blu-ray™ & DVD on Monday, April 3rd, following its release in UK cinemas on Friday, January 20th 2023

Having established himself as a top A-list Hollywood director with the likes of Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016), Chazelle delivers a cast of thousands epic about Hollywood in the silent era and beyond, a project that’s apparently been gestating in his head for some 15 years. With its name referencing a city that grew to great heights and considerable excess before crumbling into dust, Babylon starts with Manny Torres (Mexican actor Diego Calva in his first US role) and compatriots attempting to deliver an elephant to a Hollywood party at a desert mansion in the middle of nowhere. The tone for the whole is set – or perhaps set free from audience preconception about what is to follow – when one of Calva’s compadres, walking behind the trailer containing the creature pushing it up a hill, is unexpectedly covered in elephant excrement.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Infinity Pool

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

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Dance Features Live Action Movies

Climax

Director – Gaspar Noé – 2018 – France – Cert. 18 – 97m

*****

Uppers and downers – either way blood flows. Arthouse enfant terrible Noé combines technical skill and singular focus with some of the most spectacular dancing ever put on film to produce a dark and challenging vision of hell on earth – now available on VoD

Cinema at its purest. Bright white on a screen. A woman starts crawling from the top of the screen. Extreme audience disorientation. We realise she’s crawling through snow. She appears to be in a bad way. Traces of blood. The camera follows her forward movement down the screen. Slowly a tree comes into shot from the bottom. We are watching the same overhead camera movement.

A series of vox pops on a television screen with shelves of books on one side and piles of DVDs on the other. Dancers answer questions on why dance is important to them. Would they do anything in order to make it big? What would they do if they weren’t able to dance?

Then the narrative proper begins. It’s 1996. We’re inside a building with a dance floor watching the most amazing dance routines we’ve ever seen.… Read the rest