Tag: falling

Men

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2022
No Comments on Men
Sticky post

Director – Alex Garland – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

***

An urban woman dealing with separation and bereavement encounters several men with the same face in an English village – out in cinemas on Wednesday, June 1st

A face passes before the eyes of Harper (Jessie Buckley) as her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) falls to his death from the balcony above their London flat. It’s the Spring. She drives to a house in the country – strictly speaking, in a small rural village – which she’s rented for two weeks to get away from it all.

There, she meets well-to-do landlord Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) who shows her round the property and hands over the keys. He’s an affable and chivalrous sort of chap who insists of bringing her bags in from the car and can’t stop talking; he might have walked straight in from the previous century or even the one before. He mentions that the TV reception can be a bit iffy, especially when it’s raining, and also recommends a visit to the village pub.

She’s glad when he’s left and promptly calls her partner Riley (Gayle Rankin), who she will be in touch with this way on and off throughout the narrative and who will eventually drive over to see her, the only time we ever see Riley in the flesh.… Read the rest

Tags abandoned, affable chivalrous, Alex Garland, balcony, bereaved woman in peril, bereavement, berserk, Christ, church, church font, city and country, city and countryside, city and rural, comfort, counselling, country, crossword, echo, falling, farmhouse, fecund, fecundity, field, floral arrangements, gay, Gayle Rankin, green, Hide and Seek, holiday rental, house in the country, Jesse Buckley, jumping, keys, knife, knife wound, landlord and tenant, lesbian, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQI, London, London flat, lush green, male and female, mobile phone reception, mobile phone signal, mobile reception, mobile signal, multiple characters one actor, music, musical ability, phone reception, phone signal, piano, property, pub, rail tracks, rain, Rory Kinnear, ruins, rural village, sheela-na-gig, sound, spring, stalking, staring, taking a break, the green man, tunnel, UK, urban, vegetation, vicar, village pub, vulva, Western art, wet

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.

Tags 18th century, action, actors, age, alphabet, apartheid, architecture, artefact, artist, Bible, biographies, body part, book, boundaries, buildings, catalogue, category, children, classicist, classificatory systems. reports, colour, compendium, conception, confines, consumption, country house, Dante, David Attenborough, David Rudkin, device, directory, division, documentation, drawing, dying, editing, entries, exhibition, falling, fatality, food, footnote, garden design, grid, historian, identities, index, journey, law, letter, library, lists, maps, motivation, multimedia, narrative, natural history, numbers, obsession, open plan, order, page, painting, Patricia Morison, Peter Greenaway, photocopy, photographs, poet, political prisoners, production, pseudonymous, random, real time, rectangle, Rembrandt, rhythm, screen, seamstress, season, secret, sex, Shakespeare, South Africa, speaking, stomach, storytelling, subjects, suitcases, taboo, talking heads, text, Tom Phillips, UK, verbal, video editing, visual frame, volume, website, whimsy, wife, window, word, YouTube

Features Live Action Movies

La Haine

Director – Mathieu Kassovitz – 1995 – France – Cert. 15 – 98m

***1/2

Three disenchanted, immigrant youths from a banlieu estate take themselves to Central Paris for 24 hours – in cinemas from Friday, September 11th, on Blu-ray from Monday, November 16th and on BFI Player from Friday, December 18th

There’s a verbal story opening and underscoring La Haine. A man falls off a building. Each storey he passes in his descent, he says, “so far, so good…” “so far, so good…” “so far, so good…” It’s not how you fall, it’s how you land. Cue an image of planet Earth with a flaming Mototov Cocktail descending towards it.

Shot in stylish black and white and set in the aftermath of a riot in a Parisian banlieu, the film follows three young friends who beneath their tough guy street banter are concerned for their friend Abdel who has been hospitalized and may well die. While ‘banlieu’ translates literally as ‘suburb’, the French banlieu is at the rough, opposite end of the social scale from cosy, English ‘suburbia’. The banlieu is more like an English sink estate, full of people at the bottom of the social order, powerless, excluded.

This particular banlieu is home to immigrants of various different ethnic backgrounds: Sayid (Saïd Taghmaoui) is Arabic, Vinz (Vincent Cassell) Jewish and Hubert (Hubert Koundé) Black.… Read the rest

Tags #blacklivesmatter, estate, falling, France, gangs, housing estate, immigrant, Molotov Cocktail, Paris, Planet Earth, police, poverty, riot, social deprivation, underclass, violence, youth

Features Live Action Movies

Les Misérables

Director – Ladj Ly – 2019 – France – Cert. 15 – 104m

****

Exclusively in cinemas from Friday, September 4th

Although this takes its title from Victor Hugo’s eponymous novel, it’s not really an adaptation except in the loosest possible sense. It ends on a quote from the book:

“There are no bad plants, nor bad people – only bad cultivators.”

What it DOES have is a poor underclass and a bunch of cops whose job it is to keep them in order and keep the peace. An optimistic prologue shows the whole of France watching a world cup match and celebrating as France wins – a joyous, transcendent occasion and an example of how things could or ought to be.

Then it quickly shifts gear: three cops in their car patrol a poor housing estate. Chris (Alexis Manenti) is white with an in your face, tough guy approach that commands the residents ‘respect’. The equally tough and no-nonsense Gwada (Djebril Zonga) is black, generally more conciliatory and better at negotiating with local people on the ground. Newcomer Ruiz (Damien Bonnard), in his first day on the job, hails from the countryside and finds himself at odds with the approach of the other two, particularly Chris.… Read the rest

Tags celebration, cops, drone, estate, falling, France, gangs, housing estate, immigrant, Islam, Molotov Cocktail, Paris, patrol, police, poverty, riot, social deprivation, teens, threat, underclass, violence, youth