Tag: lockdown

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Beyond Utopia

Director – Madeleine Gavin – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

North Koreans flee their repressive country over the Chinese border and through several communist countries, where repatriation would mean imprisonment, torture and possibly death – heartstopping documentary is out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 27th

Whether you’re coming to the subject of North Korea cold or whether you already know a little about the subject from the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone (Marc Weise, 2012), the animated feature True North (Eiji Han Shimizu, 2020) or Korean War movies like Operation Chromite (John H. Lee, 2016) or Nambugan: North Korean Partisan In South Korea (Chung Ji-Young, 1990), this contemporary take on the North Korean refugee experience throws much fresh light on the subject.

To augment its twin central narratives – two entirely separate stories of North Koreans attempting to escape their country – director Gavin helpfully breaks them up with an intermittent primer on North Korea. Much of this comes from Hyeonseo Lee, who fled the country over 20 years ago and has subsequently talked about it in TED and other public speaking forums. Lee was the producer’s original intended subject for the film, which changed considerably as director Gavin began researching the subject.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Hello, Bookstore

Director – A.B. Zax – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 86m

*****

A small town US bookstore and its enthusiastic, bookworm owner are seen in good times and bad, bad being the global pandemic when it’s just getting by, profits plunge and the business is threatened with closure – out in UK cinemas and on demand on Friday, June 30th

Shot in a mixture of colour and black and white, this documentary about a bookstore (or bookshop, as we call them in the UK) in Lenox, Massachusetts – called, quite literally, The Bookstore – and its owner of 40 years Matt Tannenbaum opens with a short sequence in black and white showing the premises under pandemic lockdown, making this film an addition to that small but welcome group of movies that don’t pretend the pandemic never happened.

The genial Tannenbaum has to explain to callers that he’s not letting anyone in, “not for browsing, just for kerbside” and has lengthy conversations on the phone. He admits a masked delivery man with the latest shipment of books, but that’s all. “It’s so hard, it’s so boring, it’s so different,” he says. Clearly he prefers non-pandemic times, when people come into the store, and he can talk to them, find out what they like, and supply books suitable for their tastes.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***

A stage play frames a tale of various characters in a 1950s US desert town, built on the site of an asteroid impact, which becomes the centre of a cover-up after an alien appears – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 23rd

Iconoclast Anderson’s latest is being sold as one thing by its trailer, when it’s actually something else. And watching the film, that something else completely threw me. What we are being sold via the standard letterboxed movie framed image is, a 1950s family trapped in the town of Asteroid City, USA when their car irreparably breaks down, then the entire (not very large) population including visitors imprisoned there following an incident with an extra-terrestrial spaceship and an alien. The overall tone is of whimsy, but maybe there’s something unsettling and disturbing about it too.

Anderson’s movies have never been about photorealism as much as artifice, which is part of their undeniable charm. Perhaps that’s even more true of Asteroid City than most. The costumes, the production design, have gone for a very particular, stylized look. This is fifties American desert romanticised into pastel-shaded eye candy, and if all that were required of going to a movie were to sit down in your seat and soak up the scenery, then provided you’re not the type to insist on photo-representational accuracy, this would be a winner hands down.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Leaving To Remain

Director – Mira Erdevički – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 88m

**1/2

Three Roma people who have settled in the UK after leaving the Czech and Slovak Republics must navigate life both after Brexit and during the pandemic lockdown – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 28th

Something film does extremely well is to show people’s lives or wider social attitudes at a given point in time. This documentary was planned to explore a very specific subject matter, but when events changed, the film changed with them to take account of developments. Erdevički originally intended to study the effect on Roma people immigrating to the UK, but as she was doing so, first, the UK’s vote in favour of Brexit resulted in extra bureaucratic obstacles for these people to navigate should they wish to stay in the UK and, second, trying to deal with all that as well as facing all the challenges everybody else was facing under pandemic lockdown. During the pandemic, she had her three subjects film themselves.

Ondrej

Erdevički has chosen her three Roma subjects well: they are all go-getters. The type of people who get things done. All three have come to the UK because they or their families wanted to better their lives and make a positive contribution.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

A Bunch Of Amateurs

Director – Kim Hopkins – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 95m

***

The Bradford Movie Makers amateur filmmaking club struggles to survive in the modern world – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 11th

Founded in 1932, the Bradford Movie Makers is a club for lovers of movies to make their own films. Such amateur groups were once common in parts of Britain, but now they’re dying out. As one BMM member comments, Leeds and Wakefield are gone. The BMM may be next: its accounts are in a bad shape, with various utility bills unpaid and several years’ worth of rent owing to a seemingly sympathetic landlord. The decrepit garage space at the side of the building needs clearing. It’s currently used as a local dumping ground for rubbish. And many of the members themselves are getting on in years; in the course of the two or three years covered by this documentary, some of the members’ spouses will die.

But this is Yorkshire, and life goes on. Retired carpenter Colin climbs the steps of his uphill garden to perch precariously by his fence to plant daffodil bulbs. Eventually at the club, his herculean feat of climbing the narrow stairs to the screening room is augmented by the installation of a stairlift.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Beyond The Mask

Directors – Jane Harris, Jimmy Edmonds – 2021 – UK – 60m

****

People talk about their experiences of bereavement in the light of the COVID-19 lockdown – now free to watch (donation suggested)

In March 2020, the unthinkable happened as the world entered a global pandemic. In the ensuing year or so many people lost their lives while many more felt and indeed still feel a sense of loss for the ’normal’ life that existed beforehand. Directors Harris and Edmonds are no strangers to bereavement having lost their son unexpectedly at age 22 while he was travelling abroad in 2013 and part of their process of dealing with it was to make the excellent documentary A Love That Never Dies (Jane Harris, Jimmy Edmonds, 2018) in which bereaved parents talk about their different experiences of losing children.

Not everyone has suffered the misfortune of losing a child, but if you’re reading this you will invariably have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, at least thus far. This latter condition is universal. So, what does the experience of bereavement have to say to our current situation of the pandemic – or, for that matter, what does our current situation of the pandemic have to say to our experience of bereavement?… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Violet Evergarden
The Movie
(Gekijouban
Violet Evergarden,
劇場版 ヴァイオレット
・エヴァーガーデン)

Director – Taichi Ishidate – 2020 – Japan – Cert. 12a – 139m

***1/2

Violet Evergarden struggles to come to terms with the loss of the man she loved in the war… then discovers that he may still be alive – in cinemas for six days from Thursday, July 1st

Being a companion piece / coda to a long-running anime series, it’s possible this may leave the newcomer feeling somewhat adrift, at least for the first reel or so. Young girl Daisy’s grandmother Ann has just died. We learn very little about Ann beyond the fact that she used to regularly receive letters from her own mother beyond her mother’s death.

This was accomplished by Auto Memory Dolls, not as you might suppose some sort of animate toys but rather girl employees of the CH Postal Service who wrote letters for people close to death for their loved ones to receive and read afterwards. That business is on the verge of disappearing as the new technology of the telephone takes hold, wiping out the market for the Dolls’ services.

One such Auto Memory Doll was Violet Evergarden who had previously worked in the war where she was weaponised by Major Gilbert.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

76 Days

Directors – Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, Anonymous – 2020 – China, US – Cert. 12– 93m

***1/2

A US documentary edited out of footage shot on the Wuhan Covid-19 hospital frontline by two Chinese reporters allowed access – on VoD from Friday, January 22nd

Documentary film making is a curious medium – one might even say genre – and this is a curious piece of work. On the level subject matter, it hits paydirt. The city of Wuhan, China has a population of 11 million. When it went into lockdown on January 23rd, 2020 as the authorities attempted to curtail the spread of Covid-19, who knew a global pandemic was coming? Few if any in the West and perhaps no-one in China either.

Be that as it may, two journalists, Chen and one who has kept his / her name off from the film, started shooting what was happening in four hospitals in that city, a lockdown which continued for the eponymous 76 days until the local outbreak was considered safely under control. Given what happened later, interest in the footage they shot and the film subsequently made is now far greater than they may have initially imagined.

Documentary film maker Wu was appalled by China’s initial cover-up of what was happening in Wuhan and sought out journalists who’d had access to events and documented them on camera with a view to exchanging information and making a film himself about the pandemic situation in the US, a project eventually cancelled.… Read the rest