Tag: morality

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Watership Down
(new 4K restoration)

Directed by Martin Rosen
Certificate PG
92 minutes
Released 25 October

Reviewed for Reform magazine.

Now fully restored in a new 4K restoration, this 1978 tale of rabbits on the run proved that an animated film need be neither made by Disney nor sugar-coated for children. Watership Down, although a children’s film, came from the producer of the Oscar-winning DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love (1969), Martin Rosen. He ended up directing it too.

A prologue details the relationship between the creator-god Frith – represented as the sun – and rabbitkind. As with most creation myths outside the Judeo-Christian, there’s quite a bit of sex and violence. The rabbits breed furiously; hitherto non-carnivorous animals are given teeth to keep the rabbit numbers down. The rabbits are given powerful hind legs to outrun their predators.

Having established rabbits as intelligent creatures possessing a mythology and a world view, the main story… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my alternative, longer review for this site.]

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

How to
Blow Up
a Pipeline

Collaborators – Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barer, Jordan Sjol, Daniel Garber – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 103m

****

An eco-terrorism thriller based on the manifesto by Andreas Malm – out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 21st.

Credited as a film by its four main collaborators (its three writer-producers and its editor) rather than (as is the usual industry practice) merely its director Goldhaber (Cam, 2018), this is based on climate change activism apologist Andreas Malm’s non-fiction treatise which argues for the destruction of property e.g. fossil fuel industry infrastructure as part of the fight against the fossil fuel industry which is causing climate change. What the book doesn’t do is tell the reader the techniques and specifics that would enable them to actually blow up a pipeline.

Likewise, this movie doesn’t provide the viewer with the knowledge and technical wherewithal that would enable them to blow up pipelines after watching it. Like Malm, it offers moral justification(s) for the act. It shows a committed group of young people who have between them carried out extensive research into everything necessary for their planned act and reached a point of moral choice where they feel they have no other option than to carry out such an action.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Pickpocket

Director – Robert Bresson – 1959 – France – Cert. PG – 76m

*****

Why is a man compelled to pursue acts of petty thievery – acclaimed, arresting, existential drama is out in cinemas on Friday, June 3rd

I have just rewatched Bresson’s classic and am still not entirely sure I have its measure. Perhaps that’s the thing about great works of art. Oh, to have seen it on its original release, had I been old enough, and watch it without the baggage of it being proclaimed a cinematic masterwork.

Words on the screen proclaim at the outset that this is not the thriller its title might suggest; it’s rather a study of a man who repeatedly commits crimes which is trying to understand why he would do that.

The characters, of whom the main protagonist Michel (Martin LaSalle) is the one who gets most screen time and indeed, is scarcely if ever off the scree, are played deadpan, with Bresson doing his utmost to ensure that his cast perform the roles without acting. He doesn’t want the actors’ craft to come between us and his images of people doing, being, talking. He seeks to avoid the artificiality of acting thereby allowing his performers to realise his images without any acting technique mediating them.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Wake Wood

Director – David Keating – 2009 – UK, Ireland – Cert. 18 – 90m

*****

Things are not what they seem, supernatural power is abroad and terrible prices have to be paid in a mysterious, close-knit village community – out in UK cinemas from Friday, March 25th, 2011

This review originally appeared in Third Way.

This presages the recent relaunching of Hammer Films, a huge cultural force back in the 1950s and 60s reworking such horror staples as Dracula and Frankenstein. So far UK cinemas have hosted (1) Let Me In‘s arguably pointless US remake of terrific Swedish vampire effort Let The Right One In and (2) predictable, New York tenant in peril outing The Resident. Wake Wood is not only far and away the best of the three, but also fits in with the Hammer ethos – here represented by a mysterious, close-knit village community where things are not what they seem, supernatural power is abroad, and terrible prices have to be paid for misjudged actions. A fair bit of blood and gore is added for good measure.

After their only daughter Alice (Ella Connolly) is fatally savaged by a dog, Irish city dwellers vets Patrick and Louise Daly (Aidan Gillen from The Wire and Eva Birthistle) move to the isolated village of Wake Wood to start over.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Ice Cream Truck

Director – Megan Freels Johnston – 2018 – US – Cert. 15 – 96m

**1/2

A housewife newly moved in to a suburb is unnerved by the creepy, local ice cream man and van… with good reason, as it turns out – on VoD and DVD from Monday, March 1st

Having just moved back into the neighbourhood where she grew up, Mary (Deanna Russo) should probably be worried that it looks a lot like the location of classic shocker Halloween (John Carpenter, 1979) with its pavements bordering lawns and hedges around residential houses. (There’s now prowling, gliding camera here though – the shots are mostly static.)

The locality also now boasts the traditional American ice cream truck, a simple, slow moving van which still serves exactly the same traditional ice cream that it has for generations. The ice cream man himself (Emil Johnsen) seems almost a parody of his profession, addressing both children and adults alike with archaic lines like, “hello there, young fellow.”

She takes an immediate dislike to nosy next-door neighbour Jessica (Hilary Barraford) but nevertheless accepts an invitation to a barbecue where it’s promised drink will flow celebrating the recent graduation of local couple’s son Max (John Redlinger – who feels a lot older than 18) who she meets on her way to the party as he hangs out with his girlfriend Tracy (Bailey Anne Borders) to smoke pot.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Pinocchio

Director – Matteo Garrone – 2019 – Italy – Cert. PG – 125m

*****

In cinemas from Friday, August 14th, on BFI Player rental from Monday, December 14th

Impoverished woodcarver Geppetto (Roberto Benigni) decides to make the greatest puppet the world has ever seen, tour the world with it and make his fortune. A wood merchant lets him have a log because it seems to have a life of its own. Unaware of its animate properties, Geppetto begins carving his puppet, a life-sized representation of the son he’s never had.

After he starts talking to it as its “Babba”, he is surprised when the puppet (nine year old Frederico Ielapi) talks back. Geppetto names him Pinocchio. No sooner has he carved the feet than Pinocchio runs out of Geppetto’s workshop to discover the world. In many ways, that defines the character and the story to come. The innocent Pinocchio is forever in pursuit of his own gratification, prey to the perils of the world around him and initially devoid of any sense of morality, something he struggles to learn throughout the course of the story in his quest to become a real boy.

There have been numerous versions of Pinocchio in film, television and theatre since it first appeared as a written serial in an Italian newspaper in 1881.… Read the rest