Notorious Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Directors – Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 79m

*****

Feathers McGraw returns to wreak havoc with Wallace’s latest invention, robotic garden smart gnomes – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, December 18th 2024, on the BBC on Christmas Day, and on Netflix from Friday, January 3rd 2025

Opening with the capture, some years ago, of notorious master criminal Feathers McGraw (voice: none) for the attempted theft of the blue diamond, foiled by simple Lancastrian inventor Wallace (voice: Ben Whitehead, doing an amazing job replacing the late Peter Sallis) and his smart pet dog Gromit (voice: none), this second feature sees Wallace inventing furiously, making next to no money and the household bills pile up.

However, all that is about to change with Wallace’s latest gadget, Norbot the Smart Gnome (voice: Reece Shearsmith) who, voice-instructed by his inventor to make Gromit’s carefully tended garden “neat and tidy”, chops down most of the put-upon pooch’s cherished, colourful flowerbeds to replace them with something resembling a Brutalist version of the Gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

This impresses the neighbours and passing tradesman, causing Wallace – a lightbulb sign from a stationery van (hilariously parked behind him) above his head – to realise that he has a potential business startup here.… Read the rest

Brainwashed:
Sex-Camera-Power

Director – Nina Menkes – 2022 – US – Cert. 18 – 107m

***1/2

A lecture on how movies treat male and female bodies differently, augmented with interviews from female directors, actresses, critics and others, using numerous film clips – on BFI Player from Monday, July 17th

This is a film based on a lecture given by director Menkes under the title: Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Cinema. As far as I can tell from the evidence here presented, it is (or was) something like a TED Talk but much longer. It’s possible it may have worked better as a live lecture than as a film. I’m guessing also there’s something of the band Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (Jonathan Demme, 1984) concert film about this: a live performing act wanting a film of their performance so it can reach a wider audience without the necessity of the performers physically touring the act. But where Stop Making Sense is a masterpiece of the filmed performance (or, technically, in that film’s specific case, the filmed music concert) genre, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is not. Even if you’re broadly in tune with its thesis (which I like to think I am), it does feel like you’re being repeatedly told the same thing and somewhere (perhaps around the 75 minute mark) you get fed up with it.… Read the rest