recreation Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – George Clooney – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 123m

*****

Based on a true story. A group of students become the rowing team who compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics – out in UK cinemas on Friday, January 12th

Washington State, the mid-1930s. Engineering student Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) can barely afford to live, sleeping in an abandoned, wrecked automobile at night and faced with University fees he can’t pay during the day. Desperate for some – any – work that pays enough to help him get by, he is encouraged by fellow student Roger Morris (Sam Strike) to sign up for the rowing team. Only nine people can ultimately be chosen for the team (eight plus a reserve), and to get there all applicants must undergo a rigorous trial process so that coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton from Master Gardener, Paul Schrader, 2022, and much else) and his team can select the best men for the job.

It’s backbreaking work, and against all odds, both Rantz and Morris make it into the team. Curiously, the film starts off as being about the two of them, but as the narrative progresses, the focus on Morris fades as the emphasis shifts both to Rantz and the whole eight-man-strong team.… Read the rest

Il Buco

Director – Michelangelo Frammartino – 2021 – Italy – Cert. U – 93m

**1/2

A Calabrian cowherd nears the end of his life while a group of explorers journey down a deep hole to find out how deep into the ground it descends – out in cinemas on Friday, June 10th

Literally, ‘The Hole’. Frammartino again brings to the cinema the style that made his earlier Le Quattro Volte (2010) so special. He sets up the camera, often at a great distance from the action, then leaves it there to record whatever happens. The narrative of Il Buco is actually pretty simple, a recreation of an expedition by a group of young, amateur speleologists into a hole in the ground in Calabria. (Speleology is the branch of science involved in mapping and measuring the interiors of caves, natural underground systems, and the like.)

It’s 1961. We’re first introduced to the place in a shot looking out of the ground at the edge of the hole as, eventually, the heads of two bulls come into view over the ridge. An elderly cowherd watches over the grazing cattle from a position halfway up a forty degree incline hillside. As the bus leaves the rich, urban developments of Northern Italy for the still unspoiled Southern region of Calabria, we watch it slowly make its way along rounds, through a small rural town where the party stops for the night to bed down in sleeping bags in the local, Catholic Church alongside statues of monks and the crucified Christ lying on his back, across open country until it arrives at the vast plain where the explorers will set up camp.… Read the rest