Tag: ruins

Kurt Vonnegut:
Unstuck In Time

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 22 July 2022
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Unstuck In Time
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Directors – Robert B. Weide, Dan Argott – 2021 – US – Cert. 15 – 127m

*****

A warm and compelling look at the life of writer Kurt Vonnegut, the influence upon him of the bombing of Dresden, and his decades-long friendship with director Weide – out in cinemas and on digital platforms from Friday, July 22nd, BFI Player Rental from Monday, August 22nd

Read my shorter review for Reform magazine.

The documentary Weide eventually made about Vonnegut took him the best part of four decades to complete. Weide opens with a statement about Vonnegut walking in the woods, feeling a tree and seeing the bombing of Dresden before it occurred. There seems no reason to doubt Vonnegut. He was unstuck in time, jumping around the years and decades. Weide first contacted him in 1982, never imagining that it would take him anything like as long to complete the film as it did. He starts looking at interviews of himself (“who wants to see a documentary in which a filmmaker appears as himself?”, he asks) – defined by where they were shot or what shirt Weide was wearing at the time.

Whatever else Vonnegut and his writing are, they are not conventional.… Read the rest

Tags adaptation, advent of television, advent of TV, animation, atrocity, author, Bernard Vonnegut, bestseller, bodies, bombing, bombing of Dresden, can’t finish, cancer, celebrity, collateral damage, community, corpses, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Dan Argott, drawing, Dresden, extended family, family, fan, Germany, husbands and wives, idol, interview, Kurt Vonnegut, Linda Weide, marriage, meat locker, Mother Night, Nick Nolte, novel, obscurity, obsession, passenger train, poverty, POW, prisoner, razed to the ground, rejection letters, Robert B. Weide, ruins, Second World War, short stories, Slaughterhouse-Five, student protest movement, survival, talking head, television, the Depression, time, train crash, tree trunk, TV, Unitarian church, US, Vietnam War, war, war atrocity, World War 2, World War II, World War Two, writing, WW2

Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Kurt Vonnegut:
Unstuck In Time

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 18 July 2022
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Unstuck In Time
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Transformed by an atrocity

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time
Directed by Robert B. Weide, Dan Argott
Certificate 15
Released 22 July (cinemas and digital platforms)

Full review published in Reform magazine.

The late Kurt Vonnegut claims that after touching a tree trunk he saw the bombing of Dresden before it actually happened, and it’s easy to believe him. His whole life, he says, has been unstuck in time. Born in Indianapolis in 1922, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and was shipped off as a POW to Dresden, a bustling metropolis unlike anything he’d previously seen. He survived the Allied bombing of that city inside an underground meat locker and emerged to see it razed to the ground. The Germans had him and fellow prisoners search for bodies amongst the ruins.

Back in the States… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time is out in cinemas and on Altitude Film digital platform in the UK from Friday, July 22nd.

Read my longer review.

Adaptation of Vonnegut’s Mother Night (writer-producer Robert B. Weide, 1996) – review.

Never Look Away (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2018) also covers the bombing of Dresden – review.… Read the rest

Features Live Action Movies

Men

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2022
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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