Tag: submarine

Mission: Impossible
Dead Reckoning
Part One

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 9 July 2023
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Dead Reckoning
Part One
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Director – Christopher M^cQuarrie – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 163m

*****

Tom Cruise’s seventh and director Christopher M^cQuarrie’s third Mission: Impossible outing delivers globetrotting action and one of the most incredible stunts ever committed to film – out in UK cinemas on Monday, July 10th

It seems almost fatuous to attempt to synopsise this latest Mission: Impossible effort because it basically boils down to various parties including Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his allies chasing after a key which most of them don’t know what it opens. I tell a lie, actually two halves of a key (this sounds a lot like the ancient artefact in this year’s Indiana Jones movie, which I’m sure is pure coincidence) each one of which can be used to verify that the other is the genuine article and not a fake. This MacGuffin, the thing all the characters want and which propels them through the story, in turn provides producer and star Tom Cruise, director Christopher M^cQuarrie and their collaborators with the excuse for a series of exhilarating, bravura set-pieces.

There’s also the visual pleasure of this franchise’s usual amount of people wearing photorealistic masks to disguise themselves as other people, and later ripping off (or having others rip off) their fake faces to reveal their real ones.… Read the rest

Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Eric Ravilious:
Drawn To War

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 26 June 2022
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Drawn To War
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Director – Margy Kinmonth – 2022 – UK – Cert. PG – 87m

***1/2

The career of the British watercolour artist tragically killed while serving as an official war artist in World War Two – now available to watch online following UK cinema release on Friday, July 1st 2022

The first official war artist to be commissioned in World War Two, Eric Ravilious was on an aircraft which set out from Iceland in 1942 and never came back. There is no exact record of what took place, covered by the phrase “missing in action”, but in all likelihood the plane went down in the sea. Kinmonth finds simple images to convey the incident, which appears in both her opening introduction to Ravilious’ life and her closing reel representing his passing – a warplane descending, our viewpoint falling towards the surface of the sea, an indistinct body moving in water filled with bubbles. At the end, the cold blue of the water contrasts with the gentler, rural green of the family house and surroundings back home.

After his death, Ravilious’ art was largely ignored. Alan Bennett, an admirer of the artist’s work, puts this down to the work’s cheerful and unthreatening nature and a prevailing view that art should grapple with dark and foreboding subject matter.… Read the rest

Tags 1920s, 1930s, 1939, 1940s, 1942, a modest living, active service, Acton, Ai Weiwei, aircraft, Alan Bennett, artist, censor, coast, coastal defences, cramped interior, danger, destroyer, drawing, Eastbourne College of Art, Edward Bawden, enemy aircraft, Eric Ravilious, Essex, exhibition, Freddie Fox, Great Bardfield, Great Bardfield Artists, Greyson Perry, Harriet Walter, Henry Moore, HMS Dolphin, HMS Highlander, husbands and wives, Iceland, Jeremy Irons, Kenneth Clark, landscape, London, lost at sea, magnetic mine, Margy Kinmonth, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Information censor, missing in action, MOI, MOI censor, Morley College, Newhaven, official war artist, painting, Paul Nash, public exhibition, RAF, RCA, RN, Robert McFarlane, Royal Air Force, Royal College of Art, Royal Navy, Royal Observer Corps, Second World War, Society of Wood Engravers, student friend, submarine, submarine base, Tamsin Greig, Tirzah Garwood, Tush, UK, uncertainty, underwater, unsuitable for public exhibition, war, war artist, warplane, watercolour, World War 2, World War II, World War Two, WW2

Animation Features Live Action Movies

Invention
For Destruction
(Vynález Zkázy)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 20 July 2020
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For Destruction
(Vynález Zkázy)

Director – Karel Zeman – 1958 – Czechoslovakia – Cert. U – 82m

*****

Blu-ray/DVD available from Second Run.

Review originally written as an entry for

the Aurum Film Encyclopedia: War (series editor: Phil Hardy).

Sadly, the book was never published.

Vynález Zkázy

aka

Invention For Destruction,

The Invention Of Destruction,

The Deadly Invention,

The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1961, US version)

KRATKY FILM PRAHA | STUDIO LOUTKOVYCH FILMU GOTTWALDOV

Feature length trickfilm adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel Une Invention Diabolique is less about war itself than its causes – specifically scientists who work without regard for how their experimental research will be used by others. Professor Roche (Navrátil) is kidnapped from a sanitarium and taken by clipper (towed by a prototype submarine invisible from the surface) to the island of Back-Cup where mysterious captor Count Artigas (Holub) invites him to continue his research – a task the childlike scientist is happy to undertake. The professor’s travelling companion, research assistant and the film’s narrator Simon Hart (Tokos) wants by contrast to escape and warn the world of Artigan’s plans to attack using a giant gun.

Zeman shoots his film with an all-encompassing diversity of live action and animated techniques, mixing actors, natural history photography and studio sets (augmented by drawings of set sections matted into his locked-off frame) on the one hand with live action and stop-frame puppetry, animated models, drawings and any other method you care to name.… Read the rest