Tag: whimsy

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Lavender Hill Mob

Director – Charles Crichton – 1951 – UK – Cert. U – 78m

*****

A Bank of England employee stumbles upon the perfect means to rob his employer of the gold bullion he transports there on a daily basis– classic Ealing comedy is back out in a new 4k restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, March 29th

Holland (Alec Guinness) has a lowly job at the Bank of England supervising the transfer of recently minted bars of gold bullion to the bank’s secure vault by security van., He rides in the back and is forever asking the harried driver to check round the corner for suspected cars lying in wait to ambush the van. He is considered an honest nobody, an appearance he has cultivated for the best part of two decades. He has a mind to rob the van, if only he could work out how to smuggle the bullion out of the country.

Fate intervenes in the form of a newly arrived tenant at the downmarket Balmoral Guest House in Lavender Hill, where he lodges. Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) runs a business selling tourist tat, including lead models of the Eiffel Tour for selling at that Parisian monument. He melts the lead down on his London premises to cast it into the models.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

South

Director – Frank Hurley – 1919, Restoration 2022 – UK – Cert. U – 81m

*****

One of the earliest documentaries ever made charts British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous expedition to the South Pole – out in cinemas on Friday, January 28th

Made over one hundred years ago, and one of the first feature documentaries, this record of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 expedition to the South Pole on his ship The Endeavour proves fascinating on a number of levels. It comes from a time when the cinema was in its infancy: film stock was monochrome, sound film was still a decade away. A time when large parts of the world remained unexplored, when the new cinema audiences could be attracted by real life tales of faraway, unknown lands. A time when Britain still considered itself one of the great world powers, largely on account of its Empire and maritime achievements.

Taking a camera on an expedition to the South Pole perfectly fits these last two ideas. And because shooting film was at this point in history unencumbered by the additional equipment required to record sound, it could be as simple as one person such as Frank Hurley joining an expedition as a photographer or cinematographer.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.