
Super fucking ace!
A film about two men who agreed to transport the body of a sheikh to his homeland for burial. They are accompanied on this journey by a Clarence-esque angel-fool. The film is slow and silent, like the uncompromising landscape. The vistas are beautiful but I felt like it lost its way a wee bit.
A very interesting documentary about the Alfred Talkies, the last cinema in India to use 35mm film and have a team who hand paint billboards every week. The picturehouse is like a time capsule. If the projectionist goes off for a fag, the reel runs out and everybody in the audience shouts for the next one. Folk come in, kick off their shoes and plonk their feet up on the back of the seats. Everybody scrambles for an ice cream during intermission. It’s like the past fifty years of changes to cinemas didn’t touch this one wee corner.
Sheikh Rehman and his team paint a new billboard for the week’s blockbuster, a huge six-foot tall and 20-foot long canvass. It’s unreal. As the deadline looms close, they all just bed down on their workbenches and keep going at first light.
It’s a total labour of love. The owner Najma inherited the cinema from her grandfather, and both she and her grandfather ran the whole business like a family. Running a business like a family is a cliche used in management speak and 100% bullshit, but in this case it really is true. Rehman talks about how his fellow painters are his brothers, he’s worked with them every day for 40 years and more, doing something that doesn’t pay well but that he loves dearly and that honours his father, a painter before him. The cinema manager is brought to tears talking about how much Najma and her grandfather have done for him and his family, how the picturehouse regularly runs at a loss, but Najma will take out loans to pay the staff rather than let anyone go. And Najma herself is running this cinema that barely keeps its head above water despite the fact she lives in much the same straights as everyone else at the cinema and could make much more money selling the place and going into another business. But she won’t, because like everyone else that works there, she loves that cinema. Like Rehman, she honours her grandfather by keeping it going as he wanted it for as long as she can. She talks about the cinema having good souls in it, and you can feel that, see it in this tightly bonded group of people. You can feel the same protective urge for it that everyone who works there has. Wonderful to see it in this little film.
I’m not crying, you’re crying! Just out of How To Steal A Dog, a film about a homeless little girl who devises a scheme to steal a rich old woman’s dog and claim the reward money for its return so she can put down a deposit on a house. Very funny with an old school family film vibe, like American Tail or something. Manages to be touching without straying too far into the territory of mawkish. So wholesome, you’re just routing for a big happy ending. Feel-good family film with the message that home is wherever there is family, and no one is poor who has love.
Well, that was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had in a cinema. Never seen a director heckle his own movie before. The guy was drunk and just shouted out “the miracle of life!” every 20 minutes throughout the duration of the film. It was like having a live, shitfaced DVD commentary on.
The Night of the Virgin is a gross-out cherrypopper venereal horror. Funny but at times overlong, it definitely is memorable. Where else in cinema will you see a guy cum all over ultrasound photos of deformed foetuses?
For what could be a very misogynistic film, since it essentially is about rape, it is in fact a character study of three women, and actually explores the psychological framework that would put and keep a woman in the position of aiding in the rape/murder of other women. In that way it’s more a movie about misogyny and about how women get co-opted into patriarchal violence. Good film.
A coming of age cannibal flick. Strong sister relationship at the centre of the story. Very good.
Brought my slippers to the second day of FrightFest. Best. Decision. Ever. Am never sweating through my boots again.
Fucking cool murder road movie. Keeps you going, good.
A film about an Albanian family in a blood feud with a witch. A bit like The Witch but modern day. Visually striking with a creepy vibe.