Three men talk shite on a very long walk.
A pal at the work said this was one of the best movies she’d ever seen, and this movie has been repeatedly recommended to me, so gave it a whirl. And I know everyone says Tarkovsky’s a genius and this film’s a masterpiece, but honestly, it just left me cold. I just didn’t care about anyone or anything in this film.
Needed a dragon in it.
Arracht starts out as one thing and becomes another. It begins before the famine hits and is quite a tense, dramatic beginning. Then it becomes this sorrowful, melancholy, slow, survival epic, as the main character becomes a living ghost at the edge of the world.
Beautiful waffle.
The basic plot outline is a mad bam preacher has been kidnapping blond haired, blue-eyed boys and claiming they are Jesus returned. When they fail to live up to his Messianic standards, he declares them demons disguised as Christ, kills them and buries them in the yard.
No one in his brainwashed cult colony in the middle of shitkicker nowhere questions this, until the last one seems to bring with him back luck, which results in the destruction of the preacher’s family.
If that seems dramatic and compelling, it’s not. It’s 2 hours of beautiful shots while the voiceover goes on long, ponderous soliloquies, like, “What is man?
Pass.
An incredibly intimate and personal documentary about one man telling his family he was gang-raped at 17 in a homophobic attack.
The story is of such huge issues, yet it has such a small, domestic setting. You really feel you are taken into his family home. You hear their squabbles, their irritations, their personality clashes, and them telling each over and over, “I love you. We’re family.”
And you can see how he would struggle to bring such a big conversation into such an ordinary world. When finally tells his family, one of his brothers is still on the phone, one of them is still playing on the X-Box, his Mum is fussing with her knitting.
But this story is one of healing. That speaking out is freeing. And that you will find that so, so many people have been through what you’ve been through. And trusting people with the truth is the first step to getting the love and support you need. Lovely movie.
This film is a real accomplishment. It takes contemporary footage of Stalin’s funeral and cuts it together with foley. It makes you feel like you’re watching it on 24-hour news, not as historical archive footage.
That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s like watching 2 and quarter hours of a state funeral on rolling news. Think Diana’s funeral but double-plus. I fell asleep for 15 minutes at one point and when I woke they were still shuffling past Stalin’s body for a peek. Bury the cunt already!
What was really interesting was to see the diversity of Soviet people. There’s black Russians, there are Asiatic peoples herding with reindeer, an entire continent’s worth of people all hearing the news at once. Puts you in awe of the scale of everything.
Continuing with seeing movies that have been out for a while, I’d also never seen Logan’s Run, so I went to see it as part of the free film Retrospective strand. It was actually quite good. Lots of action in the first half, kinda loses momentum towards the end.
Why does no one ever mention how much nudiness is in Logan’s Run? Jenny Agutter doesn’t wear knickers the entire movie. And you’d think someone would mention the black-light orgy scene.
Glad I never saw this at 35, coz as a kid I’d have been like, “What’s your problem? 30’s plenty.”
Realise I’m late to the party on this one, but Train to Busan is fucking ace!
I’d never seen it before, so thought it’s be nice to see it as part of the GFF Special Events. First I got chased around by zombies in the basement of the Arches. Then we watched the movie with the trains rattling into Central overhead. Just the best time.
A trio of shitkicker, garage band, fuckwits spend the night getting drunk, high, shooting fireworks off from their arse and generally partying like a shower of fannies. This leads to one of them, the titular Dick Long, getting dropped off at the hospital while the others scurry their high asses home.
The whole movie more or less takes place over the next day, when Dick’s death becomes labelled a suspected murder, as you root for these useless fuckknuckles to make it out of this jam intact. By turns funny and tense, more than a little stupid and a really enjoyable film.
Pictures From Afghanistan is a film memoir of Glaswegian BBC photojournalist David Pratt of his time reporting on Afghanistan from the 1980s to present day.
I like the way this was filmed, really grounding Afghanistan as a place, not a news item. It’s strange to see a guy get in a taxi outside O’Neills pub in Glasgow and get out a taxi in Kabul. But it’s also interesting seeing him revisit places where he took photos in the 90s and contrast the bombed-out horrors to the tentative rebuilding that’s going on now.
Thought I’d start the day with a bit of fluff with Love Sarah. My biggest concern going in was that it would be too saccharin.
It was awful. Just awful. Was ready for walking out a few minutes in. Picked it because it had a good cast with Celia Imrie and Bill Paterson, but the majority of the screentime goes to the rest of the cast who sound they’re giving their first read-through at community drama class. Because the actors don’t convey any emotion, it’s left to the score to fill in the blanks, which comes off as overdone.
The script is cringey, and I at several points closed my eyes so as to get some respite from the film, only to once again regret that we don’t have sphinters in our ears to allow us to block out sound.
The basic plot is that Sarah is going to open a bakery, when she dies suddenly. Her mother, daughter, friend and ex band together to open the bakery in honour of her memory. I don’t mind a bit of mushy fluff from time to time, but this was both just really bad on every metric and just achingly white middle-class in that Richard Curtis way. When it’s first proposed that they open a bakery without Sarah, they lament aloud, “But where will we find a Michelin star chef to make the cakes?!” Fuck all these people.
As the bakery struggles, Celia Imrie’s character has a thought, “What if we make cakes for more than just white people?” and they thrive by making ethnic food for their diverse range of neighbours. Isn’t London wonderful, with all these delicious foods from all these exotic cultures being brought here to decorate our lives? The film is really white gaze-y, which they try to mitigate by having biracial actress Shelley Conn in one of the leading roles.
All in all, it sucked. So hard.