myDylarama

Our Picks + Waves

Abla Kandalaft, Coco Green, Matt Howsam — 2020-09-13T08:40:40Z

This week we are joined by Matt Howsam, a production coordinator in the VFX industry and a film critic.

We mention the hilarious and highly original One Cut Of The Dead by Shin'ichirô Ueda, a Japanese Zombie comedy in the style of some of the best mockumentaries out there and a homage to low budget filmmaking. Depending on where you are you can watch it on Shudder or buy the DVD (it's from 2017). Abla also highlights the Netflix series Unwell, which looks at the dark side of the wellness industry and some of the products and concepts currently being flogged on the market through - yet again - more MLM initiatives.

For our festival picks, this week we recommend Visionmaker's Indigenous Filmmakers Festival, which runs from 31 August to 5 October, the Encounters Short Film Festival, one of the world's best short ff, which runs from 18 September to 11 October and is offering a £10 pass! A few films to highlight are Mahdi Fleifel's 3 Logical Exits, Clermont-Ferrand Grand Prize winner Anthony Nti's Da Yie and Morad Mostapha's Henet Ward.

Matt recommends Women Make Films, a 14-hour doc series, and the Japanese cinema season, both on BFI Player.

Matt chose to discuss Trey Edward Shults's Waves, a dizzying and theatrical film about a family dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy. We discuss the highly cinematic and aesthetic qualities of the film, the impact that has on the emotional punch of the story and the portrayal of the characters, and the somewhat problematic or baffling portrayal of family dynamics that are very personal to the (white) director through the prism of a black family.

This week's picks - Striking Colour Schemes

George Crosthwait — 2020-05-04T13:01:25Z

Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival [JAEFF] producer George Crosthwait picks his three favourite films currently available on streaming platforms in the UK. This time tailored to suit precise days. It's May and the world is looking lush and vibrant (and empty). So this time I'm recommending three films with particularly striking colour schemes.

Viva - BFI Player

Watch on: Wednesday (because like a bored 70s housewife, you'll only get through the rest of the week with cocktails and pastel colours).

Wandering through the twisting labyrinths of Netflix and Amazon Prime is maddening even when only occasionally required. With home entertainment the only entertainment, maybe you're becoming more acquainted with streaming libraries than you ever dreamed possible. Now those endless “failure-to-choose-your-adventure” searches transcend frustration and erode your love of movies itself (dear Netflix algorithm, stop trying to make me watch Extraction). Praise be then for BFI Player's “Collections” category for providing some thematic coherence to salve the choice-bloat of the larger VOD platforms.

The BFI Flare LGBTIQ+ collection is a fabulous starting point, full of queer jewels and softens the loss of the festival's physical presence earlier this year. There's a ton of great stuff here but my personal pick is the uniquely talented Anna Biller's (The Love Witch) Viva. Ostensibly a pastiche of Russ Meyer-type 70s sexploitation, Viva (Biller herself) is your typical bored suburban housewife looking for sex, cocktails and liberation. Unlike films such as Black Dynamite, the recreation of genre aesthetics in Viva is both amazingly exact and surprisingly unreflexive. Biller herself frequently rebuffs terms like “homage” and “pastiche”, challenging her audience to view her films on their own terms. Indeed, her deliberate colour palette is like nothing else in contemporary cinema, something that we might only appreciate once we deactivate our desire to make comparisons to older films (a critical habit that's hard to break). Viva is a work of high camp that nonetheless demands sincerity and rejects irony. A most ludicrous and enjoyable film that is somehow shockingly serious.

Revenge - Shudder

Watch on: Friday (because it's the end of the working/furloughed week and you either need to blow off some steam or generate some energy for the weekend).

On the face of it, Revenge is another entry into the grottiest of cinema sub-genres: rape-revenge. Neither leaning on the male-avenger trope of Straw Dogs or The Virgin Spring/Last House on the Left, nor the cheap titillation of I Spit on Your Grave, Revenge aims to flip the stereotypes and gender roles around. The rape is deeply uncomfortable and un-sensationalised; the revenge is just really, really painful. Taking place in an unspecified and empty desert space, Revenge becomes a sandpit for eye-bleeding evisceration shot in extreme colour saturation. (male) Nude bodies glisten (with blood) under a burning sky as Jen (Mathilde Lutz) slays her way out of her nightmare vacation.

The recent successes of The Hunt and Bacurau suggest we're currently all down for a bit of human hunting in our life. Revenge will scratch that itch whilst staring down genre misogyny and providing some wince-inducing catharsis.

Ran – Mubi

Watch on: Sunday (because its an immensely long feudal war epic).

Amongst the many cinematic casualties of COVID-19, and particularly hard for me to take, is the postponement of the BFI's massive Japan season, which had been due to start this month. A planned restoration of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai has also been shelved, but we can take some comfort by settling in with his (arguably—depends how you feel about Richard Gere) final masterpiece: the magnificent King Lear adaptation Ran. Kurosawa revised Shakespearean tragedies several times throughout his career. The Bad Sleep Well loosely used the structure of Hamlet, the wonderful and ghostly Throne of Blood (coming soon to BFI Player) took on Macbeth and Ran sets Lear in Feudal Japan.

Having already secured a place amongst the greats with his films made during the golden age of Japanese cinema, Kurosawa proved himself to be a master of colour with late period work such as Kagemusha, Dersu Uzala and Dreams. “The Emperor” was exacting and exacerbating in his methods. Chris Marker's quasi-making-of-Ran, A.K. (also showing on Mubi this month) shows Kurosawa demanding that his production team paint an entire field of reeds gold in order to achieve the desired aesthetic quality. The scene was later cut from the final version of the film. Ran features a signature role for Tatsuya Nakadai (as the Lear surrogate), one of the greatest actors in cinema history. Also present is queer icon Pītā (Funeral Parade of Roses) as the Fool.

Ran is filmmaking on a scale to rival anything that Kurosawa, or anyone else, had attempted to date. It is one of the great historical epics and arguably the greatest imagining of Shakespeare ever set to celluloid.

VOD Picks Of The Week - Japanese triple bill

George Crosthwait — 2020-04-20T20:05:56Z

Japanese Avant-garde and Experimental Film Festival [JAEFF] producer George Crosthwait picks his three favourite Japanese films currently available on streaming platforms in the UK.

Visitor Q – Mubi

First up is something thoroughly deranged. Takashi Miike's no-budget tale of incest, domestic violence and lactation, shot on unappealing digital video. It's a comedy.

This won't come as a surprise to followers of Miike's career. A famously hard working filmmaker (over 100 films in less than 30 years) whose genre hopping tales of excess made him a poster director for Tartan's “Asia Extreme” DVD imprint in the late 90s/early 00s. Whilst Miike delivered a string of jidaigeki action epics in the 2010s (Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, Thirteen Assassins, Blade of the Immortal), and the recent gangster/boxing film First Love (released in UK cinemas in January), it was through his earlier hyperviolent and surreal films such as Audition, Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris and Gozu that he made his name.

Visitor Q oozes out of this period, and perhaps tops the lot in terms of risqué content. Ostensibly a riff on Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 satire of the bourgeois family, Teorema, Visitor Q likewise annihilates its middle-class milieu. In Pasolini's film, the family are seduced and liberated by a mysterious stranger. In Miike's updating, the family are abused and traumatised by both the titular visitor and each other. Their liberation, if we can call it that, comes from the evaporation of taboos and pleasure of transgression. If you can access the wavelength of this hysterical satire then you too may be released from the restrictions of your social coding (if not from your lockdown).

The Night is Short, Walk On Girl – Netflix

If, like me, in times of strife you seek solace in the loving embrace in anime, then you're probably spending a fair amount of lockdown life working through Netflix's auspiciously timed deployment of Studio Ghibli's entire catalogue. But Ghibli is not the last word for Anime, and Netflix offers a (patchy) selection of delights beyond the gateway drugs of Totoro and Ponyo. On furlough with endless hours stretching out ahead? No better time than to dive into Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion (a kind of anime Twin Peaks). Other choice cuts include pre-Your Name work from Makoto Shinkai (Garden of Words), a rare example of anime directed by a woman (A Silent Voice), and the inventive Hiroshima-set WW2 drama In This Corner of the World.

My pick for this week, however, is Masaaki Yuasa's The Night is Short, Walk On Girl. A Lewis Carroll inspired, offbeat odyssey encompassing an epic pub crawl, an improvised musical play within a film, a viral epidemic (how topical), a mysterious after dark second-hand book fair, unrequited romance and clandestine shunga traders, all in the course of one long (short) night!

Often citing René Laloux's 1973 classic symbolist sci-fi animation The Fantastic Planet as his key inspiration, Yuasa's wildly imaginative brand of surrealism has garnered him a dedicated following. Films like Mind Game, Lu Over the Wall, and adaptations of novelist Tomohiko Morimi (The Night is Short, Walk On Girl; The Tatami Galaxy) demonstrate the possibilities afforded to an animator with only a passing relationship to logic. Given that civilisation no longer makes any sense, why not dive into an animated world where nonsense rules supreme.

Still Walking – Curzon Home Cinema / BFI Player (rental)

My final pick goes to Hirokazu Kore-eda; a household name following the Palme d'Or winning Shoplifters, and fresh off his first film made in Europe: The Truth. As seen in the latter, return to the childhood home and intergenerational relationships are two Kore-eda staples. These themes never crystallised as perfectly as in my personal favourite Kore-eda film, 2008's Still Walking.

Still Walking plays as a kind of reversal of Tokyo Story (don't say this to Kore-eda, he loathes the constant comparisons to Ozu) where the grown-up children visit their elderly parents. To me, Still Walking is a fulcrum around which the rest of Kore-eda's filmography turns. The aforementioned themes aside, the cast includes some of his favourite actors: the great, and sadly late, Kirin Kiki, Hiroshi Abe (I Wish, After the Storm) and You (best known now for Terrace House!); there is a strong focus on food preparation and eating; and a final Kore-eda trope, the train. Without giving too much away, there is one long take at the end of the film which captures a train sliding across the screen. It's very simple, although the timing is very precise. It's one of my favourite moments in cinema.

Not much happens in Still Walking. The family argues and reminisces. Food is eaten. Walks are taken. This is a film of quiet moments and contemplation. Its a film that requires you to sync with its rhythm. If you do, you should achieve a sense of beautiful calm. A welcome meditation during these testing times.