I thought I’d mark my first year anniversary on Letterboxd by posting a review of my favourite film. It’s a long review, and personal at times, and contains some spoilers, so there you go - a few excuses for you not to read it! But thanks if any of you other Wings of Desire diehards do manage to make it through it to the end.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting about Wings with Dubthrone on his Collokino blog. It…
To mark my 1,000th review I figured I’d tackle one of my favourite films. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said many times by many others, but I do want to try to convey how Hitchcock’s Vertigo makes me feel and why I like it so much.
I’m not usually one to bother with spoiler alerts for old films, particularly ones like this that are so widely known, but if by chance you don’t know…
A man and his tire, stranded on the roadside, shivering beneath snow-covered mountains, and ignored by passing cars. He needs a solution, and on the rising wind of the short film’s soundtrack he sets off at a canter rolling his tire in front of him. The ironic music is like a Persian inflected Western transforming his jaunt into an increasingly wild gallop across the frozen plains and through the icy mountain passes. The scenery is fantastic and the film’s a…
Kiarostami’s short documentary pulls at the strings of the notion that no profession is more honourable than teaching. Some of the bureaucrats interviewed describe it as a sacred endeavour that ensures a nation’s cultural evolution. Its pre-revolution setting means Iranian men and scarf-less women are working side by side towards these goals; however, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the nation’s cultural evolution is ultimately one dictated by authorities rather than the fruits of…
When I was a teenager I used to delight in playing my LPs backwards and listening out for all those Satanic messages. I bet that if you played Tenet backwards you’d hear the devil mutter something palindromic like “what the fuck the what”
Now I’m not one to say this film made no sense at all, in fact when the music shut up for long enough that I was able to hear what the characters were actually saying, well, there…
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an open-ended film that allows people to interpret it in different ways that are personal to them. What I saw when I watched it this time was music. Not in a synaesthesia sense of seeing when hearing, but in a structural and thematic sense, as if it were a symphony composed for film. Kubrick was one of the best directors when it came to using music, he seemed to understand it better than…
