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…
In the brief video screened to introduce Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall the director explained his process in making the film. He described how he undertook four weeks of extensive observational filming, followed by a year to edit the footage down into the resulting four and a half hour film. His editing process involved firstly discarding the more superfluous footage and then painstakingly searching for a structure out of the best of the remaining material. I had plenty of time to…
Terror Nullius, roughly translating as nobody’s land, refers to the dubious legal principle declared by British white colonialists in justifying their claims on the “discovery” of Australia, in what must still be the single biggest land grab in human history. Terror Nullius, the film, is a double-barrelled satire aimed squarely at Australia’s enduring mistreatment of its First Nations people, its embedded racist attitudes, and its appalling treatment of refugees. It lays siege to its targets by way of an anarchic…
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…
