The TV Pick of the Week – 26/01/13

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week.

The Mouse that Roared 

Saturday 26th January

BBC2: 7.00am – 8.25am

If ever you were to think that comedy films who prematurely blow all their funny in the trailer are a symptom of the modern age (I’m looking at you, The Campaign), then you might be pleased to note it’s a long-standing tradition in Hollywood that dates back as far as some of the other established fixtures of the industry, like sexual exploitation and actors who can’t sing, singing.

If that introduction has whetted your appetite (in which case you might want to consider yourself a film sadist) let me introduce you to the wonderful, though not-without-its-faults comedy vehicle for Peter Sellers – The Mouse that Roared. The premise is perfectly tuned for Sellers with a tiny pre-industrialised country going to war with the United States in a bid to get rebuilt by their conquerors. Cue a series of ludicrous events that have the feeling that they’d work a little better in the confines of a stage adaptation (which happened a few years later). However, for the fact that many will not have seen prime Sellers besides Dr. Strangelove and the odd re-run of the Pink Panther series, this is a perfect choice. Besides which, for all its faults, the film has enough consistent laughs to hold your interest, and when the gags begin to lag, it’s still got an inventive enough premise to keep you entertained.

For cinephiles you should also note that Jean Seberg, the astoundingly beautiful actress who went on to play Patricia Franchini in Godard’s À bout de souffle is on hand as window dressing – she doesn’t do much more than look gorgeous, but hey plaudits for doing her job with some aplomb.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human.

The TV Pick of the Week – 25/12/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

Tangled

Christmas Day

ITV 1: 3.20pm – 5.15pm

Oh Christmas Day. The one day of the year it’s perfectly acceptable to watch a children’s animated film while lounging in a new pair of pyjamas, slowing getting drunk off Baileys, Port and/or Brandy. The schedules have been a bit on the weak side this year for the big day, with Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring over on Channel 4 and Shrek Forever After on the Beeb being the only real rivals to the recent Disney retooling of the Rapunzel story.

Sure, it’s a little bit schmaltzy, as per every Disney film, but it’s a solid return to their bread and butter with some brilliant little numbers and a few laughs. As an aside, I’m not the only one who finds Gothel attractive am I? As animated females go, she’s a solid 10/10. Mind you, I find Maggie Thatcher attractive, so maybe I’m not the right one to judge this.

Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Merry Kwanzaa/Happy Holidays to all.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human.

The TV Pick of the Week – 23/12/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

Bad Santa

Sunday 23rd December

Channel 5: 9.00pm – 11.05pm

Channel 5, you dark horse, you. You’re like the abusive partner of television channels. You mire me down with absolute bollocks, then, out of the blue you come round with a bottle of vino and some Thorntons chocolates, and all is forgiven.

Whether true or urban myth, it’s said that 60s hit-maker Adam Faith’s last words were: “Channel 5 is all shit, isn’t it? Christ, the crap they put on there.” Well, as you all know, I’m not usually one to refute that claim, but good telly-God, they’ve managed to nab an unsought-after spot as TV pick of the week.

Really, if the thought of Christmas gives you indigestion, then Bad Santa treads the boards of festive mockery with admirable audacity. The film is so wilfully quirky it’s hard not to love: the romantic interest is a Santa fetishist, the main protagonist is an uncouth alcoholic and there is (thankfully) no saccharine redemption through love and cuteness. Besides which, the long-awaited sequel is due to hit us next year, so before that, remind yourself of why you loved the original.

As for the alternative pick, I will dutifully de-Scrooge myself for a moment and hit you with The Snowman and the Snowdog on Channel 4 (Christmas Eve, 7.00pm – 7.30pm). You could make an argument that it’s a TV show, and not a film, but you could also smash your face against the starboard bow of the Cutty Sark – both possible, neither right. Promising a new adventure to the North Pole, who can say no to a sequel to the abso-bloody-wonderful Snowman? You can catch the original (replete with David Bowie’s be-scarfed introduction) by clicking here.

Merry Christmas film fans!

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human.

The TV Pick of the Week – 07/12/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

Scrooged

Friday 7th December

E4: 8.00pm – 10pm

As we lurch and sway ever closer to Christmas, the schedules are starting to get packed with the kind of films that don’t just encourage booze, they necessitate it. For the entirety of this month, I’ll be bringing you the best Christmas pick, and the best alternative, alongside my random (and increasingly long-winded) extra thoughts on the scheduling.

I should mention right here, that I both love and loathe Christmas. Every December I read A Christmas Carol religiously, and every year, without fail, I bemoan that Scrooge becomes a dancing, prancing, singing convert to the season. Alas, Scrooged, being an updated version of Dickens’ work, falls into the same trap of mawkish sentimentality. Before that point though, there are some brilliant quips, and quite frankly, it’s hard not to have sympathy for a man trapped amongst a sea of idiots.

If you want an alternative pick for the week (and this was very nearly the Christmas choice), Die Hard is showing on Film4 on Monday 10^th (9.00pm – 11.40pm). You all know the drill, Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman and a whole lot of killing. Still, it’s the very finest action thriller of all time. Plus, it (like nearly every blockbuster hit of the 80s) is set at Christmas, so you can force your girlfriend to watch it in the name of the festive season (bear in mind, she may later reciprocate the gesture with Marley and Me – so beware).

Last week I mentioned Channel 5’s horrific spattering of films, and I must admit, I had a case of déjà vu when I was looking through the schedules. Superman 2 (the one that’s achieved cult status purely because most people – quite rightly – hate it) is having a repeat showing on Saturday 8^th December (1.10pm – 3.40pm – although in truth, if you follow this column then you probably don’t need to know what time that’s on, as you’ll just avoid it like the clap). I take back what I said about the executives at Channel 5 playing blind man’s bluff, evidently they just have some films pinned to a dart board and take pot shots to decide the day’s offering.

Winner of the inaugural ‘most disgustingly saccharine titled Christmas movie’ is, (drum roll please) Single Santa Seeks Mrs Claus (Saturday 8^th December, 5.25pm – 7.10pm on Channel 5). As a general rule of thumb, if it’s a movie starring Steve Guttenberg and it’s not Short Circuit or the first Police Academy, then it’s going to be about as interesting as Noel Edmunds’ floral-patterned shirts.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human. 

The TV Pick of the Week – 01/12/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

The Keep

Saturday 1st December

Film4: 12.15am – 2.10am

If you see someone giving this film any less than five stars, give them a kick in the teeth (I’m looking at you, Radio Times).

The perfect antidote to all that Christmas tripe that’s being pumped through the schedules like chicken brains through a meat grinder in the back of every McDonalds (although at least with McNuggets you don’t feel like you’re getting eye cancer just by looking at them).

You know the drill for this kind of fare by now – someone releases a demonic force and all hell breaks loose in the most literal manner possible. In this case however, it involves Nazis. And Ian McKellan. And quite frankly, I could watch two hours of Ian McKellan talking to a bowl of oxtail soup and still be entranced. Add in some Nazis dying horrific deaths and I’m sold.

Effectively destroying Mann’s directing career for a period of three years (he returned to the screen with Manhunter in 1986), the film’s had an odd history, even as cult films go. In fact, it’s still not been released on DVD or Blu-ray, so this is indeed a rare treat.

I was going to write up my ‘worst movie of the week’ but Channel 5 scuppered that plan by running the gamut of absolute toss on Sunday (Road to Christmas, followed by Jack Frost, Rush Hour 2 and then Superman 2). The only saving grace to all that bilge is Magnum Force that inexplicably rounds off the day at 9pm. You honestly have to wonder if the executives at 5 are playing a game of blind man’s bluff against a board full of deliberately terrible films, and whatever they tag gets played that day in a random order.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human. 

The TV Pick of the Week – 25/11/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

Dawn of the Dead

Sunday 25th November

BBC2: 12.30am – 2.50am

Quite frankly, the only serious take on the zombie oeuvre you ever need to watch. Indeed, it seems that with decreasing amounts of tinkering, Romero’s second film in his canon of Dead movies (and most fully-formed in both execution and social commentary) has been copied, rejigged, and flat-out ripped off since its creation to the point of ubiquity and increasing over-saturation. The satire on American consumerism and rampant materialism really (if you excuse the trite pun I felt obliged to work in) gives the film some bite.

If you need a summary of this film then you might need to ask someone to help remove the rock you’ve been living under since the late 70s (although with the successive governments since then you’d be forgiven if you did want to live under a rock both literally and figuratively).

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human. 

The TV Pick of the Week – 16/11/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week.  

The Time Machine

Friday 16^th November

More 4: 10.55am – 1.00pm

If this recession has made you unemployed, then one of the few benefits besides the walk to the local Jobcentre and marathons of Come Dine With Me, are the classic films that are liberally spread around the daytime TV schedule. If you’re one of the fortunate few in gainful employment, then you might want to set your Sky+ for this. The classic science fiction story of a Victorian scientist who builds a time machine and ends up in a dystopian future where the cannibalistic Morlocks feed on the childlike Eloi, is one of those ingrained pieces of culture that is shamefully absent in most ‘top’ lists. The time-lapse progression through the years holds up well (and even won an Oscar for Special Effects) and it really does beg the question as to why they bothered to make that insipid remake in 2002.

If that’s the best film of the week, then ‘what’s the worst?’ you may well be asking. Well, if you’re feeling particularly masochistic to the point rubbing sandpaper on your member is like a soak in the tub, then you can always check out Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian on Film 4 on Wednesday 14^th (6.55pm – 9.00pm). Ben Stiller doesn’t so much phone in his performance, but sends it via post. In fact, there are whole scenes where I’m not sure if he’s even lucid, but ultimately, to beat on this film is like kicking road-kill; most people may hate it, but you know for a fact some weirdo will go home and enjoy consuming it with his family.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human. 

The TV Pick of the Week – 08/11/12

Going to the cinema is expensive, buying DVDs is expensive, renting movies is expensive and torrenting is illegal (and, more importantly, doesn’t guarantee good quality sound and image). Luckily, films sometimes appear on TV. Here’s the best one this week. 

The Inbetweeners

Thursday 8^th November

Channel 4: 9pm – 11.05pm

If you missed the enormously successful feature film debut of the The Inbetweeners last year,then fear not, the film premieres on Channel 4 this week. Unless you’ve been living under a rock the size of Gibraltar then you’ll know the premise of the TV show: four awkward teens navigate through life trying to get the attention of girls and failing comprehensively at every step. Employing the tactic borrowed from nearly every sitcom of the 60s and 70s (when you run out of ideas, take your characters on a trip abroad) the film finds Will, Jay, Simon and Neil travelling to Crete and causing their own-brand of awkward mayhem. A lot of the jokes are either riffed off, or completely ripped from classic Carry On and On the Buses story lines, but that’s somewhat by-the-by when the target demographic wasn’t even the twinkle in their father’s eye when the jokes were first made.

This was written by Robert James Taylor. He is, for all intents and purposes, a human. 

Pick & Mix: The Game is Never Over

This is Pick & Mix, In which we ignore the distinctions between feature, short, promo, commercial, viral, art film and more, in order to focus on the moving image; this column is a weekly, in-depth presentation of works which, in some cases, you may not have seen and which, in other cases, you may have watched, but not from our perspective.

House of Games
David Mamet (1987)

A woman crosses the street. It is the middle of the night. This is an American city – any American city. There is a sheen of recent rain on the tarmac. Steam billows from a grating. It’s a wide, static shot, which could have been copied from an Edward Hopper painting.  Once the woman has crossed the street, we cut to a new shot: a tight close-up, which follows her hand towards a heavy, thick-painted door. She opens the door. On it are stuck 12 letters. They spell out ‘House of Games’, which is also the title of the movie.

In House of Games, a psychiatrist – played by Lindsay Crouse – visits a gambling den, in order to cancel the debt of one of her patients. There, she meets a hustler, Mike, played by Joe Mantegna. He swiftly reveals himself to be a con-man, and his devious lifestyle proves unspeakably attractive to the repressed psychiatrist. In their second meeting, a low angle shot presents us with a waiter, who we then realise is Mike, with a tea-towel draped on his arm. At this point you should know that this movie is not to be trusted.

In 1987, David Mamet had already won a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, and his first produced screenplay had been in 1981, with The Postman Always Rings Twice. Before this, he had not directed for the screen, and House of Games was his first attempt. For anybody who is remotely interested in directing, theoretically, professionally, or otherwise, I highly recommend that you seek out Mamet’s introduction to the published edition of the House of Games screenplay.

The script is worth reading in itself, but in the introduction, Mamet presents elements of the directing experience which will at once be familiar to anybody who has tried it, but which I’ve never seen quite so candidly represented elsewhere:

‘…the production designer had questions about the colour of a wall; the costume designer wanted to go out shopping; the propmaster wanted to know how many poker chips of what colour were needed… Everybody said that the prime requirement of a film director was good health, and I quickly saw the reason why. Each decision is going to affect the film… sloppiness won’t do. Petulance won’t do.’

Once Mamet has realised that the job is, ‘in the main, administrative’, and that his own pre-prepared storyboards look like ‘amoebas’, he sets about directing the film. Were you to not have known this was his first film, you may have been able to guess from its style that it’s the work of somebody trying very hard to be careful, and to not screw up.

As with Mamet’s dialogue, both the performances and the edit are very tempered, calm and controlled. The camera swoops slowly in and out, shifting from behind walls, sitting still when it needs to. As the con-men who populate Mamet’s world need to maintain a constant, reassuring eye-contact with their mark, so does the movie maintain a constant eye-contact with us, lest we look away for a second and spot one of the many tricks that it’s aiming to play behind our backs. The entire attitude of the movie is reminiscent of a Paul Auster novel. As Auster uses simple words and simple sentences to build a structure that is ever more strange and teetering, so does Mamet use simplicity to communicate his story, before spinning us around, to reveal a whole new, unthought-of layer to his world. A gun turns out to be a water-pistol, blood turns out to be fake dye, a policeman turns out to be an actor. So when the final weapon of the movie is brandished, you’ll be forgiven for wondering what it’s loaded with.

House of Games is a bewitching, and sadly underrated film. Its collected style is both refreshing and educational. For weeks, you will hear the noir-ish plonk of its xylophone soundtrack as you drift off to sleep.

This was written by Fred Rowson, a freelance filmmaker and music video director. You should check out his work by visiting www.fredrowson.com

David Fedele’s e-wasteland: a visual portrait of unregulated electronic waste recycling in Ghana

You might remember David Fedele from the featured interview in Issue 3 of Gorilla Film Magazine. He’s the passionate documentary guerilla filmmaker responsible for PNG style (awarded Best Documentary at the Portobello Film Festival 2010) and Bikpela Bagarap, a film that explores illegal Logging in Papua New guinea. David’s a nice chap, refreshingly down to earth and eager to make a positive change in the world. He fell into filmmaking accidently (PNG style was originally just a way to document his trip and combat loneliness) but has since used it effectively as a tool to tell the human side of current events. His lack of experience as a professional filmmaker turned out to be a positive thing, as his work has an incredibly natural and honest feel, setting him a world apart from sensationalist and manipulative “documentaries” (such as the famous Kony video).

David Fedele’s latest film is e-wasteland, a visual portrait of unregulated e-waste (electronic waste) recycling in Ghana, West Africa, where electronics are not seen for what they once were, but rather for what they have become.

Here’s some information (copy and pasted) from the official site: In developing countries, the demand for second-hand electronic equipment is growing, due to increasing connection to the “global world”, and an inability to afford brand new products. Every year, around 200,000 tonnes of second-hand and condemned electrical goods arrive in Ghana, West Africa, mainly received from the “developed” world. Many of the electronics are nearing the end of their life when they arrive, and will soon be discarded as e-waste. A significant volume of electronics actually arrive as e-waste, exported illegally as second hand goods. 

e-wasteland is set entirely at Agbogbloshie slum in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Agbogbloshie is home to between 30,000 – 40,000 settlers, mainly from the poorer Northern regions of Ghana. It is also the largest e-waste dump site in Africa. Generally uneducated and with few employable skills, many of the settlers at Agbogbloshie are forced to make a small living salvaging and recycling e-waste. 

Find out more by visiting the e-wasteland website. You can also follow the project on Facebook.