It Follows

  An unusual horror film by David Robert Mitchell, with the same eerie accuracy of The Myth of the American Sleepover, but with more shocks and frights. There are some wonderfully atmospheric shots and weirdly constructed scenes. The score is very uneasy, the pace quite static with an underlying tension. People in the audience, including myself, were jolted and jumping out of their seats in fear.

PARIS NOTES

 

  Clouds of Sils Maria/ Maps to the Stars

Two films contemplating an actress taking on a role that will return her brutally to the past. They satirically portray the movie and theatre business as full of ruthless and pretentious sharks. Assayas more subtly, Cronenberg heightened to comedic absurdity. The acting from the women provides an emotional intensity, a focal point of alarm amongst the knowing self-reference.

  Goodbye to Language

Godard's latest film is typically free-associative, blending philosophical critique, puzzling deadpan humour and a vibrant, celebratory visual imagination, chopped up and displayed, highlighted by 3D. Unconstrained by narrative cinema, disconnected from the often dry, academic concepts used in video art, his film is pure experience, utterly distinctive, you can take from it what you want, he will never answer, never resolve.

 
  How to be both

Even if JLG bids adieu to words, Ali Smith is still lost in love with language. Breathless, nostalgic, charming, a little dotty with tantalising tangents, her novel spans two separate eras, existing together in bright introspection.

 

BOYHOOD

  A truthful, generous film with a gentle warmth. The family are naturalistic, flawed, funny and thoughtful. Breezing through time and memory while confronting how difficult life can be. Some scenes drift often in and out of my mind here and there, it could have been only a clever construct but Linklater and his cast have touched upon a magical flow.

FESTIVAL HANDS

http://gepettosongs.bandcamp.com/album/festival-hands

FILM STILL 4

Kay Bridgeman in Dreaming Will

FILM STILL 3

                                           William Hoyland in Dreaming Will

A POET'S TALE

Noriko's story

LOCKE

   Gabriel Ogier paid for his ticket, the server held up his note to the light. He'd given enough money for standard, he sat in a premier seat. Locke was a one man car phone nightmare. The protagonist takes a continuous motorway ride to witness the birth of his illegitimate child. In the process he reassures, argues with the non-visible, destroying his home-life, his work. Or are they actual beings that he is talking to? Gabriel felt trapped in the cinematic vehicle, confined to this solitary man's traumas without escape. It was a pretty intense journey.

 He walked out of the cinema at the end, wandering across the street to the squat gymnasium. Inside he took a seat on the floor. The live music began. Spanish blues harmonicas, northern howlers, too much reverb, hooded guys protesting with songs, chirpy munchkins. Been round the block beat-boxing, wooden microphone stand, funk backing group with Yamaha keys. Endless rapped readings and improvisations taken from blurred pen-marked notebooks, audience and performers, the same, connected. An unknown what next, freedom and openness, with some danger and edge. He danced with his friends, the two long dark-haired women, to the makeshift, booming speakers, blurting heavy, sweet reggae.

EXHIBITION

 D and H are an artistic couple, who's lives are shaped by their architectural house. They ponder, work in an experimental manner, have sex, spurn others, luxuriate in empty real time. Creative, non-actors Liam Gillick and Viv Albertine give brave, unaffected performances. Both, in unison, dowdy and erotic, analytical and mundane, we feel these people have been captured unaware. This is Joanna Hogg's best film so far, it's disarming, mysterious yet often amusing, she never takes obvious turns in plot and avoids yielding to conventional characterisation, shot with contained flair.

MAD AS HELL

   Network is a seething, passionate satire on the television industry from 1976 which was regarded as a brilliant, paranoid exaggeration at the time but has come to be seen as a dark oracle into our aggressively banal current state at the hands of media manipulation and programming. Dave Itzkoff's clear-sighted, thoroughly researched book has a hero in Network's writer Paddy Chayefsky. A difficult, conflicted man who's outspoken views could not fit into any tidy ideology or rhetoric, he was a non-conformist in his cynicism, had his own vision of truth but was afraid of youthful changes or leftist reform.

The book also benefits from the other integral players surrounding the Network. Sidney Lumet, the hard-working, equally strong-minded director who humanised Chayefsky's strident ideas in his knowledge of how to draw emotion from his actors. William Holden and Peter Finch, two booze-soaked, charismatic veteran actors who like Chayefsky were near the end of their lives. The Finchy wallet-pinching anecdote is a classic. Then there is Faye Dunaway with her self-absorbed, starry independence, asserting herself on and off screen in the old boys club. Tremendous detail.

Also, if you haven't read Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, be prepared. Challenging, harrowing with some of the lean tone of Beckett.

Today I visited the Chris Marker retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery. Humorous with it's cats, thought-provoking in it's balance of futurism and political examination, visually stunning.

FILM STILL 2

Greta Lange in Smoke Deception

FILM STILL

 Mitch Mitchelson in Smoke Deception

ALAIN RESNAIS

 Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, Providence.

SPECIAL AS HOMEBREW

 NENEH CHERRY. Blank Project.

RECOMMENDED RECORD

 N.E.W. Motion.

SEE YOU TONIGHT