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Lucía and Jun-Dai at the BFI IMAX at 18:00 on 21 April 2013.

Jun-Dai:
Not as visually stunning as I’d been led to believe from rottentomatoes.com, but the film was less dumb than I expected. Kind of interesting to see this after watching Trance, since the films have a few things in common. Trance did a much better job of coming out with unexpected plot twists from nowhere, whereas in Oblivion everything is sort of banked on a couple of major plot twists, which are pretty well foreshadowed and entirely predictable.

Moon is a pretty obvious comparison point for Oblivion, although it is a much more focused film that really tries to grapple with a single problem.

Oblivion is one of those films that’s interesting to think about a bit, but start to seem pretty stupid if you think about it too much. Why do the drones suddenly stop working when the Tet explodes, given that they’re capable of running without it the rest of the time (such was when it’s on the other side of the planet)? Why do the vehicles and other devices have no remote operation? Once Jack is considered hostile, should pretty much everything stop working for him (hovercraft, gun)?

Oblivion‘s broad scope comes at a price—the story is told from Jack’s perspective, and we hear a bit of Julia and Malcolm’s history, but mostly the world is unknown to us. We only get a glimpse of what life is like for Malcolm’s crew. We have no idea what has happened to the rest of the world. The Tet itself is a bit of a MacGuffin, since all we see inside of it is empty space and pods—we are meant to imagine that a civilisation is there, but what that civilisation is like or how it lives is irrelevant. In this sense we realise that we are not really meant to care about what happens to humanity, we are really just concerned with what happens to Jack, since the story is about him.

There is an interesting question embedded in the film: If there are many Jacks and they all have an equal claim to loving Julia and to being the man she loves and married, and she knows no difference between them (except perhaps for the main Jack who’s gone off to get himself killed), how is one to deal with this problem? The film avoids this question, of course, as it does the question about what Jack would do about Victoria were he able to save her.

Victoria really gets the short end of the stick in the film. We are not meant to like her, because she’s a goody two shoes, and because she represents a usurper to our heroine Julia. She does nothing particularly wrong, but she’s treated as an unsympathetic character that somehow represents the lure of techno-fascist mindlessness of the world Jack inhabits in the beginning film, and she’s basically brushed away as a character. If the aliens had their way and were able to replace her with Julia-clones, then she really would have been brushed away to irrelevance on a whole other level.

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Lucía and Jun-Dai at the Vue Cinemas Islington at 18:30 on 20 April 2013.

Jun-Dai:
An entertaining thriller. It starts out as a heist film, but really ends up falling into the story-within-story, which-reality-is-real genre. Sort of an Inception-lite, if you will.

There’s a funny moment where Elizabeth’s shaved public hair moves from being an odd moment in a scene to a plot point.

There’s also a scene at a fancy restaurant called Yauatcha, which I’ve passed many times (though I’ve never gone in—it doesn’t look much like my sort of place).

In a way it’s a bit sad that it didn’t end up being more of a heist film. The heist scene itself was nicely set up and executed, and I think I’d have enjoyed the film more if it had been more about that and less about the character’s weird emotional interactions with each other.

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Jun-Dai and Lucía at home on 30 March 2013.

Jun-Dai:
I don’t think it would have occurred to me if I hadn’t watched the pilot of The Walking Dead shortly after, but White Material does feel a bit like a zombie film.

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Jun-Dai and Lucía on 29 March 2013.

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Jun-Dai, Lucía, and Sach on 18 March 2013.

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Lucía, Jun-Dai, and Sach on 16 March 2013.

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Lucía and Jun-Dai at home on 4 March 2013.

Jun-Dai:
It’s an age old movie cliché, but the island Hirta, as played by the island Foula, is as much a character in the film as any played by human actors. Foula is a small enough island that by the end of the film it’s easy to get the sense that you’d know your way around if you were to ever go there.

It’s remarkable that Michael Powell would travel all the way to the island to make his film, or that he’d hire so many locals to act in it, all a good half dozen years before Italian neorealism took off, and a decade before La Terra Trema. While the style of the film is much less realist than what Visconti and Rossellini would do later, it’s still a remarkable attempt to really try to capture a sense of life in a place like Hilda within a fictional context. In some ways it’s a shame that Powell never pushed this further. Had he taken entirely different lessons from this film, he could have invented a British realism that would give us a much better sense of life in that time than any of his later films did. I’m not complaining, Powell is very much a great director.

The two films that came on the DVD seem like essential viewing in combination with this film: St Kilda, Britain’s Loneliest Isle (a short film about St. Kilda made a few years before the evacuation) and Return To The Edge Of The World (a short documentary about Michael Powell and John Laurie returning to Foula 42 years after making The Edge of the World). The three films in combination are kind of awe-inspiring.

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Jun-Dai, Lucía, and Maki at the BFI Southbank at 18:20 on 2 March 2013.

Jun-Dai:
This is one of those films that leaves me with the feeling that I need to watch it again soon. It’s easy to get caught up in the film’s wandering plot, but it’s a bit of a challenge to try to piece it together into a coherent experience.

Franco Citti is magnetic as a likeable good-for-nothing hoodlum who doesn’t quite know what he wants and (consequently?) is pretty terrible at everything he sets out to do. This isn’t really a remarkable idea for a film, particularly an Italian one, but there’s something special about the way Accattone is filmed. This film is much rawer than Fellini, but is not self-consciously weird (like later Pasolini) or self-consciously shocking or gritty like so many others. It isn’t as aestheticised as Mamma Roma is (with its nighttime tracking shots as Anna Magnani walks the streets amid pools of light), but it is definitely not striving for an anti-aesthetic either.

Franco Citti’s performance is so natural that the emotional impact of a lot of what he does is sort of muffled. It’s only a few moments after he steals his son’s necklace that the moral significance of it hits me. Arguably it’s a small crime compared to his pimping, but it’s surely meant to have an impact.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but surely there’s some allegory we’re meant to see in Accattone’s attempts to defy death by diving into the water?

One sequence that really stuck with me was when Accattone tires of walking with the cart. We see a long pan (maybe 10 seconds or so?) where he maintains a fixed distance from a rotating camera, and basically does a 90-degree angle as he wanders over to the curb. He seems so tired, and the shot seems conspicuously long (and close-up). Then the same shot is repeated with a second companion, and it is almost identical to the first shot. Then, in a third shot, the third companion wheels the cart to the same spot on the curb and sits down as well, and it is only in this shot that it becomes clear how incredibly short the distance they have traversed is.

Accattone has a distinct way of walking, and I’m guessing Pasolini hired Citti in part for this walk, or he spent a lot of time getting it right.

It was a pleasant surprise to see William Weaver’s name come up at the end of the film for the subtitle credits. I haven’t thought about him in a while, but for a professor that I knew only one semester, it’s hard to think of many teachers I’ve had that had as much impact.

I was also surprised to see Elsa Morante in the opening credits, but I didn’t catch what character she played and I have no idea what she looks like. It seems she was one of the prisoners. Another reason to watch the film again.