Conor Bateman's Blog, page 12
April 9, 2015
The Mise en scène is the Message – The Advertisements of Errol Morris and Roy Andersson
Television advertisements— those didactic short films for people with terrible attention spans — are almost instantly beloved or derided, based oninstincts triggered less by substance than style. Some of the biggest ads in recent memory come from a wide variety of products. These commercials, which range from showcasing deodorants to confectionary, succeed because they are inventive, surprising and, more often than not, genuinely funny. Events like the Superbowl have made television commercia...
March 31, 2015
SFF 2015 – Teaser Films Announced
This morning we got the first glimpse at the line-up of the 62nd Sydney Film Festival in the form of their teaser announcement, consisting of 27 feature films and a filmmaker retrospective. Like last year’s teaser announcement, the festival have peppered this preview with international festival favourites sitting alongside some more unknown films, an eclectic bunch of films sure to fill up watchlists.
The big gets announced here are all exciting ones, saddled with high expectations and a weal...
March 29, 2015
Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry’s first feature to hit Australian cinemas, Listen Up Philip, moves in misdirection; its first fifteen minutes set up an acerbic yet tiresome character study, Jason Schwartzman relishing his most arrogant character yet in Philip Lewis Friedman, “notable” under-35 novelist self-sabotaging the release of his second book. He talks (and lives) in affectation, his sense of superiority an assumed persona, aping his notions of the ‘great American novelist.’ These undesirable characte...
March 24, 2015
Anthology Series 001: Tokyo! (dir. Michel Gondry/Leos Carax/Bong Joon-ho, 2008)
The Anthology Series is a new recurring roundtable column here at 4:3 wherewe look at the oft-overlooked genre of anthology films. Also known as portmanteaus, the anthology film is composed of a series of short films grouped together by theme or some awkward overarching premise. Some of the more popular portmanteaus in recent memory include Paris, je t’aime and horror anthology series V/H/S. There are also anthology films done by the same director, think Love Actually, Argentian Oscar-nominee...
March 23, 2015
Far From Men
The schoolteacher takes another drag on his cigarette and smoke wafts throughout the house, it hits the light and clarity disappears, a figure sitting in another room is caught in a diffused glow, we can’t him make out now but we know what he looked like before, his past self passed off as his present in our short-term memory. Smoke and the dust of rubble are regular features in David Oelhoffen’s Far From Men (Loin des hommes), providing a sharp contrast from the barren Algerian landscape, a...
March 20, 2015
The Connection
The Connection (La French) follows the magistrate and police squad in Marseilles who sought to take down the ‘French Connection’ drug trafficking operation in the early 1970s.The Connection‘s existence seems marketed as a filmic corrective; William Friedkin’s The French Connection is seemingly the definitive take on the subject matter yet it completely sidelines the involvement of international police in France and Turkey, pinning much of the operation’s unravelling on two American cops. The...
March 19, 2015
The Savage Eye (dir. Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick, 1959)
In our regular column, Less Than (Five) Zero, we take a look at films that have received less than 50 logged watches on Letterboxd, aiming to discover hidden gems in independent and world cinema. This week Conor Bateman looks at the independent hybrid fiction-documentary The Savage Eye.
Date Watched: 18th March, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 15
“Virgins and mysteries. The truth concealed in plaster.”
It should come as no surprise that there are a lot of cinephiles on Tumb...
March 16, 2015
We Like Shorts, Shorts: Papillon d’amour
We Like Shorts, Shorts is a new column in which we single out impressive short films which are easily accessible online. The full shorts will always be embedded in the articles for easy access.
A lot of modern experimental shorts rely on non-manual repetition and alteration, of both time and image, made possible as a result of computer generation. Sometimes mind-numbing loops become delirious comedy, as in recent Tropfest winner Animal Beatbox. Other times, though, as in the case of Nicolas...
March 10, 2015
It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports
Errol Morris’ latest work is a tad unusual, partially because a six-part short film series released over a week and totalling 91-minutes isn’t exactly a feature film (though, in that vein, isn’t P’tit Quinquin just a TV miniseries?), but also because It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports amounts to a blurring of the line between advertisement, web shorts and film. ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, in which directors take on events in recent sports history (30 years) in what is supposed to be a half-hour slot on...
March 9, 2015
Eden
The first big musical moment in Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s fourth feature, sees fifteen-year-old Paul (the ageless Félix de Givry) talk to a DJ the morning after an underground party. The DJ is packing up his gear, the club is almost completely empty, and Paul asks about one song. He remembers it being light, with a whistle. The DJ nods, looks through his vinyl crate and pulls out a record. Hansen-Løve uses the well-worn close-up on the record needle going down, as with all films involving music...
