Conor Bateman's Blog, page 13
March 5, 2015
California Company Town (dir. Lee Anne Schmitt, 2008)
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 experimental documentary California Company Town, from Lee Anne Schmitt.
Date Watched: 5th March, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 4
As the ‘best of the decade’ lists rolled in circa December 2009, Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) wrote a piece...
February 24, 2015
Atom Heart Mother
Much of Ali Ahmadzadeh’s Madare ghalb atomi works as an Iranian take on Jarmuschian ideas of age, culture and place— set for the most part in a car, with pop culture literate dialogue, at one point a neat one-take, and featuring an impressive use of music— though this intriguing style is undercut by an eventual genre shift in the film, from comic drama to thriller. The shift isn’t exactly sudden, but the way in which characters develop in the final third renders it a wholly disappointing conc...
February 18, 2015
Jupiter Ascending
Following up Cloud Atlas, an extraordinary omnibus film helmed with co-director Tom Tykwer, would have been a confronting task for the Wachowski siblings. Though the last fifteen years have seen every film they make exist under the shadow of The Matrix and its widely derided sequels, Cloud Atlas was something of a step away. The Wachowskis eschewed their box office failure inSpeed Racer by venturing into the world of independent film financing, eventually breaking even on what is still the mo...
February 17, 2015
Androids Dream
A 61-minute experimental feature that keenly focuses on the intersection of place and time, Ion de Sosa’s Sueñan los Androides (trans. Androids Dreams) is a unique hodge-podge of ideas and imagery that’s as much about its setting as the action within. The selling point for the film, at least the way it seems to have been pitched at the Berlinale, is in its relationship to one of the most influential science fiction films ever, Blade Runner. Framed as a hyper-minimalist reinterpretation of tha...
The Circle
The 2015 Berlinale wound down last week and we’re playing catchup, with one of the best received documentaries of the 2014 Berlinale finally screening in Australia, courtesy of Queer Screen’s Mardi Gras Film Festival. Stefan Haupt’s The Circle won the Teddy Award for Best LGBT Documentary Feature at the 2014 Berlinale, and was also the official Swiss submission to this year’s Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, its litany of accolades an encouraging sign both for its form, as a sur...
February 12, 2015
Con Man (dir. Jesse Moss, 2003)
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 documentarian Jesse Moss’ debut feature, Con Man.
Date Watched: 12th February, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 4
Documentarian Jesse Moss has a knack for finding interesting and unusual subjects. He’s made films about demolition derby drivers (Speedo), a...
February 8, 2015
Selma
Following initial demonstrations led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, a secret night march was planned by activists in the nearby town of Marion. Lacking King’s apparent insight for media-as-witness and, facing police sent by the office of Alabama Governor George Wallace, the night of February 18, 1965 bore a shocking result for the peaceful protestors. Though the Bloody Sunday of 1965 is the major act of violence in Ava DuVernay’s Selma, this earlier clash in her film ro...
January 29, 2015
The Target Shoots First (dir. Christopher Wilcha, 2000)
In our 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. In this instalment, Conor Bateman looks at the Chris Wilcha’s lo-fi look behind the scenes at Columbia Record Club in the early ’90s.
Date Watched: 29th January, 2015
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 7
When we launched this column months ago, I began scouring online for unusual and underseen films th...
Foxcatcher
Foxcatcher may well be one of the strangest films to be shown in Australian cinemas this year. On the surface, it’s a two-hour film about a tragedy that befalls a wrestling team in the 1980s but, in experiencing it, it feels like less a film than a three-hour tonal exercize, a sports story reconfigured through the prism of fated tragedy, told with an almost beautiful obfuscation of message, meaning or narrative import. Director Bennett Miller, coming off of the sabremetrics film Moneyball has...
January 22, 2015
CITIZENFOUR to Screen at Parliament House
The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties is taking an unusual route in the fight to stop data retention, swapping out Twitter for the silver screen. Laura Poitras’ Oscar-nominated documentary CITIZENFOUR chronicles a series of Hong Kong-based meetings between Poitras, then Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whose efforts to disclose information concerning mass surveillance on the part of the American government created a global media event and...
