Conor Bateman's Blog, page 14

Mardi Gras Film Festival Announces 2015 Program

Queer Screen’s Mardi Gras Film Festival have announced their program for 2015 and it features a whole host of international festival films, includingLilting,Tru Love and Castanha, and sees an encore screening of Queer Screen Film Festival favourite The Way He Looks.

The focus on a different cultures in this years festival also sees Queer Screen giving local audiences an array of perspectives on interpretations of sexuality from Russia to Sri Lanka and the Native American community in the Unite...

Still Life

A pervasive gloom hangs over Umberto Pasolini’s Still Life. Its almost relentlessly sad first act introduces us to John May (Eddie Marsan), a civil servant whose job entails seeking the relatives of identified corpses in an English town, resulting in most of his day being spent fruitlessly researching only to have relatives refuse to attend the funeral. His job is positioned as almost an exercise in futility, the corpses he collects having as much joy in life as he does. He’s a spectre of dea...

The One I Love

For a film that depends upon a conceptual premise that becomes clear only fifteen minutes into the picture and which is best experienced as a discovery on the part of the viewer, assessing it in vague terms of praise and plot seems to be par for the course in the critical response to The One I Love. Charlie McDowell’s film has somehow managed to make it to VOD in the United States without the marketing of the feature dipping its toes in the water of making direct comparisons to other films th...

2014 in Review: The Best Straight to Video Films

The moniker of ‘straight to home video’ is often assumed to be indicative of quality – if a film can’t muster theatrical distribution, it’s either too obscure, outlandish or just plain bad. That’s not always the case, as many solid films unfortunately slip past theatres and end up straight on the shelf or on VOD platforms, without any strong advertising campaign or promotion. This discussion between editors Conor Bateman and Felix Hubble seeks to highlight some of the diamonds in the rough.

Fe...

The Supercut: A Video Tribute to Cinema in 2014

Year in Review sees the 4:3 writing staff reflect on the best films of 2014, looking at theatrical releases, home video, the best of festivals and our end of year poll.

We begin our look back at film in 2014 with a video that takes 70 of the best films screened in Australian cinemas this year and mashes them together in a 4-minute supercut. There’s definitely going to be a few films that raise eyebrows, as there’s a whole host that were released internationally in 2013 but only graced Australi...

Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler exists within the realm of self-reflexive media commentary, following a protagonist who climbs up the ladder of TV news, yet Dan Gilroy’s feature debut works not on the basis of any incisive skewering of media broadcasting or consumption, but rather as a piece of grimy pulp fiction; it’s a tale of a person harnessing their misanthropy for monetary gain. There’s some shallow level attacks on local news and the importance of broadcasts and bloodlust running hand-in-hand, yet the he...

Star Wars Tries to Break The Internet in 88 Seconds

By now you’ve probably seen it, the biggest film-related video to hit the internet since the release of the Jurassic World trailer less than a week ago. The first teaser trailer for the latest instalment in the long-running Star Wars saga was released in the early hours of the morning (Australian Eastern Daylight Time, naturally) to a flurry of speculation and praise. The opening shot is classic Star Wars, the desert of (presumably) Tatooine, the score subtly moving in and then, suddenly, the...

School in the Crosshairs (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1981)

In our new 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 School in the Crosshairs, a genre-mashing teen superhero film from the director of cult classic House, Nobuhiko Obayashi.

Date Watched: 27th November, 2014

Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 39

A few years agoNobuhiko Obayashi’s feature debut House (Hausu) was brought...

The Drop

Dennis Lehane’s novels manage to overcome occasionally clichéd plot mechanics and outlandish twists on the basis of a very simple and very powerful skill –the ability to clearly evoke a sense of place and character. Much of this has to do with the setting of the majority of his work, Boston, where Lehane grew up. His familiarity with landmarks, dialect and his ability to effectively capture the relationship between characters and the space around them is something you take away after reading...

The God of Ramen

In title and premise alone, The God of Ramen might seem to be yet another food documentary, as much about vibrant preparation and mouth-watering images as it is actual storytelling, yet Takashi Innami’s film is so far removed from those films that it seems almost slight to call it a ‘food documentary’. In fact, it’s much more of an emotional character study, focusing on famed ramen chef Kazuo Yamagishi over an 11-year period in which the popularity of his restaurant Taishoken ebbs and flows a...