Conor Bateman's Blog, page 15
November 23, 2014
Violet
Ostensibly about the process of grief, Belgian director Bas Devos’ debut feature follows Jesse, a teenage BMX rider whose best friend Josef is stabbed to death in front of him in a suburban shopping mall. That’s the plot in its briefest form and the film actually doesn’t build too much on that throughout. It’s a minimalist feature that often seems more artistic exercise than cinematic storytelling, perhaps in the best possible sense of that phrase. We watch Jesse’s gradual social isolation, p...
November 9, 2014
Zero Motivation
Films about war and soldiers tend to be a staple of modern dramatic cinema, so many of Australia’s most lauded films tends to center on the subject. One subset of such features looks at the notion of boredom and idleness within military ranks, the most well-known recent incarnation being Sam Mendes’ Jarhead. It’s rare, though, to see a comedic film about life in the army focused entirely on the roles women play, even more surprising that the country in which this film was made is Israel. Tayl...
November 5, 2014
John Wick
Keanu Reeves graces our cinema screens once more and it’s in a film that only uses martial arts sparingly. John Wick, helmed by veteran stuntmen David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, is a lean and knowingly facile thriller that represents something of a refreshing return to simplistic shoot-em-up cinema. As much as that might read as a negative, the film embodies something lacking of late, a big name thriller not bogged down by questions of morality and fate or a need for a dark and edgy narrative...
October 30, 2014
Kinetta (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2005)
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 Yorgos Lanthimos’ debut feature (as a solo director), the slow moving and strangely compelling Kinetta.
Date Watched: 25th October, 2014
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 28
Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 feature Dogtooth seemed to place the Greek New Weird, a loosely connect...
October 28, 2014
We Like Shorts, Shorts: 23 Skidoo
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.
I first stumbled upon 23 Skidoo whilst researching the history of Sydney Film Festival for their anniversary online archive. The short played in the 1965 festival, the same year that Teshigahara’sWoman in the Dunes and Godard’s Bande a part screened. I’d sought it out after seeing how often the National...
October 20, 2014
Art and Craft
To make a film about art forgery, especially a documentary, is almost dangerous cinematic territory, the shadow of Orson Welles’ F for Fake looms large over all. However, Art and Craft, from directors Jennifer Grausman, Mark Becker and Sam Cullman, tethers its narrative of fakery not to the idea of artistic creation, which it weakly reaches for, but at a vastly more rewarding character study. Mark Landis, the forger the film centres on, is a meek and unassuming figure. Since his teenage years...
October 17, 2014
Non-Fiction Diary
When a documentary bills itself as centring on South Korea’s first group of serial killers, the comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder leaps out. Both that and Non-Fiction Diary are more than just a true-crime story, though, packed with social commentary and dark humour. Memories of Murder uses an inept and unprepared police force as representative of stilted societal evolution, whereas Non-Fiction Diary relies less on projected naïveté than some cutting comparisons with regards to t...
The 50 Year Argument
With the rise of internet journalism, it seems par for the course that documentaries are emerging that aim to showcase nostalgia-infused tributes to the age of print. Andrew Rossi’s Page One, a documentary about The New York Times struggling to move into the digital world, would seem to be the most relevant contemporary for The 50 Year Argument, co-directed by David Tedeschi and Martin Scorsese, yet the films have completely different aims. Page One mostly looks forward whilst The 50 Year Arg...
October 14, 2014
Standing Aside, Watching
Standing Aside, Watching seems easily comparable to a Western – we have a sparse and beautifully shot landscape coupled with an overwhelming sense of dread, an outsider whose actions see the seemingly placid township reveal its sinister underbelly, an intentionally slow pace building to a violent climax – but director Yorgos Servetas seems more in debt to Haneke than Ford, his feature a cutting look at modern Greek society through the eyes of a woman who refuses to sit idly by.
Antigone (Marin...
October 10, 2014
Tusk
To call Tusk a film of squandered potential seems odd, considering the plot is derived from a ridiculous, almost ironic, film pitch on a podcast and said plot follows a man who is kidnapped and surgically turned into a walrus, but Kevin Smith’s feature proved more disappointing than anything else. It exists as a dare of a film and, in that vein, holds the prospect of being completely deranged in the best possible way, yet so much of the film is tempered and middling, moving from an occasional...
