Conor Bateman's Blog, page 16

Sacro GRA

Gianfranco Rosi’s patchwork documentary Sacro GRA is focused both on place and people. Structured as a series of vignettes focused on people who live or work around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, a mammoth ring road that encircles Rome, it attempts to capture some essence of life in the area, edited and shot in a freeform fashion to avoid any forced narrative construction. Much of the film is admirable, many of the subjects in the film are amusing and engaging and the way Rosi plays with narrat...

Gone Girl

David Fincher is never content with the easy answer or the simple narrative. While traversing the idea of crime time and time again, with detectives, journalists, suspects and even potential intellectual property thieves, the roles characters appear to fulfil on the surface never fully encompass their true selves –there’s always something under the floorboards, and Fincher intends on ripping them apart to find the beating heart. With Gone Girl, it’s no different – a surface-level suburban who...

Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot (dir. Adam Yauch, 2008)

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 Adam Yauch’s basketball documentaryGunnin’ for That #1 Spot(2008).

Date Watched: 25th September, 2014

Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 43

Since 1994, sports documentaries have lived in the shadow of Steve James’ stunning and moving Hoop Dreams. Over an eight year per...

Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot

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 Adam Yauch’s basketball documentaryGunnin’ for That #1 Spot(2008).

Date Watched: 25th September, 2014

Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 43

Since 1994, sports documentaries have lived in the shadow of Steve James’ stunning and moving Hoop Dreams. Over an eight year per...

We Are the Best!

Lukas Moodysson’s We Are the Best! is, first and foremost, a story about friendship. Whilst punk rock and nostalgia are the windowdressing to narrative, the primary drive of the film and the reason it works strongly on an emotional level are as a result of the lead performances and the intimacy of its storyline. Adapted from Coco Moodysson’s (Lukas’ wife) graphic novel Never Goodnight, the film acts as a collective nostalgia trip, her memories bringing about fully formed and engaging characte...

Matterhorn

The idea of an outsider coaxing a protagonist out of their shell is a fairly tired trope in fiction generally, though some films manage to transcend it by playing with form or narrative reveal. Matterhorn, written and directed by comedian Diederik Ebbinge, seems to actively set itself apart by focusing less on broad humour than setting up emotional beats and an almost sombre development of a relationship between the central two figures.

The two men at the heart of the film are Fred (Ton Kas),...

Silence Has No Wings

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. For this first instalment, Conor Bateman looks at the experimental Kazuo Kuroki feature Silence Has No Wings.

Date Watched: 11th September, 2014

Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 47

“From one fanatic ideology centered around the Emperor to another one centered around MacArthur, that idea of our con...

Manuscripts Don’t Burn

None of the films of Mohammad Rasoulof have ever been released in his home nation of Iran. His latest feature, Manuscripts Don’t Burn (دست‌نوشته‌ها نمی‌سوزند), is perhaps his most incendiary work yet, a chillingly matter-of-fact account of a botched plot to murder a group of Iranian intellectuals in 1995 and the decision, decades later, to pick them off one by one. It’s a film concerned with censorship and the creation of art, broadly, whilst also a look at the way in which religious doctrine...

Joe

Playing in competition in the 2013 Venice Film Festival, David Gordon Green’s Joe was at something of a nexus point for both the film’s director and leading man, Nicolas Cage. Another tale of the American South, focusing on handheld camera work, intimate connection with characters and broad thematic concerns, Gordon Green was looking to replicate the success of his previous festival favourite Prince Avalanche and move away from his recent underwhelming comedies The Sitter and Your Highness. C...

Teenage

In modern popular culture, the teenager reigns supreme, the construction of pop stars itself depends upon a young and rabid fan base and the proliferation of so many filmic franchises relies on hooking viewers when they’re young. What’s not often discussed, though, is the teenager as anything more than a consumer or a social problem, and Matt Wolf’s Teenage seeks to fill this void. A mostly historical account of the development of ‘teenagers’, from child labour in the early 1900s to the Secon...