Conor Bateman's Blog, page 4
May 23, 2016
Machine Gun or Typewriter?
Past midnight, a one-manpirate radio station broadcasts to the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Almost menacingly, the hostwaxes lyrical on a political polemic; how intoday’sworldreactionaries give into artistic expression over violent action. The film you’re watching is about this man, with early imagesskittering between him, animated circles, landscape footage and grainy stills of protesters clashing with police. Then:
“This broadcast is aimed only at you. It’s for your ears only. Everyone e...
May 10, 2016
Sydney Film Festival Unveils Full 2016 Program
Additional reporting from Dominic Barlow.
This morning Nashen Moodley, director of the Sydney Film Festival, announced the full line-up of films that they will be screening across the city in June. This year there is a strong European focus, with a sidebar on female directors in Europe and Ireland as this year’s country focus, in addition to the return of Greek films to the program with Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier and Argyris Papadimitropoulos’s Suntan.
As always, the most interesting...
May 5, 2016
We Like Shorts, Shorts: Like / Speaking is Difficult (Field of Vision #3)
Over the coming months our column We Like Shorts, Shorts will play host to a series of pieces about the new short documentary series Field of Vision, hosted over at The Intercept and co-created by Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook.
Like – Dominic Barlow
No inspired idea escapes being commodified, and so it is with the ubiquitous Like button that fuelled the rise of Facebook. Ostensibly a display of shared taste and social awareness, Garrett Bradley’s Like takes us into the undergr...
April 5, 2016
Sydney Film Festival Announces 2016 Teaser Films
Additional reporting by Brad Mariano, Jessica Ellicott and Felix Hubble.
The first 26 teaser films for the 2016 Sydney Film Festival were announced this morning, an eclectic collection of features and documentaries that, along with the Martin Scorsese retrospective announced late last month, begin to form a clearer programming picture for the 63rd festival.
As per usual with the teaser program, the Sundance Film Festival is a point of reference, with six films that played Park Slope announced...
March 9, 2016
10 Cloverfield Lane
It’s through an ingenious trick of marketing that10 Cloverfield Lane, the debut film of commercial director Dan Trachtenberg, became a must-see film. Starting its life as a spec scriptcalledThe Cellar, it got a rewrite fromWhiplashdirector Damian Chazelle (who was first attached to direct this, but alas) and the production codename “Valencia” before being sprinkled with the magical promotional dustof theCloverfieldbrand. That the alteration waskept from cast members long after filming had ce...
February 16, 2016
Rocky Mountain Express – An Interview with IMAX Filmmaker Stephen Low
Stephen Low is one of the foremostfilmmakersin the realm of large-format cinema. He’s been working on IMAX films since the 1980s, following in the footsteps of his father, director Colin Low. Both men made documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada prior to making the leap to IMAX and both have had a massive impact on the development of the form.
Stephen’s latest feature film,Rocky Mountain Express, opened last week at the IMAX in Darling Harbour, Sydney, five years after its initial...
February 3, 2016
Spotlight
Michael Rezendes comes from a familiar breed of cinematic hero-journalists. Mark Ruffalo plays him asabrupt, obsessive and with a fierce sense of morality. His marriage is strained because he overworks himself; he forgets to eat and finds his greatest relief in thoughtful colleagues delivering him leftovers; his only form of recreation is running to work every morning. He’s an outsider in his native Boston: of Portuguese descent, lapsed Catholic at an early age and with no tracesof an East B...
January 28, 2016
The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol (dir. Lee Sang-ho and Ahn Hae-ryong, 2014)
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 weekConor Bateman looks at the controversial South Korean documentary The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol.
Date Watched: 7th January, 2016
Letterboxd Views (at the time of viewing): 4
Last DecemberLee Yong-kwan, festival director of the Busan International Film Festival, was accused of fraud b...
January 13, 2016
The Hateful Eight
In its extended and intended form, Quentin Tarantino’s eighth (but really ninth) feature film begins with an overture. The red, white and black titlecard flickers ever so slightly as Ennio Morricone’s scoreworks wonders of discomfort. In addition to setting the tone, this three-minute sequence signals to us in-film that The Hateful Eight wants to be treated like no work of studio-backed cinema in recent memory. It has been advertised as a fully formed cinematic experience running on the prom...
December 17, 2015
2015 in Review: The Best Digital-Release Documentaries
This year we’ve been trying to broaden our home video coverage by looking at films that go straight to online streaming services, whether Netflix, local clones like Presto and Stan or through marketplaces like Google Play. It’s a means through which we can catch the festival or theatrical releases that slipped under our radar months earlier, but our coverage of ‘streaming’ films has taken on a new meaning in light of the release strategies of a handful of feature documentaries on a variety of...
