Recuperating in Germany

The idea was to intercut some images from Germany, but as is the case with Blogger's buggy template, there's a lot of time-wasting involved when it comes to editing the html code to allow a set of images to be followed by text, and not have the images all globbed together under the header.

Maybe I'll solve the problm on the plane, and/or make a new template, but here's a few things recently uploaded to the site as the last full day in Germany winds down, and the drinking and some smoking has been tempered by rest and Bullrich. (Seriously: what is this stuff? It's the perfect hangover cure. Someone please import this to Canada.)

First up is an interview with Austin Wintory, whose latest work is the music for the disturbing film Grace (2009), distributed by Anchor Bay/Starz, and the score to the family film Captain Abu Raed, plus a concert work titled Space, Time, and Plexiglass, written in tribute to Joss Whedon's long-gone Angel TV series.

Also uploaded is a film review of Peter Watkins' The Seventies People/70'ernes folk (1974), as well as Christopher Denham's thriller Home Movie (2008), released in Canada by Anchor Bay/Starz, and starring Adrian Pasdar and Cady McClain.



- MRH

Live from Germany

Well, 'live' is a bit generous, but until April 21st, all site blogs and updates will happen in clusters, since web access isn't a wholly daily thing.

Just uploaded is a belated interview wih Oliver Groom, producer and owner of Project X, the indie label with the most comprehensive catalogue of Peter Watkins films on DVD.

Interviewed in conjuction with the release of Watkins' Privilege (1967), our conversation also delves into film restoration, home video distribution, and the challenge in assembling the best possible DVD edition of a Watkins film, as well as making 35mm print available for commercial and pedagogical screenings.

Coming shortly is a review of Watkins' The Seventies People/70'ernes folk (1974), one of his few remaining films still unavailable on DVD, plus a review of Ron Howard's engaging but hardly Oscar-worthy dramatization of the famous talks between British talk show host David Frost and disgraced President Richard Nixon, Frost/Nixon (2008), set for an April 21st DVD release.

***

Travelling Factoids:

- it isn't necessary to arrive 3 hours prior to departure at the airport, but the tactic does force one to relax, since it's too late to retrieve what you forgot during that mad dash to the cab (or gracious free lift). Being early also forces one to decompress before boarding the plane and worrying about being seated beside some obnoxious boob.

- infants on planes will scream a lot, but if you're three rows away, it's tolerable. Sleep deprivation also reduces the natural trigger factor to go nuts.

Coming soon: Asus factoids, and why the eee PC 1000-HE truly rocks.

- MRH

Great Art on DVD

Director Peter Watkins must be feeling a little good this year, knowing so many of his films are widely available on DVD. We covered Punishment Park, Culloden, The War Game, and Privilege, and now the longer version of Edvard Munch, which Watkins directed and also edited.

Featuring a cast of over 200 non-actors, this docu-drama on the early life and mid-career of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (note adjacent picture of his famous painting, The Scream) is an amazing achievement because it avoids so many of the genre cliches most big studio productions regularly use, such as fictional characters to help us get closer to the iconic subject, an obligatory happy ending, and those painfully maudlin moments showing the artist in Great Pain and Suffering for Art’s Sake.

Munch suffered – he lost family members to TB, fell in love with a married woman whose insistence on maintaining a distance was pure torture – but Watkins doesn’t stop his narrative for a dreary scenes of self-abuse and self-pity; we get flashes in several montages, but they’re part of many life experiences that influenced Munch and fueled some very dark and disturbing images.

At over 3 hours in length, the film has its flaws, but that’s counterbalanced by Watkins’ typically intense research, ensuring a fair chunk of historical accuracy and an intimate window into the creative process of an artist who moved through various styles and technical processes during his 66 year career.

Edvard Munch is also an amazing example of editorial brilliance, both visually and aurally. With no formal score to poke audiences for specific reactions, Watkins uses editing as a primary tool to convey a huge amount of professional and personal information (some derived from Munch’s unpublished diaries).

It sounds simple, but traditional score is often used to soften edits, enhance scenes, and add subtext the filmmaker, writer, and actors failed to capture in scenes. Watkins’ sound design is a textbook example on how to convey a diversity of ideas – concrete and impressionistic – through flashes of sounds without being arty or overbearing.

Watkins presumes audiences have the interpretive skills to process waves of information, and that’s probably why Edvard Munch doesn’t feel dated; whether through TV, film, or videos, the evolution of film technique has fine-tuned our instincts to process information with greater speed. The big surprise is that Edvard Munch was made 34 years ago.

Our other offering is The Dali Dimension from MVD Visual, which also breaks the format of documentaries by going straight into the meat of the filmmakers’ thesis: the relationship between Salvador Dali’s art, and modern science.

We still learn the basics of Dali’s career as an internationally celebrated surrealist painter, but the real delight is learning what aspects of science – DNA, the hypercube, atomic science – inspired and reside in Dali’s art. At just under an hour, it’s one of those docs you wish was longer, but MVD’s DVD includes some extra interview material, giving us 70 mins. of strong material to ponder.

Next: Durham County (Anchor Bay/Starz).



- MRH

Visit KQEK.com’s Main Page HERE!
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British Bleakism

British Bleakism is, according to me (ahem), a discrete if not unofficial movement or style within film and TV that is unique to British filmmakers who have a knack for crafting stories that are unrelentingly bleak, dire, doom-laden, and make you feel humanity is doomed, or the human species as a whole is a vile aberration that should’ve been corrected by Nature at some point

A film steeped in this viewpoint in immutable; no editing can change its tone, no music can reduce its potent message of we-all-suck, and no sequel could bring closure because the images and sounds in said Bleak film are far too impressionable. Once you see the lowest moments of the low, it just won’t leave the mind.

A pioneer in this unofficial movement, at least in fiction, was Michael Reeves, whose Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) is an angry, depressing drama of the sadistic urges that can’t be expunged from human DNA. It begins with a scream, and ends with a scream, and life sucks. End of directorial statement.

(One could argue the same goes for torture porn and sado-porn genres, but in rare cases, those genres work with banal archetypes tailored to the young male market, and any drama is manifested by an obsessive detail by the filmmakers on prolonged physical torment that’s heavily sexualized, if not fetishized.)

In the documentary form, British Bleakism probably reached a major artistic high point when a spate of anti-nuclear films emerged during the 1980s, or more specifically after 1982, when Dr. Helen Caldicott told us how we would die slowly from nuclear radiation after a bomb blast in the Oscar-winning short documentary, If You Love This Planet.

This stark NFB film would’ve made the perfect companion piece to our review of Threads (1984), the BBC’s answer to the American’s anti-nuclear TV drama, The Day After (1983), but it’s unfortunately unavailable on DVD (a HIGHLY common problem with most NFB works, if not Canadian films), and my copy, taped from TV when it aired in the eighties, is on VHS tape No. 35, which is currently in deep storage among 2000 other tapes that can only be accessed with a mighty pick ax and flashlight.

That doesn’t upset the context of our review, though, because Threads is very much a companion piece to Peter Watkins' brilliant 1965 docu-drama, The War Game, which won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary in spite of being banned by the BBC.

I actually made a point to avoid Threads (24 years, ahem) because it was reported to be utterly, utterly depressing (it is), and although I did tape it when it had a rare airing in Canada in the eighties, after peeking at the final scene and all that bloody matter, I taped over it.

Folly? Indeed, because while Threads did get a VHS release in North America, it’s only available on DVD in the U.K. It’s as though no one here wants to touch it because it’s still a hot potato of bleakism.

So we’ve reviewed the Region 2 DVD of Threads, as well as Peter Watkins’ The War Game, which comes paired with his superb 1963 anti-war docu-drama, Culloden, from Project X/New Yorker Video. The anti-nuclear films are uniquely British in the way the filmmakers perforate governmental myths, myopia, and absurdities, although their messages are still very much relevant.

Eventually we’ll also cover further British nuclear-themed documentaries and dramas, but for the time being, I think I need a small break from the subject, because British Bleakism is arguably more depressing than a five-film Ingmar Bergman marathon.

Go ahead, you try it.



- MRH

Visit KQEK.com’s Main Page HERE!
Technorati Tags: DVD Reviews