Author: Matt

Criterion Corner: Still Walking (#554)

Matt3 Comments

Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Still Walking was the second or third film by the Japanese director that I watched, after After Life and probably Nobody Knows. In some ways, I now recognise it as a more typical film for Kore-eda than After Life, in terms of its themes and character constellations. Where the earlier film undoubtedly has the feel and emotional heft that I’ve come to recognise as typical of a Kore-eda film, it is much more high-concept in terms of its premise and plot. More than that, though, when I think of Kore-eda, it‘s his families, both biological and found, that come to mind, and where family isn‘t as obviously a theme of After Life, Still Walking is very much about this: the families we find ourselves saddled with, the ones we make for ourselves.

But family isn‘t just about the people we have in our lives, it is also about those we have lost. Still Walking is focused on a theme that is central to many of the director‘s films: considering the kindness and warmth that are perhaps the most apparent characteristic of Kore-eda‘s films at a first glance, it is striking how many of them are in no small part about death.

Continue reading →

They create worlds: Like a Thief in the night

Matt3 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Like most people who’ve been playing video games for a long, long time, I like a good first-person shooter. I still remember the excitement of playing Wolfenstein 3D, and then later Doom and Quake. There were 3D environments before these, but they popularised them, while also driving the hardware evolution that, some 30-odd years later, would see graphics cards that do real-time raytracing. (If you have no idea what any of this means, don’t worry: it’s not what the post will be about.)

But while it’s fun to run around a 3D environment wielding a gun and shooting baddies, those aren’t my favourite first-person games. Give me a choice between running around, guns blazing, enemies falling left, right and centre, and sneaking around in shadows and biding my time, and it’s usually the latter that appeals most.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #185: Diamonds in the rough

Matt3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

There is certainly joy in encountering anything perfectly crafted. Whether we’re talking about films or books or songs or games, there are examples that are exactly what they set out to be and you can’t see a single thing you’d change. Such craftsmanship is exceedingly rare, but to see it is always amazing.

And yet: sometimes it’s the imperfection of something that makes it especially memorable.

Continue reading →

Criterion Corner: La Haine (#381)

Matt1 Comment

If you look at Mathieu Kassovitz’ 1995 modern classic La Haine with a dispassionate eye, it’s easy to criticise the film. It is obnoxious in the way it demands our attention, not too dissimilar from some of its protagonists and their look-at-me-fuck-you-too way of life. It can be accused, and fairly so, of being derivative, in terms of its style and its story: there’s more than a little Mean Streets and Do the Right Thing to the the film. And it’s not exactly subtle – when given the choice between going loud and going nuanced, nine out of ten times it will choose the former.

But, bloody hell, if La Haine isn’t still tremendously effective – and timely.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #182: And, all of a sudden, there they were…

Matt3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

When I was a kid who got into watching films very early, the actors I’d see in movies had somehow always been there. A large part of this was that 99.9% of what I’d watch was on TV, so early on already I’d see all those films with the likes of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn (or indeed Audrey Hepburn), Shirley MacLaine, Steve McQueen, and so on. When it came to newer films that came out in the late 1970s or 1980s, it may have been a different set of stars – Sigourney Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis, Kathleen Turner, Harrison Ford, and many, many more – but somehow it still felt to me at the time that these had always been around.

Because, for someone born in 1975, they kinda had.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: 8 1/2 (1963)

Matt3 Comments

Watching Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the first time in 2024 is a strange experience: it is so clear that this film has inspired many directors who’d go on to make films of their own that are very much inspired by Fellini’s. From Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz via Tom Di Cillo’s Living in Oblivion to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth – and that’s just some of the movies that, like 8 1/2, focus specifically on artists in a protracted state of crisis, trying to produce a work that, to all extents and purposes, is the film we’re watching.

Continue reading →

Through a lens darkly: Fantastic Machine (2023) and Civil War (2024)

Matt1 Comment

When it comes to the inventions that changed the world, what are the ones you think of? I suspect that most would come up with the likes of the wheel, the printing press, and the steam engine, electricity and the computer. But what about the device that has perhaps become more ubiquitous in the last twenty years than any other: the camera? While it is likely that fewer people own an actual, bespoke camera in 2024 than at the beginning of the millennium, everyone who owns a phone has in their possession a powerful device that can record still images as well as moving pictures, and people make use of this to an extent that would have been unthinkable before the smartphone. We’re all photographers and filmmakers: an estimated 5 billion photos are taken on a daily basis, and 3.7 million new videos are uploaded to YouTube alone every single day. What are the effects of this? Is the world different when you’re looking at it through the lens of a camera? Or, to ask differently: Are we different when we’re looking at the world, and at ourselves, through the lens of a camera?

Continue reading →

Criterion Corner: I Know Where I’m Going! (#94)

Matt1 Comment

I’ve by no means seen all, or even most, of the films that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made together (mostly under the moniker of “The Archers”, the name of their production company), but I like, even love, the ones I’ve seen. I wrote about their wonderful A Matter of Life and Death earlier this year, and I’d consider The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp one of my favourite films.

Late last year, the BFI ran a series of Powell and Pressburger films, which sadly I missed, living in the wrong country altogether (for BFI series, that is) – but it made me aware of their 1945 romance I Know Where I’m Going!, which was released on the Criterion Collection as one of their very earliest films: it’s the 94th release in the series, which by now contains more than 1200 titles. More than just being another Criterion release from a pair of filmmakers whose work I’ve liked a lot in the past, I Know Where I’m Going! is set in the Hebrides, so as a fan of Criterion, the Archers and Scotland, I didn’t have to think long and hard about getting the disk.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #177: The definitive version

Matt3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

Even though these days I’m much more about film and TV, there was a time when literature came first for me. I studied English and American Literatures (as it was called at the time), and later I taught the subject. I had much more time – and, frankly, energy – to read a lot… and even better, while working at uni I was paid to read. And teach, do research, supervise and counsel students, do some admin, assist the professor who was supervising my PhD thesis. I didn’t love every single one of those tasks, certainly – but still, it was a very good time for someone who loved books.

It’s also during that time that I started to get into drama in earnest. Our department had a fairly active drama community, and while I never felt 100% comfortable being on stage myself, this is where I discovered how much I enjoy directing. Sadly, that’s something that didn’t survive my move into other professions: like so many, I had a choice between staying in academia, which would have come at a personal price I wasn’t willing to pay, or leaving and doing other kinds of work, and it’s the latter that won out. I miss a lot about my years working at university (and this site and our podcast are to some extent my way of making up for what I left behind), but I never regret the choice itself.

Continue reading →

Sight and Sound: Man with a Movie Camera (feat. Roksana Smirnova and Misha Kalinin)

Matt1 Comment

Wikipedia describes Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman and edited by Vertov’s wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as an “experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film”. What kind of images does this conjure in your mind? My knowledge of Soviet art isn’t particularly broad, but it’s biased by what I’ve seen of Soviet propaganda: heroic, productive workers, didactic visuals showing us what the ideal communist world ought to look like. A utopia that, with the benefit of hindsight, often looks phoney, frightening or both.

Whatever I might have expected of Man with a Movie Camera, it’s very different from what the film actually is: an audacious, joyful approach to an art form that, even 36 years after its birth, was still in its infancy in many ways.

Continue reading →