Author: Matt

Artistic fingerprints: loving stop-motion animation

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It’s somewhat strange for me to say that I have a favourite kind of animation. It depends on the individual film, on the individual artists. I love Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away and Porco Rosso and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I love the vibrant, expressive, always surprising computer animation of the Spider-Verse films as much as that of WALL-E with its Roger Deakins-like, classically handsome lighting and cinematography. I love Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, the Looney Tunes classics, the medieval inspirations of Cartoon Saloon’s The Secret of Kells and Wolfwalkers. The styles and techniques with which these films were made were meaningful choices, and they were the right choices.

There are films I love in all kinds of animation. But if I did have to choose a favourite between these styles and techniques, I would have to say it’s stop motion.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #155: Best fiends and purely professional relationships

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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!

So, apparently Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t a huge fan of Ivor Novello? One wonders what Novello thought of Hitchcock. It’s not exactly a secret that Hitch wasn’t always the easiest director to work with. He famously said that all actors should be treated like cattle, and when he said that he was correcting an allegation that he’d supposedly said that actors are cattle. Arguably, his correction didn’t exactly do much to make him look any better. Of course, being treated like cattle might still have been the better deal compared to other ways in which Hitchcock behaved towards his actors – and particularly his actresses. (It’s no accident that one of the sections in the Wikipedia entry on Tippi Hedren’s is titled “Allegations of sexual harrassment”.)

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Criterion Corner: After Life (#1089)

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You arrive at a sort of waystation. The people working there give you a room, they provide food, and they tell you what has happened.

You’ve died.

Also, you’ve got three days to choose a memory of yours. The staff will take that memory, turn it into a short film, and that will be what you are left with, and what is left of you, for eternity.

So, go ahead. Choose. It can’t be all that hard, can it?

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Forever Fellini: I Vitelloni (1953)

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It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was somewhat lukewarm on Variety Lights and The White Sheik; both films had things to like about them, but neither made me look forward to watching the remaining dozen films in Criterion’s collection dedicated to Federico Fellini. The third film in the collection, I Vitelloni, didn’t immediately seem like a big step up. As in the previous two films, we get men behaving badly (towards women, but not only), feeling entitled to all the best life has to offer and feeling sorry for themselves when they don’t get it. They’re more grating because of how the film plays a lilting Nino Rota score that suggests we’re to consider all of this as a lark: boys being boys, that sort of thing. But then, around the halfway point of I Vitelloni, something changes: a note of desolate sadness creeps in, a despair underlying the laddish performativity of it all, slowly but surely becoming the film’s dominant tone.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Showing you fear in a handful of previews

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Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

There are movies that are like rides – but what about rides that are like movies? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam shared his experience with such rides with us.

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They create worlds: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, or What I Did on My Viking Vacation

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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.

To be honest, I thought I’d burned out on the Assassin’s Creed games. For a long time, they were a staple in my gaming diet: a series of Dan Brownesque stores in which global conspiracies rub shoulders with ancient civilisations – and where you run around stabbing people. A lot. Mind you, while I kinda enjoy the ludicrousness of the setting, that’s not why I kept playing every single instalment in the series for the longest time. No, what kept bringing me back to the Assassin’s Creed well was that each game is mostly set at a specific place and time in history: I’ve climbed cathedrals in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade as well as in revolutionary Paris and late Victorian London. I’ve scaled Venetian palazzi and Egyptian pyramids. I’ve hobnobbed with the likes of Cleopatra, Blackbeard, the Marquis de Sade, half the Medici family, Dickens, Darwin and Marx. In short: I enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed games because they let me be a tourist, travelling less to distant countries than into the past.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #150: Serial killings

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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 Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho in the late 1950s, did he ever consider that his film, that most classic of slasher movies, would spawn four sequels (one of which would ignore its two predecessors to then be ignored in turn by Psycho IV), a shot-by-shot remake, and a five-season TV series focusing on the young Norman Bates? Then again, in the world of horror movies, that’s not all that impressive: there’ve been six Scream films to date, and a seventh is in the making. There’ve been three Exorcist films followed by two versions of the fourth film (one by Paul Schrader, one by Renny Harlin, obviously two directorial peas in a pod), and a new trilogy is about to launch in a week or so with The Exorcist: Believer. Everyone’s favourite homicidal doll Chucky got his murder on in eight films so far. Freddy Krueger has ruined teenagers’ dreams nine times so far. Bad, bad things have happened to vulnerable bodies ten times in the Saw franchise. Michael Myers (no, not that one!) has folded, spindled and mutilated the folks of Haddonfield and beyond in (wait for it) thirteen films. (Okay, that is not 100% correct, but that is something for another post, and probably not one written by me.)

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Criterion Corner: Miller’s Crossing (#1112)

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I only discovered the Coens and their films in 1996, with Fargo – a film that I loved the first time I saw it, and that I’ve only come to enjoy more and more every time I rewatch it. Which kinda messed up my first viewing of The Big Lebowski; I don’t know what exactly I expected, but I definitely didn’t expect this shaggy dog story of a Raymond Chandler parody. I have revisited the film repeatedly, though, and I’ve come to enjoy it a hell of a lot. Still, even though I bounced off of The Big Lebowski the first time around, I still tried to get my hands on some of the Coen brothers’ other films (possibly still on VHS at the time). One of the films I watched was Miller’s Crossing.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #148: Memories of murder… of sorts

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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!

I was a teenager when I first watched Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho – though at the time I’d already picked up much of the plot through cultural osmosis, including that twist. As a result, there was little in Psycho that surprised me, except for this: even with me knowing who’d get killed how, why, and by whom, the film was still supremely tense. And that’s still true now, dozens of years later: as much of a cliché as the shower scene has become, for instance, it still works. It’s still one of the best scenes of its kind, and it’s difficult to top.

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Petite maman, petite soeur: The Five Devils (2022)

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Léa Mysius’ mystery drama The Five Devils (in the original: Les Cinq Diables) is a frustrating film. It is beautifully made and features great central performance. Its ideas are intriguing, and it looks gorgeous to boot, if in a foreboding, even menacing way. (There are shades of the French series The Returned, and not just in the film’s aesthetics.) There is a lot to like here – but the film is weighed down by misusing a metaphysical conceit that, while it could work well in a different film, prompts the audience to focus on all the wrong things and ask all the wrong questions. What we end up with feels like an incongruous blend of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman and the German Netflix series Dark.

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