Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment 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.
Read moreThe Corona Diaries: Friday the 13th.
By Mege. – Friday 13th. What a coincidence. It was the day the Swiss authorities told us that we should all keep our distance from one another, that we should work from home if at all possible, that congregations of more than 100 people were a no-go and that we should self-quarantine if we felt sick. (Please note that these measures are only valid for Switzerland and are already obsolete anyway. Check with your own authorities.) Most shops and restaurants were still open. The situation seemed serious, but not really desperate. I still thought that my week-long holiday in Berlin might really happen. Hah. Continue reading
The Rear-View Mirror: The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
There has rarely been a story as good at portraying the conflict between belief and organised religion as that of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans, the peasant girl that believed to have seen archangels and saints and whose fight for her king and her god finally led her to a martyr’s death at the stake.
And while I haven’t seen any of the more recent cinematic takes on the story, I doubt that any of them are as harrowing as Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.
What rhymes with bombs?
On the one hand, I hesitate to call For Sama a movie, because there is no artifice, no script, no second take. There is a woman called Waad Al-Kateab, who shoulders her video camera and films the day-to-day chaos as she finds it. She lives in Aleppo, Syria, in the middle of a war zone, and nothing and nowhere is safe. If there are no Russian planes dropping bombs on the neighborhood, there are the snipers outside to worry about, or food shortages, blackouts. She is surrounded by friends who have not yet left, maybe because they feel rooted there, maybe because they are more afraid of leaving than they are of staying.
I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: What to watch while ‘social distancing’
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment 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.
Read morePlay it again, Cath: The Truth (2019)
A new film by Hirokazu Kore-eda is always a good reason to look up and take note. Ever since I first saw one of his films, the witty, inventive After Life (1998), the gentle giant of Japanese cinema has not disappointed me. Not all of his films are equally strong, but especially after his Cannes-winning Shoplifters (2017), I was sure I’d want to be there to see his latest at the cinema.
However, I would not have expected the new Kore-eda to be a thoroughly French éclair of a film starring Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche.
Continue readingThe Rear-View Mirror: Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
It still gets me, that scene. I think I must have been ten or so, and there was nothing to prepare me for what would come on the telly. No-one in my family was any kind of art-house movie nut, so it must have been a coincidence that Buñuel’s short Un Chien Andalou was on. And then that razor cuts through the woman’s eye. It took me days to recover. Not many other movie moments have stayed with me because of their violence, and none as long as this one. Continue reading
I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Fun things to watch during an epidemic
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment 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.
Continue readingThe ineffable sadness of being: About Endlessness (2019)
I saw a priest drowning his sorrows in sacramental wine, calling out to a god he no longer believed in. I saw a man mourning the death of a daughter he had killed himself. I saw another man, facing a shooting squad and begging for his life. I saw many, many soldiers stumbling through the snow towards a prison camp they might never reach. I also saw joy, glimpses of grace – but mostly I saw sadness in many facets. And beauty.
The Rear-View Mirror: The Divorcee (1930)
Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
The Divorcee begins with a group of friends which make up the in-crowd of New York society. Jerry (Norma Shearer) and Ted (Chester Morris) are in love. They decide to get married. Paul (Conrad Nagel), who also loves Jerry, is firmly relegated to the friend zone. Gutted, he proceeds to get drunk and gets into a car accident that disfigures one of the other women of the group: Dot (Judith Wood). Ur-‘Nice Guy’ that he is, he marries her out of pity. Wedding bells and domesticity, sacrifice and unrequited love. So far, so Hollywood. Female facepalm. But then halfway Shearer delivers the following searing monologue:
Continue reading
