Driving You Blood Simple

Last month was the most excellent weekend in Bristol at The Watershed for Cinema Rediscovered and The State of Things. 

I have teased on Instagram my first attempt at zine making - obviously a hell of a lot more work to do on that, but now I can share where the article is, on Cinema Rediscovered Blog.

Along with my piece 'Blood Simple: The Coen Brothers’ Characters and Genre Twisting Storytelling' are other great pieces of writing from other participants on the course which can be read HERE. 

Just to get you hooked, here is a little sneak at the edited zine...

Around the World: Hungary

Ever thought it was possible to see from a dog's point of view without animation or humans doing the voices in tacky live action films? Well it is possible and it is beautiful as well as bleak and heartbreaking. The curiously named White God is superb.

I remember seeing reviews about White God when it was first released, it was screened at Cannes in 2014 and was nominated as Hungary's choice for Best Foreign Language Film but wasn't shortlisted, sadly. It could easily been a film that was over looked as the story seems familiar but there is something special about this film.

Hagan is a mutt and loved by his own teenage owner Lili. When Lili is forced to stay with her father while her mother is out of the country, the estranged family don't see eye to eye. Her father doesn't like dogs and refuses to pay a harsh "mongrel" fine imposed by the Hungarian government. After he a Lili fight, he abandons Hagan on the side of the road. The story follows both Lili who searches the streets at night for her beloved dog while trying to mend her relationship with her father and keep up with the youth orchestra she is part of. Hagan has a very different journey. He lives on the streets, eating scraps of food where he can, avoiding the dog catchers and looking out for his owner. He passes through various people's hands eventually ending up being brutally trained for fighting. But instead of a happy reunion with Lili, Hagan, along with 250 other dogs who had been abandoned, takes to the streets, attacking, killing anyone in their way. They hold the streets hostage, but Lili is determined to find her Hagan again.

So many adorable dogs but terrifying when running in a pack. The ending scenes are truely marvelous, the dogs are as one, or as a characters describes, an army. The brutallity that Hagan and the other dogs suffer is heartbreaking, especially as they have been left aside by owners who didn't care enough about them. Their revenge is, in a way, justified but the violence against them is visited ten fold back on the people.

Although the film begins like a story we've heard before, you don't expect the outcome at all. The image of the quiet streets and just the sound of dogs in the distance is wonderfully constricted. But the last scene in the film, of the pack surrounding Lili is beautiful. Even though there is no real resolution, there is hope and that is sometimes better than a clear cut 'happy ending'.

Next up... check out all the films HERE
#AroundtheWorldin80Films

Around the World: Wales

After the last post from Around the World, I was hoping for a more upbeat story but having just rented Soloman & Gaenor, I should have guessed from the title (and synopsis) that things wouldn't end well. Nothing usually does with 'star crossed loves'.

Set in South Wales on 1911 in a small mining town. There are continous issues with the mines, with strikes and talks going on throughout. Solomon (Ioan Guffudd) is an Orthodox Jew who hides his ethnicity when he sells fabrics door to door. hi family own a shop in the small town and tend to keep to their own comminuty which is subject to abuse. Soloman meets and falls in love with Gaenor (Nia Roberts) who has a strict father and openly anti-Semitic brother. Soloman struggles to keep his love a secret from his family and his family a secret from Gaenor. When she discovers she is pregnant, she is publically disgraced in her church.

Released back in the late 90s, the BAFTA winning film was also nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category but it lost out to Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother. Tough year. The film was actually film in both English and Welsh. I think I saw the English version with a bit of Welsh and Hebrew too.

The story is familiar, two lovers who want to be together by their opposing families and beliefs keep them apart. But in this story, they keep secrets from each other. Solomon keeps his family a secret and in turn keeps Gaenor a secret from them. She later, thinking he doesn't love her, keeps her pregnancy a secret from him until it becomes too much to bear. As with all these stories, there is a feeling of tragedy in the air from the start but the gentle courtship and growing feelings between Solomon and Gaenor makes you desperately hope for a happier ending or at least a satisfying close. 

Next up... check out all the films HERE
#AroundtheWorldin80Films

The Slumber Party Massacre

I talk about them about them all the time, I know, but they have such great screenings I just can't help it. They were great at The State of Things in Bristol. I'm super excited about what they'll do for Halloween. Of course its The Final Girls.

Back in July, before all the madness happened, Fox (I've mentioned her a few times) and me got tickets to see a slasher movie. Not the sort of thing I'd do on a Friday night but the I remembered reading about it somewhere else before (I'm pretty convinced it was Dell on Movies) and thinking this sounds awesome.

The Slumber Party Massacre isn’t your average 70s/80s slasher, it is known as the first feminist slasher movie. Slasher films usually feature women half naked most of the time, getting killed all the time and overall, a negative representation of women.

Rita Mae Brown, feminist writer and activist, originally wrote the screenplay for The Slumber Party Massacre as parody of the genre but as production moved on, some things were changed. When editor and aspiring director Amy Holden Jones ended up with the script for The Slumber Party Massacre, things looked like they’d change for the better. But Roger Corman, praised in the industry for his work, wanted more gore, more naked women, as the film has filled its quota. Regardless of these changes, the film stands out as being progressive (in my eyes anyway) in more ways than one.

The story goes, a group of ‘high school girls’ all on the basketball team, plan a slumber party at Trish’s house whose parents are away. They invite new girl Valerie, who lives next door but feels uncomfortable and doesn’t go. It also just so happens that mass murderer Russ Thorn has escaped and starts killing everyone he meets, but he seems fixated on this group of girls. The girls are in for a scary and bloody night.

The panel talk that followed the screening was brilliant. Discussing how the women are depicted as more capable as they actually fight back, arming themselves with knives when a pizza delivery guy drops dead in the living room after one of the nastiest off screen deaths. It was also noted that the women who dressed in short wear lived longer which was a intriguing observation. The objectification of women is seen but in a way it was more natural, if a little pointless but this was on purpose. A shower scene where women discuss athletes and later on in the house, undressing in the living room so the boys have an opportunity to watch them. The men’s deaths are actually more gruesome, as the men are screaming in pain (and understandably). Even the killer is shown to be weaker than then women when he corners one of the final girls with his weapon of choice, a phallic like object, an electric drill than is chopped down with a machete. He begins to loose at this stage, whining like a child and falling into the pool. Another fair point is that women are seen in jobs such as carpenter and phone line repairer, which is refreshing and more importantly, completely normal. The team’s coach, also a woman, is a fighter. She senses something is wrong and goes over to help, fighting back, almost cornering the killer. These genre tropes being challenged were strangely uplifting. Feels odd to say this about a slasher movie, but it’s true, a Friday night out that is hard to beat.