Devon and Cornwall Film

Greetings Devon and Cornwall Film! Phig Billy here, resident gonzo cartoonist on our sister site the PRSD. I have been given the fantastic opportunity to report on this year’s Screen Writer’s Festival: a three-day annual event which takes place in the gorgeous grounds of the Manor by the Lake in Cheltenham. Yesterday was the first day of the festival so I thought you might appreciate a rundown of the highlights…
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While flicking through the latest issue of Sight & Sound magazine, we were surprised to stumble across the following comment by Crash director Paul Haggis in a story about how the Iraq War is being represented on-screen.

He said: “To make a film like Transformers at a time of war is a political act.”

Haggis didn’t go into any more detail, but his thoughts reminded us of our ‘Transformers/War On Terror’ theory from a few months back (hey, we knew that GCSE in Media Studies would come in useful someday).

Here’s what we had to say back in July (doesn’t time fly, etc):

“Transformers (which, let us not forget, first appeared during the Reaganite years) is all about ‘the enemy within’. Robots (ie, terrorists or commies) in disguise. You have to be extremely vigilant to spot them as they move among us. Heck, they’re even turning ‘our’ technology against us. The good guys have to beat the enemy at their own game by donning disguises themselves or acquiring more weaponry. And though they claim they won’t hurt ‘humans’, it’s acceptable for them to injure innocent people as collateral damage. The good guys rationalise this by winning the hearts and minds of decent American folk, while demonising the so-called baddies and emphasising the greater good. They spin tales about how the baddies cannot be trusted and how they have consistently messed things up on their home ‘planet’. Frankly, if they’re not reined in, the war will spread to other ‘planets’…”

Well, you get the gist. We’re gonna send a link to this story to the Sight & Sound film boffins to see what they have to add, but in the meantime, why don’t you post your own theories and comments below.

Posted by Thin White Duke

‘The rules of film making can be taught in five minutes,’ Orson Wells was once told. ‘The rules are learnt in order to be broken.’

Puffball is a film that denies the normal ‘rules’ of cinema as it is not a generic film. As its director, Nicholas Roeg, explained when he was at the Exeter Picturehouse last week: ‘It’s a love story, a horror story, a story about sex. Like our lives.’

Set in the heart of rural Ireland, Puffball explores the forces unleashed from curious minds. Seen though the eyes of four women, all at different stages of their life, this film steers the audience through a journey of witchcraft and sabotage. When Liffy, an ambitious, English architect, moves to the village she falls pregnant. Her neighbour Mabs (Miranda Richardson) is desperate, to the point of obsession, to have a son and convinces herself that Liffy’s unborn child was destined for her own womb.

Roeg’s haunting storytelling formula does Fay Weldon’s novel justice and his exceptional use of visual effects achieved through cinematography enhance the spellbinding plot. However, those unable to detach themselves from the pre-conceptions of cinema risk finding Roeg’s return to the big screen patronising and repetitive, as his use of themes and symbolism are not exercised lightly. Yet, fans of Roeg will be stimulated by lasting, sometimes grotesque images true his style as he plays with his familiar themes of sex, life and death.

Just as Orson Wells was told, Roeg’s first film in 12 years breaks the rules of cinema and sends them spouting like the contents of an exploded puffball.

Posted by Claire Horrocks

Take Final Destination and throw in a good splodge of Samuel Beckett and you’d probably end up with The Seventh Seal, by Ingmar Bergman.

With film folklore preceding this Swedish tale of a knight playing chess with Death, you could be forgiven for putting it on your list of movies to see but never get round to.

Think of it more as a refined European film noir 10 years on – the maguffin isn’t a worthless Maltese Falcon but the answers to unanswerable questions of faith and mortality, and there’s the existential edge of fatality reminiscent of The Big Sleep (to quote the book: what did it matter where you lay, once you were dead). Even without gangsters and molls the 92 minutes roll with speedy ease and despite the broad sweep of philosophising the only ponderous moments are in the opening shots.

The Knight, Antonius Block, played by Max von Sydow, has returned from 10 years of crusading only to find his homeland in the grip of plague. No wonder he’s bummed out. And when Death (Bengt Ekerot) comes sidling up to him, he wants answers and buys his time trying to pull a Gary Kasparov.

It’s Gunnar Bjornstrand, his squire, who steals the show. Disregarding the ‘higher’ questions of his master, he engages with the inhabitants of the grim land with a rough practicality, saving lives and offering support, and pretty soon the two have a merry band of followers who are just one step ahead of Death.

Surprisingly, angst-ridden hand-wringing is kept to a minimum, and even the mediaeval acting troupe are made more tolerable by an engaging performance by Nils Poppe as Jof and a shockingly attractive Bibi Andersson as Mia, his wife.

There was no The Seventh Seal 2 The Re-match, so you can pretty much guess the end, but who’d have thought it would be uplifting. Brisk, fun and entertaining, it’s certainly worth a watch. Then you too can join in the Bergman Brigade. Swedish films about death, now that’s nothing to be scared of.

Catch it at the Exeter Picturehouse on October 23 and in Falmouth on
October 24. Keep an eye on our weekly Arthouse Roundup for booking details.

Posted by Captn

WINTER storms, festivities in the streets on New Year’s Eve, a model posing in a chilly artist’s studio and the mayor throwing coins to the children on Feast Day – the magic of St Ives throughout the seasons has been captured on film by
David Pearce.

The cameraman has ploughed his life’s savings into Footprints, the epic which he shot on location in St Ives and which conveys the atmosphere of the town’s narrow streets and harbourside and the pounding of the waves on the rocks.

One of the most powerful sequences shows a fishing boat preparing to put out of the harbour as a storm increases in strength.

Another, reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, shows seagulls waiting and watching from every nook and cranny, preparing to pounce on ice-creams and bags of chips.

Visitors of the human kind swarm through the streets and pack the beaches in the height of summer, then, as the year draws on, the same stretches of sand are seen virtually empty except for a lone walker.

For David, now in his 60s, making the film has been a lifetime’s ambition – one that he has nurtured since he visited the town for the first time aged eight, on holiday with his parents from their London home.

Footprints opens with a black and white sequence featuring a boy making that journey by steam train, clutching his camera.

Throughout his career as a cameraman in feature films and commercial television, he dreamed of returning to St Ives to make a film which would capture why it was so special.

David mulled over this idea when he and his family visited the town for holidays, from their home in Hertfordshire.

Meanwhile he was working for Anglia TV, which included shifts filming the royals, including Princess Diana.

He was earning good money and everything was going well.

Then one evening in 1999, his life fell apart when he was knifed in the street as he went to fetch a takeaway in his home town of Harpenden.

His attacker received a year’s jail sentence, but David could not recover mentally from the experience and turned to alcohol for solace.

His marriage broke up, he was unable to work, and his financial worries started snowballing.

“I had no work and I had to give up everything,” says David. “I sold everything in Harpenden and I was given nine months to live because of the alcoholism.”

He moved to St Ives to the small cottage he owned and spent time in the town’s Edward Hain Hospital. The treatment and support that he received there set him back on the road to recovery.

As he started to feel better, he decided to make a start on the film he had always dreamed of shooting – one which would capture on camera the same sense of place that generations of artists have caught on canvas.

He has been particularly inspired by the nineteenth century impressionists Whistler and Turner, who were among the earliest artists to travel to St Ives to paint, attracted by the light and scenery.

He raised £50,000 to buy a top-of-the-range camera by partially remortgaging his cottage, and then got to work. He went out every day, rain or shine, and watched and waited, recording the things that happened around him.

“Every time I looked through the viewfinder, I got these incredible feelings of energy,” he says. “Every day was exciting to go out and I miss it tremendously.”

The film took three years to produce. After compiling a substantial amount of footage, David engaged the services of film editor Charles Davies, with whom he had worked in the 1960s, to skilfully edit hours of camera work into the finished film.

As production work progressed, David ran out of money and had to use his cottage to raise another loan to complete it.

“I mortgaged everything – £200,000, every last brick,” he says. “If you want to do something, you have to do it. It is a piece of art and my whole life is in it.”

He views the film as the most important achievement of his career and is now trying to interest a television network in broadcasting it, so that it can be seen by a wider audience.

It has already been enjoyed by friends and acquaintances in St Ives, some of whom star in the film, at a special launch at the Tate St Ives.

“I’m a completely different person and I couldn’t be happier,” David says.

The DVD of Footprints is available for £16.99 (with delivery) from www.footprints-thefilm.com It can also be bought at the Tate St Ives gallery and the Harbour Bookshop in St Ives.

Posted by Captn

Check out the mysterious machinations of the Motion Picture Association of America in Kirby Dick’s fascinating documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated on BBC4 tonight (Monday) at 10pm.

The board, as any self-respecting D+Cineaste will know, is in charge of dolling out the movie ratings in the States, and has some pretty strange ideas.

A bit of the old ultra-violence is nodded through, whereas rumpy pumpy gets a no-no. In short, it’s a bit like Mary Whitehouse running the BBFC.

Dick’s documentary features interviews with John Waters (who let’s not forget, directed a film with someone eating a dog egg in it), the South Park boys, and Atom Egoyan, whose excellent Where The Truth Lies featured Mr Darcy trying to bum Kevin Bacon.

It wasn’t excellent because of that scene - it was excellent as… well, you get the point. As did Mr Bacon. Boom boom!

Anyway, here’s a funny clip from This Film Is Not Yet Rated - not least because of the typically rubbish pronunciation of ‘Almodovar’.

Posted by Thin White Duke

Sunshine has recently been released on DVD, and yet again I see another review in another film magazine echoing the previous verdicts printed when the movie graced the silver screen.

I say ‘verdicts’, but perhaps I should say ‘list of excuses’ as to ‘why this film should receive four stars’.

I remember walking down to our local cinema with my wife in tow. “This isn’t giong to be another of those wierd films you like, is it?” she asked cagily.

“Of course not, it’s got great reviews, and they say it has a very Alien feel,” I replied in glee and anticipation. Little did I know that the reviews should have read, Alien Rip Off.

The reviews I’d based my excitement on had claimed that director Danny Boyle’s influences were clear, and I knew that this was not a bad thing. Films such as Brick blatantly adopt a style familiar to cinema-goers, but what I saw was merely a check list of cliches and films that Mr. Boyle would have liked to
have made.

It was painfully obvious from the word go, which could perhaps be excused in a fast paced, no brainer, action flick, but this pretended to be a philosophical masterpiece.

Then there were the embarrassing changes of mood, from 2010/Alien to the introduction of a villain lifted straight out of A Nightmare On Elm Street and then back to 2001 to round it off.

I desperately wanted to like this film, but not quite as much as the loyal Boyle-ites who claimed that there is no way to make a science fiction film without clambering all over the feet of greats from the past.

The claim that it is not possible to make a film without ripping off the old masters is a very weak argument; take Twelve Monkeys and Donnie Darko as recent examples of original science fiction. Both are embedded in well used time travel vehicles, and yet seem fresh.

Maybe I will listen to my wife before I blindly follow reviewers’ claims in future, although I could have done with realising this before I believed the four-star Transformers reviews…

Posted by Picklebot

Peversely, for a site called D+CFilm, we actually get pretty bored watching
other people’s movies. But we came across one the other day, while yomping through MySpace, that we actually watched through to the end! Almost un-bloody-heard of.

So when we say you should watch this, we mean it, maaan. It’s hilarious - especially if you remember the days of joysticks stuck to Beano annuals and Jet-Set Willy (ask yer Granddad).

Unfortunately, we have absolutely no idea of where this came from or who it’s by - although there are a few similar pieces on YouTube.

Hey, praps a hip, young D+Cineaste can shed some light on the matter. Send your thoughts to info@dandcfilm.co.uk

Anyway, have a look.

Posted by Thin White Duke

We’ve had a Transformers review through from Eye On Cornwall’s Pickle Bot. Thought you’d like to read it - although Bot wisely draws a veil over our ‘Transformers are terrorists’ thesis. Indeed, the entire world has drawn a veil over our ‘Transformers are terrorists’ thesis…

Still, here’s what Bot said: ‘Watched Transformers last night and, man, was I disappointed. It was shameless, tedious, had swathes of poorly executed attempts to produce some pathos in the viewer, and trampled all over what I loved about Transformers.

‘It was painful. The effects didn’t really wow me, ending up looking complex for the sake of it. I used to read the comics where the plot, while wafer thin, was at least acceptable! I just don’t know where to begin in slagging (Slag was a Dinobot by the way, no pun intended) off this juvenile fantasy of a pile of tripe…’

Well, don’t sit on the fence, Pickle Bot. Ho ho! Oh, and if you really do have a ‘pickle bot’, you should probably go see a doctor. Groo.

Posted by Thin White Duke

We went to see Transformers on Saturday and found it unexpectedly dull - especially given it’s a movie about massive robots directed by Michael
bloody Bay.

Still, the two hours wasn’t entirely wasted. We enjoyed two scoops of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (yum!) and formulated a convoluted thesis about why the film was made.

It goes thusly: Transformers (which, let us not forget, first appeared during the Reaganite years) is all about ‘the enemy within’. Robots (ie, terrorists or commies) in disguise. You have to be extremely vigilant to spot them as they move among us. Heck, they’re even turning ‘our’ technology against us. The good guys have to beat the enemy at their own game by donning disguises themselves or acquiring more weaponry. And though they claim they won’t hurt ‘humans’, it’s acceptable for them to injure innocent people as collateral damage. The good guys rationalise this by winning the hearts and minds of decent American folk, while demonising the so-called baddies and emphasising the greater good. They spin tales about how the baddies cannot be trusted and how they have consistently messed things up on their home ‘planet’. Frankly, if they’re not reined in, the war will spread to other ‘planets’…

Well, it was a long film. Anything to add, viewers? Email us at info@dandcfilm.co.uk or get in touch via our MySpace site.

Posted by Thin White Duke

In Fast Food Nation a teenager is stirred into action by philosophising Ethan Hawke - Richard Linklater certainly has come along way since Slacker, when all they would do is talk.

Disillusion runs through this film - even young love can’t brash it out as the American Dream disintegrates.

Greg Kinnear underplays the bright-eyed enthusiastic executive of the fast food firm whose search for the source of ‘fecal matter’ (that’s poo to me and you) in burgers leaves him less bright-eyed and slightly less eager.

As Sylvia, Catalina Sandino Moreno is wary of her new life in American, but becomes increasingly ground down during this film.

Linklater has been criticised for turning what was non-fiction into fiction, but he’s on his own firm territory here - scepticism, things not being as they seem and a whole ‘action will set you free’ agenda.

The action doesn’t even have to succeed, it just has to be done. To that end, it’s only the women - teenager Amber (Ashley Johnson) and immigrant Sylvia, who are free (except Hawke, who of course has gabbed his way through plenty of Linklater films without much action - unless you count Julie Delpy, and he only got action out of her for one night and it took two of the aforementioned films).

Even though Eric Schlosser, who wrote the original book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, was on board to write the screenplay, there’s a fear this film is a bit of a mish-mash, neither being the great expose nor the superb theatrical comeuppance you might expect.

Then again that’s the nature of this existential trip, and if the film was European, it wouldn’t even be an issue.

Certainly, the story loses pace in the last third as we begin to realise there’s not going to be a great denouement. But that’s the nature of non-fiction.

Linklater is at his best pulling realistic dialogue out of his characters. And he seems completely at ease in the scenes with the neo-slackers, which are crisp and leave you wanting more - a bit like fast food really.

Without the Neo-realist elements of Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, it takes on more than the food industry or immigration. Its sights are firmly set on the American Dream, and the message that it’s a shit-stained dream is finger-lickin’ good.

Fast Food Nation opens in Falmouth on Friday, Plymouth and Dartington on June 15 and Exeter on June 22. See the weekly D+CFilm arthouse roundup for details.

Posted by Cptn

Those of yous too lazy to catch The US Vs John Lennon at the Exeter Picturehouse or The Barn in the last coupla months, might wanna watch it on telly tonight.

Showing on BBC2 at the ungodly hour of 11.35pm, the documentary follows John Lennon’s journey from moptop to anti-war icon, and explains why the American government may have tried to silence him - although judging by the Plastic Ono albums, it was Yoko they should’ve silenced.

Anyway, if you’re too lazy to watch it tonight, you can pick it up on DVD on Monday. And if you’re too lazy to do that, check out the trailer below and pretend you watched the whole film. Who’d ever know, right? Heh heh!

Posted by Thin White Duke

Hullo viewer! It’s your friendly neighbourhood D+CFilm here, back in action
after some, ahem, technical difficulties. This website lark is no cakewalk, we can tell you.

Still, at least you have the sexy Sunshine banner at the top of the page now,
so it was worth all the trouble, wasn’t it?

Anyway, we’re not here to apologise and explain (for once) - we’re here to show you the trailer from Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts.

There was such a fantastic response to Capt’s review, we thought you might like to watch a bit of a clip. 

Granted, you could probably just log onto YouTube and type in ‘Ghosts’, but you’ll probably end up with lotsa clips of Rentaghost or something (like what
we did).

So click below and save yourself the bally bother. As for the next few days, look out on D+CFilm for an interview with Broomfield about the film.

Oh, and while you’re at it, you might wanna check out Capt’s other reviews for Almodovar’s Volver or Altman’s Prairie Home Companion - both of which are doing the rounds of the local arthouses this month.

See? D+CFilm is packed full of goodness - without ruining your appetite.
And hey, it’s good to have yous back.

Posted by Thin White Duke

There’s a danger that calling Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts haunting might seem trite, but the director’s take on the account of the death of 26 Chinese cockle pickers in 2004 is a powerful tale of economic migration.

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Follow the main cinema links for dates, times and matinee screenings.
Follow the title links for movie details, friendship and maybe more.

PLYMOUTH ARTS CENTRE

Running With Scissors (15) Click here to watch trailer

Old Joy (15) Click here to watch trailer

TAVISTOCK WHARF 

The Last King Of Scotland (15) Click here to watch trailer

DARTINGTON ARTS/THE BARN

Letters From Iwo Jima (15) Click here to watch trailer

Flags Of Our Fathers (15) Click here to watch trailer

Casablanca (U) Click here to watch trailer

The Red Shoes (U) Click here to watch trailer

EXETER PICTUREHOUSE  

Becoming Jane (PG) Click here to watch trailer

The Illusionist (PG) Click here to watch trailer

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (PG) Click here to watch trailer

The Wizard Of Oz (U) Click here to watch trailer

Volver (15) Click here to watch trailer

Them (15) Click here to watch trailer

SAVOY, PENZANCE

The Science Of Sleep (15) Click here to watch trailer