other films

I will plug Emirates, who have carried me to and fro so comfortably so efficiently. They are rightly the carrier I was recommended most by most for the UK-SEA route. Being bafflingly cheap for the service and conducting themselves with exceeding grace and professionalism, as all others on the flight were spilling coffee down my leg and finding cause to make their voice heard over some unmet extraneous expectation. So, I lost myself inside their bottomless selection of films, albethey a little re-editted and de-nuded (oh words).


men who stare at goats
Examining the conflict between the military and spirituality, rather like Avatar. Here we see an active passive resistance playing with new spiritual disciplines. Could we, should we train our prophets this way?

Placing a Vietnam vet in the context of our Vietnam, Iraq, emphasised how much has changed in the spirit of public opinion on illegal wars, we are now dulled to the sloganised and bebannered cries of non-violence, immune to the suggestion that peace is possible. Accordingly, the comedy on this is a painful irony, that our generation no longer has the optimism of the hippies – we know that the hippie movement only ends in tears and we know that war is inevitable. So, having failed to invent a new non-violence, we can only revisit past hopes with irony.

We also see here that image of animals wandering the ruins of empire, always a powerful image. Is.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/


the lovely bones
Harrowing, made bludgeoningly so by obvious metaphors. Miniature ships in the glass bottle of your immaculate suburban life crash smashed on the rocky shore of calamity. Some of the landscapes feel as if they began life ambitiously aiming for a dreamlike middle-earth quality, but had to settle for an over-coloured collage. The sum is visually rich and immersive, as a child's imagination, as scrap book of memories, but.

Photography and innocence - with all of its spontaneity and reckless abandon and unselfconscious self-portraiture. Further, both issues of cost and delay are visited in this depiction of a happy analogue age, would the magic be the same with a digital camera? Why not?

The portrayal of evil in this film is a similar evil to that which sells the Daily Mail – pervasive, active, other, uncaused, unredeemable. How should we speak of evil? How should we portray evil, how in fiction, how in documentary? Are there of portrayals of evil, which by omission, increase a sense of fatalism and hopelessness? Of this film, is there a pleasure in being scandalised?

Here we also see home and home-coming's homeness, as well as intergenerational homeness and its tensions. Importantly the film stands as a criticism of suburbia, but it was all a bit difficult, tangled and emotional.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380510/

lost in translation
A meditation on Scarlett Johansen in soft hues and soft focus, comfort viewing for the far flung. bookending my little filmic adventure in south east Asia, concluding that which aptly began with Up! on my way out in January. I haven't enumerated a top ten, but this film is in there. It sympathises with any experience of disorientation locally or abroad. If this film is self-pitying, it manages it at least elegantly. We see the superficiality of globalisation's breadth at the expense of depth and the cost of crossing cultures compensated in alcohol's consolation, the film offers some illustration of all that is concealed in saying, I've been in Singapore.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335266/

cloudy with a chance of meatballs
Upon return to England and here following swiftly a coffee's conversation on greed, gluttony and a theology of food, James and I enjoyed this computer generated caper. It is a story beautifully told.

Are we more tolerant of moralism in animated films? What makes a children's film a children's film? To come as children, is to remain teachable, maintain a delight in colour and to affirm those dreamt dreams of the why not. Insert Madeleine L'Engle quote here.

Fat on film. As in Wall-E, obesity is emphasised as inconvenient, rather than unhealthy or unattractive, in a tangle of mixed moral messages. But as a warning against the danger of the remoteness of food production, this film is fairly unambiguous.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844471/

wristcutters: a love story
The Swedenborg Society offered this as a theology of Hell for the unconcluded as Sarah and I. Who was Swedenborg, and what must a philosopher do to so inspire so pleasant a society headquarters in Bloomsbury? A happy, slightly cultic, free Friday evening's screening, with free wine. Join us next week for other afterlife films.

Anyways. This is another film shocking by how easily Hell can be portrayed in the familiar. Desaturated as Bothersome Man, and similarly relishing the hellishness of the daily grind. Here we differ from Bothersome's view of the afterlife, there being ruled by a regime of fastidious tidiness, here we see the entropy of apathy played out in all things abandoned, rusting and exhausted. I found the palette over-processed, dialogue unclear and the characters hard to care about. It is a worthy film, but too self-consciously indie, too knowingly bleak, too nonchalantly suicidal. It is saved largely by Tom Waits, and some of its questions and landscapes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477139/