Posts tagged film

(via I Am A Great Man)

When I first met Tom Greeves he was playing the lead in a film about a Conservative candidate who forms his own party and tries to take on the system.

It’s an independent, low-budget film and I’m sure it’s taken a huge amount of work to finally get it finished and released. It’s on Distrify, which seems to be a sort of Bandcamp for films. You can pay to watch the film, or pay a bit more to download it. I downloaded it this morning and watched it this evening.

It’s brilliant. Tom is (as always) hilarious and the whole thing is somehow both realistic and ridiculous. As a Tory speechwriter and stand-up comedian in real life, Tom plays the conservative completely convincingly while also taking the piss perfectly.

My favourite music these days is stuff my friends have made. I’m really enjoying weaning myself off mainstream media and exploring the edges. I’m proud now to have a friend in a great independent film that I can recommend to people.

Here’s one of my favourite bits:

I got the Hitchcock box set for my birthday, and last night we sat down to watch Rope (1948) on the projector.

I’d never heard of it, but the premise sounded cool:

James Stewart stars with Farley Granger and John Dall in a highly charged thriller inspired by the real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case. Granger and Dall give riveting performances as two friends who strangle a classmate for intellectual thrills, then proceed to throw a party for the victim’s family and friends - with the body stuffed inside the trunk they use for a buffet table. As the killers turn the conversation to committing the “perfect murder”, their former teacher (Stewart) becomes increasingly suspicious. Before the night is over, the professor will discover how brutally his students have turned his academic theories into chilling reality in Hitchcock’s spellbinding excursion into the macabre.

It was either going to be hilarious or very dark, and in the end it was a bit of both. The screenplay is adapted from a play by Patrick Hamilton and Hitchcock filmed it as a play, with no cuts. The reels of film were only ten minutes long, so every ten minutes or so he zooms in on someone’s jacket, changes the reel and carries on. Of course you notice the trick but it just made me more impressed by the actors, who must have had to do perfect 10-minute takes.

The DVD extras were great, and told us all about the technical difficulties of moving walls and furniture during scenes to allow the huge Technicolor camera to move around. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the final script, spent most of his interview talking about how the film wasn’t as good as the way he wrote it, and how the whole play was about homosexuality but the censors cut so much that the relationships barely make sense.

The trailer is hilarious - James Stewart’s character from the film tells you what happens after a mini-prequel in the park. I love the bit when he gets to “the housekeeper, named Mrs Wilson”.

Definitely worth watching.

The Flight of the Red Balloon - Trailer

One of the most beautiful films I’ve seen in ages. I’d forgotten how much I love Juliette Binoche. ;)