It’s my birthday! Hooray, I hear you all cry. Sing Hosannah! Et cetera.
So, the day has brought me:
(plus a West Ham retro shirt, the new Stephen King novel and a Batman “Visual History” encyclopedia. Added to the Darth Vader mug and Plan 9 From Outer Space t-shirt from Father’s Day on Sunday, it’s been a good haul!)
“Water” dvd with Michael Caine.
Chucky the complete collection
Halloween 15 disc blu box
Night and the City Criterion
Night of the Demons
Madman blu
The Killers Criterion
The Dead Next Door
101 Dalmatians Diamond Edition blu
Tourist Trap blu
Dolls blu
Pickup on South Street Criterion
Rats Night of Terror
Fade to Black
Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone! Blu
Scalps
Recent arrivals on BD:
The Killers (1964)
Immoral Tales
Baron Blood
The Wolf of Wall Street
The Immigrant (Australian BD, as there hasn’t been a UK release so far)
I have opted for this release
lechatquifumedvd.com (EUR 30.99)
Once you watch it, let us know what you think about it. I’ve heard the film’s pretty good.
Oh, I’ve seen it already Mick; a couple of times, tbh. It’s being pegged as an “Iranian Vampire Western” but it’s really more of a romance than anything else. It’s beautifully photographed with lots of interesting images that tend to stick with you, and it rolls along with a dreamlike quality. It’s neither gory nor scary, and it’s not trying to be. The director, Ana Lily Amirpour, wears her influences loud and proud. Lynch, Rodriguez, Jarmusch are all evident here. If there’s a criticism (and it’s a subjective one really, and I don’t mind it at all), it’s that it is incredibly slow moving. Entire scenes play out in silence (well, silence from the characters; the pop/Iranian/spag-sounding soundtrack almost never stops, like watching a film with the sound off and Spotify on) while characters look at each other, or look away from each other or similar. The director states in a bonus feature that she was attempting to capture the almost electric energy in that space between two people, just before they commit to something significant and irretrievable, like a kiss or some other declaration of love for instance. Or a bite, of course. How successful she’s been with that I think depends on your mood going into the film. Sheila Vand is both vulnerable AND predatory - and always beautiful - as “The Girl” and Arash Marandi possesses an inherent likeability as Arash, the poor bugger constantly kept under the yoke of a particularly nasty drug-dealer* thanks to his heroin-addicted father, although Arash is also partial to a spot of drug-dealing if need be; whatever it takes in the fictional Iranian town of “Bad City”, shot entirely in California and tbh looks like it too, not that that’s a bad thing by any means.
Lazy comparisons? Um… try Let the Right One In (Alfredson, 2008) if it was remade in Farsi using twentysomethings instead of pre-pubescent teenagers, or maybe Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes (2003) if there was a segment in that film featuring a vampire. I think you’ll like it Mickey; I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a look in any event.
*Ms. Amirpour based the role of Saeed “The Pimp” on Watkin Tudor Jones aka Ninja of South African rap/techno act Die Antwoord, seen most prominently starring in Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie (2015).
Sometimes it might be a forte, it depends on whether a director knows their craft very well. I’m a sucker when it comes to any sort of Antonioni (I virtually love his every single motion picture) or Jarmusch flick (yes, I even have a bee in my bonnet about that comatose movie called Limits of Control, even if it is a tad pretentious) or almost any slow-moving film for that matter, but in my view, nowadays filmmakers tend to attenuate narrative as much as possible with a view to rendering their efforts more ‘intellectual’ or whatever and what we’re left with is mostly artsy stuff with not much going on beneath its somnolent, sophomoric plumage.
Sometimes slow pace contributes to the diegesis and aggrandizes its impact on the viewer, on other occasions it simply drags one’s attention from the screen. What I’m driving at is that these days, it’s exceedingly facile to distinguish a movie that is intended to make some money from a flick that is aimed at the intellectual/artistic or pseudo-intellectual/pseudo-artistic audiences.
I guess this has always been the case, but perhaps it’s even more noticeable in contemporary film industry, Bela Tarr being the most conspicuous case of ridiculously acclaimed supine filmmaking.
BTW, don’t get me wrong, I love his Damnation, but there is no way I could sit through The fucking Turin Horse for the second time, as a matter of fact, I’d rather give myself an enema or get a comfy, soft pillow, the latter being much preferable OFC.
And TTH got such a rousing praise, phew, such a great, great film, particularly when you need a flick which gives an instructive picture of how to get into one’s underdrawers which befalls every five minutes in this enchantingly filmed film.
Upstream Color is another instance of a perfect sleep-inducer - I literally almost fell asleep during watching this movie which seems to be about everything and nothing. Perhaps I was just sleepy - all I remember from the first half an hour that I managed to take in is a haphazardly assembled series of scenes barely related to one another - perchance, it’s just an impression that I ultimately derived from this great, fantastic, tip-top piece of filmmaking. OK, everything wasn’t unrelated, but the storytelling felt so exacerbatingly seamless and deemphasised that I could not give a flying fig about what was happening on the screen.
At any rate ::), I’ll certainly give that Iranian pic a watch. I may view it along with the latest movie by Jarmusch which I’ve yet to see.
I’m due to re-watch it myself, amazing stuff.
In the last moment:
I found this on the market in town today. I goggled it via imdb on my phone to check it out and of the 9 user reviews 3 gave it 1 star, yet another gave it 10!
Apparently it’s a low budget ‘homage’ to our beloved genre that stars some herberts from a band called Spindrift.
They seem pretty good and I couldn’t resist a film with that tag-line (even with it missing the apostophe) 
I’d never heard of it (or them) before… I’ll let you know…
I likes me a drop of Spindrift! I only came across them when they started following me on Twitter (I must’ve written some Spag-related triggerword that they were searching in order to scoop up like-minded souls, or something), but I thought, yeah, they’re okay! Didn’t know they’d made a film though, I’ll have to have a dig around for it.
