First published on Snipe //
“Let’s open with one of those long, audience-testing shots, yeah, yeah, keep him driving around. Make about ten laps then we’ll cut.”
I imagine this is how Sofia Coppola speaks and I imagine this is how she sets up her anchored camera, after watching some ‘70s european art house cinema and listening to some French indie pop, before mumbling instructions to her Ray-Ban-wearing crew. She silently pats herself on the back with a studied expression of seriousness.
First published on Little White Lies (December 10 2010) //
Brian Welsh’s second feature, starring those recognisable but unnamable faces from a spectrum of Britain’s most loved/hated evening TV programmes, even manages all the feel and finish of some of those primetime weekday dramas, though it’s a trait that both works for and diminishes this particular low-budget production.
First published on Little White Lies (July 1 2010) //
When you’re directly funded by the Lisbon tourist board, tasked with making a commercial film promoting the city and its culture, it seems a tad hypocritical to send your film off on a whim discussing how films, ‘garbage’ images, are now only used to ‘sell’ things.
First published on Little White Lies (24 March 2010) //
To look at the endemic slew of mediocre films rolling onto screens every week, it might be trite to comment that ideas are not always the primary concern of a mainstream film; the aim of purely entertaining is an aspiration that can frequently take primacy rather than bogging down the viewer by inspiring original thought.
First published on Little White Lies (March 12 2010) //
Pretension is a subject seemingly dear to Banksy. It’s all over his work, from his mordant stencils which inspired a boisterous surge in street art popularity, to his grand socio-political satires plastered across the most daring of locations, Banksy takes the clichéd and turgid and shrewdly spins it on its head.
First published on Little White Lies (March 31 2010) //
The seemingly well-timed Best Picture Oscar for The Hurt Locker could either demonstrate film’s genuine power or its promotion of a skewed vision where, as Robert Fisk notes, “the sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost thirteen years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures. Our invasion of Iraq in March 2003 closed the page – or so we hoped – on our treatment of the Iraqi people before that date, removed the stigma attached to the imprisonment of an entire nation and their steady debilitation and death under the UN sanctions regime.”
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