First published on Snipe //
As well as telling the story of the 1957 obscenity trial concerning City Lights Books’ publication of the seminal poem, Howl, Friedman and Epstein’s film attempts to navigate the murky juices of Allen Ginsberg’s life and work during the 1950s, with a little slick black and white reconstruction of some of 20th Century literature’s most seditious moments to boot. And it fails to do any of it convincingly.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Conviction is a sickly and cynical bit of force-fed fluff, masquerading as serious drama as it squeezes all life out of its once-dignified story, dragging it through the shit heap of Hollywood to exploit its working-class subjects with predictable execution. Not the first, and not the last time this will happen.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Mark Romanek
Country UK
In 1952, the breakthrough came. All disease and illness were cured, all disability wiped out. By the 1960s, age expectancy reached over 100 years.
This is the opener for Never Let Me Go, a love-triangular pseudo-sci-fi-drama in which mankind undergoes the dystopian treatment in an alternative history, where science and technology have made the simultaneous leap to put an end to all (physical) human suffering. This, we are shown, is achieved through harvesting body parts and vital organs, taken from mild-mannered clones, to transplant into and onto the broken bodies of the higher strata of society. By now you could be tempted to think Brave New World or possibly Gattaca, and ponder that we might already be well-acquainted with this plot.
First published on Snipe for London Film Festival 2010 //
Director Rowan Joffe
Country UK
The Surprise Film at previous London Film Festivals has ensured its hot ticket status, with big films making it worthy of the hype. In 2007 they gave us the Coen brothers’ adaptation of the bleak Cormac McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men. In 2008 it was the treat of Mickey Rourke as The Wrestler. And last year it was Capitalism: A Love Story. All right. That was a bit of step down but it wasn’t awful, just disappointing.
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.
Internet Present 