13th Keswick Film Festival
Tomorrow sees the start of the 13th Keswick Film Festival and a busy four days of film related fun. I’ve always enjoyed the festival for a number of reasons, not only is it a really great weekend but it’s usually the only chance I really get to enjoy all of the work I promote by maintaining the website for the festival and Film Club.
Once again I’ll be donning a staff T-shirt to help out but because of an influx of volunteers this year I haven’t been added to the rota of specific duties. This has the disadvantage of meaning I still haven’t decided exactly what I want to see.
Thursday evening is easy because there isn’t any choice. I’ll be at the Opening Party wondering which of the special guests will be there, followed by the first film In Love With Alma Cogan. On Friday choices have to be made. I’m still deciding between David and Kamal and Pardon, that’s if I can make it through to Keswick for 1pm. Another choice to be made next, this time between Vacation and No Pain, No Gain. I was disappointed to have missed Gnnar at Leeds Film Festival and have heard so many good things about it, so I’ll be seeing that at 6pm. The final choice is between Yellow Sea and Welcome To The Sticks, the latter sounds like a good fit for Keswick but Yellow Sea may be more my kind of film.
It doesn’t get any easier on Saturday. Do I make the early start for the The Kids Britain Doesn’t Want which is showing in partnership with Keswick Peace and Human Rights Group. I’d quite like to see Ways To Live Forever but it’s the free family screening so may be busy and I don’t know if it will finish in time to catch the short film Sailcloth which is showing at the 1pm screening of Lou. I’d like to stay and see Lou but I’ve got to go to the Osprey Short Film Awards. I’m really looking forward to the awards again this year, there’s a great selection of films on show and any of them could be worthy of the prizes. In fact the only bad thing about the Ospreys is sometime between now and then we’ve got to finalise exactly which films are going to be the winners. We’ve also decided to introduce an audience award this year and it will be good to see if the audience agree with the judges.
The screenings at Rheged all sound good but I’ll be staying in Keswick. Later on Saturday afternoon, I think I’ll see The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom because 50/50 will be much easier to see elsewhere. With all the excitement of John Hurt being at the festival I nearly forgot the fantastic Lancaster Millennium Choir are returning with another show at 7pm in the Theatre. I’ll stay in the Theatre to see John Hurt in The Naked Civil Servant because I don’t think I have ever seen it and I have already seen Tyrannosaur and as great as Tyrannosaur is, it’s maybe not the type of film you want to see more than once. I’m hoping that I can sneak out before An Englishman In New York starts and dash up to the Alhambra to catch Bird On A Wire.
By Sunday I think I will already be exhausted and for some foolish reason I’ll be contemplating staying up through the night to watch the Oscars. So I’ll probably be skipping the early screening and 10 hour epic and just need to decide between Little Moth and Mia Sara. At 3pm I’ll be going to the John Hurt event although A Separation was one of the films I still really wanted to see but I will be able to catch up with it somewhere else. I have already seen Melancholia but for some reason do feel like seeing it again but I’m more likely to see Tales From The Shipyard. Or perhaps I should use the time to find something to eat (or sleep). Once again both of the closing films, Babycall and Carancho sound good so another tough decision to finish off the festival.
Should be fun though!
Post A Week 2011
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of my first postaweek2011 tag which was all about the final day of the 12th Keswick Film Festival. So it looks like I succeeded in posting every week for a year, even if I was a little late starting. I had hoped that it would become easier to write each week but I don’t think it has. I still find myself on a Sunday trying to think of something to write rather than being in the position I had hoped where I’d just be checking I’d posted at least one thing in the last seven days.
An interesting year, nearly everything changed but also somehow stayed the same. Once again I’m off to Keswick Film Festival this week and really looking forward to it. As a committee member I’m volunteering again but somehow have avoided being added to the rota which also means I haven’t decided what to see. There’s so much to choose from and the usual problem of everything clashing. It’s usually a frantic four days of fun and it will be good to take a break from the ‘real’ job even though I’ll be just as busy.
My plan is to continue writing every week, I thought about trying but not forcing myself if I was struggling but if I do that then I know I’d eventually just stop. A year later and I’m still thinking how hard can it be to find something to write about every week and wondering about all the possibilities the next fifty two weeks may hold. One way or another things will be different this time next year, plans are already afoot, I just need to get the film festival out of the way first.
Skyward Sword
I’ve tried really hard to like Skyward Sword although I’m not really sure why. It could be my love of Nintendo or of the rest of the Zelda series but it’s probably more to do with the Edge score of 10. I’ve read Edge’s review a few times now, trying to work out what it is I’ve missed but I can’t find any justification for the fabled ten. It would be unfair to say Skyward Sword is a bad game, it isn’t but it is hugely flawed. There are moments of excellent and genius design throughout the game, I’d like to give you an example but genuinely can’t remember. That’s the problem for every fantastic piece of the game it’s surrounded by literally hours of tedium, bad level design and weak stories and characters. It has taken me 50 hours to get to the final (and I really hope it is final – this game could have ended at so many earlier points just as well) and most of that time was uninspiring and dull gameplay. I often found myself questioning why I was still playing. It’s Zelda, though, it has to be good doesn’t it? Surely a the most fantastic dungeon is going to be just around the corner and restore my faith and make it feel like the trudge was all worthwhile. In fact the dungeons are usually fantastic but the joyous experience of playing through them is seriously diluted by everything else you have to do to get there. Whenever I did complete a section or obtained a MacGuffin I felt like an old person who had just walked into a room but then couldn’t remember why. What did I need this thing for and where do I go now?
There is a fantastic game in Skyward Sword, unfortunately it can only be around 20 hours long and is buried in 50 hours of play.
Share And Share Alike
Like many people I have problems with recent changes to Facebook to allow the “frictionless” sharing of various things. Most people seem to be rightly concerned about the changes to 3rd party applications such as Spotify which now automatically shares whatever you are listening to. Like many things that Facebook do, they have a really good idea and just get the implementation wrong. It may be foolishly of me but I quite like the idea of data being collected about my life and stored in a central place. The problem is really who has access to that data. There’s a line that I don’t think has been crossed yet, I don’t mind Facebook knowing what music, films, games, books, articles I’m consuming if this is used to serve me more relevant adverts or recommendations. The problem is sharing this information by default with other people on Facebook.
I understand “Frictionless” sharing means I don’t have to click a share button on every article I read on The Guardian or film I watch via Netflix. I like that a repository of everything I do is being created, I’d probably like it to go further so that if I had a loyalty card at the cinema, every visit was recorded, my PVR and DVD player should be making a note of everything I watch. Maybe this just extends from having kept a film diary for years and me wanting to share what I’ve seen. I want to be able to choose what I share with others. Yes be frictionless and don’t prompt me every time but then let me choose what I want to share.
For now all I am doing is setting the sharing level to private. Everything I do is now saved in Facebook but only I (and Facebook) can see it. I think it’s great to have a Video section on my profile listing everything I’ve seen and I’ve only been using Netflix for less than a week. The thought of looking back over this in the future or being able to search it really impresses me. What I want now though is the option to go in and choose which of these things I want to share with others. I want things to be added automatically but then let me choose what to share. Amazingly this functionality doesn’t exist. I have sharing set to private and there is now no way for me to change it for individual stories. I think if that simple change was made a lot of people would be much happier, I know I would.
Of course, I can then start to get paranoid about what else Facebook is doing with the data but at the moment I’m more concerned how much data I have tied up in Google.
Post A Week 2012
As we entered 2012 it didn’t seem right to continue using the postaweek2011 tag on my posts even though I’m still working towards my goal of posting every week for a year. I was late starting so I still have another month of posts to go and hope that I will continue after that. The original plan was to hope that something would come up each week that I could write about but it seems to have turned out I’m usually scratching my head on a Sunday trying to think of something to write. That’s certainly the case this week. As with every Sunday I though that this coming week I’d write during the week and not leave it to the last minute. I thought I would write about the Oscar nominations on Tuesday but they were actually fairly uninteresting and then I was busy with something else (going to see Carnage, great film, if that came out last year in the US it really should have got some acting nominations).
It’s quite scary that January is almost over, I’ve spent most of it trying to catch up with things from 2011. I still have hours of television to watch but have caught up with a lot of thing now. The Slap is excellent (still a few more episodes to go), it made me want to read the book although I did question if there was any point now I have seen the television version. Mongrels was some of the smartest and funniest writing on any show and it’s such a shame it’s been cancelled. I wondered how many people, like me, had not yet got round to watching it before it was decided to be a ratings failure. In this digital age, should we not have an accurate way of knowing how many people have watched or recorded something to watch later.
Misfits doesn’t seem as good now which is a shame. Life Too Short wasn’t as bad as everybody was making out, it’s just a shame they couldn’t create a new character for Warwick Davies to play instead of him basically being television’s “Ricky Gervais”. I still haven’t started Pan Am and keep wondering if there really is any point in watching The Killing (the US version, obviously).
Award Season
Award season is now under way, I nearly got up in the middle of the night to watch the Golden Globes last week but sensibly decided against it. It doesn’t sound like I missed much, the obvious winners seem to win. I was pleased that Tintin won Best Animated Film because I don’t understand all of the negative reviews. I suspect it only won to get Steven Speilberg on stage, the Globes are odd like that, so it will be interesting to see how it does at the BAFTAs. I haven’t seen Rango but from the reviews suspect more people would be happier with that taking away the prize. I don’t really have a lot else to say about the Golden Globes. My Week With Marylin seems misplaced in the Comedy or Musical category but I haven’t seen it so shouldn’t comment.
The BAFTA nominations also came out and I took these a bit more seriously. To be completely honest I wasn’t that impressed with the list. Everyone has rightly kicked up a fuss about the lack of Olivia Colman for Tyrannosaur so I guess that means nobody really saw the film. Carey Mulligan was better in Shame than Drive but again I suspect people just haven’t seen Shame yet. I suppose the Marmite effect of The Tree Of Life explains it’s complete absence but I had hoped BAFTA would recognise it in some way. I’d hate to think that people forgot about it just because it was released before September. Nearly everything on the list has a late summer release.
I was really pleased with the outstanding début by British writer, director or producer. I haven’t seen Coriolanus but Black Pond, Submarine and Tyrannosaur were among my favourite films of 2011 and I image more worthy of the Best British Film award than My Week With Marilyn and possibly Tinker Tailor Solder Spy. I also really liked Attack The Block so it’s good to see Joe Cornish in that category as well. Really pleased that Black Pond is getting some recognition, even the Empire writers claimed they hadn’t heard of it.
3D Or Not 3D?
Surprisingly I don’t really have that strong opinion about 3D. I do resent having to pay more to see something in 3D and absolutely think there is no point in retrofitting films in to 3D, surely this is just as bad as colourising black and white films. In the right hands 3D can be very effective, just look at Pina or Hugo (although I still fail to understand why some 3D was added to the Méliès films shown within the film) and I imagine Cave Of The Forgotten Dreams works well. Pixar seem to make 3D work with their new films but perhaps it is more suited to bright CG.
In the end 3D is just a technique and in the right hands it can be made to work well. In the wrong hands it can be distracting and pointless. I half saw Monsters vs Aliens on TV over Christmas, early on somebody is playing with, what I have just found out is called, a paddle ball; the ball bounces straight towards the camera and back again, to and fro multiple times, it looks horrible and is completely pointless and that’s my really issue with 3D. If you take the 3D away the scene still needs to work and when you’re just pointing things at the camera it does not work. Anybody making a film in 3D should be forced to watch it in 2D and remove all of this pointless pointing.
I saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol at the Imax and suddenly understood why people were saying Imax is the way forward and not 3D. The Imax scenes were just as immersive as any live action 3D I’ve seen and without the need for glasses and the darkness that follows. My biggest problem with Harry Potter and Tron in 3D was that most of the film took place in the dark and the glasses just made it even harder to make out what was happening. I don’t really understand how Imax can feel 3D when it’s not so maybe it is really just down to the cinematography and a bloody huge screen.
And finally to the world of gaming and the reason I was prompted to write this post. The Edge review of Rayman Origins ends by saying “playing Origins feels like stepping into an alternate reality in which the 16bit era evolved by increasing in fidelity, not dimensions.”, how I wish I lived in that reality, if only so we could get another great Sonic game.
Film 2011
In 2011 I watched 212 films which is only slightly more than the 203 I saw in 2011, with the Leeds International Film Festival I thought it might be higher. A third of these films were released in 2011 and I saw just over half of then (52%) in the cinema, mostly the wonderful Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. Just under a quarter (22%) were repeat viewings of films I’ve already seen which means the vast majority were new to me.
It’s time to try and work out what I thought the best films of 2011 were. It’s hard enough to pick out a number (ten seems to be the tradition) so it makes sense for me to do this is mostly chronological order. The year kicked of a lot of the award favourites got their release in the UK: The Kings Speech, Black Swan, True Grit, Animal Kingdom, 127 Hours. I enjoyed all of these films quite a lot apart from The King’s Speech which I think was highly overrated but in my opinion the best of these films and my first choice is…
#1. Black Swan
It’s completely bonkers and I loved it. Seeing it with a highly shockable full house at Hyde Park Picture House certainly added a lot to my enjoyment.
#2. Blue Valentine
I still haven’t seen the end of this film due to a power cut and in a way I don’t want to because I often have a problem with endings. Brilliant performances, soundtrack and story all brought together in such a clever but not too clever way.
#3. Submarine
Simply wonderful.
#4. Senna
This does exactly what a great documentary should do; take a subject I have zero interest in and tell a story that it’s impossible not to be fully engaged by.
#4 1/2. Life In A Day
Nobody told me to select 10 films so there’s no need for me to cheat but I wanted to include another great and completely different documentary. I only saw it in the last few days of the year and was unsure how to rate it for my film diary. Straight after seeing it I wanted to give it 5/5 but then dropped it down to 4.5 and finally settled on 4, I’m not entirely sure why. There are some really remarkable sections throughout the film and some other less interesting parts but that is life and the purpose of the film. The final scene sums it up perfectly and made me forget any previous flaws I had with the film.
#5. Tree Of Life
Love it or hate it. The people behind me thought it was a “pretentious piece of crap” but I fell firmly into the love camp. I didn’t expect to like it but it completely absorbed me and stuck with me much longer than many other films that simply fade from memory as soon as you leave the cinema.
#6. The Guard
I want to say this was the funniest film I saw all year but I’m now not sure exactly how much of a comedy it was. I really enjoyed it though, whatever it was.
#7. Living In A Material World
Another documentary, a subject matter I was interested in this time but t’s mostly on this list because it’s nearly three and a half hours long and I my usually distracted wandering mind never once got the slightest bit bored.
#8. The Artist
I had a few minor issues with the film but it’s still probably the most enjoyable film of the year. I want to see it again because it was so much fun and I think I might even like it more a second time around.
#9. Black Pond & Tyrannosaur
Another cheat. I wanted to include Black Pond because not only did I really like it but I also feels like it needs some more attention so more people get to see it. I left the cinema thinking that Black Pond was probably the best British film I’d seen all year. I was sure there were other films but I couldn’t recall them, I quickly remember about Submarine from earlier in the year which I think I preferred slightly. Looking back through my film diary the only other serious contender was Tyrannosaur.
#10 The Deep Blue Sea
The first film I saw in 2012 was this Terrence Davis film from late last year. I had no real expectations from it and (perhaps as a result) it completely blew me away. Once again I’m not entirely sure why I liked it so much but liked it I did. There’s something amazing about the hopelessness portrayed throughout the film which I somehow found realistic and engaging.
∞∞∞∞∞∞
So those are my best films of 2011, the year I increased my cinema going but kept away from the multiplex, as a result I’ve missed a lot of the big releases but no doubt I’ll catch up with them at some point. The only films I really regret not seeing are Bridesmaids, The Inbetweeners and A Separation (which I’ll hopefully see at Keswick Film Festival next month) although there are probably many more I’ve simply forgotten about (I’ll try and do a list, like I did last year, so I don’t forget).
There were lots of good films and only a few disappointments so all in all, it was a good cinematic year.
Honourable mentions: True Grit, Animal Kingdom, 127 Hours, Source Code, Attack The Block, Never Let Me Go, X-Men, Super 8, Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, Tangled,Tomboy, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Adventures Of Tintin, Melanchonia, Another Earth, Take Shelter and Hugo.
Disappointments: The King’s Speech, Hanna, Drive, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
More TV
I remembered* some more great television from 2011 so it seems only fair to mention them here:
- Sirens
- All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
- The Promise
- Holy Flying Circus
- Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle
- Eric and Ernie
TV 2011
At some point earlier in the year I realised that, come the end of year, I wouldn’t be able to remember all the great television I’d seen. There are plenty of ways to record films and books you watch and read but I’ve never found anything that works really well for television. GetGlue has probably come closest but being US based means it’s missing a lot of international content. So what I’m trying to say is that I find it quite to difficult to write an end of the year round up of television.
It’s easier to start with what I didn’t see. Really recently I’ve yet to see Great Expectations which sounds wonderful. Sat amongst nearly other 200 things on my PVR I have Top Boy, Pan-Am, Frozen Planet, Life’s Too Short, Misfits, The Slap and the US remake of The Killing. It almost seems too obvious to point out the excellence of Forbrydelsen, I was late to the party but really enjoyed it when I did finally get there and I am still interested to see what the Americans did with it.
The second series of Glee and Downton Abbey were big disappointments. Downton Abbey was far too close to a parody which isn’t great for drama, it picked up towards the end and the Christmas episode was rather good. ITV shouldn’t have rushed out a sub standard series or edited it down into fewer episodes of a higher quality.
The Closer, The Good Wife, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory and Californication all maintained their high standards. I’m not sure where I am with Nurse Jackie and The Big C but both still seem good to me.
Closer to home the second series of Luthur worked when it really shouldn’t have. New programmes such as Fresh Meat, Twenty Twelve and Friday Night Dinners were all smart and hilariously done. Only Connect continues to be my favourite quiz show (not hard) and by adding in play-along walls one of the few things I’ve started watching at the time of broadcast.
I’m happy to show my support of 10 O’Clock Live, it took a few weeks to settle down and probably still needs some tweaking but when it worked (Mitchell and Brooker rants) it was really worth it. Speaking of Charlie Brooker if he did any Wipes or How TV Ruined My Life this year they deserve a mention as does Black Mirror which felt like another must see series.
I feel like I’ve not mentioned so much, including what is probably my televisual highlight. Shadowline, Rubicon, Southland, The Hour, The Fades, Being Human, This Is England I recognise as being good but failed to engage me like I wanted them to.
My favourite piece of television throughout 2011 has to be Doctor Who. Obviously there were weaker episodes in the split series but to be none were weak. When it was good, it was really good and one of the few things I immediately wanted to watch again and for me who rarely watches anything multiple times there can be no greater praise.
