Film Shapes

Tod Browning's Freaks was a Saturday afternoon offering as part of Exhumed Cinema for the Strange Festival . It was first time the old Liberty Cinema in Perth has been open for films since 1997 (I believe they had some art and music shows there in 2022). The films are being shown by 35mm projector, in this case the projectionist spoke before the film. He told us the film would be on four 20-minute reels, and as they weren't allowed to cut the head or tail, there'd be a 10 second fade between reels. They might have needed more reels as, apparently, some of the more 'objectionable' scenes were cut from the original 90-odd minutes, bringing this widely seen version down to a smidge over 60 mins (it's pretty clear where the excises were made). The screening actually turned out to be the fist leg of a night at the Strange Festival, which had shows and installations throughout the Perth CBD. We popped in to some pop-up events in and around Hay Street Mall - Slow Rain...

Reality Winner isn't the title of a shitty TV game show, or a victor of one such mess. It's actually the name of a Pashto language expert who was arrested by the FBI for 'mishandling classified documents' in 2017. It starts with a dialogue-free locked off wide shot of a woman at her desk in an office with, crucially, Fox news showing a clip of FBI director Comey's sacking on wall mounted TVs. Cut to a number of days later and we see Winner, played with wet-eyed anxiety by Sydney Sweeney, heading home after grocery shopping. On her arrival home, she gets a knock on her car window, and here's where the film begins its unusually constrained method of using only the recorded transcript of her 'interrogation' as dialogue. This works surprisingly well and there are even a number of gimmicky shocks when redacted material is mentioned. It's a neat way of working, presumably a cheap way also, and it stands as more of a docu-drama record of this part of recent...

There's an intriguing correlation that seems to be occurring in pyjama films these days. Once the undisputed master of the genre, the MCU has dipped of late (though the recent Guardians film was a peach), whereas the erstwhile shite DCEU has lifted its game. Their latest entry is The Flash , written by Christina Hodson and Joby Harold, and directed by Andy Muschietti, and to my surprise, it's a bit of a banger. It concerns the fast one in the Justice League, Barry Allen (AKA The Flash) and his awkward attempts to fit in to society. A possible reason for his gormlessness is the fact that he lost his mother when he was a child, so when he realises he can run fast enough to, stay with me here, crack the space time continuum (!), he decides to go back and prevent his mother's death. What could go wrong? Well, shit, obviously a lot, and so, wrong it goes. Even though Batman warns him off it, Flash can't resist and is on his way back to his past when he's knocked out of ...

Based on events in Barcelona following the death of General Franco, this film looks at injustices within a prison system that systematically brutalised its inhabitants. Director Alberto Rodríguez sets most of his film inside the (in)famous Cárcel Modelo prison, where Manuel (Miguel Herrán) is sent for embezzling a sum of money from his company (in an early indication of the film's intent, we discover that he's been left to carry the can for the boss's son). The prison building is a fantastic drawcard for the film - it was designed in the 'panopticon' style, a kind of concentric layout where, in theory, one guard could view all sections of the jail from a central hub, with the 'spokes' as the inmates' quarters. On arrival, Manuel is sent to solitary quarantine where he's attacked by bugs and guards alike, but where he also meets Blacky (Jesús Carroza), a fixer type of prisoner. When he's finally released into 'regular' accommodation, Black...