Revelation Film Festival 2020 - Wrap up (plus podcast summary)

Right, that was a fun four days. I'm going to run through the nine films I saw with some brief notes and a rating on each. Here goes.

My Rembrandt

This documentary is a bit of a love letter to Rembrandt with the makings of a controversy bubbling underneath. The director, Oeke Hoogendijk, introduces us to Jan Six (pictured left) and his possible new discovery of a hitherto unknown Rembrandt. The story flicks around various eccentric collectors and it all looks fantastic but the film could have been a bit more focussed on the central issue - namely the veracity of the 'new' painting. For more on this film, see the longer review here.

Desert One

This documentary, by esteemed filmmaker Barbara Kopple, tells the story of the failed attempt to rescue American hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution in 1979. There are some good moments here (notably interviews with U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his Vice-President, Walter Mondale) and the animation is pretty good. The issues I had are more to do with the way Kopple glorifies the cock-up and vilifies almost anyone not in a U.S. forces uniform. It also got fairly boring, which should have been easy to avoid with such a gripping real life tale.

iHuman

There's a lot to recommend in this doco about the future of AI. It starts with Jürgen Schmidhuber, an absolute bellend who is supposed to be the 'father of modern AI' and jumps about to other talking head geniuses expounding on the possibilities of where the world is heading. Some highlights (?) include the Chinese cities that use massive levels of surveillance and Project Maven, Google's hush-hush military connection. The visual effects are brilliant, as is the moment when a data analyst talks about managing our lives in the 'post-privacy age'.

The Trouble with Being Born

This is the film that was booed in Berlin and banned in Melbourne but I struggled to find why people would be so agitated by it. It's the story of an android built to replace a lost daughter, and the film leaves so much out that it's almost anti-exposition. It has some scenes that are slightly questionable (suggestive posing, erotic moaning) but these are handled in a sensitive, even otherworldly way. It's a film choc-filled with grief and loneliness, sewn together with mysterious time shifts and odd people and places. It's how I imagine Spielberg's AI would have turned out were it any good.

Atlantis

Well, this was a hard slog. Ukraine have won a war with Russia but things are still bleak, and this film revels in the misery, in theme AND form. Most of the shots are locked off wides with vehicles or people appearing in the foreground and then departing. Some of these feel like they go on for north of ten minutes, but surely that can't be. I wonder if it's the film I've seen with the fewest cuts. It reminded me of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but that film had more style and humour and it took me along with it. This one seemed to challenge the viewer to enjoy it. There's one scene of a mortician reporting on a corpse that was mind-numbing. Strangely, I'm glad I saw Atlantis.

Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan

This is a great documentary on the life of legendary Pogue's singer/songwriter, Shane MacGowan. As more of an appreciator than a fan, I wasn't really super-psyched to see it, but it's one of the best of its kind. It's edited like a fairground ride with found footage, film from MacGowan's youth, TV spots, live gigs, even clips of old films (I noticed James Mason in Odd Man Out in there) and different styles of animation. Director Julian Temple is very much at home with this stuff. MacGowan is just past 60 but he's seen better days and, sure, it's a cautionary tale of the effects of booze and drugs but it also celebrates MacGowan and his Irish heritage. For the 'few rounds', he's joined by his wife Victoria, Pogue's biographer, Ann Scanlon, Johnny Depp and former Sinn Fin President, Gerry Adams.

The Jump ★★★½

Here's a well-tuned doco about a Lithuanian sailor in the Soviet fishing fleet and his attempt to defect one day in November 1970. The film's success is primarily down to the central character of Simas Kudirka - he's an extremely watchable old geezer, who has clearly been through a lot of shit, yet still manages to be positive. The director, Giedre Kickyte, has balanced his film well (a lesson to Desert One) by finding nuance in all parties, even the KGB interrogator. For a more detailed write-up, check this out.

[Here's where I ran into trouble patching in the star ratings, hence the change in style☺]

Collective ★★★★

What an excellent film. A nightclub fire in Bucharest kicks off a spiral of deceit and malignant corruption. We begin by hearing that, though the number of immediate deaths was terrible, many other young people died in the days and weeks following, due to bacteria filled hospitals. The way the dominoes fall here is astounding and the structure is just as good as the story. It plays out like a 70s political thriller from Alan J. Pakula. The film switches focus around half way through, from a no-nonsense journalist to the new Minister for Health and both these guys find the levels of ingrained villainy disheartening. Their final moments on screen are proper kicks in the bread basket. Highly recommended.

Archive ★★★★

Going in not knowing too much about this film was a good idea. It's pretty much a two-hander, an AI designer and his prototype, alone in a high security facility. The themes of grief, loss & loneliness aren't too heavy handed and hints of a war, maybe intergalactic (?), keep things obtuse. A kind of deadline from the corporation for the AI fella (Theo James) lends a degree of peril to proceedings. I don't want to say too much here, only that there are rubbings of Metropolis, Ghost in the Shell, Moon and a Nicole Kidman film that would be a giveaway if I mentioned it. First time director Gavin Rothery nails this one. Catch it if you get a chance.

A FEW SPOILERS IN PODCAST!

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Top twenty WWII films

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg - 1987) This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19. The English Patient (Anthony Minghella - 1996) All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

This eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise feels like a good place to end things. The series is rapidly ripening and it's possible that any more and we might be getting into the fruit fly stage. It's not going out on a limb to say they will probably continue until Tom Cruise is in traction but, by the looks of this warlock, he'll outlast us all. The Final Reckoning is many things to many people. On the one hand, it's great fun, packed with tension and brilliantly edited to within an inch of its celluloid life (kudos to the editor with a name like a British snooker player, Eddie Hamilton). On the other hand, it reeks with honking dialogue and convoluted exposition that wastes an awful lot of its lengthy run-time (170 mins, no thanks Mr. Bladder). One character actually says, "It's the end of the world as we know it." At this stage, I didn't feel fine. And for your bingo card, make a cross in the square for 'characters saying the name o...

The Tasters

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Münter and Kandinsky - The Blue Rider

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Thunderbolts*

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Sinners

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The Surfer

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F1: The Movie

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Two to One

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80s Movies and their Songs

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it. Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

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