An archive of blog entries about films and film production.
It’ll have that Jeremy Renner back as Hawkeye. Hailee Steinfeld will be Hawkeye Jr. Florence Pugh from Black Widow (2020) will be back as Yelena (and possibly not too happy with Renner). And it’ll be streaming on Disney+ from November 24.
[via]
I won’t be able to offer the kind of service Rob used to offer when it came to either BFI events or news (and I don’t think he can either!), but as TMINE’s new Official Movie Reviewer in Residence, I hope to offer at least some kind of news service for movies.
The BFI announced this on Friday and it looks fantastic, so I thought I’d let you all know about it.
The BFI today announces a new celebration of one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, film critic-turned-director, François Truffaut (1932 – 1984), taking place across the UK from January – February 2022. This major retrospective will include BFI Distribution re-releases of THE 400 BLOWS (1959) and JULES ET JIM (1962), a two-month season at BFI Southbank, a collection of films available on BFI Player, partner seasons at cinemas including Edinburgh Filmhouse and Ciné Lumière, and BFI Blu-ray releases later in spring 2022. Alongside the BFI Southbank season – FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT: FOR THE LOVE OF FILMS – which is programmed thematically, there will also be screenings of a series of films that Truffaut lauded in his film criticism or which were particularly influential on his own work.
Truffaut spent a number of years working as a film critic at publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became renowned for his scathing reviews and a 1954 essay in which he criticised certain trends in French cinema. Along with peers like Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer, he became one of the most significant directors of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 1960s. This seminal movement, which revolutionised filmmaking with its preference both for a playful approach to narrative and for shooting on location, would go on to influence the ambitions and practice of many filmmakers of the 60s, 70s and beyond, while countless filmmakers, from Steven Spielberg and Bong Joon-ho to Greta Gerwig and Wes Anderson, continue to hold Truffaut’s work in high esteem.
The BFI will bring a raft of Truffaut films back to the big screen in cinemas around the UK and Ireland and then onto the small screen. BFI Distribution will re-release THE 400 BLOWS (1959) in a new 4K restoration on 7 January 2022, followed by the re-release of JULES ET JIM (1962) on 4 February 2022. Cinemas will also be able to screen another five Truffaut films, all via BFI Distribution; SHOOT THE PIANIST (1960), LA PEAU DOUCE (1964), THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968), MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969) and THE LAST METRO (1980).
In the spring, the BFI will release JULES ET JIM, THE 400 BLOWS, THE LAST METRO and LA PEAU DOUCE on Blu-ray, each presented with contextualising extras and an illustrated booklet in their first pressings. A collection of 10 Truffaut films will be available to subscribers of BFI Player from January, with the four BFI Blu-ray titles being made available on BFI Player later in the spring.
The two-month season at BFI Southbank, running from January – February 2022, curated by BFI Programmer at Large Geoff Andrew, will feature thematic strands, so that audiences can easily explore Truffaut’s rich and varied back catalogue. In January, the Antoine Doinel films will introduce or reacquaint audiences with the character who some have described as Truffaut’s fictional alter-ego; Antoine Doinel is depicted over a 20-year period in THE 400 BLOWS (1959), short sequel ANTOINE ET COLETTE (1962), STOLEN KISSES (1968), BED AND BOARD (1970) and LOVE ON THE RUN (1979).
Also in January will be The Renoir Truffaut, named for the French filmmaker who was a major influence on Truffaut. Screenings in this part of the programme that show Renoir’s significant influence will include THE WILD CHILD (1970), A GORGEOUS GIRL LIKE ME (1972), DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (1977) and THE LAST METRO (1980).
In February, the season will focus on The Literary Truffaut, with screenings of films that Truffaut adapted for the screen, including JULES ET JIM (1961), FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966), THE STORY OF ADELE H (1975) and THE GREEN ROOM (1978).
The final theme of the season will examine The Hitchcock Truffaut, named for the director with which Truffaut is often associated, and whose work was of great influence on him. Films screening will include the brilliant merging of American noir and the New Wave style seen in SHOOT THE PIANIST (1960); the subtle account of an extra-marital affair SILKEN SKIN (1964); and Truffaut’s most overt tribute to Hitchcock, MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969) starring Catherine Deneuve and legend of the French New Wave Jean-Paul Belmondo, who recently died aged 88.
La la la! Here’s another Marvel movie! Yay! I love Marvel movies. I’m so looking forward to this! Wait… Shang-Chi? Who? What? Maybe even… why? Trailer, please… Huh. A couple of cameos by people I’m not that interested in, some okay martial arts, Awkwafina being annoying. Aren’t trailers supposed to make me want to watch a movie, not put me off?
It really was an unpromising start and when I sat down to watch Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), I was confidently expecting to be as underwhelmed as I was when I watched most of the Disney+ Marvel shows. Bar Black Widow (2020) and certain parts of WandaVision (Disney+), it’s been feeling like Marvel has been struggling to kickstart its franchise back into action, following the closure that Avengers: Endgame (2019) brought to its decade-long story.
Surprisingly for me at least, Shang-Chi manages to both restart that storyline and make us care about – and let’s be clear about this – an absolute nobody of the Marvel comics whom nobody but nobody outside of a comics shop has ever heard of. And who goes into comics shops?
It’s one of those movies that transcends many of its sillier foundations to become something much more. Shang-Chi, while by no means a threat to Shakespeare or Mamet in its writing, is fun, engaging, character- rather than punch-driven, and generally a pleasure to watch from start to finish – and beyond, because of the obligatory credit scenes.
I’m not quite of the generation raised on video games – movies were still the dominant medium for me growing up, with TV there in the background, too. But I imagine that the members of Generation Alpha are going to be more video game-literate than we Millennials are cine-literate, and be able to quote the best scenes from Grand Theft Auto as easily as I can quote Notorious or When Harry Met Sally.
As such, Free Guy is taking a big chance: it’s a take-down of modern video games that ends up concluding that “video games would be better if they were more like documentary movies, wouldn’t they?” I wonder how well that will go down with its target audience – or will it just go over their heads? Or am I misjudging those viewers, all raised on Fortnite, who might even agree?
Free Guy takes as its basis the likes of The Truman Show (1998), The Lego Movie (2014) and Tron to give us ordinary guy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a bank worker who lives in Free City, a town divided between those with really, really exciting lives (the sunglasses wearers) who are always zooming around at high speed, shooting things, ignoring the law and generally having fun; and the regular people, who all seem to do the same things day after day after day, often getting killed in the process, only to be reborn again the next day. Little does he know, he’s only a character in a video game and those people in sunglasses are the players.
But one day, he spots sunglasses-wearer Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) and realises she’s The One. Inspired, he changes his narrative and follows her. Then, when he acquires a pair of sunglasses himself, he learns the true nature of the world and decides to advance up the levels of the game to win her over.
Nevertheless, he’s still only a character in a video game, a video game run by the evil Taika Waititi (Green Lantern, Jojo Rabbit). So can Guy ever truly be free?
Pfft. You know how you can really like someone and want them to do well, and usually they’re so reliable, you never have to doubt them – and then they do something really dumb? No? Okay, just me then… Awks.
Normally for me, though, the Rock – aka Dwayne Johnson – is one of those people. He can sing in Moana, he can star in a terrible Fast and Furious spin-off, he can act with a giant CGI gorilla and I’ll not flutter an eye lash. No matter what movie he’s in, no matter how dumb it looks, it usually turns out to be somewhere between “better than I thought it was going to be” and “totes awesome!”
And Emily Blunt is one of those people, too. True, she was almost Black Widow in the Marvel movies before a scheduling conflict meant Scarlett Johansson had to step into the breach at the last minute to take her place – I am just not ready to imagine a world where that never happened, but I can forgive Blunt for something she never actually did. Isn’t that nice of me?
But apart from that near-slip from her, I’ve been able to rely solidly on Blunt’s presence in a movie since more or less The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to know it’s going to be in the above-mentioned quality bracket.
And now we have Jungle Cruise, in which would-be explorer-cum-scientist-cum-sufragette Blunt decides to head to South America in 1916 with her closeted brother (Jack Whitehall) in order to find a slightly magical flower that could cure all known diseases, if you can believe all the old parchments, maps and wives’ tales that she’s collected. There they meet Johnson – and his rival (Paul Giamatti) – and charter him and his tourist-attraction vessel to take them down the Amazon to find the flower.
There’s a couple of obstacles for them. Naturally, there’s headhunters and cannibals. There’s also the zombie-like conquistadors who first found the flower, led by Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story). There’s also a relative of the German Kaiser (Jess Plemons) who wants to get the flower for himself and is in hot pursuit of Blunt in a surprisingly modern submarine, aided in his quest by some helpful bees.
Yes, bees.
That’s where they lost me. Pfft.
© 2022 The Medium is Not Enough
