“It all looks a bit…ummm…new!”

Thus went perhaps the strangest quote I overheard during my quick jaunt around City Screen’s new East London venture, Hackney Picturehouse, which threw open its doors earlier today for a special open day for Founder Members. Hackney Picturehouse is, of course, ‘a bit new’ because it is, of course, a bit new.

Historically something of  an East London vacuum – ‘but there’s no tube stations?’, goes the common, puzzled refrain from the rest of the capitol – the area has been on the up and up over the last few years. Some call it gentrification or mutter disapprovingly about hipsters, others are quick to point out that as much as some areas of the Borough have changed or ‘improved’, others are still struggling to make social and cultural ends meet. But however you see it, Hackney is increasingly become an excellent place to live.

And the most recent addition to that excellentness is the Hackney Picturehouse, a four-screen miniplex that will officially open its doors to the public on October 28 and, luckily for me, is but a mere stroll away. For the privileged elite (ie. those who were willing to shell out thirty quid for membership at a cinema which hadn’t even opened yet), today brought a special sneak-peek, followed by a choice of preview screenings to be held later this week.

Thus, after months of quiet anticipation and the occasional excited arm-flapping moment, I present a sample of my first impressions of the new Hackney Picturehouse:

First things first, and for a relatively grand building, I have to say that the entrance – on the long side of the old Ocean building on Mare Street – is a little underwhelming; there’s the usual glass doors, concession stands and posters advertising upcoming screenings, but not a whole lot more. It’s a pity they couldn’t find a way to utilize that corner doorway, but all is forgiven when you come to the neck-botheringly low ceiling art which pays tribute to founder members in a riot of colour and typography. It took me a while, but I eventually found my little imprint on the future of Hackney entertainment:

Around the corner and I’m straight into Screen 4, the smallest auditorium, with the ultra comfy seats we’ve come to expect from Picturehouse Cinemas and ample leg-room. Initially I sit at the very front, disconcertingly close to the screen and move hastily to the back row, which sits under an overhanging projection booth – quickly deciding this is my favourite seat. If I tell you that I’m usually a middle-middle kinda guy, you might get some idea of just how cosy Screen 4 must be. Obviously the cinemas are all still in varying states of completion, so I disregard the odd unattached speaker, but the strange flashing on the side walls whenever the screen is showing white or light colours is a little disconcerting.

Back out into the foyer, and at the bottom of the stairs sits a relic of celluloid times gone by – a Philips DP70 – an infamous projector built to handle 70mm Todd-AO film and the only one to have ever won an Oscar. Thankfully for us cinephiles, however, this isn’t the only non-digital projector in the building and I head upstairs, making a beeline for Screen 3, which houses 35mm projection capabilities in an old-style elongated auditorium set-up, with an oddly shaped screen designed specifically to cater for a range of aspect ratios. Importantly, the raised level of the screen and the ample floorspace at the front will be hosting live accompaniment for silent film screenings, beginning with The Wirral’s finest exponents of sci-fi math-prog, The Laze, who will perform their score for the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney, on November 1st.

Next up is Screen 2 and, entering as I did from a strange second door at the top of the auditorium, I am immediately confronted with the prospect of committing one of the cardinal sins of cinemagoing, blocking part of that all-important shaft of light which streams from projector to screen. Needless to say, with the projection booth sitting at the top of the stairs, and the projection angle being quite tight, it could potentially be an annoying auditorium if you have a lot of latecomers struggling to find their seat.

Finally, it was time to step into the big one – Screen 1. I had some idea of what to expect, having already seen pictures of the auditorium on Facebook, but walking in at the bottom with projection filling the rather large screen that makes up the entire end wall made quite an impact. Of course, given the sheer size of the projection area, I doubt the first five or so rows will prove all that popular. Similarly, the sheer width of the steeply-raked auditorium means that the seats on the far side – particularly from the front until about half-way up – will test your neck muscles rather severely.

All in all, however, these are but minor quibbles about an ambitious new cinema that I’m sure will prove exceedingly popular (especially given the dearth of cinemas in the Hackney area – Dalston’s absolutely brilliant Rio Cinema notwithstanding). In fact, I’m a little worried it might prove too popular and it’ll be a fight to get a hold of tickets for some of the one-off screenings, Q&As and special events that are planned over the coming months. In the meantime, I’m just looking forward to my preview of Errol Morris’ Tabloid next week, and the prospect of finally having a truly ‘local’ cinema, the first in the many intervening years since I lived around the corner from the Chelsea Cinema in Adelaide’s leafy eastern suburbs.

Membership, as well as tickets for the first week of screenings and a bunch of upcoming special events, can be purchased on the Hackney Picturehouse website. And for all your up to the minute needs, be sure to follow the lovely folks on Facebook and Twitter.

Okay, so it’s been a little quiet around here lately. Lots of tumbling tumbleweeds and not a lot of blog action. But despite laying dormant for the last six months or so, Screen Addict will be back with a vengeance (or at least a whimper) in the coming weeks with a handful of necessary adjustments.

For starters, I’ve abandoned the frankly ludicrous idea of writing a little something about every film I watch, partly because it’s insane, but mostly because it’s just too large a task when I have so much other stuff to do. In short, it uses up precious energy and time that I’d rather devote to writing more in-depth pieces whilst simultaneously restricting my ability to post about whatever the heck takes my fancy.

Thus, in the coming months, Screen Addict will continue as a venue for my occasional reviews (or, more likely, I will continue to use whatever I’ve watched to go off on a massive tangent about something or other), but it will also hopefully feature festival reports, an in-depth analysis of breaking news stories, a bit of info about filmy things that I’m getting up to, and/or generally allow me to rant and rave about film-related things that have caught my eye.

Anyway, whilst I plug away at my cushy day job (cataloguing films for the East Anglian Film Archive for inclusion on their new website, as well as the BFI hosted Union Search catalogue, aka Search Your Film Archives), try to devote some time to upcoming writing projects AND attempt to edit a friend’s feature film, you can follow me on Twitter – @scrnddct – or become a fan of Screen Addict on Facebook. You know you wanna!

On it’s UK release, We Are What We Are was met with near-universal positivity, but for some reason I just found it to be a bit tired, pretty cliched and very dull. Maybe it was the fact that I saw it first thing on a Sunday morning (and on an empty stomach), but to my mind, the dull thuds that punctuate the soundtrack are a fairly good articulation of the film as a whole. Sure it’s visually interesting, and the performances are fine, but it all just felt a little pointless.

For the UK advertising campaign, leading arthouse distributor Artificial Eye made extensive use of a quote attributed to David Hayles of The Times, which suggested that We Are What We Are ‘does for cannibals what Let the Right One In did for vampires’. Undoubtedly, such a link was intended to pull in members of the indie-genre crowd, but such a comparison is valid only on a superficial level, largely because Let the Right One In has depths and complexities which far exceed the shock-simplifications of We Are What We Are.

Much the same could be said of any reference to the recent Greek curio Dogtooth, which takes an similarly skewed look at an equally creepy, maladjusted family, but had a lot more to offer than Grau’s Mexican cannibal cruncher. Although my review may have decried Dogtooth‘s overt kookiness, it managed to play with familial themes much more astutely (and the kookiness at least added some entertainment value, as well as rounding out the intriguing naivety of the central characters). The fact that the ‘children’ in Dogtooth were complete shut-ins also added to a sense of foreboding peril which simply doesn’t face the characters in We Are What We Are, who roam their environment with reckless abandon and only the vaguest hint of vulnerability.

And in some ways, the louche manner in which We Are What We Are‘s trio of teens interact with the outside world (whilst the film attempts to portray them, as the title implies, as merely dysfunctional but otherwise ‘average’ teens), simply dissipates any tension that might otherwise have existed, leaving the film as dull and lifeless as the corpses that the protagonists flay in preparation for their ‘family ritual’.

Indeed, at almost every turn, We Are What We Are features a cinematic cliche of some sort; bumbling cops (all bravado and no nous), the constantly victimised putas, the male as hunter/gatherer, the female – embodied here by the pretty brunette perpetually clothed in a nightdress – as homekeeper. In fact, the only thing that didn’t feel entirely cliched and, if pursued, might actually have added substantially to the film’s complexity and depth, was an all too brief subplot in which we follow the brother stalking another young man, following him to a gay nightclub, kissing him and bringing him home. Of course, the initial promise soon develops into another cliche, with the suggestion being not that this young cannibal had particular sexual urges, but that he was simply using the inherent ‘weakness’ of the young gay male to lure him to his death.

Indeed, where many critics have praised We Are What We Are for its apt portrayal of contemporary Mexican society, I can only see an even broader embrace of cliche and stereotype.

Then again, it was Sunday morning, and I still hadn’t had my breakfast.

In order to stem the tide of my perpetual catch-up in this (often) ill-conceived attempt to write about every film I watch, I present this mass posting, where I write a brief something about some of the British titles I have caught over the last couple of months but have neither the time nor inclination to expand upon further.

Here goes nothing…

The Village of the Damned
d. Wolf Rilla / 1960 / UK / 77 mins

Nice little creepy MGM-backed Brit-chiller, although very much a B-picture (in the nicest possible way!) Produced, no doubt, to fit neatly into double-bills, this original adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos suffers somewhat from a severe truncation and a rather abrupt ending, but manages to win over audiences with a batch of brilliant set pieces and a wealth of sheer creepiness.

Passport to Pimlico
d. Henry Cornelius / 1944 / UK / 84 mins

Typically Ealing in its treatment of a small band of Average Joes (or should that be Average Tom, Dick and Harrys?) against the might of institutions. There are obvious parallels to be made here with the personal responsibility of each and every city and village in the UK during WWII, along with an allegory about the importance of exercising wartime restraint and community respect. A true classic of British cinema.

“Blimey! I’m a foreigner!”

And now for something completely different…

The First Movie
d. Mark Cousins / 2009 / UK / 76 mins

A wonderfully poignant, poetic and personal documentary from Mark Cousins which, without fuss or favour, rejects popular images of Iraq by giving us a glimpse into the lives of one set of villagers in Kurdistan. After screening a series of films – from E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) to Where is the Friend’s Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) – for the children of the village, most of whom had never seen a film, Cousins gives them basic HD handycams and allows them to shoot whatever they want, with intriguing results. Highly recommended.

Stay tuned for more…

When I wrote about Todd Philips’ last feature, The Hangover – which receives almost equal billing on some UK posters for Due Date – I arrived at a loose theory about what I termed Male-Orientated Comedies. Since then, I’ve refined the tenets of the theory somewhat to cover what are essentially frat boy stories, told in different ways or in new (non-College) settings, with a distinct gross-out element and a predilection for supposedly ‘boundary-pushing’ (but often just coarse) humour. I termed them Male-Orientated Comedies simply because they are exclusively by men, for men and – crucially – about men.

The Hangover certainly fitted within the parameters of MOC, and it’s pretty tempting to think of Due Date as a pared-back, two-handed version of Phillips’ earlier Vegas vacation and, in a lot of senses, it is just that. But whilst The Hangover‘s ‘load’ (so to speak) was spread across an ensemble, Due Date, by its very nature, must cling tightly to the relationship between its two central characters, with a very real risk that it simply might not work. Then again, with a pairing of Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr., how could it not?

Well, it does work for the most part, with the duo perfectly embodying the odd-couple pairing of which Hollywood is so fond. But whilst this central partnership is actually pretty great, the film as a whole is far from a resounding success. Already mortally wounded by a severe case of episodic plotting, Due Date suffers most from the sheer ambiguity of Downey Jr.’s character, and from the giant, stinking leap in logic that sees them drive halfway across the United States in a stolen, battered Mexican border patrol vehicle.

And its precisely this kind of farfetchedness (along with its strong MOC tone) that gives Due Date rather more than a slight resemblance to the hit-and-miss hilarity of Pineapple Express. Indeed, the very fact that Philips attempts, in what is ostensibly a broad comedy, to tether one foot in the dramatic, semi-serious mould (through both the central MacGuffin-esque plotline of one character trekking cross-country for the birth of his first child, and the death of the others’ father) whilst simultaneously unable to reach the heights of sheer ridiculousness achieved by Pineapple Express, no doubt accounts for the middling success of Due Date.

And whilst there are some great little set pieces here, and some very witty lines (many of which are no doubt destined to become catchphrases in certain circles) in the end, Due Date fails largely because it loses its way for long sections and fails to maintain narrative interest, literally fumbling along with its characters until they get into their next, contrived and ill-conceived pickle.

I really wanted to not laud The Social Network, largely because I think it’s been a little overhyped. But there’s one element of the hyperbole surrounding this film that I just can’t avoid. Sure, there’s no question that its a solid effort on all counts, there also seems to be no doubt that it is Aaron Sorkin’s script that wins out.

After all, without Sorkin’s sense of narrative development and sheer dialogic wit (which finds its apotheosis here in the blithe, deeply intelligent world of Harvard geekery), the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook could easily have been very dull, slightly confusing and rather forgettable. In Sorkin’s hands, of course, it becomes much more than its constituent parts, with the narrative actually having rather little to do with Facebook, which acts merely as a backdrop for Sorkin’s quasi-courtroom drama and its ensuing tale of friendship, betrayal and social disfunction.

Just as The Social Network would be nothing without Sorkin’s script, however, screenplays are nothing without worthy interpreters. David Fincher does his typically solid best, with an excellent score from Trent Reznor and a surprisingly strong cast, featuring a central trio who were either considered one-dimensional (Jesse Eisenberg), a massive risk (Justin Timberlake), or were simply an unknown entity (Andrew Garfield).

And Eisenberg is great, bringing a version of Zuckerberg to the screen that audiences despise and admire in equal measure. And, as with Ben Stiller in Greenberg, I developed a strange sense of admiration for Sorkin and Eisenberg’s semi-fictional rendition of Zuckerberg, who buries his profound sense of misunderstood genius in a barrage of pithy one-liners.

Like Zuckerberg, The Social Network is not exactly a picture of perfection, but the fact that it deals with a semi-transient element of popular culture without managing to reduce itself to misjudged references and cheesy attempts to catch the zeitgeist is due – once again – to one thing: Aaron Sorkin’s excellent script. Last night, he won the BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay, and if he doesn’t repeat the trick on Oscar night, I’ll eat my hat. Or maybe even my shoe.

Low budget, independent genre pics are a notoriously difficult thing to get right. Midnight Movie doesn’t quite achieve that winning formula, but it is a valiant enough effort.

I’ll admit to having a soft spot for this film based purely on its central conceit – a crazed killer springs into action every time his directorial opus is screened, trapping punters in the cinema from hell as they unwittingly watch their fellow audience members killed one by one. In this vein, the early scenes of Midnight Movie are unsurprisingly populated by lame gags about the cinemagoing experience, which not only fail to raise a chuckle, but simply seem like lazy attempts at forming some kind of intertextuality for the slasher pic within a pic to come.

And if the dialogue wasn’t bad enough, narrative-wise Midnight Movie is held loosely together by flimsy plot twists and ill-judged (and confusing) attempts at building a backstory. And much of the key imagery seems to have been cherry-picked from a swathe of more successful horror films; from the Jigsaw-meets-Leatherface baddie, to his distinctly Wolf Creek-ish torture crypt.

Then again, when we’re talking about a low-budget horror flick about filmgoing, which features a film within a film – and which may or may not take place entirely within someone’s twisted mind – it’s hard to ascertain exactly where plagiarism ends and tribute/parody begins. Besides, there are actually some clever ideas in here and a handful of interesting (if cheesy) set-pieces; a tricky double-bluff featuring the foyer doors as our friends attempt to escape from the killer, is matched only by the film-strip jumping back to life and righting its upended projector so that the killer can continue on his massacring way.

Despite a few glimmers of hope, however, Midnight Movie never really manages to reconcile the sum of its parts, with a disappointing conclusion aptly reflecting the relatively unremarkable whole.

Ahhh…the surreal silliness that is A Town Called Panic!

I love the television series – hell, I even love Aubier and Patar’s Cravendale milk ads. And I’d been waiting to see the film since it premiered at Cannes in 2009, but I couldn’t help but think that there was a distinct possibility that what worked for short-format television wouldn’t necessarily translate to a feature film, even one as fleeting as Horse, Indian and Cowboy’s first, brief foray onto the big screen. After all, I couldn’t shake the notion that such relentless surreality is vastly better experienced in short, tempered bursts, particularly when it is delivered via intentionally jerky stop-motion animation.

But I shouldn’t have worried, A Town Called Panic is relentlessly zany, sure, but that 75 minutes just flew by! I would attempt to explain the plot, but to do so…well, to do so, I would need to make an 75 minute long stop-motion animation film about a cowboy and an indian who want to build their equine friend a BBQ, but accidently order too many bricks, and then have their house stolen by upsidedown, undersea creatures with pointy heads, but somehow end up on a frozen tundra fighting a giant, mechanical penguin, and that’s all before (and after) a bunch of other stuff happens.

Somebody clearly never read the teachings of the prophet McKee! Still, as this trailer aptly demonstrates, it’s far better than all of the films lauded by the chosen one…

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the American film industry was clamouring to update to the latest sound technology in the hope of capturing an ever-lucrative market share, Japanese cinema audiences were beholden to a vastly different way of experiencing the moving image.

Developed from long-practiced traditions of Noh and kubuki theatre, films of the silent era – both local and imported – were interpreted for Japanese audiences by live benshi narrators, who would relate the story, give voice to the characters and apply their own personalities to an entirely unique brand of cinematic storytelling.

The most popular benshi increasingly became attractions in their own right, and it was not uncommon for them to be billed above the film itself. Indeed, such was the lasting appetite for benshi narration in Japan - helped, in no small part, by the strength of benshi unions - that the tradition continued well into the 1930s, long after sound cinema had become standard practice for most of the western world.

Released in 1933 – when the US box office was already topped by a steady stream of musicals and talkies - Taki no shiraito (The Water Magician) was perhaps Kenji Mizoguchi’s most popular silent production. Presented as part of the Silent Film and Live Music series, it’s screening at the Barbican provided a crucial pre-sound link for Aspects of Japanese Cinema, an extensive screening programme timed to coincide with the Barbican Art Gallery’s current exhibition – Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion – which closes on February 6.

In what might be a first for UK audiences, The Water Magician was presented at the Barbican with live benshi narration (in English) by Tamoko Komura, who was accompanied by Melissa Holding on the koto. Komura does a wonderful job of evoking the shifting moods of Mizoguchi’s glorious, yet tragic love story, giving voice to the main characters and describing their inner and outer worlds.

And yet, as quasi-orientalist as it might sound, I can’t help wonder if the experience might have felt a little more ‘authentic’ if the narration had been in Japanese with sub- or surtitles. Then again, regardless of language or presentation format, the curious mix of theatre and cinema that is live benshi narration is surely something that needs to be seen more widely in the UK, if only to allow silent film fans a greater understanding of how film presentation differed across cultures during the silent era.

Another curious aspect of this particular screening, of course, was the sheer (and welcome) predominance of a female perspective. As well as the dual-female presence of both Komura the benshi and Holding, her accompanist, The Water Magician is itself a product of Mizoguchi’s usual preoccupations with well-intentioned, but seemingly doomed women, and their relationships with lowly men desperate to better themselves via an attachment to these strong, powerful women. The title character is also played by the great Takako Irie, a strong female figure in Japanese cinema history who helped to produce this film as well an earlier Mizoguchi, Manmo kenkoku no reimei (The Dawn of Mongolia), in 1932.

On a completely different tack, however, I’ll end this post with an excerpt from The Water Magician which features a re-score by Canadian band VOWLS, as presented live at Toronto’s Shinsedai Cinema Festival in July 2010.

What can you say about a film like this? Really?

Noé’s fluid/florid style absolutely dominates every one of your aural and visual senses, to the point that its hard to gauge the quality of its performances or the strength of its narrative, making it even harder to adequately describe. Enter the Void is undoubtedly stunning visually – certainly like nothing I have ever seen before – but is that really enough?

Populated with both brief moments and long stretches of gawping brilliance, Enter the Void also possesses – comparatively, at least – more than a few periods of pretentiously dull quasi-profundity. In fact, at no point does it become clear whether this new emperor of the senses is wearing very much at all.

And if you strip away all the visual trickery and formal experimentation, Enter the Void actually has, at its core, a fairly conventional storyline. Having recently convinced his sister to move to Tokyo, a young man’s involvement in drugs trade leads to his death, after which his spirit travels through time and space to reveal an agonising tale of parental loss, sibling separation and nihilistic hedonism. But Noé has never hidden this fact, of course, using the Cannes press kit to give Enter the Void the apt designation of ‘psychedelic melodrama’.

And in the end, although I admire Noé’s audacity and applaud his willingness to experiment with the cinematic form, I’m still not entirely sure whether I actually ‘enjoyed’ Enter the Void. Then again, I can at least admit that Gasper Noé’s latest opus has affected me: I haven’t been able to watch film of a car going through a tunnel ever since.