Review of 'The Gunfighter' (1950)

I truly enjoyed The Gunfighter. The nature of Jimmy Ringo's fame problem was immediately clear when he was hassled by a cocky young cowboy. The tension in that first scene was not only discernible but recognisable--celebrity ‘reputation-versus-temperament’ incidents are as present today as they were when this movie was made sixty years ago (and that same culture is believably present in the film’s 19th-century setting). I loved The Gunfighter’s Western imagery and language. While the period set was not showcased like that in Once Upon a Time in the West, it was a pleasure to watch the story unfold within this old-fashioned world.

Film Noir; Review of 'Pickup on South Street' (1953)

It was surprisingly simple to learn the characteristics that make a movie a ‘film noir’ movie. Always aware of the genre, I never knew what it described but imagined it indicated fairly stringent visual style. Now my understanding is that the term film noir refers more to narrative elements than the artistic merits implied by its name. Thankfully, these narrative aspects were easily apparent in Pick Up on South Street: the moral ambiguity of its characters, their cynicism, questionable motivations, etc. Visually, much of the story unfolds at night, another film noir trait. I enjoyed decoding the underworld language, an embellishment for the essentially simple story that lays at the film’s core.

FTV Blog 4: Kate Grenville's 'The Lieutenant'

In year 12 English I studied The Secret River by Kate Grenville, a fictional book about a convict's relations with native Australians. Australian history never took my fancy but it was my favourite of the three books we read (preferring it over The Kite Runner and Nineteen Eighty-Four) because of the beautiful language Grenville employs to tell her stories. My Dad had a copy lying around of The Lieutenant, another Grenville work of similar content, so I started reading it. I hardly ever read proper novels but I knew with Grenville it would be a pleasure to roll through the words on the page, effortlessly absorbing the deftly crafted descriptions of scenery and characters.

While wondering how to describe Grenville's style, it's occurred to that despite being elegantly presented, I wouldn't say it's 'subtle'. Often Grenville will spell out the thoughts of the protagonist, but I don't think this is a bad thing at all. It means I don't have to read between the lines looking for deeper meaning. Gladly, I see the book as a great story rather than a work that relies on heavy interpretation or analysis from the reader.

FTV Blog 3: Photographic Journalism: Reuters Full Focus

I stumbled across a series of photo albums on Reuters the other day and was awe-struck instantly. Some of these photos are incredible; simply stunning. I often overlook photographs as a medium to look up, view, or 'consume', but these completely change my opinion. I would rather have a hard copy of some of these than buy a good novel or DVD or music album. 'A picture can tell a thousand words', well it's more than that, isn't it? Photography--especially in journalism, I think--has a capacity to invoke emotions and stimulate the mind beyond words. Interestingly, I came across this around the same time I started using flickr for photography class. While it occured to me to 'flick' through photos on flickr, just highly-rated or popular ones on its home page, I am completely sure that I prefer the photos found here. Not only are they often equally artistic or aesthetically appealing, but they are journalistic, documenting real life, events and emotion in the extreme corners of our civilisation. These images are the as powerful as possible without being there live on the site.

Review of 'Sullivan's Travels' (1941)

Sullivan's Travels opens with a fight scene atop a moving train. I liked that; grand, audacious, exciting, even by today's standards. I believe the movie maintained this standard of production and ambition throughout. It seemed like it would have been quite a blockbuster in its day, which made it very easy to watch. Road movies, too, are generally a pleasure to watch--and Sullivan’s Travels is as much an adventure films as it is comedy--because they double that effect of ‘escapism’, of the viewer being able to lose themselves in the narrative for the duration of the picture. I’m not crazy about Sullivan’s Travels but it would be a hopeless man who couldn’t enjoy it.

Review of The Crowd (1928)

Paul Harris' introduction to The Crowd left me eager to watch the film, expecting a slow, solemn exploration of the bleaker realities of life. While the narrative content matched my expectations--the protagonist learns the hard way that life doesn't work out the way you planned, having faced an uphill battle for his job, his money, his family, and his place in the world--the movie itself was was a melodrama instead of a thriller. I felt it was too rapidly paced and the tension too often eased with small slapstick jokes, making the film lose much of the potential emotive power in a story with such dark themes.

FTV Blog 2: Copy Shop, The Making of Collision Course

The other night my Mum invited me to sit down and watch a show she came across on ABC. It was an Australian documentary about the process of using high-speed cameras to film dancers (and wrestlers, athletes, gymnasts) performing mid-air to get super slow motion footage. The point of filming them was for the purely aesthetic beauty of the human figures moving so slowly in mid-air, but when watching this after the behind-the-scenes the effect was lost on me because the magic had already been exposed. Also, I was pre-occupied with the knowledge the dancers weren't actually doing anything natural, they had been told to 'collide like this' or 'jump like that'. Strange that the feature was a behind-the-scenes with occasional clips of the polished product. Almost always the making-of has a back seat role but then again, there is no ordinary medium in which to present these slow-mo shots. You can't have an entire TV or episode full of these shots ans nothing else. Perhaps I would have appreciated this documentary more had I already seen these slow-mo shots (apparently projected onto arts centres' exterior walls).

Interuterion by Samantha Ray
A key part of the final product (the shots, not the making-of TV show) was a Samantha Ray song called Interuterion, a deeply emotive and immersive soundscape

Copy Shop. Had no idea what that was going to be about and soon enough found myself hit with the 'what on Earth is going on?' feeling. The film didn't just engage me but demanded my attention as I became more and more desperate to understand what was happening. My impression of the ending was that in killing himself, all the copies would die too (although class consensus seemed that the suicidal man was not the original, just another copy, so the other copies would remain unaffected by his death). To interpret the plot, one analogy could be that all the copies are like voices in your head--the slight but numerous factors, experiences and beliefs that make up your conscience--and the cancerous copy men in the film are like the voices in your head if you go insane; enormous internal conflict and hysteria. So one way to end those voices is to end your entire being (suicide)--in the film, the copied men cannot exist without the original.



Stylistically, however, Copy Shop was very impressive. It was not innately pleasing to the eye (with a dirty, grey picture) but was technically brilliant. There was some clever work with the non-diegetic video, like the superimposed newspaper flicking across the frame (complete with sound effect) as we see a man reading a newspaper, or the transition between one shot and the next when the protagonist tears in half a photocopy of himself--the frame is torn down the middle to reveal an identical shot only without the character, who has accidentally made himself disappear after destroying the copy of himself. (A lazy description of the technique. Best see for yourself what I mean.)

FTV Blog 1: Distant Relatives, Spellbound

In the past week I've been doing some listening to Distant Relatives, an joint album by New York hip hop veteran Nas and Jamaican reggae/rapper Damian Marley. Musically it stounds out for its beats & backing vocals, both borrowing African elements, but where it truly distinguishes itself is by the themes it explores, dropping stereotypical hip hop's tribal and materialistic allusions to sex, fame and fortune in favour of deeper wisdom and moral questions such as having grace before desire (Count Your Blessings), valuing strength of character (Friends), and the troubling nature of man's existence (Patience).
Arguably most rap already involves these ideas only in much cruder lyrics. In fact, on the track Friends, Nas' lyric 'real men, we have a code of ethics, no questions / no jealousy, no feminine tendencies...' is instantly comparable to the Jay-Z line 'males shouldn't be jealous, that's a female trait' (track Heart of the City, album The Blueprint). While both exhibit rappers' supposed chauvism when read out of context, Jay-Z is easier to criticize because his sound is very commercial and he's had tremendous mainstream success, putting him in the firing line for hip hop skeptics to label him as just another sexist rapper. Nas, in contrast, sounds more respectable because he and Marley are not ashamed to speak openly about their values with sensitivity and sentiment. They would be unfashionably saccharine if they weren't already highly respected musicians.

I watched Spellbound on Friday night, the American documentary that follows a handful of children before then during the National Spelling Bee. I watched it about ten years ago when it came out in cinemas and absolutely loved it. I suppose the filmmaker did his job; I got caught up in the drama of the spelling bee, I was completely engaged with the story and rode all the bumps with the characters.

This time I watched it I still enjoyed it but acknkowledged it was occasionally dull, such as the early scenes in rural Texas. I realised that the most recent thing I watched from this part of Texas was Friday Night Lights, which involves the punishment & glory of emotionally charged high-stakes football; a rather contrasting genre to a spelling bee (but arguably no more dramatic for its protagonists than Spellbound, in its own way). I noted this with amusement but with equal measure of wariness I also avoided drawing parallels about the way I've changed over the past ten years.