Recent viewing includes the big-budget Furious 7 and the smaller but better It Follows, as well as a collection of older genre movies on disk.
Viewing notes, March-April 2015: part one
Category: Commentary
Blaxploitation and historical counter-narrative
Watching Blacula (1972) while reading James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work turns up some surprising depths in the cheap blaxploitation horror movie.
Val Guest on Blu-ray
Surprisingly, the underrated British director Val Guest has recently been represented by a flurry of Blu-ray releases, two of which highlight some of his finest work while the third makes available one of his lesser known minor films of the ’50s.
More recent animation
Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata creates a masterpiece in his final feature, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, while Hiroyuki Okiura seems a worthy successor to the studio’s achievements with A Letter to Momo; less successful is Ari Folman’s live action/animation hybrid Robin Wright at The Congress.
The pleasures of hand-made animation
Despite the dominance of computer animation these days, there are qualities in hand-made animation, whether drawn or stop-motion, which offer a richer, more aesthetically pleasing viewer experience, as evidenced by a random selection of new and classic releases.
The cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet
In their Blu-ray set of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first six features, the BFI provide a superb introduction to novelist and filmmaker’s radical and frequently controversial work which combines high art with lowly genre tropes in illuminating and surprisingly entertaining ways.
An evening with Jonathan Rosenbaum
An opportunity to meet my favourite film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, turned out to be a rich evening of films from around the world.
Watching Horror
Watching horror, like watching war films, is a way to experience fear without actually being vulnerable. Vicarious thrills allow us to indulge emotions which, in real situations, would be very unpleasant. We always have the guarantee of personal survival, the threats contained within structured narratives which, traditionally, provided us with a way back to normality.
Recent Viewing: more horror from Arrow
More releases from Arrow range from the reality based and historical horror of Deranged and Mark of the Devil to the flawed black comedy of The ‘Burbs.
Recent Viewing: horror from Arrow Video
Arrow Video has quickly become one of my favourite sources for both genre and “art” films, with impressive editions of a wide range of titles; most recently I’ve been immersing myself in some of their horror releases.
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