Film Vehicle Breakdowns: Have you ever broken down on the side of the road because of an avoidable issue? If you have, you’re definitely not the only one. Each year, Highways England deal with more than 85,000 breakdowns on the roads they patrol. Many of these are caused by problems regular maintenance could have solved quickly and with ease.
In fact, in the last two years alone, more than 40 per cent of the Film Vehicle breakdowns Highways England attended were due to vehicles running out of fuel, poor tyre maintenance, power loss and engine trouble.
It seems as though Hollywood is reflecting reality – and the folks at Halfords delved into 27 films featuring on screen breakdowns to see what vehicle maintenance lessons we all can learn from the cinematic world.
They’ve asked and answered all these questions and more and discovered that an eye-popping 89% of these Film Vehicle breakdowns took place in America…Hollywood ‘ey! Not only this but our findings show the importance of regular tyre checks. Films such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Rocky Horror Picture Show saw their characters get in a spot of bother as a result of flat tyres.
Learn all you need to know and more with the help of the infographic below and take note of the 27 car maintenance lessons that 27 films can teach us all.
By Naseem Ally. Gloria Bell, Julian Moore’s latest film sees her staring as Gloria, a free-spirited divorcee looking to get her mojo back via the nightlife of Los Angeles. She starts out as a wallflower who is socially awkward; making for great entertainment seeing her bust a move amongst the eccentric lighting and disco soundtracks in this film.
Gloria is the main vocal point and the camerawork in this film captures this accurately. It’s a very intimate showing of Gloria’s day to day life. The extreme close ups reveal this lost, out of place, woman looking for a sense of belonging, amongst the drug and sex fueled escapades she embarks on in LA.
There’s a great shot, where the camera spins with Gloria as she gets on a merry go round. It feels like the appropriate metaphor for this film. Once her dating life blossoms after meeting Arnold, played by John Turturro, the film constantly weaves in and out losing it’s cohesiveness.
It feels a bit frustrating as you get invested in the story.
There’s two lines in the movie that spring to mind. ‘Some days I’m happy, some days I’m not’ and ‘When the world blows up, I hope I go down dancing’. This is a perfect analogy as after Gloria and Arnold hit it off enjoying each others company, the cracks of her dating life unravel in drastic ways.
From lashing out with a paintball gun to waking up at a deck chair in Vegas, after drowning her sorrows in a cocktail of marijuanna and booze. It seems like flicking through her diary entry and picking out a page.
Perhaps this is a reflection of Gloria’s intimate tale of coming to terms with her frustrations as a divorcee whilst aiming to recapture a glimpse of her youth.
Data Breaches & Cybersecurity Within The Film Industry
By Frankie Wallace.
If you pay attention to the media, then chances are you have been seeing more and more stories about cyberattacks. These types of stories tend to tell consumers about how companies lose an enormous amount of customer data, have their entire networks shut down by third parties, or in the case of some governments, find out their elections have been tampered with. It’s in the news so often because it’s becoming a common occurrence, and the repercussions have been extremely negative.
This has also made it into film, of course. Some of the biggest hacking cases in history have affected companies across all industries, from transportation to the manufacturers and retailers of the products you use every day. Considering its prevalence, it makes sense that movies would be made about it. For instance, movies like ‘Snowden’ have addressed real-life issues surrounding cybersecurity and the most perilous consequences our society has seen regarding it.
Unfortunately, cybersecurity mishaps step
beyond the topic of our favorite movies and have begun to threaten the movie
industry itself. If we as a culture can do better to understand how prevalent
cyberattacks are in our society and why, then maybe the film industry can
narrow down the risks they themselves face and respond accordingly. Only after
the film industry understands these risks will it be able to protect itself
against them.
There Has Been a Digital Assault
on Our Society
Our society is under persistent attack by cybercriminals, and we’ve feeling the reverberations of this assault long before Edward Snowden ever did anything movie-worthy. Internet hackers have been around for a long time (remember ‘War Games’ with Matthew Broderick?), but there are more opportunities for them to interfere with the world now due to the accessibility of technology.
Because everything is stored on computers nowadays and most everyone has a computer, data breaches have become extremely common. Airlines, banks, schools, and businesses of all sorts have fallen victim to them. It’s an ever-evolving arms race: Though protections are more technically proficient, so are hackers’ abilities.
It’s not just about traditional computers either; the mobile devices you carry in your pocket can also be exploited. Smartphones are gold mines for data breaches. Some parties have found it necessary to destroy their cellphones when data threats increased and there is too much is at stake. Before you get to that point however, using encryption and passcodes, as well as being very careful of what information you access through your mobile device, is important.
The Cyberthreat to Film as We
Know It
How does this newfound social focus on
cybersecurity affect the film industry? Hollywood is stacked with cash, so
surely they have the best cybersecurity measures in the game, right? Well, you
might be surprised to know just how much damage cybercrime has already done to
the industry.
HBO, Netflix, and Sony have all been victims
of severe hacking incidents. And because these companies haven’t put the proper
effort toward tightening up their cybersecurity, the personal information and
livelihood of actors, movie makers, and film crews have been stolen, putting
those people at risk.
It’s not just the people working on movies
that could be ruined, though. In some of these cases, unreleased movie
information has been leaked. Hackers could ruin premieres, and movie sales
could plummet similar to how music sales have, putting hardworking people on
the street and debilitating the strength of surprise in entertainment.
Hackernoon explained why the media industry in general is so susceptible to data breaches. You may be surprised to find that the number of parties involved in the film industry plays a large role in this vulnerability:
Hollywood is
especially susceptible to cyber security threats due to the sheer number of
people who are involved in every movie or television show that is produced. In
addition to the core production team, studios typically hire a wide range of
freelancers to write music scores, generate special effects, and complete many
other tasks that are essential to the success of a film or TV show. While this
may be an excellent artistic choice, the long chain of people creates a
multitude of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers.
While the industry itself has a lot of power,
that power and decision-making is split among so many people that nothing is
completely safe. Making the situation worse, when their employers aren’t
protecting them, their sensitive information (as well as the data of film
production companies) is vulnerable to attack.
On the one hand,
you’ve got a massive wall of ice that serves to protect the realm against
hostile invaders and zombies defended by an underappreciated force of guardians
who are doing all they can to hold the line. On the other, enterprise firewalls
assailed by cyber-attackers and botnets, and there’s an equally beleaguered
staff tasked with keeping out the bad guys.
Without sufficient protections, you can bet
your bottom dollar that winter will come … and likely faster than you might
expect.
What Hollywood can do starts with considering
their people first — not just the stars of movies, but the people investing
their time, funds, and talents into making film what it is. Additionally, film
studios can use parts of the large budgets they give out every year to invest
in better, actively updated cybersecurity methods.
The film industry needs to prepare for more
cyberattacks to keep itself stable. Industry heads need to understand how these
things affect society and what threat they pose to the stability of the
entertainment business as a whole. Protecting the mystique surrounding new
movies and the data of people making these movies is the only way to ensure the
industry doesn’t sink. But time will tell whether the parties in charge make
this a priority before it’s too late.
Within the opening seconds of Decade of Fire, we are told: ‘We did not burn the South Bronx. In fact, we were the ones who saved it.’ This singular statement tells us exactly what kind of documentary we are about to see, laying the foundations for what is essentially a passionate personal account from somebody who lived through the fires that savaged the area in the 1970s.
Vivian Vazquez has collaborated with fellow filmmaker Gretchen Hildebran to tell her story, and it is this personal account that gives the film the layers it needs to have a genuine impact on the audience. The wide array of archive footage is impressive to say the very least, telling the story purely visually and offering intimate accounts of the incidents at the time, but it could have ran the risk of feeling no more than the sum of its parts were it not for the story Vazquez tells and the way in which she tells it. Her voice-over feels very real, personal and emotive, giving new meaning to the scenes we are shown. This alone turns Decade of Fire into more of a story, with a strong structure and an effect that builds.
However, while Vazquez’s personal touch is the film’s greatest strength, it may also be its bigger flaw. When a documentary is told from this perspective, it’s difficult as a viewer to shake off the clearly biased standpoint coming from the filmmakers. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this per se, but it does bring to question the various things we may hear throughout. Most of what we are told is presented alongside accompanying footage, but when we reach the final act we are told things in a very matter-of-fact manner without too much to seal the deal. As the film reaches its conclusion, it feels less ‘history from a personal perspective’ than it does a ‘professional edited set of views’, which is where the film can begin to create problems for itself.
That being said, these issues are few and far between. This film is interesting throughout and Vazquez adds far more to the film than she takes away. The final act, while problematic, is also unquestionably the most emotive aspect of the feature, as the tragic events we have been shown build to a genuinely inspiring conclusion, leaving us with hope for the future in spite of the many things we are warned of. We are told that we as people can overcome these dangers together, and there is something surprisingly hopeful and proud in Vazquez’s voice. After all, it’s the people who rebuilt their community, in spite of a society blaming them for the failings of others.
News reported that the people of the Bronx simply did not care about their homes enough, and Decade of Fire asserts itself as a correction to that false ideal. We are on the ground, amongst the community, witnessing their suffering and their efforts to overcome it. It’s a personal and intimate account of an incident that really needed it, and while Vasquez’s bias can bring some elements into doubt, it’s also precisely what makes the film so successful and valuable as a historical artefact.
The film peaks in these up-close moments, that bring us to the heart of the issue and the people involved, as opposed to its more preachy aspects. Decade of Fire does not need to preach. What we are shown, along with Vasquez’s terrific voice-over, is more than enough to ensure the film lingers long in our memory once finished. It is a film not without flaws, but one that towers over them to remain vital viewing.
The yakuza film is one of the stalwart genres in Japanese film, going back to the pioneering days of silent cinema. Over the decades it has been reborn in numerous different guises, often functioning as a mirror of the dreams and nightmares of its time. Whether they paint the members of the Japanese underworld as snarling brutes, incorrigible cowards, or morally upright heroes, yakuza films can always be counted upon to deliver a cavalcade of vengeance-fuelled action, pinkie-chopping, complex gangland intrigue, and tattoos – lots and lots of tattoos.
One of the earliest examples of what could be regarded as a yakuza film is Daisuke Ito’s A Diary of Chuji’s Travels (1927), of which sadly only fragments survive. What we know of the story revolves around folk hero Chuji Kunisada, a yakuza boss travelling Edo-era Japan incognito, trying to stay out of the hands of the law while hoping to right the wrongs that have been done in his own clan during his absence. Director Ito was one of the pioneers of popular cinema in Japan, effectively creating the chanbara or period actioner with his signature highly kinetic, fast-paced style and stories of heroic outlaws.
While gangster characters subsequently appeared in a wide variety of Japanese films, from Yasujiro Ozu’s Dragnet Girl (1933) to Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), it would be halfway into the 1960s until the Toei studio created an actual yakuza genre. Dubbed ‘chivalry films’ (ninkyo eiga), they typically featured upright, honourable gangster heroes living by the underworld code and defending the weak, as representatives of the good old ways of Japanese tradition in a rapidly modernising turn-of-the-century Japan. It was no coincidence that the mid-60s emergence and peak popularity of the genre coincided with the reconstruction of Tokyo into a gleaming modern metropolis ready to welcome the Olympics and the technological marvel of the shinkansen bullet train.
Red Peony Gambler from 1968, directed by Kosaku Yamashita, is among the more iconic productions in Toei’s hugely prolific output of that decade. Star Junko Fuji is the placid but deadly beauty who wanders the land as a card player, making alliances in film after film with her two male fellow icons of the genre, Ken Takakura and Koji Tsuruta. Takakura would later break into Hollywood, notably opposite Robert Mitchum in Sidney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974) – a film co-written by Paul Schrader, who had clearly studied the Toei-style gang film in great detail: the same year he would deliver a hugely influential study of the genre in the pages of Film Comment magazine.
Though the yakuza film is synonymous in the popular imagination with the Toei studio, rival companies also dabbled generously in the genre. Nikkatsu delivered many, including several by the inimitable Seijun Suzuki, who would often mock the conventions of this and any other genre that passed through his hands.
The Daiei studio was better known for its chanbara swordplay actioners, but it must be remembered that its most iconic character, the blind swordsman Zatoichi, is effectively a proto-yakuza: like Chuji Kunisada he is a member of the outcast class and wandering gambler in Edo-era Japan. Zatoichi actor Shintaro Katsu played an actual yakuza in another Daiei hit series built around his gruff persona: Hoodlum Soldier, directed by the great Yasuzo Masumura (of Red Angel and The Blind Beast fame), revolves around a gangster drafted to serve in the Imperial Japanese Army on the Manchurian front, who teams with a pacifist sergeant to hatch a string of insubordinate ploys meant to keep them away from the battlefield as long as possible.
The Shochiku studio may be better known for its genteel home dramas, it also had a little-seen “hidden face” as purveyor of populist fare throughout the 1960s and ’70s, including the odd yakuza film often made by directors on loan from other studios. One of the most lauded proponents of the Toei yakuza film, director Tai Kato, ironically made his best film at Shochiku.
Released in 1966, By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him is in some ways a predecessor to Kinji Fukasaku’s gangster films of the following decade, in that it places its tale of gang warfare in a context of ethnic tensions between zainichi Koreans and native Japanese mobsters in the immediate aftermath of defeat in World War II. Starring former real-life gangster Noboru Ando and future Tampopo director Juzo Itami, it is a film ripe for rediscovery.
In its own loopy way, Yakuza Law by Teruo Ishii represents another transitional point between the chivalrous gang films that had been its producer Toei’s bread and butter for the better part of the 1960s and the rough-and-ready ‘true account’ style of yakuza movie that would come to dominate the ’70s. As the final entry in Ishii’s ‘torture cycle’, it is an omnibus of three tales in which gang members stray from the underworld code, only to receive a violent comeuppance at the end. Each episode is set in a different era of Japanese history, with the final segment bringing the genre into the then-contemporary late 1960s. All that was left was for someone to drag the impeccably stylish but also rather staid yakuza film kicking and screaming through the grit of a new and far more ruthless decade.
That someone would be Kinji Fukasaku, who had delivered a number of quite promising modern-day gang tales at the close of the 1960s, but who truly dynamited the genre with 1972’s Street Mobster and the following year’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity. In these, sneering young punks and battlefield returnees fight for survival in the urban slums and black markets of the late 1940s, banding together and growing into the modern-day yakuza organisations that will ride the lucrative waves of reconstruction and economic growth in the decades that follow.
Literally plucked from the headlines, these ‘true account’ films saw Fukasaku experimenting with techniques borrowed from documentaries, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave, all while telling his tales of rise and fall at a breakneck pace. The epoch-making success of Battles Without Honour and Humanity led to a five-film series, and the director spent a good part of the decade churning out a host of variations on the same themes and style, including Cops vs. Thugs and the ferocious Graveyard of Honour.
As the true-account style ran out of steam toward the end of the 1970s, the following decade saw a general shift in Japanese cinema toward catering to a female demographic. This move also, perhaps somewhat improbably, affected the yakuza film, which suffered from a drastically reduced output that nevertheless produced a handful of real gems aimed at this new audience. Among the notable yakuza titles of the 1980s, the long-running Yakuza Wives series from Toei ranks as the biggest success, while the independently made Ryuji, about the daily domestic travails of a married gang member, managed to garner a cult following that endures to this day.
The blockbuster production Sailor Suit and Machine Gun is especially worth spotlighting, in that it combined the yakuza genre with the idol movie, as a high-school girl inherits a faltering yakuza gang after her aging oyabun father passes away. Produced by the media-savvy Kadokawa Films, it offers a high-concept, crowd-pleasing tale that is directed by indie luminary Shinji Shomai in a highly unconventional one-scene-one-take style.
Coming at the tail end of a decade in which the yakuza film re-emerged as the go-to genre for Japan’s straight-to-video “V-Cinema” market, Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive is perhaps the ultimate 1990s yakuza film. It embodies and indeed epitomizes both the fanciful excess and the keen social awareness that were the twin characteristics of the best of that decade’s output – while remaining resolutely idiosyncratic at the same time.
In a move reportedly inspired by the Pacino-DeNiro pairing in Michael Mann’s Heat, it stars the two undisputed kings of V-Cinema, the eternally pompadoured Riki Takeuchi and the versatile Show Aikawa, the former as a Chinese-Japanese criminal spectacularly encroaching on yakuza turf and the latter as the cop with orders from the wrong bosses to take him down. Starting out with a blitzkrieg descent into the Tokyo underworld and capping off with, well, something best left unspoken if you haven’t seen it, it packs in everything from a decidedly dingy backroom porn shoot to an immortal and omniscient chef plying his trade in Yokohama’s Chinatown.
With the implosion of the video rental market in the 2000s, V-cinema went into a downward spiral of ever-dwindling budgets. Directors who had made their name in the genre during the 1990s either went onto bigger and better things (such as Miike’s move into family fare) or gave up on filmmaking entirely (such as Rokuro Mochizuki of Another Lonely Hitman and Onibi: The Fire Within fame, now a struggling stage director). The vacuum they left has yet to be filled, but since the avenues for amateur and indie filmmakers in Japan remain numerous – notably through events such as the Pia Film Festival and the Yubari Fantastic Film Festival – young fans of the genre have lately emerged with their own takes on the genre.
Most of these are affectionate if derivative homages that exhibit their shoestring budgets, but Hiroshi Shoji’s Ken and Kazu went for a more intimate approach that channelled the best aspects of the aforementioned Ryuji and Takeshi Kitano’s Kids Return. Focusing on young people that have to make impactful life choices, it treats petty crime as a bullshit job like any other for a Japanese millennial – though coming face to face with the yakuza is perhaps not the best of prospects for those wishing to settle down and start a family.
