Category: REVIEWS

Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni) is a middle-aged woman trapped in a loveless marriage who has just been diagnosed with the menopause. Her husband, Costas (Andreas Vasileiou) pays little attention to her and when he does it’s because she has done something that he thinks is wrong.

He ignores her requests to improve her life and whenever she goes away from him for too long, Costas tightens the grip on Elpida, making her feel alone, isolated and oppressed. Elpida’s mind is full of fantasies and that is how she copes with her situation, her fantasies are filled with passion, hope and sometimes disturbing thoughts. However, as the film goes on the audience start to question which of Elpida’s fantasies are real and which are not.

Pause is a Greek film that studies the mind of a lonely, repressed woman who feels that all hope is lost. Throughout the course of the film the audience watches alongside Elpida’s experiences as they start to sympathise with her and perhaps even wish that some of her fantasies were indeed real. Although not showing a typical example of domestic abuse, the film does give an account of a couple where the love has gone and Costas’ domineering nature rules over his wife.

Besides Elpida’s fantasies, her only respite from her husband is through her friend, Eleftheria (Popi Avraam) whose approach to life is somewhat different than Elpida’s and she helps her to have some fun from time to time. However, Elpida’s fantasies become all too much and as her fantasies start to become more frequent, the audience start to question her reality and indeed her sanity.

The film takes the audience through Elpida’s state of mind quite closely and the cast all do an excellent job to show exactly how close Elpida may be to cracking under the pressure. Fyrogeni puts in an excellent performance as the put-upon housewife who longs for something better and Vasileiou equally gives a strong performance as the cantankerous and supremely selfish Costas.

PAUSE by Tonia Mishiali (Cyprus, Greece) from european film promotion on Vimeo.

Through its slow and deliberate pacing, the film gradually increases Elpida’s fantasies and due to the clever direction and editing it builds up its audience only to knock them back down again. This not only gives the audience an idea of Elpida’s mindset but helps them understand just how she is feeling at any given moment. Other films try to give a more empowering and hopeful message to women like Elpida but Pause takes a different route, carefully guiding its audience down avenues they may have not been expecting, leaving them with more questions than answers by the end.

Ultimately though, this makes the film better because it is able to talk to a wider audience and not just those who could relate to her experiences so closely. Pause is not a comfortable watch but perhaps the way it lets the audience into Elpida’s mind it may make some more empathetic towards someone whose experiences may be so far removed from their own.

Prayers To The Gods Of Guerrilla Filmmaking: Review

If you have already seen films which appear to be documentaries or mockumentaries, but are in fact fiction, or the reverse, prepare yourself for this ambiguous tale. A straight-talking Italian writer/director named Marco Brunelli goes to Hong Kong, a humming and intriguing city, hoping to blend in while making his film.

He’s spent everything on it and is now cashless. He has warned the five cast and crew, who he has flown in for the film, principally from Canada, that they’ll be staying in a bad place, that there will be a tight schedule, and they’ll be paying for their own food and transport. 

Inspired by Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, Brunelli moves them into the windowless Chungking Mansion building in Hong Kong’s Kowloon, and bizarrely brings along a film crew to document the process, led by Johanna Taylor. This is either 1. Selfies gone mad, or 2. A master class in low budget film making.  

Marco Brunelli’s mantra goes a bit like this: “This is like the Nouvelle Vague in the 60s when people went to Paris and just started to shoot.” The key to this guerilla method is no permits. If you look it up, it’s true.  Hong Kong is one of the few cities that does not require a film-permit to film on the streets. So, he chose the right place. 

In December 2011 the six strangers arrived to shoot the feature film – The Night Of The Great Chinese Lottery – in three weeks. A terrible pitch, according to one of the three actors, Andrew, perhaps the worst pitch in history, but still the actors showed up because, as they said: we weren’t doing anything else at the time. This is a small budget movie apparently trying to look like a big-budget one, whatever that means.

Andrew, in the role of ‘Patrick’ appears throughout in his natural role of smug twenty-one-year old male constantly mocking the director for amongst other things his style, script, receding hair-line and scarf. You can see where this is going. One of the first lessons of guerrilla film making is that there is a significant disadvantage to not paying your actors. You can end up in the terrible position of dealing with their petulance, arguments and innuendos amongst a constant string of expletives.

And in this case while having it all filmed! The anxious and difficult-to-read Marco did bring it on himself by choosing a person he declared both ‘obnoxious and annoying’. Andrew (Patrick) certainly plays to type, even calling himself a stubborn smart-aleck. Good luck with that. 

Second lesson: Marco needs a producer. As he runs around madly location-scouting, finding fixers, taking risks, being insulted, and making sure the schedule is being adhered to, the viewer begins to understand the role of a producer. Essential. This is a great film for understanding the nitty-gritty of filmmaking. 

Third lesson: Comfortable beds. Faced with a grotty hostel, low budget, and annoying people, this situation would appear to bring out the worst in anyone. And we know that lack of sleep is a form of torture. By the end even the lovely sound-producer Alejandro, has no shame in calling the director lazy. The impression I get of this film is that lazy is definitely one word that doesn’t describe Marco Brunelli.

Apparently, guerrilla film appears to involve little pre-preparation. Spontaneous and stressful for the director as well as the frustrated actors who feel as though their time is being wasted. However, it’s hard to confirm this when none of them was acting professionally. `Fourth lesson: Employ people you like. Mutual respect usually brings out the best in people. Mathieu, in the role of Eli, will be getting jobs all over the place after Prayers To The Gods Of Guerrilla Filmmaking is released. 

The worst and most intriguing part of Taylor’s film is her invisible presence. Without it the film crew would have nobody to complain to, play up to, or witness their graceless arguments.  Yet, Prayers To The Gods Of Guerrilla Filmmaking is an interesting study of making something out of one person’s vision. And Marco Brunelli and cinematographer Francisco Fuentes (//www.birdothebird.com) certainly have that. In the end it’s hard to know whether this is a film inside a film or just one film. Did Brunelli’s 2012 film get a screening somewhere, or is this it?

Prayers To The Gods Of Guerrilla Filmmaking is out now.

Watch here – //www.guerrilla-film.com/ or via Amazon: //www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B07GXZ2M2B

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.

Gloria Bell is out in cinemas now.

Little Did You Know, The Confessions Of David McGillivray: Book Review

The life of a film critic is one of excitement, danger and passion. At least that’s what they told me when I first became interested in writing reviews. Luckily, horror icon David McGillivray’s autobiography ‘Little Did You Know – The Confessions of David McGillivray’ tells the reader that with the right attitude and the right opportunities, your life can be anything you make of it.

McGillivray gives a very personal and meticulously detailed account of his life from very different standpoints. Some of them focus on his work while others tell of his friends, family and the relationships he’d rather not have.

Little Did You Know is also not just an allusion to the genre of seventies soft porn, something which he ventured into with ‘I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight’, but is also a very fitting title as McGillivray’s autobiography very much reads in that way – a confession.

David McGillivray talks about the many different things he has done with his life, from writing film reviews, screenplays, acting in Edinburgh and even a little drug dealing on the side. His self-deprecating, dry wit never comes across as self-congratulatory and pompous as it might from others with bigger egos, but instead is quite the opposite as he talks about his life in a very matter of fact kind of way.

McGillivray’s accounts are often funny, deeply personal and occasionally punctuated with moments of bold honesty. A kind of honesty which never appear to be written to sensationalise his life, but rather his ‘confessions’ just seem to be the things that have been on his mind for a very long time. Thankfully, now that he has been given the opportunity to write it all down, hopefully he can finally feel at ease with them, an approach for an autobiography that is admirable.

For those expecting a tell-all tale of the debauched side of London’s hidden underground of sex, drugs and rock and roll then they may find themselves disappointed as McGillivray tells his story as he lived it and with very little flourish or exaggeration.

It may seem glamorous and racy when seen from afar, but as David McGillivray may suggest, life is just a series of successes and failures that just so happen to occur between the things that matter.

Also, having taken advice myself from McGillivray’s book, if he were to personally ask me what I thought of his autobiography then I would only have one thing to say. I loved it. You can quote me on that too (as long as you get my name right).

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.

DECADE OF FIRE theatrical trailer from Gretchen Hildebran on Vimeo.

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.