Wednesday 7 February 2024

Inside Cinema - Shorts - 1 to 10

 

There are ninety six short episodes of the BBC's Inside Cinema on iPlayer. All the photos below are the ones they posted online. What is great is that you never see the narrator, just the excerpts from films they are describing. These are the first ten.


Catherine Bray introduces the first episode Women in Red. Among the many films are Catherine Diaz in The Mask, and the  women in The Matrix, Ghost Ship and Death Becomes Her.

In Spacesuit Style, Christina Newland (she appears in many of the Sky Arts programmes about movies) takes us through films such as 1950's Destination Moon, Journey to the Seventh Planet from 1962, some more recent movies and some of which I had never heard, including some foreign films. It's amazing just to see all the different designs of spacesuits for each movie.

Christina again,  telling us all about Meg Ryan in When Meg Met Nora. In 1989 the pair collaborated on When Harry Met Sally followed by Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and five years later on You've Got Mail. We see clips from all three as well as three other Meg Ryan films: Kate and Leopold, James Mangan's 2001 rom-com,  The Women and In the Cut, all so very different.


Nixon's America: A Country Divided. Christina starts with the brilliant The Conversation from 1974 before looking at the background to the Viet Nam war and the riots. Joe from 1970 was a film I didn't know and Winter Soldier was a controversial documentary. All the cinema chains in America refused to show it. Punishment Park was pulled after four days. But it was Easy Rider that was the worst clip when a biker is gratuitously shot by a passing truck. That would not get made today.


 The scream is from Toni Collette in the 2018 film Hereditary that introduces The Menace of Miniature. She is making all these models in Ari Aster's feature debut. This episode by Grace Lee is too horrific for me.


Much more interesting was Michael Leader's Burton's Gotham. He shows us clips from the 1989 film Batman. The exterior crowd scenes look great, but it was the production design of director Tim Burton and Oscar winner Anton Furst (Full Metal Jacket) that was truly remarkable. Hugely expensive, these sets at Pinewood Studios would "unlikely ever to be repeated, matched or surpassed." The film is compared to Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy that went for real locations, not that futuristic nightmare. 

Here is Hayley Joel Osmont who "can see dead people" in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense. Among them a certain lead actor. Six Oscar nominations for this unexpected smash hit. The Sixth Sense Untwisted is narrated by Leigh Singer who called the movie "a game changer" and shows us why.


Mike Muncer leads us through Fears of a Clown. We see Lon Chaney's 1924 film and lots of different clown costumes in mostly horror movies. Again, lots that were new to me including 2017's Terrifier. Just don't get me started about It.

It's Robbie Collin this time talking about Hollywood Action Figures. From Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolf Valentino, all quite muscular, to the gym toned Stallone and Arnie. Their personas are instilled in more modern movies such as the Fast and Furious and Marvel franchises. "Behinds you can get behind". If you like that sort of thing.

And here is Megan Fox working her way through High School in Sophie Monks Kaufman's episode called  Maneaters. We see all kinds of femme fatale in horror films. From the excellent  Byzantium in 2012 to the ugly Raw from 2016 and Park Chan-wook's 2009's Thirst starring Song Kang-ho, the lead actor in award winning Parasite. 

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