Friday 19 April 2024

Sight and Sound Magazine - May 2024

 

On the front cover is Hamaguchi Ryusuke, whose film Drive My Car was one of the best last year. See post 22nd December 2023.

The Editorial concerns that fictional character Tom Ripley. I would not have been interested in the Netflix version with Andrew Scott, but much more so for Mike Williams' discussion about Wim Wenders' The American Friend. 

Opening Scenes is all about the controversy surrounding Jonathon Glazer's acceptance speech at the Oscars.

Editor's Choice concerns a retrospective of the films of Chantal Akerman whose film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels is many critics favourite film. But a three hour twenty one minute tedious documentary drama is not on my list to see. More interesting would be the BFI Southbank Events surrounding Lindsay Anderson  in "Dark British Cinema".

Preview discusses a new film Eno about Brian Eno's "musical" life. Not a review of this film, more the background to it's making. Seems a complicated movie about a complex individual conceiving "ambient" music.  I only know Eno from Roxy Music when he played synthesizer. 

Report looks at the Argentine film industry and the cutbacks by new President Javier Milei.

The Ballot Of .... looks at the favourite films of Spanish director Pablo Berger that include Hannah and Her Sisters.

The Long Take this month features Pamela Hutchinson talking about swearing in movies, including films such as the recent  Wicked Little Letters, The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Atonement ("one misplaced four letter word"), The King's Speech and of course Hugh Grants expletive ridden opening to Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Flick Lit has Nicole Flattery comparing Don DeLillo's essay about the Kennedy assassination with Oliver Stone's JFK.  She asks is DeLillo's 1988 novel Libra "time for it's adaptation?". 

TV Eye: Andrew Male on why Three Body Problem is so much better than post Game of Thrones series such as Shogun. It sounds wonderful, and so does the trailer. Shame that it's on Netflix so I will just have to wait.

"A Crack Where The Light Gets In" is the title of the headline piece about Hamaguchi Ryusuke. Eleven pages in all about his career with Adrian Martin reflecting on his early movies and influences. There is then an interview at the end about his latest film. I liked the snapshots of his eighteen films which include documentaries. Drive My Car was his "biggest international success". His Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is on my list to see. However his new film Evil Does Not Exist may not be so good. 

"The Dark Side Of The Tune" has five pages about Mika Levi, the "composer" for The Zone of Interest. More sound than music, she (sorry, "they") first worked with Jonathon Glazer on Under The Skin which I saw at the cinema. See my post of 31st March 2014, a very weird film. 

Skipping a couple of articles we arrive at the film reviews. That for Dune Part 2 seemed a little late, The Trouble with Jessica has been and gone in a week, Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding looks interesting. Monkey Man is too violent for me and the rest are mainly European films that will be hard to find. 

There were then quite a few pieces that were of no interest to me, nothing in DVD and Blue Ray reviews, or in Wider Screen, or in Books or Endings. From The Archive, however, is a 1973 interview with the director Richard Lester (The Beatles' films A Hard Day's Night and Help came about when John Lennon liked his The Running, Jumping and Standing Still film from 1959) and others including the three movies of The Musketeers, How I Won The War (1967), A Funny Thing Happened On The Way to the Forum (the 1966 Buster Keaton movie) and The Knack And How To Get It that won the 1965 Palme D'Or. Lester was actually born in Philadelphia but stayed in the UK. He won the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012 and is now 92! But best of all was from his 1968 film Petulia as we got a full page photo of Julie Christie.

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