Film review: Blancanieves

Last year, Hollywood coughed up two takes on Snow White: one camp, one dark, neither much cop. Director Pablo Berger’s free interpretation of the Grimm tale offers another angle, both camp and dark, and the result comfortably tops its bigger-budgeted contemporaries by every possible measure: more fun, more stylish and decidedly more memorable.

Set in 1920s Seville, the fairy tale’s key components are given bold makeovers, as the orphaned daughter of a matador father and flamenco star mother joins a travelling troupe of (six) bull-fighting dwarves, with a bandana-wearing rooster named Pepe as her confidant and a wicked stepmother (played with deranged glamour by Maribel Verdú) plotting her demise. Both silent and monochromatic, Berger evokes the filmmaking fashions of the period in which Blancanieves is set, with iris-in wipes and title cards building a cinephile-pleasing pastiche. But like its iconic apple, there’s poison under Blancanieves’ skin, with happy endings replaced by a desperately sad conclusion of which the hardened Grimms would doubtlessly have approved.

On select release now

reviews: Daughn Gibson, Bell X1, Strangers Family Band

                                                   

Daughn Gibson - Me Moan (****)

On All Hell, Daughn Gibson triple-filters country ballads through crackles, loops and warped samples, teasing out an atmospheric production closer to the likes of Vatican Shadow or Demdike Stare than the acts to whom his stage name pays homage (namely 50s/60s cowboy crooner Don Gibson and blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn). Me Moan confidently elaborates upon this already impressive vision, with opener The Sound of Law seizing focus with gritty lyrics (opening line: “my daddy was a beast”) and a colossal, propulsive chorus.

Elsewhere, Mad Ocean revels in a voodoo vibe built from bagpipe wails and Gibson’s oaken baritone, while The Pisgee Nest – based on a real-life tale of sexual exploitation – takes another step into the shadows, with distorted slide guitar wriggling under the skin. But it’s not all so unsettling, with Kissin on the Blacktop’s Footloose-string bends and Won’t You Climb’s romantic shimmer providing the dawn after the darkness.

Out now

                                                    

Strangers Family Band - Strangers Family Band (**)

Back in 2010, Floridian psychedelic rock quartet Strangers Family Band promised their debut would be a sixteen track concept album in the Sgt Peppers/Village Green Preservation Society mould. For whatever reason, in the years since they’ve slashed those plans down to a comparatively concise seven tracks, and it’s a good move: even at 42 minutes, Strangers Family Band feels like too much odyssey and not enough oracle.

The track titles alone - Starship to the Sun, Cosmic Wine, Moonberry Jelly Jam - indicate their propensity towards retro cliché, with the madcap worlds of Syd Barratt, Ray Davies and their ilk freely picked apart and re-offered. Indulgences aside, the band are tight and highly proficient, jamming through heady grooves stuffed with exploratory guitar lines and solid bass backbones. But to play the overdone ‘girl/drug’ lyrical conceit not once but twice (Elle S. Dee, Mary Jane) only emphasises their lack of fresh ideas.
Out 15th July



                                                   

Bell X1 - Chop Chop (**)

For their sixth album, Bell X1 shelve the Talking Heads-aping pop strut and glitchy electronics that flavoured predecessors Blue Lights on the Highway and Bloodless Coup, as part of a deliberate effort to strip their songwriting back to its simplest expression. It’s an understandable urge for the trio but a dangerous one, for Bell X1 aren’t a particularly dynamic troupe (on record at least), and removing layers only draws attention to the fact.

Nonetheless, Chop Chop achieves several moments of elegance, with warm horns elevating Diorama’s easy-listening melodies and The End Is Nigh ticking the ‘anthemic finale’ box ably. But even here Bell X1 betray a lack of distinct personality, with the latter’s strings-hoisted passions glancing where they should pierce, and a shimmering guitar line straight out of Where the Streets Have No Name suggesting they’re still keeping tabs on those other inhabitants of the ‘Dublin-born chart-toppers named after military aircraft’ wiki-stub.

Out now

EIFF 2013: The Complex (Kuroyuri danchi)

Once a feted pioneer of the horror genre (thanks primarily to Ringu’s ground-breaking success), a series of missteps has since seen Hideo Nakata’s stock tumble. Whether Americanising his own canon (The Ring Two) or laying spooks aside for thrills of a more psychological nature (Chatroom, The Incite Mill), the Japanese director has floundered more often than he’s flourished over the last decade, so it’s a relief to see him back in comfortable territory with The Complex.

But with a full house of familiar tropes on show (creepy kids, mysterious neighbours, bumps in the night and a dilapidated old building to put them all in), it quickly starts to seem a little too comfortable. While the central yarn delivers the right mix of pathos and frights, it also feels derivative of past works – in particular Dark Water’s similarly-themed tale of guilt, grief and vengeful child-spirits. An intense finale, however, confirms Nakata’s still a skilled nerve-shredder, with its hysterical, hellish visions proving neatly effective.

EIFF 2013: Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari

Bizarre doesn’t begin to cover Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari’s collection of wild and weird vignettes, filmed on location with the Mari people of remote Northern Russia by Silent Souls director Aleksey Fedorchenko. Each self-contained segment introduces a different female protagonist, and collectively the tales offer considerable variety: sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, but often some indescribable (and frequently discomforting) middle ground.

Sex and magic act as twin totems, with the Mari’s Pagan folklore parlayed into a series of vivid dramas filled with hexes and ritual: prayers are made to trees; corpses are reanimated to avenge spurned love; and in one exceptionally offbeat offering, a live bird takes up residence in a woman’s vagina after a run-in with a forest giant. At its best, the results capture something of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson’s deadpan sketches, though the comparison is perhaps over-flattering to Fedorchenko, who lacks the equivalent pathos. Instead we get bawdy oddness in spades, which ensures you won’t easily forget time spent in its company.

next friday!

Thanks to all who came along to our debut shindig at the Duck last month - it was nice to see so many familiar faces! But that, my friends, was a mere warm-up. On the 19th July, Bottle Rocket 2: The Flying Duck Era kicks off proper, in our new regular slot of the 3rd Friday of every month. Which, conveniently enough, is the same as the old slot, so no need to Tipp-Ex those diaries!

And that’s not the only bit of continuity: expect the usual blend of indiepop, new wave, post punk, soul, rock n roll and probably a moment or two that’ll make you wince (with PLEASURE). By which we mean stuff like Prince, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Camera Obscura, David Bowie, Otis Redding, XTC, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Talk Talk, LCD Soundsystem and all their ilks. Plus any requests you want to fling on the facebook wall.

BOTTLE ROCKET @ THE FLYING DUCK ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
FRIDAY 19th JULY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
11PM – 3AM ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
£5/4 (OR FREE IF YOU GET DOWN BEFORE 11PM) ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
TOAST ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

EIFF 2013: Consequence (Gegenwart)

Despite its English title, a sense of consequence – indeed, causality of any kind – is absent from German director Thomas Heise’s subtle documentary, which detachedly observes the minutiae of a small town crematorium’s daily operations. Its original German title Gegenwart – ‘present’ – seems more apt, not only because of the film’s day-in-the-life structure, but for the way it ironically undercuts the typical connotations – absence, loss, finality – associated with such a workplace.

Heise concentrates his camera on the building’s nuts-and-bolts underbelly – a cold, perfunctory space in which floors must be mopped, surfaces wiped down and furnaces maintained. Amid this, the dead are just another chore, dealt with in a matter-of-fact fashion by employees and filmmaker alike, both of whom treat the abundance of (identical, plain, stackable) coffins with an unemotional sense of routine. While this chilly distance keeps Consequence’s insights slight and somewhat aloof, it also provides a clear point of fascination, with its sober depiction of death (and the people who encounter it daily) neither macabre nor morose.

EIFF 2013: Hawking

“Imagine coming to the end of questions” expresses Mary Hawking – younger sister of cosmologist Stephen – towards the end of this eponymous documentary. She’s referring to her brother’s restless curiosity; an inquisitiveness that helped the Oxford-born physicist overcome severe health problems to become one of science’s most celebrated thinkers. For Stephen to stop contemplating the universe in all its mystery and glory is, she suggests, impossible; there’s simply too much he hungers to know. Unfortunately, viewers may share this feeling of unanswered questions come Hawking’s end credits: for all its wealth of detail, Stephen Hawking the man remains somewhat unknown.

Co-written and narrated by Hawking himself, this elusiveness is possibly traceable to its subject’s conflicted relationship with his own celebrity: having been stung by false press and dogged by concerns that his public profile is as much a consequence of his disability as his academic genius, a reluctance to open up emotionally is understandable. To director Stephen Finnigan’s credit, however, this absence doesn’t damage the film’s overall appeal, with Hawking’s sharp wit foregrounded and his accomplishments vividly catalogued.

EIFF 2013: When Night Falls (Wo Hai You Hua Yao Shuo)

A stanch exposé of real-life injustice, When Night Falls dramatises the plight of Wang Jimnei, whose son Yang Jia was convicted of killing seven police officers following an earlier arrest for a petty misdemeanour. During his trial (and subsequent appeals), Yang’s mother was committed to a mental hospital under false pretences, preventing her from offering emotional or judicial support; by the time she was freed, Yang’s execution was a fait accompli.

These details are imparted early, in a detached but inventive opening sequence consisting of a photograph montage and matter-of-fact voiceover. The core drama then picks up Wang’s story the day she is discharged from hospital, with writer/director Ying Liang adopting a realist, docudrama aesthetic of naturally-lit, fixed-angle shots, with few edits to interrupt the raw emotions. Throughout, our perspective on events is carefully restricted (we don’t know why Yang did what he did precisely because, tragically, Wang doesn’t either – and indeed, never will), while Nai An is superb in the central role, conveying a grief compounded by impotence and – like the film itself – exuding a muted dignity despite the anger simmering inside.

a rather nice poster, advertising the upcoming bottle rocket dates

(design courtesy of Pam Bryden - thanks Pam!)

EIFF 2013: Emperor Visits the Hell

Sixteenth century Chinese novel Journey to the West has been adapted dozens of times in dozens of ways, from cult Japanese television show Monkey to Damon Albarn’s opera of the same name. But it’s safe to presume that Emperor Visits the Hell is a fairly unique take on the material: a tale of shape-shifters, ghosts and celestial executioners rendered emphatically ordinary through use of drably contemporary settings and deadpan performances from a non-professional cast.

In juxtaposing the fantastical and the quotidian, director Li Lou contrives a dry, satirical humour, with the titular underworld little more than an administrative headache, and the machinations of the powerful (ostensibly gods and kings, but visually closer to bureaucrats and other public officials) depicted as comically listless. But as its jarring conclusion foregrounds, there’s anger at work here too, with a final scene – in which the principal actor delivers an out-of-character drunken diatribe – skewing the spotlight away from ancient voyages and towards the political travails of the present.

EIFF 2013: A Story of Children and Film

As its mimetic title might indicate, A Story of Children and Film plays more like an appendix to Mark Cousins’ encyclopaedic The Story of Film than a fresh project. It’s a welcome added chapter, shrugging off historiography in order to thematically dart from country to country, decade to decade, examining cinema’s many depictions of childhood with characteristically contemplative insight.

Neither confined to nor wary of obvious or mainstream examples, Cousins shuffles his cine-deck to find the connections between, for instance, US blockbusters and 30s Japanese cinema (E.T. and Children in the Wind, respectively), or the ways in which Tom and Jerry cartoons and the early work of Lynne Ramsay both use the frame to block out the adult world. With excerpts from 53 films squeezed into 104 curatorial minutes, some readings inevitably cry out for further elaboration (particularly when discussing more obscure or harder-to-obtain selections), but such frustrations are rare; for the most part, this side-odyssey is a stimulating and perspective-broadening experience.

flying duck debut playlist!

Thanks to all who came down for our flying duck debut - here's what we played!

1. scott and charlene's wedding - fakin' nyc
2. paws - homecoming
3. the lemonheads - if i could talk i'd tell you
4. surfer blood - weird shapes
5. jens lekman - an argument with myself
6. the damned - alone again or
7. wolf parade - language city
8. don henley - boys of summer
9. the rolling stones - start me up
10. mc5 - shakin' street
11. pixies - bagboy
12. the clean - tally ho!
13. austra - painful like
14. saint etienne - you're in a bad way
15. christie laume - pas de nouvelles
16. siouxie and the banshees - stargazer
17. sparks - happy hunting ground
18. television - friction
19. the joy formidable - whirring
20. gang of four - return the gift
21. arcade fire - keep the car running
22. edwin starr - 25 miles
23. the score - please please me
24. the kinks - powerman
25. thelma houston - jumping jack flash
26. the kills - cheap and cheerful
27. ladytron - seventeen
28. robyn - in my eyes
29. chvrches - the mother we share
30. vampire weekend - diane young
31. bruce springsteen - thunder road
32. manfred mann - blinded by the light
33. jefferson airplane - somebody to love
34. les surfs - tu seras mi baby
35. chuck berry - no particular place to go
36. the four tops - i can't help myself
37. the replacements - i will dare
38. the stooges - down on the street
39. michael jackson - the way you make me feel
40. mcalmont and butler - yes
41. kirsty maccoll - they don't know
42. cake - the distance
43. transvision vamp - i want your love
44. the sonics - money
45. le tigre - deceptecon
46. buzzcocks -
47. blur - girls and boys
48. the smiths - these things take time
49. the primitives - crash
50. martha reeves - dancing in the street
51. the pipettes - pull shapes
52. talulah gosh - talulah gosh
53. elvis costello - what's so funny (bout peace love and understanding)
54. david bowie - modern love
55. the knack - my sharona
56. queens of the stone age - no one knows
57. manic street preachers - velocity girl
58. idlewild - film for the future
59. the ramones - let's dance
60. elvis - burning love
61. the isley brothers - twist and shout
62. electric light orchestra - don't bring me down
63. prince - i wanna be your lover
64. b-52s - rock lobster
65. pulp - common people
66. magnetic fields - chicken with its head cut off
67. pet shop boys - opportunities
68. fleetwood mac - everywhere
69. huey lewis and the news - hip to be square
70. the clovers - rotten cocksucker's ball