When published in 1982, Roald Dahl’s The BFG was dedicated to the memory of his late daughter, Olivia, who died age seven some 20 years prior. In 2016, the live-action adaptation of the novel from director Steven Spielberg takes on a bittersweet quality of its own: its screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, passed away due to cancer eight months before the film’s release. In the same year The BFG was published, Spielberg and Mathison collaborated on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which has endured as one of the most beloved family films in cinema history. Spielberg’s adaptation of The BFG not only succeeds as a lovely swansong for the screenwriter but also proves the director’s most charming fusion of whimsy and childlike wonder since that career milestone – you know, excluding the one where a robot child’s world goes to hell less than halfway through…
Monthly Archives: July 2016
A Patch of Fog (Michael Lennox, 2015)
Following Oscar-nominated short Boogaloo and Graham, A Patch of Fog marks the feature debut of Northern Irish director Michael Lennox. Belfast is the setting of this low-budget thriller, though with nary a reference to the Troubles in the film’s screenplay or geography, the two-hander drama could plausibly take place just about anywhere. It’s in the mould of thrillers like Misery and The Fan, where a symbiotic relationship begins between a media personality and an obsessive stalker, though any veers towards violence as a means of conflict resolution in A Patch of Fog come only after a considerably lengthy bout of mind games first. And in being set in the run-up to 25th December, it offers a new contender for the misanthrope crowd to declare as their favourite Christmas film – take that, The Proposition…
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