I joined the Sordid Cinema podcast team to discuss Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver in a spoiler-filled chat.
Monthly Archives: June 2017
Bong Joon-ho on ‘Okja’ & Netflix
“Someone said it’s very difficult to define, this movie. For me, that is the biggest praise.” South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is speaking of his latest project, but such a query of genre and tonal classification could easily be applied to most of his prior features as a director – from debut Barking Dogs Never Bite to Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother and Snowpiercer. With pretty much all of them, you think you know what you’re going to get based on a glance at the plot synopsis, only for a considerably different beast to emerge during viewing; sometimes multiple different beasts…
Marianna Palka on ‘Bitch’, ‘GLOW’ & feminist films
The Skinny is chatting to Marianna Palka, the Scottish writer, director and actor, who’s fresh off the close of the Sundance London film festival where her latest directorial effort, Bitch, has just played. Glasgow-born though largely US-based since her teens, Palka has her “finger in both pies”, as she describes it, regarding filmmaking in her two home countries. “I’m always working on getting stuff done in Scotland and getting stuff done in America at the same time,” she says, “so it’s kind of like whatever happens first happens. But there’s many plans to do many things here that are really exciting…
Transformers: The Last Knight (Michael Bay, 2017)
Transformers: The Last Knight makes no sense, but somehow still makes more sense than the previous film, Age Of Extinction. In almost only that sense, it is a success…
American Gods – Episode 8
Considering their show is so much about taking a leap of faith, it’s appropriate that Bryan Fuller and Michael Green took their own one in ending the first season of American Gods on a cliffhanger before they even knew for certain that a second season was to be greenlit (spoiler: it has been). It’s a pretty satisfying one, too, thanks to the quality of the rest of the episode. Some non-book readers may be wondering when the heck anyone is going to get to Wisconsin, but, for the most part, viewers will have their faith rewarded…
A Snapshot of American Independent Cinema in 2017
Returning for its fifth instalment (and second in a row at the lavish Picturehouse Central), the team behind this year’s Sundance London gave British audiences a flavour of the American indie scene of 2017. As well as bringing together UK, European or international premieres of various buzzy titles that made their initial bow at the main Sundance Film Festival back in January, this year also offered big screen revivals of some past Sundance premieres of note (Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape among them) and the first instance of a surprise film (Patti Cake$, out on general release this autumn), as well as the usual shorts programme and filmmaker talks.
This year’s main lineup was a mixed bag quality-wise, and it certainly didn’t look great that only one of the 14 premiering features (Marianna Palka’s Bitch) was directed by a woman – last year had three, including closing film Tallulah. That said, the strongest titles were very strong, and there was definitely variety to the stories and filmmaking styles on display. The Skinny caught the vast majority of this year’s feature lineup, so here’s an unranked top five of some of the most notable or distinctive films on offer, some of which will be arriving in UK cinemas or on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime soon…
Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017)
From his ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End) to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, some of the best recurring elements in the films of writer-director Edgar Wright are his memorable musical cues, often during action where the choreography is perfectly timed to the chosen song – think Shaun’s pool-cue-whacking of a zombie in sync with Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now…
American Gods – Episode 7
One of the greatest assets of this first season of American Gods has been the breathing space it allows its various subplots, as well as its breaking away from traditional episodic structure, be it devoting an entire instalment to a flashback or lavishing a lot of attention on the various side vignettes of Neil Gaiman’s source novel. It’s an enjoyably weird show, one that prefers to luxuriate in a particular mood, before actually explaining what it’s just shown you.
Unfortunately, there can be a breaking point regarding a show’s otherwise pleasing qualities, and Episode 7, “A Prayer for Mad Sweeney”, hits it. That’s not necessarily down to the instalment being bad per se, nor its storytelling quirk (the ‘Coming to America’ prologue device becoming the focus of an entire episode) being inherently objectionable. The direction (from Adam Kane) and performances continue to be very engaging, and Pablo Schreiber and Emily Browning would be wise to submit this episode for any Emmy consideration, in light of the dual turns they get to play with (and play well)…
Edgar Wright on car chase thriller ‘Baby Driver’
“I was going to say I’ve not been offered a musical, but that’s not true. I think if it was the right thing and I thought I could do it well, then, yeah, of course.” British writer-director Edgar Wright is speaking to us down the phone from LA. The current topic: how his movies, particularly Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and new film Baby Driver, often take on some of the cinematic language of musicals. “The thing about it with this movie,” he continues, “is doing some of that work in a completely different genre. Baby Driver is not a musical per se, but it’s completely powered by music…
American Gods – Episode 6
Vulcan (Corbin Bernsen) is the first deity introduced in American Gods that doesn’t appear in Neil Gaiman’s novel, although was reportedly created by Gaiman himself, specifically for the series. Considering the skeleton of the book that needs to (mostly) be followed for the show’s main narrative, it’s not surprising that Vulcan ends up a one-episode-and-done deal in a pretty concrete fashion – sacrificed by Wednesday, in response to his betrayal of Wednesday and Shadow to the New Gods. He’s based on the Roman god of the forge, metalworking and volcanoes, and while he crafts Wednesday a sword in the old way, guns are more his forte these days and his volcanoes are now fiery lead vats with which to create them; not so much a god of open flames, as a god of open fire…
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