E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Cold Sweat turns 50 this year, and is a movie hardly anyone knows or loves. B-movie fetishists are a perverse lot, and I am one of them. I can genuinely revel in a well-made, odd, quirky, forgotten second-rate flick, with few if any pretensions, seeing it with great affection and respect for what it is; whereas many a pretentious, 'bigger picture' can leave me cold. Cold Sweat is actually, in its way, a great film, but because the director Terence Young has almost no auteurist-following, it's been neglected; the reviews it does get are perfunctory and mainly indifferent - it's seen, if at all now, as a toss-offed Charles Bronson actioner, one of the cheap Euro-trash movies he made as his violent vigilante career went supernova. It's out on DVD, and easy to find online. I'd recommend it to any fans of the crime/thriller genre, and, for the reasons I mention below, it is separately fascinating for being an example of how a film can gather incredible talent...

Anyone looking for an astringent corrective to the postmodern hypertrophies of the Tarantino style will find it in the beautiful and profoundly intelligent new film from Joanna Hogg, The Souvenir , executive produced by, among others, Martin Scorsese, and starring Tilda Swinton and her daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as a fictional mother and daughter in 80s London. Like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood ... The Souvenir is especially interested in framing a narrative around film, and directing film - in this instance, the hero is a young woman, from the English upper class, who has become a film student, and is seeking to make a film about working class life in a part of the country she barely knows. Hogg allows us to see how a film student (her in actuality looking back in memory) might film and tell the story of her own aesthetic awakening, through the medium she loves - through the story of her sentimental education, as it were, as a naïve lover, swept up by a Heathcliffian slight...

It is perhaps no surprise that most ( not all, thankfully ) film critics have praised Tarantino's latest (9th) film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... as a masterwork - I have seen it even called Shakespearean - a term that comes from a scene in the movie; but he is more a Jacobean Middleton. Tarantino's late career has been focused on revenge - one of the primary staples of drama and melodrama in all English literature; it is also, of course, the staple of Nicholas Cage's late career, so it is not an inherently perfect one. Violence is to Saint Quentin what bars are to San Quentin - the raison d'etre. I cannot think of another director - not even Peckinpah or de Palma, Hitchcock or Scorsese - so cocked and aimed in one direction - that of setting up and paying off scenes and situations so that 'all hell breaks loose' and terrible violence ensues. Tarantino has argued - often publicly and coarsely - for an art for art's sake separation between reel violen...

TOXIC MALE GAZES REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT Orson Welles was a magician - not a necromancer - but the joke about resurrecting the dead is in every frame of the Netflix released THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, his best movie, yet. Welles, foremost an artist and a charlatan (he was obsessed with tricks, fakery and illusion throughout his visionary work for stage, radio, and the screen), would have known that nothing is as haunting as the posthumous work. Only the truly great get to come back from the grave. Of course, Welles famously crafted his late-period film-as-process oeuvre and praxis from his inability to get financial backing, and the way his final forays were often left unfinished; after a while, his unmade movies took on more weight and anticipated value than the ones he had completed. Yet even here, the story is faked. Welles always (except in KANE, usually considered his masterpiece) left his work unfinished, more or less - often intentionally, or accidentally. His signature st...

Aim High, more often Year-end Best of lists are invidious, and, also, these days, ubiquitous, to the point of madness. But we have loved them for years... so... In the spirit of austerity and limiting resource-expenditure, Eyewear, the blog , this year will focus on the TOP ONE of various categories. Note we cannot claim to have seen or read everything, including The Post , or Lady Bird , which may end up winning the Oscar in 2018. So here goes. (we have not included our Eyewear books; nor have we included books of poetry, that may follow in 2018) BEST NOVEL 2017 1. The Transition - novel by Luke Kennard Oddly overlooked by some, this brilliant mock-dystopian millennial epic was both brilliantly funny, and insightful, and the debut of one of the UK's best-known younger poets. A great British comic novel, easily comparable in laughs per page to Lucky Jim . BEST FILM 2017 1. Good Time  If this was a longer list, we'd have room for Bladerunner 2049 , The L...

SPOILER ALERT SOLDIERS NOT BATHING Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan (not the 1958 film with John Mills and Richard Attenborough ) may well be the summer movie event of 2017, just as Saving Private Ryan was the autumn event of roughly 20 years ago (the same year Nolan's Following debuted). However, whereas the earlier WW2 classic featured a bravura beach invasion of Europe scene unrivalled in contemporary film, and was directed by the leading blockbuster film-maker of our time, Spielberg , this new movie features death on a beach where the soldiery are seeking to escape the beachhead and the seabed, equally, and exit Europe (at least mainland). It was the first Brexit, as it were, and as endless pundits are muttering, and that forsaken politics does shade some of the gung-ho little England flag-waving at the end. More pointedly, the new film is an attempt to outdo Spielberg, but also Kubrick , James Cameron , and Ridley Scott , potential rivals to Nolan, whose immaculate, ...

DANGER - SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Logan , the new film by James Mangold , and the tenth outing for the Wolverine character from the Marvel Universe, as played by Hugh Jackman , is receiving a lot of critical praise. Released March 1, the film has been called "the Citizen Kane " of comic book films, and compared favourably to the previous benchmark for quality in this sub-genre, The Dark Knight trilogy, by Christopher Nolan . It shares with that trilogy a gritty realism, a downbeat tone, and serious actors at the top of their game. It is however not an urban picture, but, as every critic has noted, a road movie/Western in its DNA. The cliché is to cite Shane , which the picture does itself, as the blueprint, but this is a red herring, since the actual Western it most resembles is The Searchers - let alone In Cold Blood or T2 . Mangold has co-written the film, at a time of Western darkness (Brexit, the rise of Trump ) and the film opens on a landscape torn from Beckett by ...

CHARLIZE THERON IS THE NEW ICON [SPOILER ALERT] The new Mad Max: Fury Road film has had a fascinating gestation and now a narrative of striving against another kick-ass franchise, Pitch Perfect , itself a vehicle for amazing women. Well, that's the media hyped story, and let's leave it there.  I saw Mad Max 4 (as it were) on Friday in 3D in London; at the end, reactions from the audience were mixed.  If you wanted to sum it up you might say Marmite - it did create a love-hate tension in the packed theatre. I loved it.  I loved the insane Cirque du Soleil mania, the battery acid propulsion, the high-octane raciness; I loved the Trigger Warning vision of it.  The eco-warrior-feminist subtext; the redemption; the ugliness; the beauty; the sheer Wild West poetry of the cinema it extends and amplifies in its very motion. I would argue that, at 70, director George Miller , in tandem with a hugely talented team - a crew of hundreds - has choreographed one of the ...

EYEWEAR THOUGHT SELMA THE BEST AMERICAN FILM OF 2014 SO WE ASKED THE CRITIC AND WRITER STEVEN TIMBERMAN , AN AMERICAN, TO WRITE ABOUT IT FOR US HERE IS HIS PERSONAL ESSAY, A REVIEW WE ARE GLAD TO SHARE SELMA IS TIMELESS, THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT WILL STALE   I don’t want to write about Hollywood’s problem with fostering, accepting, and recognizing diversity. I don’t want to write about Selma’s status as another javelin to be thrown in our Great Culture Wars. I don’t even want to write   about Selma’s ability to shift historical narratives in order to reach greater emotional truths. Well, much. I want to write about how viewing Selma made me feel. Though I grew up in Southern California, our community had a strong conservative lean. When students tried to organize a “Day of Silence” in support for LGBT rights, parents pulled their students from school in droves. An English teacher had the gall to criticize George W Bush as a “crook” and had to appear on f...

Wes Anderson 's The Grand Budapest Hotel begins with a frame story as elaborate as the movie's sets. In the present, a young woman walks through a graveyard to the gravestone of a famous writer. After adding a key to the many hotel keys already hanging on the gravestone, she begins to read a book called The Grand Budapest Hotel . The scene cuts to 1985 with the author of the book reading it to the camera. The story he tells goes back to 1968, when he visited the Grand Budapest Hotel and heard Zero Moustafa tell the story of how he came to be the hotel's owner. That story, which takes place in 1932, focuses on the hotel's concierge, M. Gustave.             At the end of the film, Zero sums up M. Gustave's life: "To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it—but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace!" M. Gustave's world is that of the luxury hotel; as the hotel's conci...

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A GEORGE ON A GREAT INDIE FILM The Lincoln Lawyer and The Paperboy really depended on him, Killer Joe and Mud electrified because of him, and his cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street was apparently the only scene not cut down for the sake of running time. The Matthew McConaissance has reached a peak, and with McConaughey playing the lead in the upcoming Christopher Nolan epic Interstellar ; it’s likely he’ll keep climbing. Perhaps his most fully fledged, head-rattling and enigmatic performance so far is as Rust Cohle in new television series True Detective – a landmark achievement in a somewhat stale medium (despite what the idiot-box machine might be trying to tell you). Detective aside, the flag at the top of McK2 is in the shape of Ron Woodroof in the biographical Dallas Buyer’s Club .             Ron Woodroof, a rodeo bull rider by day, drug, drink and sex addict by night, is informed he is...

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC ON A FILM THAT PEOPLE WILL BE DISCUSSING FOR DECADES TO COME, DESPITE, OR BECAUSE OF, ITS HEDONISTIC VIM AND STARK LOOK AT BANKING CRIME.   Martin Scorsese delves into a territory not completely unfamiliar to him, but perhaps at a level of rambunctiousness, vivacity and also repugnance that reminds us how great a director he can be. There is certain material that beckons his cinematic technique and knowledge that puts him on a pedestal among his contemporaries. In every regard, American Hustle looks like an ITV soap in comparison to The Wolf of Wall Street . The film tells the true story of Jordan Belfort , a wholly unlikeable character that due to incisive and bombastic screenwriting and editing, by Terrence Winter and Thelma Schoonmaker respectively, we are happy to watch for three hours. While we certainly are not rooting for Belfort, we are fascinated by what the abomination will do next.         ...

EYEWEAR'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A GEORGE THINKS AMERICAN HUSTLE, DESPITE ITS GOLDEN GLOBE FOR BEST COMEDY OR MUSICAL IS A DUD. Clearly, American Glasses American Hustle is the story of a great con. No, not the film’s plot, which has the wow factor of the BBC’s mediocre television show from some years ago, Hustle . The con is the plenitude of awards this film is getting. I don’t want to imply that director David O. Russell is the artist behind these cons, but he has certainly been lucky these couple years. Silver Linings Playbook was released around this time last year, and also got multiple awards nominations despite being a very plain feat of moviemaking albeit with an enjoyable script. Driven by this popularity, it seems Russell has abandoned the quirky traditions that made his earlier films so interesting under some pretence that he is now John Cassavettes ; sacrificing plot in favour of caricatures – I mean, characters.          ...