Change Your Image
claytonhq
Reviews
La chimera (2023)
Threadbare attendance. More slow, dull film-making
Saw this as the final offering of the Borderlines Film Festival, Herefordshire 2024. I attended 10 films.
Audiences for this sort of dross are down to the bare bones now (15 in the cinema tonight) while the website critics continue to wax lyrical about all the fantastic dimensions of this art that remain invisible to us peasants. The Emperor's new clothes spring to mind.
When they refer to "comedic elements" I presume they're referring to the fast-motion bits (presumably an homage to early '70s Benny Hill TV sketches). Yep, Benny got way more laughs than this one.
Modern art films have sadly disappeared up their own bottom. To create you must must be able to communicate - it's a process that involves bouncing ideas around, not sitting in an ivory tower wandering around inside your own mind and mixing in ever decreasing circles of very rarefied humanity pathetically attempting to prop each other up with sycophantism. Meanwhile the rest of us lose interest and wander off.
Downbeat, poorly drawn and drawn out. Every film I saw in this festival could justifiably be described as slow. Storytelling has given way to egotistical rambling. Boring.
Past Lives (2023)
What's past is past
I don't review often on here because I find the scores generally accurate. Not so with this one so here we go.
We all have past lives that we may look back on and miss (or even more, regret their passing) and some say you can look back but you shouldn't go back. Hae Sung takes a chance and decides to travel to see his childhood sweetheart (and her new husband) one last time.
I love Korean cinema, saw the high score this one received and went along. Maybe my expectations were too high.
The opening shot shows the 3 protagonists sat in a bar with 2 unkown and unseen onlookers speculating as to their relationship. You just saw the most imaginative part of this film. The rest is a rather slow and predictable unfolding of Nora paying the price for her choices.
She ends up regretting the loss of her childhood romance and ending up with the clearly apparent weak foundations of her relationship with her husband, a nothing story of her rushing to acquire her green card and little else between them.
So at the end she says goodbye to Hae Sung, goes home and bursts into tears. And the film ends. Which is a shame because the interesting part of this film could have been what happened next - where she and her husband recognise that their relationship has little depth and that she has made a mistake pursuing her ambition at the cost of what is most important, namely personal happiness.
And so the message of the film is that someone who makes career-based choices will probably end up unhappy.
Has modern cinema nothing new to convey? And yet people, even in this day and age, live with so many delusions that are ripe for inspection and exploration. Come on film-makers, live your lives then make a film about what you discovered. You might just be able to deliver an interesting story.
Tôkyô monogatari (1953)
Slow
I don't normally bother reviewing films on here because the ratings are generally pretty accurate. Not so with this one.
Art critics and film students (I was one myself) might have certain rarified tastes but those with average sensibilities will find this film slow to the point of being an ordeal.
Even though this film is now 70 years old, the message, that young people don't have much time for old people, wasn't even new back in 1953. And that really is all that this film has to convey. As with many art films, (and almost anything by Terence Davis or Ken Loach), the lack of almost any development in the narrative makes it a tedious watch.
Blue Jay (2016)
Couldn't be Hollywood
Bucketloads of chemistry in what is basically a 2-hander. Is it the writer/star's autobiography? Feels very authentic.