My Top 10 of the London Film Festival 2014

Quick disclaimer: some of these I saw at Cannes earlier this year but they were still playing at the LFF so I have included them here even if I didn't get a chance to see them again. I should also mention that I didn't get to see loads of films at the LFF such as The Imitation Game, It Follows, Whiplash or Men, Women and Children to name a few. Sounds like Whiplash may be many people's favourite of the festival but I'm afraid I will have to wait to see it like everybody else!

Anyway, here is my top 10. Click the titles for my reviews:

10. A Hard Day

9. Son of a Gun

8. Timbuktu

7. '71

6. Fury

5. Foxcatcher

4. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

3. Monsters: Dark Continent

2. Wild Tales

1. White God

More reviews from I Love That Film

More top 10 lists from I Love That Film

More from the London Film Festival 2014

PLEASE buy my book on The Blair Witch Project

International Fury Trailer Unleashes War as Hell

It's so long and tanks for all the action in the breathtaking latest international trailer for David Ayer's World War 2 film Fury. Closing the 2014 BFI London Film Festival and starring one of the most exciting casts of the year with Brad Pitt, Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal all crammed in a tank together, Fury is definitely going to be a must see movie, even for those who can't stand Shia LaBeouf.

The official synopsis says it's 'April, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.'

Director David Ayer may have slipped into silliness with his previous film Sabotage, but his best work includes End of Watch and the casting here suggests something very special. The new trailer is more focussed than any previous ones with showing the relationship between Pitt's team leader and new boy Logan Lerman as he struggles to fit into a close-knit group of surviving soldiers as they roll into Germany nearing the end of the war.

For me, Lerman is the unproven one out of this cast but I hope that this is the moment where he is going to shine, even with the impressive cast that surround him. Pitt is usually good, Pena is frequently excellent and I think we have still yet to see LaBoeuf's best. While Bernthal depends on a few too many recognisable mannerisms, he was also the best actor for a long time in The Walking Dead. Ayer did a fantastic job with End of Watch and from this trailer, Fury has all the hallmarks of being a great war movie. It certainly looks like an explosive way to close the BFI London Film Festival.

Watch the trailer:



What do you think?

More on the BFI London Film Festival 2014

BFI London Film Festival 2014 Gala Screenings

The full programme for the London Film Festival has just been announced and there are a huge number of films to be very excited about. First up, the galas are ridiculously exciting. I was lucky enough to see some of these at Cannes this year. Click the titles for my reviews of Mr Turner, Wild Tales and The Salvation. 

Here is the list of galas in full taken from the BFI London Film Festival website, where you will also find the remainder of the programme.

I also saw Foxcatcher at Cannes. It is an unbelievably gripping film with a trio of exceptional performances from Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and most surprisingly Steve Carrell. My review is coming soon.

The films I’m most excited to see from this list are Whiplash, Mommy and Fury. However, for those who have not yet seen Wild Tales, this film was my favourite from Cannes 2014 and is an absolute must-see!

Opening Night Gala: The Imitation Game

The life of Alan Turing, the codebreaker who helped turn the tide of WWII. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

Closing Night Gala: Fury

David Ayer’s brilliant action drama tells the story of US soldiers and the demons they face down as they drive their tank through occupied Europe during WWII. Great cast!


American Express Gala: Foxcatcher

A riveting, tense and unsettling exploration of the power of money and obsession from the acclaimed director of Capote and Moneyball. Must see for Steve Carrell’s performance!


Accenture Gala: Whiplash

A gifted young drummer finds himself challenged by a brilliant mentor intent on pushing his student to greatness. Stars Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons.


Virgin Atlantic Gala: Men, Women & Children

Jason Reitman explores the way the modern technologies both enhance and hinder our lives and relationships in this cross-generational comedy drama.


May Fair Hotel Gala: Wild

Reese Witherspoon impresses in this moving account of one woman’s attempt to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.


Centrepiece Gala Supported by the Mayor of London: Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain’s extraordinary life during WWII is explored in this magnificent period drama.


Festival Gala In association with Time Out: Mr Turner  

Mike Leigh’s Cannes-winning account of the later years of J. M. W. Turner, brilliantly played by Timothy Spall. Click the title for my review from Cannes 2014.


Archive Gala: The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands

This dramatic reconstruction of two decisive naval battles from the First World War is one of the finest films of the British silent era.


Debate Gala: Rosewater

Jon Stewart brilliantly tells the story of Maziar Bahari, the journalist who was detained for 188 days in Iran.


Dare Gala: Mommy

Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan impresses again with his latest award-winning exercise in stylistic and imaginative melodrama.


Love Gala: A Little Chaos

Kate Winslet plays a landscape gardener employed by King Louis XIV to transform the gardens at Versailles.

Laugh Gala: Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)

Six hilarious short stories combine to form a macabre tango at the gates of madness in this outrageous comedy about the trials of modern life. An absolute must see! Click the title for my review.


Thrill Gala: The Salvation 

Mads Mikkelsen does what a man’s gotta do in the lawless pioneer West in this violent and stylish, smørrebrød western. Check out my review by clicking the title.


Journey Gala in association with Sight & Sound: Winter Sleep 

The Palme d’Or-winner of Cannes 2014. Cult Gala: The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom 

Sonic Gala: Björk: Biophilia Live

Family Gala: Song of the Sea


What are you excited to see from this list? 


More on the BFI London Film Festival 2014 

BFI London Film Festival to close with Fury

What could be more exciting than The Imitation Game opening the BFI London Film Festival? Well apart from the prospect of most of London coming to a standstill and getting all quivery at the knees over Benedict Cumberbatch, it is the closing night film that has really got my motor running. The European Premiere of Fury from director David Ayer is rolling into Leicester Square on Sunday 19 October and promises to close the LFF with a spectacular bang.

As far as I’m concerned, Ayer hit a pretty major stumbling block with his last film Sabotage but before that he had written and directed one of my top 3 films of 2012, End of Watch. That film had also been screened at the London Film Festival and was an intense ride around the badass streets of LA with two cops in the thick of cartels and drug dealers. Swapping the cop car for a tank, Fury takes us back to World War 2, a subject Ayer hasn’t written about since U-571. 

Starring one of the most exciting casts of the year, Fury sees Brad Pitt, (a post-meltdown) Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal and Logan Lerman rolling around in a Sherman tank behind enemy lines in 1945 as the war is drawing to a close. I can’t say much for little Logan Lerman yet but the rest of that cast promise big things for this film. If Ayer can capture the horror of fighting in World War 2 as well as he captured the danger of being a cop on the streets of LA, Fury will be a belting way to close this year’s BFI London Film Festival. 

No doubt Pitt, Ayer and hopefully more of the stars of the film will attend the premiere and get their snaps taken on the red carpet while delighting fans with their smiles and regaling journalists with tales of not washing and living like soldiers while working in English fields on the film. If you can’t get to the London premiere, there will be simultaneous screenings in various cinemas across the country. 

Here is a snippet about the film from the BFI LFF website:
 
‘In Fury, it is April, 1945. As the Allies make their final push in the European Theatre, a battle-hardened army sergeant named Wardaddy (Brad Pitt) commands a Sherman tank and her five-man crew on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Outnumbered and outgunned, and with a rookie soldier thrust into their platoon, Wardaddy and his men face overwhelming odds in their heroic attempts to strike at the heart of Nazi Germany.’

Festival Director Clare Stewart calls Fury a ‘resounding cinematic achievement. Rarely is a film so successful at balancing the human drama of war with such thrilling action sequences’. David Ayer says ‘It’s a true pleasure to be returning to England, where we shot the film – the fields of Oxfordshire and Bovingdon Airfield in Hertfordshire were our home for 12 weeks last year, so it’s something of a homecoming for us to present the movie at its European premiere’. 

Fury will be released across the UK on 24 October 2014. The 58th BFI London Film Festival in partnership with American Express runs from Wednesday 8 October to Sunday 19 October. The full programme for the Festival will be announced on Wednesday 3 September and tickets for public booking will open on 18 September. 

Here is the trailer:

More on The BFI London Film Festival 2014.

FURY Trailer brings out the big guns

The new film from director David Ayer gets a fantastic looking new trailer featuring its impressive cast battling through World War 2 in a tank. Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal will be packing that war machine with so much testosterone, you'll be able to smell the sweaty balls dripping off the screen.

This is the director of End of Watch, one of my top 3 films of 2012 as well as the guy who wrote Training Day. His last film, Sabotage, may have been a bit of a misstep but at least it gave Arnie a bit of a darker character for his post-Governor career.

World War 2 are often action packed and though The Monuments Men was a recent star packed disappointment, Fury looks like a gritter, dirtier and far more exciting ride that George Clooney's film. Logan Lerman is the only one of the major players who I'm not thrilled to see in this. No offence to Lerman who I'm sure is great but when he comes toe to toe with Pitt, Pena, Bernthal and LaBeouf, he's bound to struggle. What a cast and what a trailer! Can't wait for Fury to be unleashed in November.



More trailers from I Love That Film

Fight Club, Feminism and Misogyny: A2 Film Studies Exam Answer

It's that time of year again when the A2 Film Studies exams are nearly upon us. As usual I'm doing lots of revision with my students and also practicing exam answers. Here is one I wrote on Fight Club and whether the film could be considered misogynist or not.

'Marla is at the root of it’, says Jack in Fight Club.  Discuss what this statement says about the film as a whole.

When Fight Club’s narrator Jack begins to tell his story, he believes that it all starts with how he came to meet and begin a complex relationship with a woman named Marla Singer. Played by Helena Bonham Carter, Marla is a gothic looking, free spirited, depressed and deviant woman who spends her time in support meetings for people with serious illnesses. Jack blames Marla for much that is wrong with his life and many have suggested that this makes the film misogynistic. However, it is far from that simple.

 In Fight Club, the protagonist who the audience is encouraged to identify with at first seems to hate Marla. She ruins everything for him once he finds that he can cry when in support groups and that this allows him to sleep at night. He calls her a ‘bitch’, a ‘tumour’ and finds her presence threatening and annoying. The viewer learns this through Jack’s voiceover and so audiences are encouraged to identify with his feelings of hatred. The fact she is dressed all in black, smokes constantly and steals clothes from launderettes also makes her appear to be a negative character, very similar to the femme fatale figure of film noir who often lures the male protagonist to his death. Later in the film, Jack treats Marla terribly, often being rude to her and trying to get her to leave his house. This is made all the more offensive to audiences when they learn the twist in the story and that Jack is actually having sex with Marla before sending her on her way.

 On the other hand the film could also be seen to be about men needing to mature in order to have a healthy and loving relationship with another person. Jack is like a baby when we first meet him, nursing at the giant breasts of a man who has had his testicles removed and now resembles a mother figure. Jack cannot deal with the fact he may like Marla and so creates an uber-masculine alter-ego who treats women poorly and distances them from him. The end of the film sees Jack rejecting Tyler and accepting Marla as an equal and potential partner when the pair hold hands to watch the destruction of credit card company buildings. This shows that by the end of the film, Marla is a source of happiness for the protagonist and after reverting to being a baby then acting like a rebellious teen with Tyler, Jack is now mature and ready for a grown-up relationship with a woman.

 Fight Club could be also be read as a film that attacks the feminisation and emasculation of men in modern society. While Marla is not a very ‘feminine’ woman, it could be argued that Jack has been feminised by his job and the commercial culture he lives in. He is a consumer who loves nothing more than buying from the IKEA catalogue and satisfying his nesting instinct. He has never been in a fight, hunted for his food and never had a father figure around to teach him to be a traditional man. The film answers this problem by giving Jack his alter-ego Tyler Durden who is fearless and tough, rejects advertising and material possessions and uses women only for his sexual desire. Tyler wants to return to a vision of the past where men were hunters and did not have to go to work and be treated poorly by bosses for low incomes that allowed them to buy comforts such as duvets. It could even be argued that Marla finds the masculine Tyler side of the protagonist more sexually attractive than the more feminine Jack side.

 While the statement ‘Marla is at the root of it’ suggests she is a major character, women in Fight Club are barely present and could be seen to be ignored or dismissed in the narrative. They do not participate in the fight clubs or Project Mayhem and Marla and Chloe are the only named female characters. Women are either not invited or do not want to attend fight clubs and we learn little of Marla during the course of the film. Chloe is a cancer sufferer and is made a bit of a joke out of as she wants to just have sex one more time before dying. Both Marla and Chloe are tied to the idea of sex and although Marla seems quite strong and fearless in many ways, she also keeps returning to a man who treats her incredibly poorly.

On the other hand the men in the film are also very negatively represented and actually Tyler appears to be the main cause of problems for Jack in Fight Club. The men in the film are at first seen as whimpering support group attending victims. They cry and hug and many have literally lost their testicles. The men who join the fight clubs and are later sucked in to Project Mayhem are easily lead followers. They become like a cult, never thinking or questioning anything they are told. They are silenced by Tyler and become terrorists and moronic. Tyler becomes increasingly thuggish and dangerous until Jack if forced to fight and then kill him. Even though women are negatively represented in Fight Club, Marla appears to be the sanest person in the film by the end.

Marla is indeed at the root of Fight Club but she is not the cause of all Jack’s problems as he originally suggests. When he meets Marla, his psyche splits and in order to deal with the fear of falling in love, Jack creates Tyler in order for him to become a mature man. The film ends with the protagonist rejecting the macho rebellion of Tyler and accepting Marla as a source of love and affection. Marla is at the root of his salvation and the film is therefore neither as misogynistic nor radical as some have suggested.

12 Years A Slave Review

The director of 12 Years A Slave, Steve McQueen, is an artist. He paints the bleakest possible picture of slavery imaginable, capturing beautiful but haunting images that seemed to have been beamed directly from the past. In 12 Years A Slave he transports you to another time and place making you feel the heat and the pain and forcing you to become a witness to the horror of history. Where Django Unchained tempered its brutality with its Tarantino-ness, the only respite from the misery of 12 Years A Slave is the beauty of its compositions and the fact that for one man there may actually be a way out of this hellish misery.

The slave in question is Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man who lived in New York with his family until one day in 1841 when he is abducted by 'entertainers' who chain him up and send him down south to live the next 12 years as a slave. Along the way, he is beaten, humiliated, forced to work, to punish other slaves and to keep his past and literacy a secret. Over the 12 years, Northup is passed through three slave owners from the seemingly gentle and (vaguely) caring Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) to the sadistic psycho Epps (Michael Fassbender).

After watching 12 Years A Slave, it is incredible to think how few films there have been about the subject of slavery in America. 200 years of this shocking practice and fewer than 30 films that really explore slavery exist. 12 Years A Slave, though it may only be one film, goes to serious lengths to show the horror, the humiliation and encapsulate the experience of those who were slaves in the South in the 1800's. It is a true story, based on only one man's memoirs but it says so much that audiences may not ever feel the need to see another film on slavery again.

By having Northup as it's protagonist, 12 Years A Slave may not focus on the ordinary slave's experience but instead it zeroes in on the promise, the pride and the painful humiliation of one early African-American to emphasise the wrongs done to all slaves during American slavery's awful 200 year existence. Northup is stifled in every way by his circumstances; he must not admit to even being able to read and write and he is treated worse than an animal. McQueen never shies away from showing the slaves as broken people. Shots of them staring blankly, running back to their masters and treating each other poorly show just how dehumanizing the impact of slavery is.

12 Years A Slave is a constantly tough watch, just as it should be. Every ray of hope is dashed. Every kindness is stamped on and every punishment and humiliation is dwelt on. Sean Bobbit's cinematography captures the sweaty south beautifully but though many of it's shots look like gorgeous paintings, many more are stark reminders of the brutality at the heart of slavery. When Northup is hung from a tree, it is an ugly moment framed with strangely beautiful long shots; a series of depressing snapshots of history. Add to this, Hans Zimmer's haunting, achingly sad score and the sound of slave voices singing Roll Jordan Roll and 12 Years A Slave becomes a mournful ode to 200 years of misery and shame.

12 Years A Slave brings a terrible historical truth to life. It may only be the story of one man but it feels definitive; every frame is a painting that transports you to another time. Through it's cinematography, production and costume design, but most of all the performances of a completely committed cast, 12 Years A Slave depicts the ugliness of slavery with unforgettable imagery.

Stick around! Please enjoy some more reviews from I Love That Film:

Dallas Buyers Club

American Hustle

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

All is Lost

The Railway Man

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Captain Phillips

Saving Mr. Banks