Category Archive: FILM
The Weir Career
The films of Peter Weir (1974 – 2010) Peter Weir’s career is an enigma. He has huge reserves of talent, and we absolve him of all sins thanks to Picnic alone, but there are pockets of emptiness in many of his films, all of which are watchable (OK, maybe not Green Card). (As Norman Gunston might have asked, “13 films in 40 years, Peter? What do you do for a living?“) With the once respected Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences giving Peter a career-end-Oscar at its Governor’s Awards late last year), we review his oeuvre. 1974 The…
Continue Reading →Tár
Directed by Todd Field (2022) To err is human; to forgive, Divine; to cancel, de rigueur. Lydia Tár (not her real name?) is a pianist, ethnomusicologist, composer, and the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s as busy as a bee: at a festschrift, she plugs her new book to Adam Gopnik of the ‘New Yorker’ (they wouldn’t invite Steve Bannon, but this luvvie? No problem!) and she is preparing the forthcoming live recording of Mahler’s 5th. She’s teaching (and bullying) at Juilliard; lunching with a moneyman who wants to pick her brains; she’s hiring and firing; she’s…
Continue Reading →Amsterdam
(Directed by David O. Russell) (2022) The judgment of eminent film critic David Stratton is, we suspect, affected by seeing everything. TVC perhaps suffers from the reverse circumstance: we don’t see very many films, because life is too short. We do try to guard against the impulse to stick to films we’ve already seen, and remind ourselves that it was ever the case that 90% of films made are rubbish. It is just that now the rubbish is even more nauseating in its freighted agitprop, the production quotas and standards that would make the Hays Office blanch (in a different…
Continue Reading →Moonage Daydream
(Written and directed by Brett Morgen) (2022) The great David Bowie died in 2016. He’d have liked this ‘documentary,’ we suspect, because like him, it is sui generis, an assault on the eyes, ears, and (pace his philosophical meanderings) the mind, that satisfies for almost all of its 2 hours and 15 minutes. With a mountain of footage and full estate authorisation, Morgen has lovingly assembled a vibrant, moving monument to the peripatetic searcher and androgynous transformer who was Starman, Ziggy Stardust, Cracked Actor, DJ, the Man Who Sold the World, the Space Oddity, a Young American, a Hero, and…
Continue Reading →“This never happened to the other fellow”
The Music of James Bond with George Lazenby By Guest Reviewer David Ross My parents used to receive coarse brown envelopes in the mail bearing the enigmatic label ‘OHMS’, but invariably containing something disappointing (most often a bill). How much more exciting to be On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, as George Lazenby was in 1969. Conductor, Nicholas Buc, took a scaled-back ASO through a selection of Bond themes in chronological order from the instantly recognisable theme written by Monty Norman for the 1962 release of Dr. No to the latest outing of 007, No Time to Die. Breaking up the…
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