catholiclefty

The Silence Of Lorna is a quirky piece that manages to run along reasonably well, with a few difficulties, before derailing right near the end. The story of an immigrant woman in Belgium who is involved in various immigration scams as a route to achieving her modest dreams of a better life, the film does a passable job of making us sympathise with the lead character while taking some odd stylistic choices which often don't work too well - notably omitting one important incident entirely, and the transition over this incident is presented to us as a fait accompli, which is confusing at best. And the end is just odd, with a pregancy whose status is deliberately kept ambiguous, and a life reduced to living in a strange cabin in the woods. Weird. Clearly this ending is trying to say something profound, but I've no idea what that was.

Arta Dobroshi does a very good impression of Ellen Page (where's she disappeared to lately?), but also does a reasonably decent but workmanlike job of the lead role. Certainly I felt there was the possibility to really shine somewhere in this part, but this performance, while decent, was quite a few notches below shining. Jeremie Renier is mostly good as a drug-addicted guy trying to beat his problems, though his character ends up being dispatched so summarily that it detracts somewhat from what has gone before. No-one else stands out.

This is an odd film, that never quite manages to say anything that it seems to be aspiring to say. Not bad, but not very satisfactory either. 5.5 out of 10.

Apparently this style of cinema is called 'mumblecore', which is some sort of euphemism for mostly unscripted, aimless, slice-of-life cinema. Well, while I can't say I disliked Hannah Takes The Stairs, I think it probably fair to say that the only thing I really found held my interest was Hannah herself, and the fact that she was played by an interesting actress, and quite cute, and took her clothes off rather a lot. The story went nowhere and wasn't really about anything, except some people supposedly 'working' - which seemingly involved sitting around and doing not much - and Hannah flitting between all manner of boyfriends and not being satisfied by any of them. And there were no stairs whatever in the film, taken by Hannah or otherwise!

Greta Gerwig was indeed very watchable, even if her character would be a downright irritating girlfriend (no wonder she gets through blokes quickly). The other characters, if they can be fairly described as such, range from the ok to the disposable.

This is a weird style of filming that is neither true-to-life or follows normal cinema conventions. While vaguely interesting for a while, I can't say it works all that well for the length of a feature. The occasional plunge into deeper things (notably talking about depression) still feels quite superficial in this structure, however worthy the attempt. Different, but ultimately not all that successful. And no stairs! 5 out of 10.

At 14 syllables long, this is a worthy attempt for longest titled film of the year, though I suspect it will be beaten at some point (we shall see). Gonzo : The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is far more documentary than reconstruction, which wasn't the impression I got from the posters, where I expected large swathes of reconstruction starring Johnny Depp. Instead we get flashes of Depp but mostly this is archive footage and interviews with people. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not my expectation.

Equally, for much of the film this seems closer to being an examination of 'US presidential politics in the mid-70s' than an investigation in Thompson. Not knowing much about George McGovern, I didn't mind this in the slightest, but it seems rather an unbalancing amount for a film supposedly about Thompson rather than just this little bit of his work. Oh well. Equally I'd argue that the choice of 11th September 2001 to open the movie was too obvious and achieved little for the film.

This was mainly interesting, about a character whom I'm a little too young to know all that much about. This didn't deliver what I expected, but a decently crafted documentary isn't something to complain about, and this achieved that. As with most documentaries though, Man On Wire (my review) notably excepted, you have to wonder why this needed to be a film as opposed to a TV programme. 6 out of 10.