Celluloid Diaries: February 2013

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Win free tickets for the Offscreen film festival

Offscreen
Today's giveaway is courtesy of the Offscreen film festival who is giving away five duo tickets for the movie of your choice.

To enter to win, all you have to do is leave a comment telling me which movie you'd like to see.

You can gain extra entries by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google+ and/or a forum. Or by following this blog through GFC, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and/or Google+. Six possible entries per person.

Contest is open worldwide. Five winners will be chosen on March 7. Good luck!

Here are a few examples of the movies Offscreen will be playing. The complete festival program is available online at http://www.offscreen.be.

Room 237

Have you seen Stephen King's The Shining? Well, this ingenious documentary explores numerous theories about the story and its hidden messages. Discover why many have been trapped in the Overlook for 30 years!



Polyester

Life for housewife Francine (played by Divine) is hell: her son is a glue-sniffing foot fetishist, her daughter a slut, and her husband the owner of a local porn theater who leaves her for his seedy secretary. The film is presented in Odorama, complete with original scratch and sniff cards. It's only one of the many John Waters films that play in retrospective at the festival. John Waters will be at Offscreen himself with his stand-up show This Filthy World, a book signing and a masterclass.



Vampyres

José Ramon Larraz has had an unusual career as a filmmaker, comic book illustrator and photographer. Vampyres is his best-known film. His other works that play in retrospective at the festival are Scream... Or Die, Symptoms and The Coming Of Sin. There are also two exhibitions giving you an overview of his comic book illustrations and photography work.



Berberian Sound Studio

A British sound engineer arrives in Italy to work on a mysterious giallo picture. Daringly original and masterfully constructed, this inspired homage to the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, also recalls the claustrophobia of Brian De Palma's Blow OutBerberian Sound Studio will be presented in the presence of British writer-director Peter Strickland and Belgian voice-artist Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg.



Branded To Kill

By balancing delicately on the edge of surrealism, this dark and impenetrable masterpiece becomes a resolutely fascinating gangster film. The film was so cutting-edge at the time that it cost director Seijun Suzuki his job at the studio. It has since been recognized as a major classic in Japanese cinema.



Las mariposas de Sadourni

Circus dwarf Sadourni gets sentenced to jail after a crime of passion. Free at last, he finds work at a club where he dubs movies and falls in love with his beautiful colleague. A visually stunning film that couples Murnau's expressionism with the surrealism of Jodorowsky.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Currently reading / watching / listening to...

St. Moritz in Switzerland

Reading:

Black Hole by Charles Burns. A hugely enjoyable graphic novel about a sexually transmitted plague infecting teenagers in suburban Seattle. Kids get sick, mutate and run away from home. Black Hole had me thinking long after I finished it.

Love Saves The Day by Gwen Cooper. Well, it's a cute book... What else can you expect from a novel that is mainly told from the point of view of a cat? If you're not utterly obsessed with cats, this may be too simple and sentimental though.


Watching:

Hitchcock (2012). Anthony Hopkins imitates well Hitchcock's manerisms and speaking patterns, but it's still Hopkins we're watching instead of the master of suspense. The story (how the making of Psycho influenced his marriage) is interesting, but a bit too simple. Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh has the best performance of the film.

The Last Stand (2013). The leader of a drug cartel busts out of a courthouse and speeds to the Mexican border, where the only thing in his path is a sheriff and his inexperienced staff. The Last Stand is pretty forgetteable. I can't believe this is from the same director who made A Bittersweet Life.

Seven Psychopaths (2012). A group of friends becomes entangled in the criminal underworld of Los Angeles after one of them kidnaps a gangster's beloved Shiz Tzu. Funny, but too long. I preffered Martin McDonagh previous film In Bruges.

Sideways (2004). The magic word that made me watch this movie is... wine tasting. Two men reaching middle age with not much to show but disappointment, embark on a week long road trip through California's wine country. Charming.

Grave Encounters 2 (2012). Does fast-forwarding two-thirds of a movie count as watching it?

Mama (2013). I was looking forward to this horror movie, but Mama turned out to be a bit silly and illogical.

Tabu (2012). I liked this Portuguese movie because of it's setting (Lisbon and Africa) and originality in style (much of the film reminds us of the cinema from almost a century ago). Sometimes Tabu has too much dialogue and telling and sometimes too many silences. But that just adds to the charm and originality.

The Impossible. Liked this one. The first half really had my heart beat faster and while the second half was a bit slower and sentimental, I never stopped feeling pity for that poor family that got caught in the tsunami.


Listening to:

Ballroom Stories by Waldeck and Takefumi Haketa's creepy soundtrack for Kairo.


What are you currently reading, watching and listening to?

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Life lately


What have you been up to lately?

Friday, February 8, 2013

Alecia Stone's favorite sci-fi and fantasy movies

best sci-fi fantasy movies

The following post is by Alecia Stone. She is the author of Talisman Of El, a novel with a gorgeous hero, thrilling emotions, romance and intrigue.

Being a fan of sci-fi and fantasy movies since childhood, many films have inspired my imagination and as such have inspired Talisman Of El. I’ve watched many movies, so this one was hard to compile, but I think the list below features a range of movies that I can say have been both an inspiration and are also slightly similar, whether in plot or theme, to the elements in my novel.

10. Harry Potter



















2. Narnia





talisman of el