MODERN TIMES - Celebrating Yuri Gagarin and Charlie Chaplin

Celebrating a week of space and cinema: on 12 April, 1961, Russian cosmonaut and fighter pilot Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and on April 16, 1889, Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin was born. Two heroes of our Modern Times.

And here is a glimpse of the future nostalgia.

MODERN TIMES

a short film by Ben Craig, Richard Mountney, Simon Mountney, Tom Mountney, and Robin Mair.

When we look up at the stars, we see how they used to be. Starlight takes years to travel to Earth. We kid ourselves it’s static. Like old movies, the illusion of permanence makes us feel less flyaway. As the world rockets to the future, we need things that seem stuck. Black and white cinema is comforting for this reason. It’s already the same colours as the night sky. Its stars have been around forever. It doesn’t pummel your eyes, or shriek of the world. When you watch a movie that was made before you were born, it’s reassuring because you know so many others have seen it. We’re not the audience of the past, but we’re part of that audience. Ben Craig’s short film, Modern Times, is about the séance of cinema.

It takes place in a movie theatre. Not on Earth, but in space. This theatre is in orbit around the moon. It projects movies onto the moon’s surface. The future, as ever, looks sleek and bright and unhampered by cost. People happily pay to watch Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie, Modern Times. They look transported as a silent classic lights the dark side of the moon. Never mind the rest of the universe. These people are true movie-lovers: they barely register their surroundings. It’s all about the screen. Darkness only adds its lustre. They know they can’t marvel properly at home. The timeless pleasure of being a spectator is half what you watch, and half where you watch it. The heavens, here, offer a majestic venue.

The music we hear is an aria; Casta Diva. It’s a prayer to the goddess of the moon. Bello a me ritorna / Del raggio tuo sereno. Return to me beautiful / With your serene ray. Like most arias, it’s about longing. Even if you don’t know what it means, the singer’s voice is full of orphaned hope. In the opera, Norma, Casta Diva is sung when the world has turned against the heroine. She asks for peace, and for a kinder, gentler world. When the chorus sing in harmony, it’s as if everyone around her echoed that need for calm. The music obviously fits with the setting in Modern Times, but it expresses a common wish too, as this space audience slips the surly bonds of Earth, and enters the haven of the spheres.

Death is where other people take over. That’s why watching movies is like being dead. You keep all your feelings intact; but love of movies means being an observer by choice. You let the people on-screen live out the most private moments of their lives: their heartbreaks, their joys… So your heartbreak and your joy can be relived. Life doesn’t teach us anything in the midst of living. We have to watch life, to learn. And even though movies are often an exaggerated, sentimental version of life; if you watch them in the dark, in silence, that space is rich. In Modern Times, the audience are watching Chaplin and not watching Chaplin. The sublime part of the experience is in their faces. Life is in their eyes; the part that thinks: “I am like Charlie Chaplin” and the part thinks: “I will remember the feeling of watching this film… this place… forever” – a swooning consciousness.

The best shot in when the lens of the projector flings out light, and we cut to the pupil of a young woman’s eye, at once shrinking from the light, and sharpening its focus. I was reminded, as I watched this, of a few lines from a poem: Words can never contain / as music does / the unsayable grace / that leaps like light / from mind to mind. This shot feels like an epiphany to me. What it is the young woman thinks of, doesn’t matter. Watching movies gives you room to grasp unknowable truths… and to let go of them. You aren’t really dead. The meaning of life isn’t really revealed to you. But you can feel peace, if you’re agile. Like savouring a kiss, the best part is ephemeral. After that, hazy memory must suffice.

French cinemas used to announce a new Chaplin movie with a sign that read: Il est ici. He is here. That was how famous Charlie Chaplin was; how many people thought they knew him. Only recently, the internet was abuzz with the story of a time-traveller apparently spotted attending the 1928 premiere of Chaplin’s movie The Circus. We’re not the audience of the past, but we’re part of that audience. Modern Times was released in 1936, yet it persists… in ways, and forms Charlie Chaplin could not have dreamed of. Modernity is fickle. A movie only feels “modern” as long as its stars haven’t begun to fade. Whole worlds can disappear, off-screen. The solace for the audience is that the movie will endure.

A review by James Tatham / Movie Waffle

10 Films presents CHOOSE NOT TO FALL

Parkour is the epitome of panache. Like bungee-jumping, BASE jumping, and all those other extreme sports where men make suicidal leaps to prove their worth, parkour (also known as free-running) emboldens, it makes the heart soar. The name itself is derived from parcours du combatant, the obstacle course French army cadets are required to master as part of basic training. In parkour, the city is an obstacle course, which must be overcome by the most efficient means. Practitioners of parkour are known as traceurs (they "make haste"). They’re young and daring, and they scale walls like cats. The short film, Choose Not To Fall, is about Daniel Ilabaca, traceur par excellence; a Nike-wearing Cyrano de Bergerac.

The first shot sees Daniel passing over us. He’s aloft. We’re below. It’s hard to think of a more eloquent expression of the transcendent feeling parkour evokes in observers; the splendour of expert movement, how it lifts you even to see it. He jumps – so deftly – it’s as if it was impossible for him to fall. Daniel is fearless, super-humanly agile. The short sets him against the brutal grey of London. He’s dressed in black, an insurgent. The city is his oppressor. But the tone of the film isn’t harsh; it’s soothing. The director, Matthew Marsh, wants to show how parkour beautifies a concrete jungle. When Daniel moves, you’re like the kid watching the plastic bag in American Beauty: you see “the life behind things”.

Daniel is a good speaker too. He talks of how: “in the world in general, imagination and creativity has been lost, and [it’s] been slowly fed back...through computer games…and kids are addicted to games because it’s an easy way to achieve.” Parkour is, from his perspective, a life-threatening response to the great failing of modern life: our wish to abolish the stakes… to lose, and not to suffer for it. In computer games, if you die, you press “Play”. In parkour, you can’t afford to slip. Once you volunteer for risk, you also volunteer to accept the penalties. This is why parkour is for the brave; not because the feats are courageous, but because the practitioners abide with injury and pain. It’s not a sport for whiners. If you fall, you abandon blame. That’s the nobility of these guys: the heroic refusal to demand assurances. Parkour obliges you to be captain of your life.

Matthew Marsh’s film has the steely grace of an Anton Corbijn photo. His black and white images are suffused with strength. You can’t look at Daniel Ilabaca in motion and not see an athlete, and a rock star, mated. He’s city-born, city-weathered, and city-cool as anyone on the cover of Dazed and Confused, or ID. Marsh, like Corbijn, understands the power of black and white to make a subject enduring. Like a photograph of musicians, the film is an attempt to emboss something that is ephemeral by nature. Parkour is over, mostly, by the time you catch sight of a traceur. So the film slows that motion, seeking to capture the image Ilabaca creates in your mind – the wonder – rather than the harum-scarum of free-running.

No-one in London seems to notice Daniel taking risks. Jaded city-dwellers occasionally afford him a second glance, but they rarely stop to look. In a telling moment, Daniel executes a perfect summersault as people walk past him, oblivious to his prowess. He could be on fire… He could be flinging bolts of lightning… and Londoners would ignore him. In this context, parkour becomes even more an act of rebellion. Not only do practitioners defy death, they also defy the life-throttling metropolis: they refuse to blend in. This is not to say parkour is about garnering attention (though, let’s face it, Daniel did want to be filmed); it’s only acknowledging how lifeless we all seem…how we look down... in contrast to traceurs.

Those who’ve seen District 13 (a French action movie from 2004) will be familiar with David Belle, the man who invented parkour. He was the guy who made you want to renew your gym membership: the one who outran thirty assailants; leapt through narrow windows; vaulted staircases…and, all the while, looked so serene, it was as if the chase was his morning work-out. You never saw Belle sweat, in District 13. He had panache. He stowed fear, and doubt, and thoughts of personal safety… until, to see him move, you’d think it was effortless. With this in mind, Choose Not To Fall is made with a traceur’s attitude: the leap doesn’t matter; it was (and is) always possible. At heart, in parkour, the aim is to be braver.

James Tatham, Movie Waffle for 10 FILMS



Trivia

John Ketchum, Filminute’s co-founder and head of jury singled out CHOOSE NOT TO FALL as the most quoted film in the festival, with many references and comments from online voters and Facebook fans repeating Ilabaca’s line “If you’re afraid of falling you fall because you’re afraid.”


About the director

Matthew Marsh graduated with BA degree in animation from Kingston University. His graduation film went on to win numerous awards including a Royal Television Society award for best animation. His work has been screened in the V & A, The Barbican and on the Southbank and is part of BFI’s film collection. Matthew also works with live action producing and directing the documentary The Next Explorers and Choose Not To Fall which was an instant success winning a number of international awards.

To Claire; From Sonny - a review

"You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you."
A quote that stays in my mind from the moment when I've read a review about The Fall in 2008. After two years I had the chance to meet the author, James Tatham, the name behind Movie Waffle, one of the best written film review blogs from Wales, UK. James is also an english teacher at a college in Cardiff.

Here is the result of our first collaboration, probably the first film review for an youtube short film created by a teenager.

To Claire; From Sonny – A Review
by James Tatham for MovieWaffle and IO.1

Young love is like dying: a total, blissful, elegiac sense of the world. Youth itself is a finite state; unlike adulthood, which drones on and on. Youth – like pop music – is emphatically present. It crackles: “Now”. And that boldness of feeling floods young love. To be in love at sixteen is to be awash with feeling: filling up and up and up. Again, it makes for that death connection: the tsunami-life, where living surges so fast that death seems like the only possible corollary. Shakespeare didn’t kill off Romeo and Juliet because he set out to write a tragedy; he killed them because young love can only die…or else it cools… or else you grow up. Josh Beattie’s short, To Claire; From Sonny, is a small masterpiece on the subject.

“Dear Claire,” he writes. And then we see her. She’s posing at the back of a ferry, in Brisbane, Australia. The city is behind her. She’s young and beautiful. Sonny’s narration takes the form of a letter to Claire, telling her of his life since their break-up. He writes in a reverie. Claire was his first love. Like all first loves, she gave him the sense that all life’s questions had been answered. But they broke-up, or else… something happened. So now Sonny rides the train, and thinks of his new girlfriend (who, to his bemusement, “voluntarily eats celery”), and Claire is dearer to him than ever, now that she’s gone. He writes to evoke her. He wants her memory to crash over him. The hurt she brings is a powerful love.

Unabashed feeling is valid here, because, to render young love accurately, you can’t dodge feeling with cynicism. In some respects, To Claire; From Sonny is reminiscent of the kind of heartfelt movies Alejandro González Iñárritu makes, where the shimmering beauty of life is constant, and death is like a complimentary space. There’s always death in an Iñárritu movie, because, without it, life wouldn’t glisten. Iñárritu makes elegies, and To Claire; From Sonny shares that wistful sentiment. Director Josh Beattie is remarkably deft at avoiding maudlin overtones, or the threat of despondency settling over the short. Again, like Iñárritu, he’s able to make you feel transported rather than entombed. Half the pleasure of watching the movie comes from the life it catches: from Claire’s eyelashes brushing Sonny’s chest, to the way the world flows past a train window, silently unmooring passengers’ thoughts.

The young actor who plays Sonny looks a little like Nicholas Hoult, the young actor who played the embodiment of youth in Tom Ford’s A Single Man. The actress who plays Claire looks a little like Gossip Girl’s Michelle Trachtenberg. Neither is required to speak in To Claire; From Sonny. But they do look like they could be a real couple; you believe in their romance. This isn’t meant to be an actor’s showcase, after all; it’s a director’s calling card. What stands out most, watching the short, isn’t the brilliant quality of the acting; it’s the prodigious skill with which the film is made. A graveyard sequence is shot in panoramic miniature, as if it were a diorama, illustrating grief. Time-lapse photography depicts Brisbane as aloof.

At seventeen, director Josh Beattie displays the kind of instinct a twenty-year professional should envy. Like all natural film-makers, he knows intuitively when to cut and how long a scene should play. He frames his actors wonderfully: one shot in particular, of Claire walking down a suburban road, has her centre-frame – insistently pacing toward us – moving closer and closer to the camera, until she’s so close… we lose sight. When Sonny thinks back on his favourite moments with Claire, intimacy is conveyed through close-ups of her feet, eyes, hands. The film isn’t a moment too long or too short. It takes up only the space of a letter, saying the one thing every letter says: Now, I’m thinking of you.

Young love isn’t about marriage, or having children. It’s a two-man show, where every night you both split your heart open, and every morning you both treasure the pain. Nothing competes with love when you’re sixteen. Homework doesn’t hold a candle to the heart-stricken wait for his-or-her next call. When you grow-up, love is clouded by other love affairs: the heart gets paunchy, balconies are rarely scaled. Jobs come to pummel love. Routines set in. Years chip at certainties. For a spark to be a spark, it can only last a short while. To Claire; From Sonny is about the tumult of love, the part that’s most exciting, and the shortest lived. We all cherish our first love. We all mourn the loss of our heart-quaking youth.





http://moviewaffle.com/

You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you.

I have to recommend you a great film reviews blog and a fantastic writer.

http://moviewaffle.com/

I've discover it two years ago while I was surfing on web about THE FALL. Moviewaffle was at the beginning at that time but now after two years it looks like a everybody loves it ...It was longlisted for Wales Blog Awards 2010 (Best Writing) .

Here is one of the best reviews of The Fall directed by Tarsem Singh written with passion and truth by moviewaffle.com ...

The Fall – A Review

The greatest special effect is the close-up. Every vista pales in comparison with the human face. Because without that face – what do you connect with? What moves you? The desert might be a character in Lawrence of Arabia, but its performance is opaque. What makes Lawrence is Peter O’Toole. The same way – in Apocalypse Now – Marlon Brandon shows you what the jungle is thinking. In director Tarsem Singh’s breathtaking movie, The Fall, there are sights that equal anything David Lean or Francis Ford Coppola accomplished. And there is also a little girl (Catinca Untaru), whose face knocks every other wonder into a cocked hat.

The story is about a stuntman in Hollywood in the 1920s. He has fallen, both literally and metaphorically (the movie – while breathtaking – isn’t subtle). He’s in hospital. A famous actor has seduced the stuntman’s girl. Of all his injuries, this cuckolding is the worst. The stuntman becomes addicted to morphine. Bedridden, it’s hard for him to maintain a constant supply. He befriends a little girl (hospitalized after – you guessed it – a fall) as a ruse so she’ll steal morphine for him. In return for her help, the little girl keeps bugging the stuntman to tell her a story. He does – and it’s breathtaking – but as the story unfolds, the morphine takes over…

Tarsem Singh spent four years making The Fall. In eighteen countries. With his own money. And Catinca Untaru still steals the show. In interview, the director speaks of how he couldn’t have made the movie till he found the right girl. And he was right. When a movie is this dazzling, it needs reality. Untaru has never acted before. With luck, she will never act again. Not for Sophia Coppola-type reasons, but because: she’ll never be this good. Non-actors get one shot at a perfect performance. Then they become actors. There are reaction shots The Fall catches from Untaru that one actor in a million could replicate. Tarsem Singh’s best decision was to let this little girl dictate how every other actor behaves. When Lee Pace (the stuntman) is with her, you’re watching an actor unlearn acting. And be better for it. Because acting is play time. Would that every movie had the luxury of children playing children instead of “child actors”.

So what do we see? Some examples: the desert; a wall of sand that looks a thousand feet high; a lone rider like an ink smear on the dunes. Or how about an island in the shape of a butterfly; blissfully white; set it in a billowing blue ocean. Or a dead tree sprouting into flames. Or an aqueduct designed by M.C. Escher. Or a wedding couple ringed by whirling Dervishes. Or tiny birds flying out of a man’s mouth. Or – Beauty. In essence. The Fall is “the full meal” (as a wise teacher of mine once phrased it). It is absurd, sensual and (my favourite) unabashed. It puts me in mind of movies like The Fountain, where the audience has to have the right appetite. You either gorge on such movies or you’re bored by them. Cynics will only gag.

While spirituality might seem ham-fisted in Singh’s handling of it (“Are you trying to save my soul?” the stuntman asks, repeatedly), like Darren Aronofsky, the soul of his movie isn’t there in words, it’s grasped holistically, through the movie. To put it another way, The Fall would be about the soul if the stuntman and the little girl talked about cornflakes. Like a great song which leaps the boundaries of its form; the message isn’t the words, it’s the music.

It’s easy to wear-out a word like “breathtaking”. How good can it be? we long to sneer. But great movies come from a director’s childish awe at the world. You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you. How else to explain the power of the close-up? To look at something so intently that – for a few seconds, a lifetime – it engulfs you. Human faces are the best kept secrets told by close-ups. Most of us still retain the capacity to be awed by a desert or an ocean. And the deserts and oceans of The Fall are awe-inspiring as any in movies. But that one little girl. We’d miss her. She and everyone else who’s ever given a great performance on-screen. Because great acting is only half of it. For the other half: you have to look close.

About MovieWaffle in 2008

I am an English teacher by day, and I’m often fairly busy, but a friend kept bugging me to write and so write I did (let that be a lesson to anyone who ever had a dream for someone else).

As far as intentions for the site go, I intend to write about movies I have seen. Some of them will be new releases, some of them will be old favourites and some of them I’ll review because my friend asks me to (I’ll bet he has plans). These reviews will not be fact-checked and will often, doubtless, contain inaccuracies and things I’ve remembered wrong. But they will also, hopefully, contain some thoughts you may agree with, and they will be written carefully, with care for the movies as much as where the commas should go.

If this site were a cinema it would be a small one, with only sort-of comfortable seating. It’s a pre-multiplex site: you come for the movies.

About MovieWaffle in 2010

The closest I ever came to getting shot was in Florida.

It was summer, and I had an AK47 pointed at my feet. The gun wasn’t mine, but it was my finger on the trigger. I had been handed a machine gun by a friend – partly for fun, partly to test my masculinity – and now, with a paper target taunting me like a raised middle finger, I was aiming low, in order not to lose control of the gun and kill everybody.

AK47s are lighter than you expect. They’re nearer the weight of an empty body bag, rather than a full one. However, far from being emboldened by the unexpected lightness of my gun, I was convinced that, when I pulled the trigger, the bastard thing would leap for my chin like a dog with iron teeth. So I pointed it down, as if ordering: “Sit”.

I was already nervous, after being told that I could burn my hand if I touched the barrel after firing. But the image of me, post-massacre, breaking my chin with the murder weapon…was too much.

I paused. There was something at stake beyond hitting the target. If I handed the gun back, I’d be coward. Not in the he-left-his-buddies-in-a-firefight sense; not even because I feared killing everybody, but because I’d have avoided risk.

Pulling that trigger was necessary to my life.

I gripped the gun, asserting control. My arms were rigid. The paper target was twenty feet away, but I wasn’t aiming for it. My aim was to fire. I willed my toes safe. I willed my friends safe. I willed the witless, molten AK not to catapult into my chin.

I fired…

(This is pretty much how I’d describe reviewing)