Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999)
12-year-old James Gillespie lives on a Glasgow housing estate during the 1973 refuse collectors’ strike. After James’ friend falls into a canal and drowns, James becomes increasingly withdrawn. As bags of rubbish pile up and rats move in, James starts to spend time with Margaret Anne, a vulnerable 14 year old expressing a need for love in all the wrong ways, and Kenny, who possesses an unusual innocence in spite of the harsh surroundings.
Easy to call Lynne Ramsay's debut feature social realism or to classify Ratcatcher under the British Kitchen Sink realism movement. While it certainly has many traits of it, I think the film is a lot more poetic than those traditions with Ratcatcher's touches of surrealism in the grim Glasgow setting. The squalor of Glasgow is depressing of course, but Ramsey portrays some touching moments of working class childhood, particularly with the dreams to escape it - riding the bus to the countryside and a new housing project, sending a mouse to the moon etc. Also beautiful tender moments of youthful love, such as a bath scene between James and Margaret Anne (something that would be difficult to get away with filming these days). I really loved this one, I thought it full of a sense of wonder and curiosity towards childhood/growing up, and full of compassion and love for its characters, rather than grim and depressing like many people have found.
The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2009)
JR, an aspiring news-anchor, forces her younger brother Colin to embark on a road trip to move her belongings out of her professor-turned-lover’s place. Traveling through New England, they uncomfortably run into old school-mates or revisit familial history from which they have long since diverged.
Your miles will vary with The Color Wheel depending on your tolerance for 2000s mumblecore films about privileged twenty somethings in the US Northeast, but I though the film captured the feeling of being a lost recently graduated student watching all your peers go off to do better things while feeling stuck in a rut having your dreams slip away - a feeling I am all too familiar with. The estranged brother and sister relationship also feels believable (at least up until the ending, which is a bit of a twist), even if the dialogue seems a little too rehearsed and overwritten. Shot in beautiful black and white 16mm.
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
A lovable tramp falls for a blind woman who sells flowers on the street and who mistakes him for a millionaire. Upon learning that she and her grandmother are to be evicted, the tramp undertakes a series of attempts to provide them with the money they need, all of which end in humiliating failure.
Somehow my first Chaplin film - big blindspot of mine. City Lights is considered by many to be his best, and I feel a little underwhelmed? I can appreciate lots of it - a few years into the sound era he's making a silent picture and sticking his thumb at the transition to sound, it has big choregraphed scenes, lots of pathos throughout. But I don't know, I felt like the story was a little undercooked, like a skeleton of a story to get us from place A to B. Furthermore, many of the gags, while funny, went on for far too long when making an earlier exit would have been more refined. As mentioned, the Chaplin film that I've seen, but based off the experience of the great silent clowns, I think I prefer Buster to Charlie
Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020)
Undine is a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, while Christoph is an industrial diver. Linked by a love of the water, the two form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help Undine overcome the considerable baggage of her former affair.
My second time watching Undine and I caught it as part of the TIFF retrospective on Petzold. Love how Petzold plays with the Undine myth as a tale of new and lost romance and identity, and my appreciation of the film grew in my rewatch now that I have a little bit of a background on the myth. Has two great performances by Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski (one of my favourite contemporary actors). Also a great film to learn more about the history of Berlin (one of my favourite cities) as it goes into a deep dive of the history of the city through urban planning.
12-year-old James Gillespie lives on a Glasgow housing estate during the 1973 refuse collectors’ strike. After James’ friend falls into a canal and drowns, James becomes increasingly withdrawn. As bags of rubbish pile up and rats move in, James starts to spend time with Margaret Anne, a vulnerable 14 year old expressing a need for love in all the wrong ways, and Kenny, who possesses an unusual innocence in spite of the harsh surroundings.
Easy to call Lynne Ramsay's debut feature social realism or to classify Ratcatcher under the British Kitchen Sink realism movement. While it certainly has many traits of it, I think the film is a lot more poetic than those traditions with Ratcatcher's touches of surrealism in the grim Glasgow setting. The squalor of Glasgow is depressing of course, but Ramsey portrays some touching moments of working class childhood, particularly with the dreams to escape it - riding the bus to the countryside and a new housing project, sending a mouse to the moon etc. Also beautiful tender moments of youthful love, such as a bath scene between James and Margaret Anne (something that would be difficult to get away with filming these days). I really loved this one, I thought it full of a sense of wonder and curiosity towards childhood/growing up, and full of compassion and love for its characters, rather than grim and depressing like many people have found.
The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2009)
JR, an aspiring news-anchor, forces her younger brother Colin to embark on a road trip to move her belongings out of her professor-turned-lover’s place. Traveling through New England, they uncomfortably run into old school-mates or revisit familial history from which they have long since diverged.
Your miles will vary with The Color Wheel depending on your tolerance for 2000s mumblecore films about privileged twenty somethings in the US Northeast, but I though the film captured the feeling of being a lost recently graduated student watching all your peers go off to do better things while feeling stuck in a rut having your dreams slip away - a feeling I am all too familiar with. The estranged brother and sister relationship also feels believable (at least up until the ending, which is a bit of a twist), even if the dialogue seems a little too rehearsed and overwritten. Shot in beautiful black and white 16mm.
City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
A lovable tramp falls for a blind woman who sells flowers on the street and who mistakes him for a millionaire. Upon learning that she and her grandmother are to be evicted, the tramp undertakes a series of attempts to provide them with the money they need, all of which end in humiliating failure.
Somehow my first Chaplin film - big blindspot of mine. City Lights is considered by many to be his best, and I feel a little underwhelmed? I can appreciate lots of it - a few years into the sound era he's making a silent picture and sticking his thumb at the transition to sound, it has big choregraphed scenes, lots of pathos throughout. But I don't know, I felt like the story was a little undercooked, like a skeleton of a story to get us from place A to B. Furthermore, many of the gags, while funny, went on for far too long when making an earlier exit would have been more refined. As mentioned, the Chaplin film that I've seen, but based off the experience of the great silent clowns, I think I prefer Buster to Charlie
Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020)
Undine is a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, while Christoph is an industrial diver. Linked by a love of the water, the two form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help Undine overcome the considerable baggage of her former affair.
My second time watching Undine and I caught it as part of the TIFF retrospective on Petzold. Love how Petzold plays with the Undine myth as a tale of new and lost romance and identity, and my appreciation of the film grew in my rewatch now that I have a little bit of a background on the myth. Has two great performances by Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski (one of my favourite contemporary actors). Also a great film to learn more about the history of Berlin (one of my favourite cities) as it goes into a deep dive of the history of the city through urban planning.
