At The Flix with @Timmy666
Greetings one and all and welcome to this week’s At The Flix, our weekly trawl through what’s cool and what hopes to be cool at the cinema this week.
Let’s take a look shall we ….
Everest (3D) (12A)
Boasting a stellar cast, a big budget and cinematography to ensure even the most hardened will have a fear of heights, Everest is an Autumn blockbuster of literally high proportions. The film tells a true story, was film types calls a docudrama, showing the adventures of a number of simultaneous expeditions up Mount Everest in the 90s which resulted in the deaths of eight climbers.
With a cast including Brolin, Gyllenhaal and Hawkes, this is also lofty ambition, quite literally as well.
Gravity brought a 3D experience that counted! Baltasar Kormákur’s film was meant for 3D, and I do hope that they’ve mastered the technology for such an occasion. The next stop for showing the merits of 3D will hopefully be Zemeckis’s The Walk.
Judging at the trailer and the critical reaction, the film’s use of sentiment is used to harrowing and unnerving effect! Not all critics have praised the characterisation but the film eschews any sense of glamour. This is the antithesis of sensationalism.
Bill (PG)
A very British affair, this is an upcoming British family adventure-comedy film from the folks behind children’s TV series Horrible Histories and Yonderland. The film is a fictional take on the young William Shakespeare‘s search for fame and fortune, as written by HH stars Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond and directed by Richard Bracewell.
It’s three years since Horrible Histories yet clearly the film maintains similar tropes with cast playing multiple characters and a quirky character-and-costume driven comedy style. Bill is very much a fictional tale – taking Shakespeare on a crazy adventure before becoming the playwright we ‘think we’ know.
This one has been a while in release – let’s hope it is at least half decent.
Walk In The Woods, A (15)
Robert Redford plays Bill Bryson and challenges himself to hike the Appalachian Trail – 2,200 miles of America’s most unspoiled, spectacular and rugged countryside from Georgia to Maine.
On paper an amazing cast, yet looking a little bit twee in the trailer – you’d ordinarily go any road trip with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte and expect it to have some substance. I’d ordinarily be an immediate convert to following their adventures but critics have questioned the effectiveness of its comic voice and that the walk is merely pleasant as opposed to amazing.
L’Eclisse (PG)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic L’Eclisse (Fri 18th – Sun 20th) is the third part of his trilogy on malaise following L’avventura and La notte. This is a ‘must see’ of cinema and to see it digital restored will be a treat. Time and time again, Antonioni proved himself as a true visionary of film, in this case a romantic drama with his then partner, the beautiful Monica Vitti, combining the tensions of beauty and isolation through the characters and through the architecture of Rome. This is not a Rome anyone will recognise – as empty during the day as at night. This is disquieting, strange and compelling cinema at its best.
That’s it from me. As always, any queries or quibbles, you can drop me a tweet at @timmy666. Until next week, have a great time at the cinema.
