#scorcese voice *cinema*

[vialdovi]

You gotta have the brain of a mosquito with gonorrhea if you dont see how peak is to have shadow the hedgehog being voiced by keanu reeves while doing the akira slide with an orchestal version of live and learn

Cinema

[fagdyk]

End of the Lanayru Mining Facility cutscene nobody will ever beat you

[rosesocietyy]

started fall of the house of usher and I'm having the time of my life rn

[vonlipvig]

ok i'm watching a good one tonight, time to watch surf's up!

[brithombar]

comic series where the justice league fights godzilla and king kong just announced storytelling is back

[back-and-totheleft]

Romantic, freewheeling, containing fathoms

IT'S early in the piece but maybe the best way to explain the allure of Oliver Stone’s romantic, freewheeling autobiography is to tell you how one of my best friends took on the experience.

My mate, a self-confessed Stone nut, downloaded the audio version of Chasing the Light - as read by the author - and then proceeded to drive around Cork city with the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter for company. “Love how he paints a picture of post-war optimism in New York circa 1945-46,” he messaged me. “Take me there...” Throughout his storied but turbulent career, Stone has certainly taken us places - the steaming jungles of Vietnam, the (serial) killing fields of the American heartland, the fervid political theatre of El Salvador, the grassy knoll. Even if we didn’t always like the destination, more often than not it was worth the journey.

Reading Stone's words in Chasing the Light, it’s impossible not to hear that coffee and cognac voice. The words roll from the page, sentences topped off with little rejoinders, just about maintaining an elegant flow. Drugs are mentioned early and often, while the word “sexy” features half a dozen times in the opening chapters alone. As in his best movies, Stone displays a positively moreish lust for life, at one point referring to how the two parts of the filmmaking process, if working well, are "copulating".

The book tells the story of the first half of his life, up to the acclaim and gongs of Platoon, and it’s clear that his own sense of drama was underscored by his family background, which is part torrid European art flick, part US blockbuster. His mother, Jacqueline - French, unerringly singleminded - grew to womanhood during the Nazi occupation of Paris. She downplayed her striking appearance as the jackboots stomped the streets but quickly scaled the social ladder, becoming engaged to a pony club sort. Enter Louis Stone.

Considerably older than Jacqueline, Louis quickly zoned in after spotting her cycling on a Paris street. In no time Jacqueline has jilted her fiancée (who, remarkably, appears to have turned up as a guest at the wedding), Oliver is conceived and one ocean crossing later, William Oliver Stone is born.

This family contains fathoms, Stone's father straight-laced and Commie-hating on the surface, yet a serial adulterer (even threesomes are mentioned) and positively uxorious towards his own mother. "It was sex, not money, that derailed my father," he writes. Louis's infidelities nixed Jacqueline's American dream, and Oliver’s with it. Jacqueline ultimately cheats on Louis, not simply via a fling but a whole new relationship, and with a family friend to boot.

What’s even more interesting is Stone’s reflections on *how* it was dealt with. Already dispatched to a boarding school, he learns of the disintegration of his family down the phone line. It has the coldness of some of the best scenes from Mad Men, children of the era parceled off to the side even as momentous events in their home life detonate in front of them. As things veer ever more into daytime soap territory, Louis then tells his son he's "broke", echoing the impact of the Great Depression on his own father's business interests.

By now, Stone is unmoored. He has secured a place in Yale but blows it off for a year and heads to Saigon to teach English: "I grew a beard and got as far away from the person I'd been as I could." On his return he decides he is done with academia; he'll be a novelist in New York, much to the distaste of his father. "That's why I went back to Vietnam in the US Infantry - to take part in this war of my generation," he writes. "Let God decide."

And here we are at the pivotal moment in Stone's adult life. Plunged into the strange days of 1968 in the jungle, he recalls a scene in which his patrol group comes under attack, imagining itself surrounded. Time elides and a metre may as well be a mile, explosions going off everywhere and bullets flying amid paranoia and uncertainty that borders on the hallucinogenic. "Full daylight reveals charred bodies, dusty napalm, and gray trees."

Tellingly, Stone focuses on this arguably cinematic episode while other incidents in which he is actually wounded don't receive the same treatment. By the time he leaves Vietnam he has served in three different combat units and has been awarded a bronze star for heroism. So many of his peers were drafted, yet he had decided to go. You never get a direct sense that his subsequent career is in any way a type of atonement, yet it is never fully explained. "Why on earth did you go?" he is asked. "It was a question I couldn't answer glibly."

From this point on, Chasing the Light mainly becomes a love letter to the redemptive power of the cinema, pockmarked with acerbic commentary on Hollywood powerplays. Stone's firsthand experience of jungle combat gives him a sense of perspective that no amount of cocaine or downers can ever truly neutralise, and it also imbues him with a sense of derring-do. At NYU School of Arts, his lecturer is Martin Scorcese, an educational home run. Watching movies is a place a refuge, writing them a cathartic outlet. It leads to visceral filmmaking, beginning with his short film Last Year in Vietnam. That burgeoning sense of career before anything else brings an end to his first marriage - "'comfortable' was the killer word". The seeds are sown for the plot that would germinate into Platoon.

As he moves past the relative disappointment of his first feature, Seizure, the big break of writing Midnight Express, and then onto the speedbump of The Hand, his second movie, Chasing the Light becomes a little more knockabout, though no less enjoyable. Conan the Barbarian, for which he wrote the screenplay, became someone else's substandard vision, Scarface a not entirely pleasant experience as his writing efforts move to the frosty embrace of director Brian de Palma. Hollywood relationships rise and fall like scenes from Robert Altman's The Player. His second marriage, the birth of his son, the slow-motion passing of his father, and all the time Stone is chasing glory on the silver screen.

By his late thirties it feels like he's placing all his chips on Salvador, a brutal depiction of central American civil war based on the scattered recollections of journalist Richard Boyle and starring the combustible talents of James Woods and John Belushi. His own high-wire lifestyle is perhaps best encapsulated in his reference to Elpidia Carrillo, cast as Maria in Salvador: "Elia Kazan once argued against any restrictions for a director exploring personal limits with his actresses, and I wanted badly to get down with her," he writes with delightful candour. Yet ultimately "I convinced myself that repression, in this case, would make a better film." Note: in this case.

Salvador was a slow burner, not an immediate critical or commercial success, but then in the style of a rollover jackpot, it started climbing the charts just as Platoon is about to announce itself to the world. Despite some loopy goings-on, that shoot in the Philippines had never gone down the Apocolypse Now route of near-madness, the drama mainly confined to warring factions within the production team. Ultimately, Platoon was the movie mid-Eighties America wanted to see about Vietnam. The book finishes in triumph, Stone clutching Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture.

There are piercing insights and inconsistencies dotted throughout. Stone lusts after good reviews but rails against the influence wielded by certain writers, such as Pauline Kael. He makes frequent reference to his yearning for truth and factual accuracy, yet hardly raises a quibble with The Deerhunter, the brilliant but flawed movie by sometime ally Michael Cimino which - particularly in the infamous Russian Roulette scenes - delivers an entirely concocted depiction of North Vietnamese forces. But then again, Stone revels in what he says is the ability to "not to have a fixed identity, to be free as a dramatist, elusive, unknown."

We've come to know him more in the decades since - through the menacing Natural Born Killers, the riveting but wonky conspiracy of JFK, the all-star lost classic U-Turn, even the missed opportunity that was The Putin Interviews. As my friend, who is the real authority, correctly observes, Chasing the Light is also weighted with nostalgia for a time when political dramas and anti-war films were smashing the box office, something hard to imagine today.

The second volume, if and when it arrives, will surely make for good reading - or listening. Buckle up your seat belt and take a spin.

-Noel Baker, “Oliver Stone’s freewheeling autobiography tells the story of the first half of his life,” Irish Examiner, Jan 17 2021 [x]

[fluttersofsuburbia-blog]

The Battle of Accessibility A Reflection on Cinema and Directing

In listening to the interviews given by Martin Scorsese and Krzysztof Kielowksi both of them in their unique ways stressed the elements of accessibility. Kielowski spoke more in regards to the creation of a film, meanwhile Scorsese stressed the need for of accessibility for film in its viewership. Kielowski navigated his discussion through the analysis of a scene and its constructive feedback with respect to accessibility of to an actor, of an actors emotions, and of the emotions of an audience. Scorsese spoke more in a formal sit down interview, and spoke of the accessibility in viewership, and maintaining the larger goal of a film to have an extended viewership or a lasting impact on its audience. 

In Scorsese’s interview he speaks a lot in respect to the recent French New Wave and its impact on the accessibility in creation of film and its more instant expression. The French New Wave pioneered on the creation of minimalist films due to the progression in technology which allowed for films to be created on a smaller budget, a shorter timeline and a minimalist crew. This accessibility allowed for vast diversity as other voices besides those of Hollywood and large European productions could now be heard. Scorsese tied this epoch back to his program that he initiated “Exhibition in the Park.” The whole program conceived in conjunction with New York University, is meant to serve as a complementary force to the technological revolution. Arguing the concept of commercial in juxtaposition to independent, Scorsese stressed the need for exhibition of the smaller productions to insure the continuance and the diversity of stories, Kino-eye and diversity within cinema. This proved to be true within the parameters of our own production as well. Specifically navigating assets or finding support from groups and donors that would allow viewership of our thesis film. Fortunately navigating these waters was not as difficult as it had been previously, but there still storms on the horizon. One of the main resources that guarantees the possibilities of exhibition is now through capital, which we had to raise for, and proved to be a limiting factor in some of the film festivals we will ultimately submit to. Scorsese focused on providing free viewership purely on the basis of merit and ability, again coinciding with his fundamental belief in accessibility. Scorsese mostly highlighted exhibition and viewership of a film, his thread of accessibility permeates into Kielowski’s interview. 

Kielowski explores the techniques and motivations within a scene by discussing with actors their logic behind each action. In order for their to be a space for an open discussion of the logic behind an actor’s action or the character that they are portraying and their actions, there needs to be accessibility. Accessibility for the actor with respect to their inner emotions and ensuring that their performance not only is genuine but also organic. The accessibility of a director to the actor with respect to communication and invoking a specific response, as well as an actor’s accessibility into their own psyche. The combination of these elements allows the audience to feel privy to something, “discrete and intimate.” Upon reviewing the footage it seems clear that Joel was able to invoke this response from the film’s talent Ricky. Ricky was able to relate to the experiences placed before him on such a personal level, that he recited his own hardships without even speaking a single word. Granting access to a moment within his life, that the audience otherwise would have never shared with him. 

The end goal of many filmmakers is exposure and exhibition, it is crucial that not only are their films accessible to be viewed but also that in their process of construction, there is an accessibility to the actor’s emotions in their portrayal of a character. The widespread accessibility and openness of the cinematic art form influences Kielowksi and Scorsese. Whether it is purely in regards to exhibition or in its creation, accessibility serves a crucial element to successful filmmaking.  

Bibliography

Kieślowski, K. (2018, November 28). 1-Hour Masterclass / Workshop with Krzysztof 

Kieślowski from 1994 [Interview]. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Iy3JyPA0g

Scorcese, M. (2014, November 27). 22 Minute Interview with 27 Year Old Martin 

Scorcese [Interview]. Retrieved June 23, 2019, from 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOsvf8Cpxgo

[takeoverfilmfestival]

Takeover Film Festival 2017

Opening Night

Takeover Film Festival invites audiences to the opening evening, featuring live music and free tapas for ticket holders from 6pm, in celebration of The Olive Tree screening.

THE OLIVE TREE

FRI 24 FEB, 6.30PM.

N. Irish premiere of this new film by Iciar Bollain and screenwriter Paul Laverty, the Olive Tree is a striking film set in Eastern Spain. The story follows a young girl named Alma who shares a close bond with her grandfather, Ramon, a country man who stopped talking after his son sold a sacred family olive tree. Unable to bear the situation her grandfather is in, Alma goes looking for the olive tree and discovers it was bought by a German energy company in Dusseldorf.

The visually stunning film focuses on the importance of family relationships, heritage and the environment. With uniformly strong performances from the whole cast making the dynamics between characters flow and the spectacular score, the Olive Tree is a beautiful film. – Lauren.

SPAIN 2016. SPANISH WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES. RECOMMENDED CERT 15. 1 HR 40 MINS.

book online

LOVETRUE

FRI 24 FEB, 8.45PM.

A stunning new film from award winning director Alma Har'el, LoveTrue is a remarkably bittersweet documentary that follows three real life individuals and their stories, all of which involve the theme of ‘true love’. Alaskan girl Blake and her complex work life, young Hawaiian dad Willie, and New York busker Victory and her divided family. Dealing with the themes of age, loss of beauty and innocence, and nostalgia by using young actors to portray younger versions of its characters, LoveTrue is a remarkably honest piece that doesn’t pull any punches. - J.P.

US 2016. DIR ALMA HAR’EL. MUSIC BY FLYING LOTUS. 1HR 22 MINS. CERT 15.  book online

YOUR NAME

SATURDAY 25 FEB, 4.15 PM (DUBBED) & 6.30PM (SUBTITLED).

Claimed to be Miyazaki's successor, director Makoto Shinkai delivers 'Your Name,' a body swap romance which was the most anticipated anime feature of 2016.

Following the lives of Taki, a high school boy in the city and Mitsuha, a girl who longs for Tokyo as they inexplicably switch places. In what seems like a realistic dream, the pair soon release their bizarre situation and must work together to adapt to each other's daily routine. Dealing with themes such as identity and youth, this layered film blends both a rom-com with sci-fi to deliver a stunning piece of animation which will have a lasting impact. –Thomas.

JAPAN. 2016. 1HR 45 MINS. 4.15PM (DUBBED) & 6.30PM (ENGLISH SUBTITLES). CERT 12A.

book online

SEOUL STATION

SAT 25 FEB, 8.45PM.

Another newly released animation from Sang-Ho Yeon whose zombie thriller and box office hit Train to Busan was shown at QFT last year. Similar in tone and style to his earlier hard-hitting anime films The King of Pigs and The Fake, Seoul Station follows a handful of homeless people  existing on the fringes of society as they become embroiled in a zombie outbreak at the South Korean capital’s central station.  The grisly events unfolding are a cypher through which the filmmaker comments on serious social issues such as class prejudice, misogyny, and the government military.

SOUTH KOREA. 2016. 1 hr 32 MINS. DIR: SANG- HO YEON. ANIMATION/HORROR. ENGLISH SUBTITLES. CERT 15 ADVISED

book online

Filmmaking Masterclasses

ANIMATION MASTERCLASS WITH JOEL SIMON

SAT 25 FEB  2.00-4.00PM.

Storyboarding and character design masterclass with acclaimed Belfast based animator Joel Simon, who will also outline key differences between anime and western style animation characters. (Workshop room).

Aimed at 14-17 year olds. All tickets £8.00. (Participants under 18 yrs need to bring a signed parental consent (downloadable) form to the workshops.

book online

‘GUERILLA FILMMAKING’ MASTERCLASS

SUN 26 FEB, 2.00-4.00pm (workshop room).

Belfast based filmmaker Seán Murray will take you through the processes  of film-making on a small budget. Showing a selection of short films, Seán will explain how to best utilise a small production crew with limited resources. This masterclass will identify the constraints of the funding process by offering an alternative and innovative approach to film-making.

This masterclass is aimed at 16-19 year olds. £8.00.

book online

ASIAN HORROR WORKSHOP

SUN 26 FEB, 6.15PM-7.30PM.

Storyteller Steve Lally’s workshop is a must for horror fans.

Steve www.storyman.info will explore some of the folklore behind Asian Horror looking at Asian mythical characters such as 'The Kappa' a river demon, 'The Noppera-bō' or 'Mujina' a faceless spirit and 'The Nü gui', a vengful female ghost with long hair in a white dress, which the character 'Sadako' from the Japanese 'Ring' movies was based on.

He will also explore how Western Horror,especially The Italian Horror Maestro 'Lucio Fulci' and  American Master of Horror 'George A Romero' had an influence The Korean Zombie movie 'Seoul Station'.

This workshop is aimed at 16-19 year olds. £5.00.

book online

All workshops will take place in the QFT workshop room.  Participants under 18 yrs must bring a signed parental consent form – downloadable from the QFT website.

SPACESHIP

SUN 26 FEB, 4.20PM.

Debut feature with powerful photography and soundtrack about teenage ennui brings a fresh new voice to British cinema. Teenage cyber-goth (Lucinda) disappears in an apparent alien abduction, whose father searches for her in a strange world of unicorns and black holes. – Caitlin.

UK. 2016. DIR/SCR: ALEX TAYLOR. DRAMA/SCI FI. 1 HR 30 MINS. RECOMMENDED  15 +

book online

Closing Screening

THE KING OF COMEDY + Cinepunked panel discussion.

SUN 26 FEB, 6.20PM.

Part biting satire, part disturbing character study, Martin Scorsese's 1983 film The King of Comedy is an underrated masterpiece. Starring Robert de Niro in one of his greatest and most nuanced performances, plays lonely and delusional Rupert Pupkin who dreams of becoming a hit comedian. This haunting and hilarious movie has slowly risen in stature over the years and is now more relevant in today's media obsessed society than ever before. One of my absolute favourite films. – Matthew.

CinePunked's Robert JE Simpson, Dr Rachael Kelly and Conor Smyth are joined by Takeover's Matthew O’Leary in a live interactive panel discussion on Martin Scorcese's satirical King of Comedy.  For more info www.cinepunked.com   

USA. 1983. DIRECTOR: MARTIN SCORSESE. WITH JERRY LEWIS,SANDRA BERNHARD. 1HR 29 MINS. CERT PG.

book online