The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

The most Afterword friendly streaming platform of them all?

by 16 Comments

Anyone else heard of Filmin? I feel I have to share the good news having just watched Stephen Frears’ brilliant The Hit (Terence Stamp! John Hurt! Fernando Rey! Tim Roth in his film debut) – basically a chilly British crime film in the Get Carter mold, crossed with a road-trip across scorched and parched Spanish landscapes. I’d never heard of it but Filmin recommended it after I rewatched Sexy Beast.

Other recent watches include Michael Mann’s Thief, Misery, Black Adder, Inside Number 9, Something Wild, Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, a Peckinpah trilogy of Convoy, Straw Dogs and The Chase, the great new Vonnegut documentary, The Guns of Navarone (!), In the Heat of the Night, An American Werewolf in London, lots of Tati, and even Spielberg’s 1941 (I’ve always wanted to see it but it turns out it’s every bit as crap as its reputation).

So, basically it’s everything I hoped streaming services would be when they started – the history of film and TV all there ready and waiting for you – rather another hugely expensive identikit Netflix or HBO production (some of which admittedly have their charms).

I’ve currently got around 150 films on the ‘Saved to watch » Continue Reading.

What have been your fave TV shows of the first three months of 2022?

by 121 Comments

Almost a quarter of the way through the year would seem like a good time for us all to flag down other shows we feel other AWers might like.

Pick of the bunch for me thus far is Season 3 of Sky/RAI’s My Brilliant Friend, a beautifully simple, but superbly written and stunningly filmed story about two girls from Naples as they go from childhood to adulthood. So eager was I to see the penultimate (there are four books in the Elena Ferrente written Neapoliton Quartet on which MBF is based) series, I watched the whole thing again from the beginning. If you’ve not seen it, watch it. Together with the other Naples-set Italian series, Gomorrah, it’s the best thing on TV right now.

Other foreign series worth a shout are Walter Presents’ Cry Wolf and Dark Woods. Best new English language show is Season 4 of Top Boy on NF. Respect for Canadian rapper/grime artist, Drake, for saving the show after C4 decided to drop it two series in.

Although a bit older, Disney’s Snowfall about the start of the coke pandemic in the 80s is in a similar vein. So glad to be able to » Continue Reading.

Squid Game – Doing for TV what Parasite did for the local multiplex

by 9 Comments

Anyone here remember how Clive James used to show excerpts from a Japanese show called Endurance all those years ago? Despite provoking equal parts disgusted bemusement and amusement (“Aren’t those Johnny foreigners jolly strange!”), huge numbers of UK viewers now happily sit down and watch I’m a Celebrity.

Remember at the time critics pointing out that people were quickly going to get bored simply watching contestants being humiliated. The logical end product was a show in which one or more of those taking part wound up having to die for the entertainment of the folks at home.

A sort of bastard love child of Endurance, Battle Royale, Takeshi’s Castle, Lost, Hunger Games and the Prisoner, Netflix’s new Squid Game is that show.

Currently halfway through series/season one and gob-smackingly good it is, too.

Without giving too much of the game (no pun intended!) away, the show is about a bunch of heavily in debt South Koreans who are offered the chance to take part in a series of contests with a brobdingnagian cash prize for the winner.

The contests – kids party games like statues (known as red light, green light in Korea) are simple enough. The » Continue Reading.

Time to rediscover Between the Lines (early 90s UK cop show)

by 6 Comments

Jaygee’s Immutable First Law of TV states that nearly all great long-running shows either start to repeat themselves or just get more and more absurdly convoluted in terms of their plots.

Dexter with Michael C Hall would be an excellent example of a once-promising series from the US that did both. From what the one episode I’ve seen of Line of Duty S6, the same seems to be happening to Line of Duty. Having set the bar for UK cop shows in the Tweenies (or whatever the fuck the years after 2010 are called). the show should have pulled the plug at the end of its fourth season when it was at the top of its game.

While I will binge the remainder of LofD S6, I’ll do so with a far lower expectations than before. For me, the best thing that the underwhelming first episode did was to motivate me to dig out my DVDs of GF Newman’s superb Between The Lines. An early 90s successor to the same writer’s earlier Law and Order, BTL starred – among others – the excellent Neil Pearson and the late Tony (none more slimy) Doyle.

If you’ve not seen it, the » Continue Reading.

No, don’t tell me the plot!

by 6 Comments

I hate knowing the plot of a film before I see it, it spoils it somewhat for me

It’s difficult to avoid the plot outline when you’re browsing films to watch.

movie reviews, friends and then trailers and sometimes posters give away too much information

In fact I’d prefer to know nothing about a film before I see it – actors, director, setting -nothing (maybe the year it was made would be ok)

Ideally and I know this is impossible, I would be put in front of a screen knowing nothing about the film and there would be a good chance I’d like it

Am I being unreasonable/unrealistic – does anyone else have a similar view?

What’s plausible in film – results may vary according to country of origin

by 24 Comments

I saw at a friends The Beat My Heart Skipped recently. It’s a French film starring Romain Duris, a big star in France but pretty unknown more widely. He plays a property gangster, part of a gang who buy up freeholds, evict tenants through menace and violence, then by obtaining building permits through bribery and sell on the property for big profits. He stalks the streets of Paris walkman on, leather jacket done up, cigarette in hand, as a quintessentially French stylish violent hardman. Yet – and what a big yet – a chance meeting re-ignites his childhood passion for the classical piano. The plot of the film revolves in no small part around his attempts to pass an audition and be taken on as a concert pianist by a leading manager. This is played completely straight, not a hint of irony or bathos. (see the clip which sees him lay into his Vietnamese piano tutor with frightening intensity)

Now imagine the same plot with a British actor. Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch could do the tortured would-be maestro. No shortage of heavies and hard men. Tom Hardy, Tom Hiddleston to name but two. But the same actor? Only a French » Continue Reading.

Let’s put together Tarantino’s new soundtrack!

by 19 Comments

A spoddy thing I occasionally do is make soundtracks; ie my soundtrack to an imagined David Lynch film, my alternative Wicker Man soundtrack etc and it occurs to me that it could be fun to do it here.

So fellow Afterworders, Tarantino has a new film out, Kill The Inglourious Hateful Reservoir Eight From Dusk Till Dawn, about a bunch of kung fu bounty hunters chasing down runaway nazis in Latin America.

I don’t think this is main theme material, but in the crucial bar room brawl with vampires scene, it certainly plays…

Pride

by 9 Comments

I went to the cinema club at our local fleapit, Reflexen, yesterday to see the French film, Girlhood.

Modern cinema bears a closer resemblance to a home cinema system than you’d think. Long gone are the days of tins full of celluloid. They were showing the film off a USB stick! There were a few problems getting the film started and once it had, they couldn’t get the subtitles to work! Giving up, the club announced they would be showing Pride instead.

Yippee ! DuCool had recommended it very warmly and his film tips are always worth listening to. My only reservation was that he does have a fondness for rather glum films. Not many frothy romcoms or preposterous monster movies on his best of the year!

Gay activists and miners. What would this be like? An agit-prop Full Monty? Brassed Off without any music?

I needn’t have worried. A great script by Stephen Beresford and some stupendous performances: I haven’t laughed so much in a cinema for yonks.

A tremendous, feel-good film with an important message. See it!!

Based on a true story too.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/pride-film-gay-activists-miners-strike-interview