Film Reviews by RC

This quirky, indy film of 2 photographers of different generations and their random collaboration of portraits. Their creative views differ but find a way to play and do justice to the people whose portraits they take. Sometimes I thought the photos unremarkable, but it was the human connection, the celebration of ordinary working people. I think of the 19th century French painters like Courbiet who first explored les paysans, les ouvriers. These are not just figures labouring in a compositional landscape, they are the landscape blown into giant proportions and their individuality celebrated with heroic proportions. Pasting the photos onto buildings, containers and vehicles creates ephemeral yet powerful images. The miners pasted onto the empty shell of their row of houses is moving. Wives of dockers tower defiantly on a stack of containers, and the real women emerge like Lilliputians from their own Gulliver images. JR's treatment of the 89yr olf Agnes Varda's features is tender and her appreciation that he will carry her torch forward.

I loved the book and so looked forward to the film. Inevitably it lost a lot of details, and timescale was very compressed, but the main characters where well-cast and played. I loved Boris' character. And I thought the young/adult versions of the two main characters was well done.

Having seen some really trite movies with 'star casts' of ageing actors I admire, I was half-expecting this to be a lavender/marigold/book group/mishmash. However, the script had some welly and Imelda Staunton and Celia Imrie played sisters with gusto. Can't say it was a great film, despite its predictable ending it was heartening and I enjoyed it.

Humility, sheer determination, patience, his striking visions and meticulous hand-skills, are just some of the reasons Andy Goldsworthy has always been one of my heroes. I once saw him live, and remembered him saying that he was an artist so he could understand nature. This recent film shows him working with mortality: in his stone structures like sepulchres with holes resonant of coffins that people can lie in, are striking. His continual work with a fallen elm tree over many years, making art around its fallen trunk and branches, its phantom limbs. The sight of Goldsworthy climbing his way along the branches of a hedgerow is mesmerising. The last shot of him leaning into the wind is his defiance against mortality as well as his embrace of life cycles and is a tribute to one of our greatest artists.

It wasn't till the credits rolled I knew it was an Armando Ianucci film. Then the satyrical knock about quality made perfect sense. I loved the earthy slapstick style, with exaggerated characters and extreme soviet attitudes.

My main reason for watching was having just been to Geiranger, which is totally awesome. It was pretty good as disaster films go, a bit too neatly tied up in the end.