Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Random Musings: July 2012

Random Notes

This month was a good one in terms of films seen. I had the pleasure of finally catching up with Japanese director Sion Sono's latest two films, the intriguing Guilty of Romance and the jaw dropping Himizu. The latter pretty much blew me away, and I expect it will be high on my year end list.

Saw quite a few classic films for both of my current Czech New Wave and Palme d'Or Winners features, highlighted by a rewatch of The White Ribbon. I also managed to watch a pair of recent Bulgarian films, that maybe didn't impress me as much, but they did show a lot of promise of good things to come from that country, and I think Avé has a strong chance of being selected as their official submission to the 2012 Oscars.

While everyone was out seeing the new Batman, I went to a screening of an excellent, inspired by the 80s, locally shot sci-fi film, called Beyond the Black Rainbow.

It was also a busy month for major festival news. Another Norwegian film scored big, with The Almost Man by Martin Lund winning the Crystal Globe at Karlovy Vary. While some impressive lineups were announced for the upcoming Locarno, Venice, and Toronto film festivals.

This month also saw the unveiling of a couple features I helped create for the LAMB. The updated LAMBtable, which replaces the old difficult to manage HTML table and the ugly temporary spreadsheet with a fully searchable and sortable version; and also a minor facelift to the Banner Gallery, adding some cool hover effects, and making it far easier to update and maintain. Check them out if you haven't seen them already.

Random Links

A few links and blogs that caught my eye over the past month, some new, some old, and some new/old faces, as well as a couple of cool creative endeavors to check out:

Can You Dig It ? - The recent rebranding and relocation of the cool blog formerly known as Feminising Film, into an even cooler blog named after a quote from The Warriors. Allowing the site's talented author, Cherokee, to expand on her wide array of interests.

Blah Blah Blah Gay - The very welcome return of Toby to the blogosphere. After an eight month break, he's back with fresh inspiration, and a slight change in focus to include book and music reviews.

The Cinematic Katzenjammer - a new addition to the LAMB already making a big splash in the community. Sporting a very cool logo and featuring daily reviews of a decent mix of new mainstream releases as well as the odd foreign and classic titles.

The Movie Waffler - A fairly recent LAMB, but a long time blogger, with a very well customized Blogger template, and some unique and inventive running features.

And So It Begins... - The blog of Alex Withrow, an aspiring filmmaker who released his debut short film titled Earrings online over the weekend, and it's a pretty good first effort.

Lisa Thatcher - A Sydney based writer who blogs about everything arts related worth blogging about, and who recently published a book of short stories, which I still need to find the time to read, titled Stack.

The Film Emporium - The LAMB's most prolific blogger, Andy Buckle, impressively got a blurb from his 5 star review of Holy Motors, quoted on the promotional material for the film, soon to be released in Australia. Not gonna lie, everything about that makes me jealous.

Cinematic Corner - Sati's blog of ever evolving visual splendor, sees the continuation of her brilliant and popular Visual Parallels feature, with a comparison of screen caps from Mulholland Dr. and Young Adult.

Readers, how was your month? Did anyone else not see Batman?

16 comments:

The Angry Lurker said...

Hoping to catch Batman this week...hopefully!

Michaël Parent said...

You had a nice month of July. I can't say the same for me since it's been my less productive month since January... Well I've just moved in my first house. So movie watching/blogging time has been reduced and the weather is awesome outside so I prefer to go skateboarding instead of being inside...
Thanks for the links, some of these blogs are really great!
For Batman, I must shamely admit that I haven't been to the Theater since the release of The Artist that I had to write a paper for the LAMB... So I'll have so much to catch-up this Fall!

James Russell said...

Not only have I not seen The Dark Knight Rises, I haven't seen The Dark Knight either (I did see Batman Begins when it came out, so I'm not completely ignorant). Can't honestly say I'm in that great a hurry to see either. I was actually going to watch the 1943 serial version instead just out of perversity, but haven't got around to that yet.


I've watched a reasonable number of films this month, cos I've been doing the grindhouse/exploitation challenge at the ICheckMovies forum, but I've been doing most of them as double or even triple bills, which was kind of wearing (especially considering the sort of things I was watching), to the point where I haven't actually watched anything for a week now.

blahblahblahtoby said...

thanks for the mention, the movie waffler looks great so thanks for that link too

FrontRoomCinema said...

Good to see my old Mate Toby back in the fold!!

Lisa Thatcher said...

Thanks for the mention BT and thank you thank you thank you for the always brilliant Czech New Wave reviews!

365 moviesandsongs365 said...

I haven't seen too many of the films mentioned, except White Ribbon, of course, but I see you were busy as always on the movie and blog discovery front ( :
I'm going to take a look at the buzz for The Almost Man, also checking out LAMB site improvements, and the blog "katzenjammer"(funny name by the way!) I better get to it! Thanks, BT

Margaret said...

Thank you so much for the link! I'm really glad I saw new Batman it was great which was quite surprising for me as I'm not a big fan of previous films.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Congrats on your move! Summer finally arrived here too. I've barely watched anything in the past 10 days. Fall and Winter seems to be the time when I do a lot of catching up too.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Your's might be the only review of it I read.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Good to see there are others who aren't excited about that film. That grindhouse challenge sounds very interesting. How many did you manage to get through?

Bonjour Tristesse said...

No worries. Glad you're back.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

Sure is.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

You're welcome, thank you for your support of them Lisa.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

I think August will be a much slower month, going to try and spend some time outdoors while the weather is good.

Bonjour Tristesse said...

You're welcome! And it's interesting because someone else told me the same thing about TDKR earlier today. I may decide to give it a watch after all.

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