Station Zero

The weather has been unsettled here on Dartmoor, but somehow, in a brief and busy few days last week, we managed to shoot about 80% of our little Arthurian film . We got rained on a bit, but we had plenty of interior work to keep us busy when it got too wet outside, and the sun even shone on several scenes. The light failed quite early on the last day, so the fight scene might end up being a bit truncated, but it’s not really a film about fighting, so I’m not too worried.  The fact that we got it done at all is a testament to Sarah Reeve’s organisational skills, to our brilliant cast and crew, and to the friends and neighbours who have so generously let us use their woods, fields, and outbuildings. Laura Francis Martin, Joanna Neary, and Jonny Hibbs all turned in lovely performances with very little direction from me, and never complained about having to stand around in mud and drizzle for hours. Niall Parker loomed menacingly as the sinister Knight of the Wild Woods. Tessa Arrowsm...

I don’t use a Windows computer, but if I did, I imagine that irritating anthropomorphic paper clip would be popping up about now to say, ‘It looks like you’re starting a lengthy occasional series of blog posts in which you try to watch every Arthurian film ever made.’ And I suppose I am, although I doubt I’ll actually be able to find all of them, and there’s no way I’m sitting through that Clive Owen one again.  It’s liable to take a while too, but here to be going on with is Episode 4, in which I take my very first look at what must be one of the most eccentric yet accurate versions of an Arthurian story ever committed to celluloid. The previous Arthurian movies I’ve written about ( Excalibur , Gawain and the Green Knight , and The Green Knight ) all share a similar aesthetic: filmed among the mountains, woods and waterfalls of Wales and Ireland, they draw much of their visual power from nature, landscape, and a certain wintry light reflecting from their heroes’ armour. Éric Ro...

Inspired by the new David Lowery film , I went looking for the version of Gawain and the Green Knight which I remember enjoying on telly back when I was young and impressionable. And I found it on YouTube for free! This was good, because I’m not convinced it would be worth paying for. But it was interesting, and my word, what a cast -  Anthony Sharpe, Ronald Lacey, Pauline Letts, Robert Hardy, Geoffrey Bayldon, Murray Melvin - the cream of 1970s British thespery, all slicing it thick and serving it raw. Nigel Green is on particularly fine form as the titular jolly green giant, despite being lumbered with a second rate panto costume and a beard-and-bouffant combo that would make a Bee Gee blanch. The opening scene, where he arrives at Camelot to deliver his challenge, feels very close in spirit to the King Arthur stories I encountered growing up. But the plot quickly veers off-piste. The great Rosemary Sutcliff is credited (mis-spelled) as Script Consultant, and perhaps we have her ...

I’ve been waiting a long time to see David Lowery’s The Green Knight. It’s been forty years since there was a serious attempt to put Arthurian legend on the big screen, and this one’s release has been delayed several times by the pandemic. Now it’s finally here (in cinemas, and streaming on Amazon Prime). And maybe it’s a case of expectations running too high, but I was a bit underwhelmed.  I’m not entirely sure why. The photography is beautiful, the costumes impressive, the score haunting, the acting strong. When it wasn’t being determinedly artsy-fartsy it reminded me of  Barry Lyndon  (there are some deliberate references, I think - a long tracking shot as Gawain rides away from Camelot along a raised moorland road, an encounter with robbers, the candle lit interiors of Sir Bertilak’s castle). When it  was  being determinedly artsy-fartsy it was more like the dreamlike grail quest sequences in Excalibur : Dev Patel’s Gawain stumbles around on a lot of I...

It's hard to believe forty years have passed since I watched Excalibur rise from the lake. It was Sunday, July 5th, 1981, around 2.45 in the afternoon, and I was in the ABC Cinema in Brighton. I remember it as if it were yesterday. In paintings and illustrations Excalibur often emerges from the lake at an angle. Sometimes it's in a scabbard and the Lady of the Lake grasps it by the middle; you can imagine her waggling it about to get Arthur's attention. But in Excalibur it rushes straight up, the misty water parting with a ripple around the eerily green-lit blade until at last the hilt breaks the surface, scattering slow-motion droplets like seed pearls.It's like watching the launch of an Apollo rocket. From the trees at the water's edge, mission controller Merlin looks on in awe. What he's probably wondering is, what happens next? Does he have a little boat moored among the roots to get him out to the middle of the mere where the sword is waiting for him? Or ...

Evening in a motel room somewhere in Texas. Two men are preparing to leave, taking down the bits of cardboard which they have taped, for some reason, all over the windows. The TV shows a news report about an abducted boy. The boy sits in a corner of the room under a bedsheet, wearing blue swimming goggles and ear defenders. We will work out later that one of the men, (Michael Shannon) is his father, and is escaping with him from a cult. The men take the boy outside to where their car is waiting, and drive off, but the desk clerk has recognised them. Listening to police radio channels, they realise the cops are onto them. They pull off the freeway onto country roads. Night has fallen. The driver puts on night vision goggles, switches off all the car's lights, and accelerates into the dark. So begins Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special , a film which I missed completely on its release, and only stumbled across recently on Amazon Prime. I had no idea what it was about, but right...

When I was rambling on about Terrance Malick’s A Hidden Life recently , I was rather disparaging about Jojo Rabbit. That was a bit unfair, because I enjoyed it - it’s funny and engaging, which is pretty much all I ask of most films these days. But when I tried to write about it I found that the weighty subject matter demanded I take it seriously, and I started thinking about a lot of problems which I was happy enough to ignore while I was actually watching it. So first of all, I did enjoy it, and I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t find said weighty subject matter off-putting. And second of all, there will be SPOILERS. As you probably know, Jojo Rabbit is a comedy about a young boy growing up in the final months of Nazi Germany and earnestly trying to fit in with the Hitler Youth and do his bit for the war effort, encouraged by his imaginary friend, a goofy version of Hitler played by director Taika Waititi. Tom Holland, in his excellent book Dominion , points out that Hitler h...

'The images and acting are beguiling, but the absence of narrative drive means that if the spell falters, Malick loses his hold on us. As with Andrei Tarkovsky, I watch his films in a heightened state of excitement and drowsiness. A great revelation is about to manifest itself, yet I fear I will fall asleep and miss it. Malick and Tarkovsky dare to engage with the metaphysical. They have taken film to the very edge of what is possible.’    John Boorman, Conclusions When I was a teenager, just getting interested in cinema, there were two Terrence Malick films. They were Badlands and Days of Heaven , and they were both superb. If you don’t know Malick’s work and this post inspires you to give it a try they are still probably the best place to start - they’re among the best American films of the 1970s, and the ‘70s was a very good decade for American films. But that was it: after Days of Heaven , Malick vanished. It seemed as if, having made his two masterpieces, he had...