#wittertainment
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This email got me in the feels today.
Miss you mam. ❤️ (She would have been 76 on the Saturday just gone)
#one email of many that encapsulates what i love about this show#the toy story 3 email and the star wars one to also make me cry#and then there was the joy of Kip and stinky pants wee#wittertainment it's a movie show that's not actually about movies#mark kermode#simon mayo#kermode and mayo's takes#wittertainment#Spotify
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Ahead of the UK DVD & Blu-Ray release of #TheGreatBuster, have a listen to Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review! They are joined by Director Peter Bogdanovich at about 44 minutes in bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj/episodes/downloads
#the great buster#buster keaton#the great buster a celebration#mark kermode#simon mayo#wittertainment#podcast#peter bogdanovich#ibks#the international buster keaton society#buster keaton society#the damfinos#damfino#damfamily#blu ray#dvd
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My very favourite film podcast has Domhnall Gleeson over to talk The Little Stranger and now I want to see it.
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Goodbye Flagship Wittertainment. A Personal History and Starter Pack for the UK’s Favourite Film Programme.
My biggest piece ever.
On one level there will always be a level of emotional resonance when something important or formative to a fan announces a conclusion. It doesn’t matter if you’ve aged out or moved on from whatever that piece of content was. The parts of the content that last in our minds are those that we will always have an attachment to.Part One. Golden Hour This writer’s late mother was always likely to have…
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#BBC#BBC Radio Five Live.#Kermode on Film#Mark Kermode.#Podcast#Radio#Screenshot#Simon Mayo#Wittertainment
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The Old Unicorn, Bramley. If you like my work check out my website
#original photographers#photographers on tumblr#Wittertainment#Hello to jason issacs#uk photography#crystal ball
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edith bowman & clarisse loughrey > mark kermode & simon mayo
#wittertainment#the only thing mark and simon do better is the bickering old married couple act#edith and clarisse does everything else better#better reviews#the ability to see things from other perspectives#positivity#fight me wittertainees#mark is becoming a parody of himself#am i kicked out of the church now?#bring on the wittertainment schism!
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Everything will be alright in the end,
and if it isn’t alright, it isn’t the end.
#you can make it through this#we all can#this felt like an appropriate way to christen a new blog#wittertainment
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“A film that stays with you” Robbie Collin reviews The Ghoul on BBC Radio 5 Live Film Review
#wittertainment#BBC#film review#Robbie Collin#The Ghoul#Gareth Tunley#Tom Meeten#Alice Lowe#Geoff McGivern#Paul Kaye
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Fences 5/5
#fences#fences movie#fences film#film#films#movie#movies#film reivew#film reviews#movie review#movie reviews#wittertainment#Denzel Washington#Viola Davis#Russell Hornsby#Mykelti Williamson#Stephen Henderson#Jovan Adepo#Saniyya Sidney#august wilson
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Tl;dr: Tom Hiddleston on "Kermode & Mayo's Take" podcast on Friday 6th May
Check your favourite podcast app then!
Kermode & Mayo’s Take makes its debut this Friday, bringing Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s witterings back to our ears after a month (and a bit) away.
It’s been just over a month since Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo were last united in our eardrums. On Friday April 1st, they signed off from their BBC Radio Five Live show of 21 years, Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review (Wittertainment to its mates), and their many fans have been waiting eagerly for their return.
It was quickly announced what that would be: a new podcast called Kermode & Mayo’s Take, with a second called Kermode & Mayo’s Take Two. But still: there’s been a wait of over a month for that to start, in spite of it now being advertised on the side of buses.
Well, we’ve got the start date. The first show was recorded on Bank Holiday Monday, and it’s going to launch at the end of this week: Friday May 6th. Tom Hiddleston is the first guest on the show, and the episode will be available at the usual podcast places on Friday.
That said, the only way might be down! The pair’s sub-two minute teaser for their new show has topped the iTunes movie podcast charts since it was released, and hasn’t budged for weeks. In truth, don’t expect it to move for a while when actually episodes start arriving. Normal service is about to be resumed…
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Members of the Church of Wittertainment will understand. Everyone else, keep on scrolling.
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Suspiria (1977) and Suspiria (2018)
Back-to-back reviews
Dakota Johnson (centre) and colleagues contort themselves in Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria
I had been saving Dario Argento’s Suspiria for a special occasion, and that turned out to be the release of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake. I watched the two films back-to-back: the 4K restored original at home and the remake at a packed CinemaCity Picturehouse preview screening. The film is officially released in UK cinemas today.
Jessica Harper in one of the many vibrant uses of lighting in Dario Argentino’s 1977 movie
Suspiria (1977)
The 1977 film was exactly what I expected, and I loved it. The vivid colour palette, especially the reds, and the striking use of lighting blew me away. The film’s score was a bonkers combination of synthesizers, greek and indian drums which will etch itself in my memory in exactly the same way that Cannibal Holocaust’s did. Some of it was ludicrously over-the-top, but it is a 70s Italian horror film after all.
The three irises: Delicate and dream-like paintings make some of the backdrops to the 1977 film
Jessica Harper was utterly convincing as Suzy Bannion — an American dancer going to study ballet in a German school where some gruesome murders have just been carried out. The film starts at a breakneck pace and does not relent all the way to the final reveal. The dialogue and special effects aren’t perfect, but the atmosphere and the scene-setting is as close as could be. I was left panting by the end.
Geometric shapes and pastel colours to create a convincingly surreal dance academy in Suspiria (1977)
The film’s twin stars of sound and colour complement each other perfectly, bringing a simple but highly effective hallucinatory quality to much of the film. The intensity always flirts with your limits, without ever crossing them. The result is a film which I enjoyed both casually and from a more artistic perspective, and one which I’m already itching to watch again.
*Those Primary Colours*
Suspiria (2018)
I thought the remake was just a bit bland, aside from Tilda Swinton’s great performances (her main one, the secret one, and the even-more-secret one) and some fantastic synchronous contortions in the numerous dance scenes. The director, Luca Guadagnino states that rather than a remake, it is a homage to a film he first watched as a boy. He wanted to pay tribute:
“To the incredible, powerful emotion I felt when I saw it”
Whilst impressive that he has sculpted his own original take on the 1977 screenplay, and it is a very different film, I didn’t feel the movie really was a simulacrum of the sentiments he describes. Suspiria (2018) just didn’t convince me in the same way that the original did, despite a more real-world aesthetic.
The ballet scenes in Suspiria are finely choreographed
Everything is dulled down — the pace of the film, the colour palette, the soundtrack and the suspense. There were some dream sequences which were laboured and unconvincing. And for a film made in 2018, some of the CGI was worse than some of the cheesy grotesqueries of the original. This made a potentially nauseating early flourish of disfigurement not as realistic as it could have been, although a later fracture did get the cinema audience wincing.
Dakota Johnson stars as Susie Bannion in the 2018 remake of Suspiria
There are hints of some interesting themes, though. In particular, post-war guilt is treated in an interesting way which drew my attention throughout the film. There were also some nice metaphors about aspects of the human psyche. Maybe they were intended to be subtle, but I was just wishing for more of them.
The plot of the original is changed quite drastically, which isn’t a negative point per se. It was just frustrating that the original’s reveal was given away early in the first few minutes of the remake, and I felt this impacted on the movie’s suspense factor. Still, there were a couple of odd mysteries and surprises which almost made up for this…
*“Lutz Ebersdorf” plays Dr Klemperer*
It’s not a bad film, the dance choreography is bewitching at times, it just isn’t memorable enough compared to the original.
Final Rating:
Suspiria (1977): ****½
Suspiria (2018): **½
#movies#blog#cinema#movie#film#film review#wittertainment#cinephile#cinemaphile#suspiria#argento#dario argento#ballet#horror#horror movies#movie review#films#film lover#dance
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Mark Kermode reacts to the news that there will be 14 more Transformers films by reenacting a scene from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love.
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Bluebells, Leeds. If you like my work check out my website
#photographers on tumblr#photography#photooftheday#photo#original photographers#uk#uk photography#wittertainment
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“Tinkety tonk old fruit, & down with the Nazis”
—7 February 1941 to Elizabeth Elphinstone from Elizabeth, Queen consort of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions.
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Projection Room: The Good Doctors bow out
So, a day we all thought would never happen has actually arrived. We all thought they would deliver on their promise of ‘10 more years’ (which they have proudly been proclaiming since their 10th anniversary in 2011), but the Wittertainment cruise is pulling into the shore for one last time - today is the very last time Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo will present their film review programme on BBC Radio 5 Live. A mainstay of that schedule for the last two decades, every Friday afternoon those two would inspire the next generation of critics, create the much praised Cinema Code of Conduct, engage the general public in the wider cinema debates, and importantly say a hearty hello to Jason Isaacs. The last remaining bit of dedicated, specialist film programming across the TV and radio slate has had a mad few years, surviving Mayo’s well publicised departure from his Radio 2 show, Kermode’s independent endeavours (like the Kermode on Film podcast, which in turn replaced his BBC Uncut blog in 2018), various moves in 5 Live’s schedule and of course, the brutal cuts to BBC programme budgets, but alas, the good doctors themselves have decided to jump before they are pushed.
The show’s given us classic moments like Kermode’s rants, something which directly influenced how we present bad movies on Talking Smit About Film and The Journal - mention the words Sex and the City 2 or Entourage to any long term fan of this show, and we will instantly think of how angry and disappointed a critic can be about a film - alongside some top tier interviews with the great and good of the Hollywood world. Whether it’s Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan Kenneth ‘Chuckles’ Branagh, or even *that* tense encounter with Charlie Kaufman (some of the most awkward radio I have heard, and that was well before I was let loose on my own show), Kermode’s reviews and Mayo’s experience made those two hours on air, and the accompanying podcast a must-listen for any cinema nerd. Add to that their commitment to championing new voices, like their Well Done U competition (where listeners had to make short, 60 second films that confined to the BBFC requirements for the titular U certificate), their dedication to independent exhibitors and distribution, and you had something that sounded very familiar to a certain mission statement on this very blog. They arguably did what we are pushing to do here at TheJackSmit.com: bring cinema closer to the general public. And they certainly did it in style.
Kermode and Mayo have had a major impact on the industry - a lot of the critics working today argue that these two have been, and always will be the standard for film criticism in the UK. Many say Barry Norman of the old Film programme on BBC One was the name the nation trusted, but these two have carried the flame through the rise of streaming, Blu-ray, and they even managed to turn around a show every week during the dark days of the lockdown - with a BBC Four programme getting a short run as a direct result. Quite literally, Kermode and Mayo have been the beacon for film in the UK, becoming a national institution in the process- they have been, and always will be the gold standard, and it’s going to be difficult not having them on a Friday afternoon after the final show airs today. As the big man, and Tom Hanks, would say, ‘everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end’. We know they will appear somewhere in a matter of weeks - potentially with the Bauer radio network as both of them present shows for that company (Mayo on Greatest Hits, and Kermode on Scala respectively), but for now, it’s time for the great church of Wittertainment to assemble for one last sermon before the cruise leaves for pastures new. There is still one question they need to answer though: who *is* driving the boat?
Listen to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on BBC Sounds and all podcast platforms
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