Pretty in Pink 23/08/12
Who else wants to be Molly Ringwald? Have puffy red hair, the best dress sense in 80s teen film and a weirdly disjointed friend who’s in love with you but moves like Lee Evans so it’s destined to fail, not least because you have feelings for the posh boy at school called Blaine who’s nothing like Lee Evans and has much more palatable hair. Pretty in Pink is literally brilliant and deserves as many incorrect uses of ‘literally’ as you can fathom. Blaine and Andie (Molly) fall in love but then his friends, her friends, class, money and high school lockers get in the way. After much umm’ing and ahh’ing and ‘we’re from different worlds’, it ends with a pink dress at prom, friends making sacrifices, lovers uniting and everybody watching, wanting to be Molly Ringwald. PS – watch out for the copy of i-D on the coffee table in her dad’s house.
Enter the Void 18/08/12
The clue is in the title. Don’t enter into this film lightly. Most of the action happens in the first ten minutes. Lead character Oscar is an American living in Tokyo with his troubled sister Linda. He’s reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the philosophy of which, takes you through the remaining 151 minutes of the film. The idea is that when you die, your soul sort of hangs around a while, watching those you have left and remembering things that happened in your life, until it finds its next home and is reincarnated. From director Gaspar Noe, Enter the Void really is like nothing you’ve ever seen. It’s a visual treat – or nightmare, depending on your patience and stamina.
Don’t Think 18/08/12
Don’t Think is the follow-up film screened on the same night as Enter the Void. Last year they did a similarly clever pairing with Let the Right One In and The Lost Boys. Don’t Think is also set in Japan, but halfway up a mountain at a festival where the Chemical Brothers are headlining. It’s a concert film but will take you a lot further than that. Live performances by the Chems are great because their music is great yada yada yada but the real delight, and stimulus for making this film, is the visual element. Huge nightmare clown faces, marching elephants, creepy crawlies, never-ending ladders, it’ll take your brain to another dimension. And all the while in giant neon lights projected into the sky the words ‘DON’T THINK. JUST LET IT FLOW’ carry you away. The calm surrounds of Somerset House are all very well, but you’ll need to stop by an all-night rave to vent your adrenalin from this one on the way home.
Drive 25/08/12
Nicolas Winding Refn’s masterpiece was released in 2011. It’s the critic’s choice – supremely violent but with so much style you forget all about the fork in eye and head stamping scenes and just remember Ryan Gosling winning over Carey Mulligan with just one look and the mellow College & Electric Youth soundtrack. The plot is fairly run of the mill if you place it in the gangster genre – getaway driver gets in way over his head with ex-convict/ bit of armed robbery/ bit of senseless killing and so on – but you shouldn’t place it in the gangster genre. It’s altogether more romantic. Watching Drive on a 22″ TV is definitely not the same as watching Drive in the epic open air grandiose Somerset House, so make the most of this opportunity!
On the Road 16/08/12
This is the UK premiere of On The Road. So we can’t tell you what’s it’s like but we can tell you what’s it’s about. Jack Kerouac wrote a book in the 50s called On The Road which is about the most famous book (or one of) in American contemporary literature. It follows two guys called Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they road trip around America, picking up, then leaving girls, drinking lots, fighting and being young and carefree. The hype and expectation around this film is huge, and not dissimilar to the Gatsby release later this year. Can you successfully turn a literary classic into something worth watching? Well, starring Kristen Stewart and Sam Riley, it sounds like it’s at least going to be as good as it should be.
