Day: October 14, 2019
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LFF Exclusive Review: The Earthquake Bird
Based on a novel of the same name by Susanna Jones, “The Earthquake Bird” (2019) is a neo-noir slow-burn psychological thriller based in Tokyo in 1989. Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) is an ex-pat living and working in Tokyo creating the Japanese subtitles to English films. She falls in love with a local photographer Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi) but suspects her friend Lily (Riley Keough) of having an affair with him. Lily goes missing and Lucy is taken into questioning by the police, suspected of murder.
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31 Days of Horror, Day 14: Office Killer
“Office Killer” is one of those films which has so much potential, but it just lacks a certain something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Released back in 1997, the film looks very dated and there’s something comical about seeing people using big bulky laptops and our main character experiencing issues using a computer. In fact, despite the film being set in the late 90s, the world the character inhabit feels alien as if it exists outside the constraints of time. It’s neither set in the now or 1997 but somewhere else, a foreign time landscape, which makes for a disorientating viewing experience. Regardless, the time setting is the least of the film’s problems.
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Spotlight: Hildur Guðnadóttir
Regardless of whether you’re a fan or not of Todd Phillips’ “Joker”, I think we can all agree that Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is phenomenal. A classically trained cellist from Iceland, she has played and recorded with various bands such as Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm, and Stórsveit Nix Noltes. She experiments with sound and musical instruments, using cello, warped samples, and nuclear reactor metal as her tools to compose her music. And, the end result is stunning. Her music has a way of invading your mind, the score for “Joker” has a rawness to it, full of menace and a foreboding sense of dread. The score for “Joker” is so far from the epic orchestral scores we usually associate with comic book adaptations, and as she explained in an interview with Film Music Mag this was a deliberate decision, “we went as far in the other direction with this score as possible.
In Their Own League 