Something to watch tonight: Thursday 19 October

Last Film Show is a digital rental from AroVision

This is a little bit of an exper­i­ment, recyc­ling a review from this news­let­ter rather than RNZ or the old blog.

But I first reviewed Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show back on 18 August (when it was in cinemas) and sub­scriber num­bers have lit­er­ally tripled since then so lots of you won’t have seen it.

It’s also – like everything else that’s more than a month old – behind the paywall.

But the film is just too good not to recom­mend now that it’s avail­able as a rent­al.

A few weeks ago I wrote an art­icle for RNZ arguing against the com­mon cinephile opin­ion that 35mm (or 70mm or IMAX) film was inher­ently super­i­or to digit­al presentation.

Thank you for read­ing Funerals & Snakes. This post is pub­lic so feel free to share it.

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I stand by this. Empirically speak­ing, there’s no longer any jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the con­stantly deteri­or­at­ing pic­ture qual­ity and envir­on­ment­al waste­ful­ness of film in cinemas. To argue oth­er­wise is just the same ana­logue fet­ish­isa­tion that sees people pay twice the price for music on vinyl, only to play it back on a tinny bluetooth plastic turntable.

Watching Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show, though, I got one of those “are we the bad­dies?” moments because the romance of film is as strong in this pic­ture as any I’ve ever seen.

Set in 2010, it’s the cine­mat­ic coming-of-age story of young Samay (Bhavin Rabari), a rapscal­lion determ­ined to wag school at every oppor­tun­ity in order to indulge his love of cinema and his curi­os­ity about its technologies.

Thanks to his mother’s won­der­ful cook­ing, Samay is taken under the wing of pro­jec­tion­ist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali) and he becomes determ­ined to take his exper­i­ments with light back to the tiny rail­way vil­lage where his fath­er makes tea for passengers.

Last Film Show is stun­ning to look at – pho­to­graphed by Swapnil S. Sunawatne – and writer-director Nalin’s influ­ences are all on show. Malick, Coppola, Kubrick, Tarkovsky are all ref­er­enced with rev­er­ence up there on the screen, but also the great Indian dir­ect­or Satyajit Ray, whose debut Pather Panchali seems to be the mod­el for Samay’s home, fam­ily and landscape.

Landing beau­ti­fully in the sweet spot of my tastes and interests, Last Film Showis an abso­lute charm­er and a whole­hearted recommendation.

Funerals & Snakes

Friday reviews for 18 August 2023

A few weeks ago I wrote an art­icle for RNZ arguing against the com­mon cinephile opin­ion that 35mm (or 70mm or IMAX) film was inher­ently super­i­or to digit­al present­a­tion. I stand by this. Empirically speak­ing, there’s no longer any jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the con­stantly deteri­or­at­ing pic­ture qual­ity and envir­on­ment­al waste­ful­ness of film in cinemas. To argue ot…

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2 years ago · Dan Slevin

Last Film Show is also avail­able as digit­al rent­al in Australia and it’s stream­ing on Prime Video in the USA but it’s not avail­able at all in the UK (yet).

Further reading

I was hop­ing that my pre­view of New Zealand’s British and Irish Film Festival – which starts today – might have com­pleted sub-editing at RNZ in time for this news­let­ter to go out but it hasn’t.

I’ll include a link in tomorrow’s edi­tion but suf­fice to say that there are 17 films play­ing in 24 cinemas across 15 towns and cit­ies. There’s some good watch­ing there.