My Year of Film
I have mentioned already on this blog that 2013 is shaping up to be the year of my personal film revolution. I have always been a person that has watched films reluctantly, even when I have enjoyed them. Sitting still for hours, watching things whirl around on a big screen until my eyes hurt, taking notice of things… The list of reasons I hated watching films could go on. People hated going to the cinema with me because I would shuffle and mutter constantly after about five minutes, and if I watched one at home I would just get up and leave the room and miss half the film.
Thinking back, my newfound interest in film actually started in late 2012. While living in Bratislava, there was a film festival, and when I got my hands on the programme I went wild highlighting all the films I wanted to see. A Bollywood film! A film about the Bosnian war! A film about a boy living in a slum in South America! I wanted to see all the films, and even though I only ended up seeing one (When Day Breaks/Kad Svane Dan, which was very good up until the last five minutes when it was very bad), I felt all enthusiastic about seeing different films and that can only be a good thing.
So when a PR company got in touch with me back in March to offer me some codes to watch movies online at Blinkbox, I jumped at the chance. Unfortunately my excitement waned when I realised my internet connection was not fast enough to stream the films. This is partially my own fault, for living in a corner of the country where it is probably faster to use a carrier pigeon than send an email, but still, it certainly threw a spanner in the works. So I left one title downloading overnight and then woke up the next day excited to watch it – at which point I discovered that it just would not play on my laptop, no matter what I did. Blinkbox customer service were helpful up until the point where I was told I would be passed to someone else, and then never heard another word. So to this day I do not know why I can’t play my downloads, and Blinkbox don’t seem to plan to let me know.
Fortunately I ended up going to visit my boyfriend and was able to use his somewhat speedier connection to stream Argo, Tyrannosaur, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. The Blinkbox website was very easy to use, and you get the film for a decent amount of time in case you love it so much you want to watch it again. Overall, while I was disappointed with the fact that I couldn’t play the films at home, I was happy with the way the service works and may use it again at some point in the future. The film rentals are reasonable considering how expensive new releases can be at a DVD rental shop, and the fact that it is not a subscription service is great for people like me who are still only dipping their toes into the film world. If you have a reasonable internet connection you probably won’t have any problems with it.
Beasts of the Southern Wild was a visually stunning, almost ethereal film, but also very sad. It is a film which deals with a lot of heavy issues but simply manages to weave them into the narrative, rather than making them the obvious agenda of the film. Tyrannosaur was a brutal and merciless film that showed the truly dark side of humanity, but it had such fantastic acting that I couldn’t help but enjoy watching it. Argo was just as exciting as I hoped it would be – just before the aeroplane took off I honestly thought that I might wee myself or be sick or scream. Other films I have seen this year include Lincoln, Flight, Contagion, Zero Dark Thirty, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, and Les Miserables. I may get beaten for this opinion but I did not enjoy Les Miserables.
I will leave it on that note, so you can all tell me how awful I am for not liking Les Mis.
