Contemporary cinema (3): “The Post”, “Baby Driver”, “Blade Runner 2049”
I’ve now attended three more weekly sessions at the City Literary Institute in central London of an evening course called “Contemporary Cinema: The Best Films Of The Year” conducted by the American John Wischmeyer.
So far, the pattern has been that we view and discuss clips from an acclaimed recent film and then compare it to a couple of significant older movies.
In Week 3, we focused on “The Post” [my review here]. This film has only recently been released so we could not see clips but viewed a review on the BBC by Mark Kermode. We then compared it to the earlier (1976) “All The President’s Men” (which I have seen) – both movies movies concern the “Washington Post” – and reference was also made to another newspaper-centred film “Spotlight” [my review here].
In Week 4, we turned to “Baby Driver” [my review here] and viewed clips of the opening car chase sequence and the following buying-the-coffee long take. The obvious comparison film was “Drive” [my review here] but we also looked at a clip of the car chase in the much older (1968) “Bullitt” (which I have seen).
Week 5 was all about “Blade Runner 2049” [my review here] and we watched – with 3D glasses – extended sequences from this long movie. Again there was an obvious comparison: this time the original “Blade Runner” [my review here] where we took in the sequence where Dekker first meets Rachael.
I’ll miss the next two sessions of the course since I’m about to take a trip to China to celebrate the Chinese New Year.