The films of Bill Forsyth - C or D/S & D ?

Bordwell on Forsyth (Antwerp confab) plus Lancaster, JLG

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/08/03/watch-those-hands-or-burt-jean-luc-and-bill-come-to-cinephile-summer-camp/

Gregory's Girl is getting the 4K treatment, and next month in NY there's some rare 35mm screenings of the others:

http://www.movingimage.us/programs/2019/09/27/detail/five-by-forsyth/

masterful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fGEDN3LUFg

amazing... I watched That Sinking Feeling before breakfast and it was taken down less than an hour later. :/

How did you feel the comedy transvestism played these days, Morbs?

I abhor trigger aesthetics, so fine

also it's done way more benignly than any US film of the era would do it

dialogue explicitly echoes Some Like It Hot ("i'm a girl" "i'm a boy")

Jonathan Murray:

An unhelpful attitude about Forsyth involves the patronizing critical notion that his films, while they have delighted many, are constrained by their obvious and sympathetic interest in the quirks of human identity and activity. A Bill Forsyth film, the argument goes, struggles to wrench its creative energies away from the small-scale (albeit charming) act­ions of harmless Walter Mitty types. The compliments routinely offered Forsyth’s films are often double-edged for this reason. “Gentle,” “wry,” “quirky,” “quaint,” “whimsical”—this is the rhetoric of (undeserved) diminution. Forsyth, to quote Jonathan Rosenbaum, all too often ends up dismissed as “a lowercase filmmaker” within histories of late-twentieth-century cinema.

Forsyth has been aware of this dilemma since his career’s earliest stages. At the time of Local Hero’s release, he said, “I feel insistently misunderstood . . . All the films I’ve made, I’ve always had a much darker side than most people have perceived.” It’s easy to see how such a superficial misreading might play out in the case of Local Hero. Its comic ensemble could be neatly pigeonholed as baffled (Mac), barmy (Happer), and bucolic (the folk of Ferness). But when the central characters of Forsyth’s cinema are properly considered, a far more complex picture emerges. Local Hero’s entire plot, for example, arises from and is resolved by the aspirations and actions of a protagonist (Happer) who suspects, but fails to fully understand, the compromised nature of his mental health. A similar structural premise shapes the plots and themes of both Comfort and Joy and Housekeeping. ...

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6600-local-hero-our-man-in-ferness

Re: Comfort and Joy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Ice_Cream_Wars

the only forsyth films i haven't seen are, i think, housekeeping and that sinking feeling.

the others are all actively bad films to some extent or another

ptui!

trivia:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6615-10-things-i-learned-local-hero

After watching Local Hero and Comfort and Joy half a dozen times in the past year, procured myself a copy of the BFI Blu-ray of Housekeeping and watched it. Very satisfying.

Christine Lahti gives one of my favorite performances of any decade