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Curzon Cinemas (a wonderful art-house cinema group) have recently launching Curzon On Demand, a service allowing you to access a huge range of foreign, art-house and independent films online. Films start from £2.00 and any film you buy is yours to stream for seven days. I gave the new service a test earlier this week and highly recommend it. 

Signing up was easy and once logged-in, the only problem I had was choosing what film to watch. Films range from the silent comedies of Charlie Chaplin, through Mild Concern favourites like The Portuguese Nun, and on to films currently on release in cinemas such as La Havre and Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life. After a lot of contemplation and soul-searching I settled on Fermat's Room, a Spanish film about four mathematicians trapped in a room that is slowly closing in on itself as they are forced to solve riddles.

The film was great, a forgotten gem that I had given up hope of seeing years ago, picture and sound quality were perfect and even my sometimes dodgy internet didn't ruin the experience. The film was gripping and surprising, almost like a more intellectual version of The Cube with better acting but just as much maths.

Living in London, I sometimes take for granted the easy access we have to independent film through cinemas like Curzon but the whole of the UK is not all so lucky. What makes Curzon On Demand such a great prospect is that it allows everyone across the country to have access to the lastest art-house films at the same time and for about half the cost of seeing the same film in the West End. No longer will you see the phrase "limited release" and resign yourself to never getting the chance to see a film.

I highly recommend you go to www.curzonondemand.com and sign up. It's free to join and there are a fair few films to tempt you.

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So far this year two big releases, The Hunger Games and The Woman in Black, have had mere seconds of footage shaved from them in order to drop down from a 15 certificate to the Box Office friendly rating of 12A. What intrigued me about this, rather than the fact that studios are hunting for a 12A rating which makes financial sense, is the fact that the barrier between a 15 and a 12A certificate can be a few seconds of removed or edited footage. Does being three years older make you better able to handle an extra seven seconds of gore?

This got me thinking about the way our bodies naturally censor every film we watch, shaving minutes off the runtime and shielding us from all kinds of images, by blinking. So now the question is whether we blink for long enough during a film to effectively censor it enough for a lower age certificate. That is what we were all thinking, right?

I did a bit of Google investigating and found that we blink 10 times a minute under laboratory conditions and 3.5 times a minute when focussed on something (a film perhaps?). The duration of the average blink is very roughly 0.25 seconds. Are we excited yet!?

The next step in my journey into testing a pointless theory was to pick four films as test subjects. Joining The Hunger Games and The Woman in Black are The Human Centipede II and A Serbian Film; both films having undergone significant cuts to achieve a release at 18 certificate and escape being banned outright. Using the running time for each film I have calculated the total amount of blinking time, under laboratory conditions and for focussed eyes, the average viewer would experience. The results of my calculations are below:

What does this tell us? In reality nothing, but in the delusion you are following me through it means that both The Hunger Games and The Woman in Black could have been released uncut with a 12A rating and our natural eyelid movements would have censored the films dramatically without the BBFC’s help. Staggeringly under laboratory conditions The Human Centipede II could have been released uncut and our blinks would have hidden all the worse of the gore for us! Only A Serbian Film, a truly grim piece of cinema, has too much offensive material for our blinks to take care of.

Taking this even further it is worth considering the fact that for the more scary/gory/extreme films we self-censor even more extensively by clenching our eyes shut, hiding behind coats, and running screaming from the room. When I first saw The Sixth Sense I spent so much time hiding behind a towel, pink and the nearest shield to hand, that I effectively edited it down from a 15 to a PG certificate. I barely saw any dead people thank you very much.

In conclusion: I have too much time on my hands. The BBFC can stop suggesting cuts and just have a BBC Sport style announcer telling viewers when to blink. I stand by my findings 100%.

*Now that you have read the whole thing the title is all the more witty and hilarious, please take a moment to quietly applaud a well written pun.

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In an interview with TIME, Natalie Portman described the type of women she wants to portray on screen but instead continues to receive an incredible number of offers for roles that mostly fall in either the “virgin” or “whore” category*. So with this in mind and in honour of International Women’s Day, we at Mild Concern decided to put the films we see through The Bechdel Test.

For those who haven’t come across it before, The Bechdel Test is a way of measuring the presence of women in film, whose lives do not revolve around men, and is named after comic artist Alison Bechdel who created the concept.

In order to pass The Bechdel Test, a film must:

1. Have two named female characters…
2. Who talk to each other…
3. About something other than a man/men.

There is far more information about it on TV Tropes. For the sake of argument “talk” means “have a conversation”, i.e. both women have to say something specifically addressing each other.

We will be keeping up a running tally of all the films that we’ve seen and reviewed, in order to assess the current state of things and to check for ourselves whether or not the film industry recognises that women exist as separate entities to men. Or alternatively, to see if we’re making a fuss about nothing. Feel free to argue with us in the comments.

It is important to note that this is not a test of feminism or equality (Sucker Punch passes after all) but more a way of highlighting the inherent biases in the film industry and the lack of diversity in roles for women. For the sake of comparison we have also conducted the Reverse Bechdel Test, which applies the rules to male characters.

This is very much a work in progress and we’ll keep updating this post with reviews from our archives and add the films that we see in the future. Before we get to the films, here’s a summary of the things we have learnt so far:

• Out of 21 films so far assessed, 6 pass the test.
• If you have sisters as main characters in the film, you’re probably going to pass: see Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Descendants, Strawberry Fields, etc.
• If, when you do a search for images of an actress in a film, you can only find stills of her topless, this is probably a bad sign. I’m looking at you Chronicle.
• We are still yet to find a definitive Reverse Fail, although This Means War came very close.

Pass

Fail

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The most recent time I stretched the scope of this blog to discuss comedy it was to talk about last year’s Laughs in the Park. Amongst the various acts was Adam Riches, someone I had never heard of but who turned out to be the highlight of the day. I swore back then in July 2011 that “if Adam Riches does a gig near me, I’m there.” Adam Riches has since won the Edinburgh Comedy Award at last year’s fringe festival and currently has a month-long stay at the Soho Theatre. Naturally I went along to see if he was as good as I remembered.

Adam Riches is a unique act; he never introduces himself or appears on-stage out of character, instead introducing himself as a series of characters, each more eccentric than the last. To go into too much detail about the characters and sketches would be to ruin the show, and frankly the sketches spiral so far out of control that I’d struggle to fully describe them and you might think I was making bits up. I will say that at one point the entire audience was in danger of getting a tennis ball in the face.

What Adam Riches has become known for is instilling fear in his small, vulnerable audience of just 150 comedy fans. The fear comes from Riches reliance on audience participation, for each of his sketches to work Riches must pluck at least one audience member from the crowd and gradually push them further out of their comfort zone. It was amazing to watch as not one of the selected few managed to resist their call to the stage, perhaps it was because Riches never asks, but simply demands, to be joined on-stage or maybe because we all knew deep down that to say no would ruin the show for everyone else. Whether they were riding lizards on skateboard or giving Riches a drink “as starlings do”, the unlucky chosen audiences members threw themselves into their roles.

Despite the perpetual sense of fear instilled in me by the possibility of having to go on-stage, Adam Riches was overwhelmingly funny. I laughed so hard I made noises I had never heard before and at one point tried to catch my breath mid-laugh, inhaled far too hard and almost killed myself in the process by inhaling my entire face. Adam Riches was so funny it was bad for my health.

I can’t recommend Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches enough, though for safety would suggest you sit near the back and in the middle of a row. What you get for your money is an hour filled with bizarre, insane comedy which can only truly be enjoyed when experienced live in a small theatre.

Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches is at the Soho Theatre until 17th March.

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Lord Chris Smith has handed in his homework in the form of a review of UK film policy. Despite David Cameron getting everyone in a right bother last week, it turns out that the review itself is balanced and considered and at no point looks to focus on the profitability of the films which receive public funding. Instead there is a focus on investment in training, distribution and restoration alongside simple film production. David Cameron gave us all the wrong impression, something which hardly fights against his status of prick. PLEASE NOTE: Mild Concern most definitely has a political bias.

The report is lengthy and gives in total 56 different suggestions for ensuring the future success of the UK film industry. The short version is that the BFI have a lot of work to do to, I’d hate to have been in their offices as they read through 56 items they will need to start addressing ASAP. You can read the entire report in a rather jazzy PDF or just read my summary of the recommendations below. I’ll try not to drone on.

Make Films for Everyone
Looking back to last Wednesday’s rant it seemed as if Julian Fellowes was speaking out against art house films, but a look at the review shows that the idea is instead to fund a wide variety of films. The review suggests funding a broad and rich range of British films, ensure a plurality of taste in funding, and specifically funding to support the “unique challenges” of animation and independent family films that parents can enjoy with their children. We get to keep our Tyrannosaurs but must support other film genres too.

Get Films to Everyone
Funding is not just for production, but for distribution too. Far too often I recommend a great independent film forgetting that in London we are lucky to have access to all releases while other areas don’t get a glimpse of treasures like Submarine. Suggested methods of ensuring everyone gets access to independent British cinema include coordinating local cinemas and film societies across the country, “enhancing social cohesion”, using new digital technology and broadband to get films to all areas and having smaller exhibitors exchange best practises. There is even a suggestion of funding screening equipment in community halls for rural areas, no one will be left out.

Promote the British Film Brand in UK and Abroad
The BFI is to spend plenty of time and money building the “British Film Brand”, possibly through an annual “British Film Week”. Another suggestion is for a UK wide film festival offering from the BFI to promote independent films, spreading the success of the London Festival to other areas. The BFI is also recommended to set out an international strategy for UK film, develop international co-production and BBC Worldwide is to continue to invest in and promote British films on a global level.

The Children Are Our Future
Lots of suggestions for the BFI to invest in educating young people in all aspects of film; every school should offer film education including making, seeing and learning about British films. Prepare to watch Kes everyone. A strategy is needed to ensure that production skills being taught are the “Gold Standard” and the three Skillset Film Academies are in need of review. The BBC and their like are to continue to invest in talent development and be the leading gateway to the industry for new talent. There should be a career ladder for any film-maker beyond their first film and any company receiving lottery funding should have a scheme in place to invest in developing new talent. Education should stretch beyond film-making and cover new media and entrepreneurship in the film industry. Talent should also be nurtured outside of the London area.

Let’s Get Digital, Digital. I Wanna Get Digital. Let’s Get into Digital
The review stresses the importance of moving to digital for a variety of reasons, and while the plight of the projectionist is sad it does seem to make sense. Digital distribution of independent British films will make it cheaper to transport for exhibition and allow access to more film for smaller venues. The report also recommends the BFI working with online distributors to help promote and invest in UK films.

There Be Pirates
The review loses me slightly in its recommendation of pushing forward the Digital Economy Act (something I’ve ranted about before, twice). Piracy may well be bad but censoring the internet is not the answer; Wikipedia will go offline for a day tomorrow to protest a similar move in America. Other suggestions to combat piracy are pro-copyright education in schools, for the Government to tackle file sharing sites and to make it a criminal offence to record films shown in cinemas.

Not All About Return on Investment
Far from being the money hungry beast David Cameron led us to believe this report might be, it instead suggests that the BFI relax recuperation targets for its investments. The report also recommends that any money returned to the lottery fund due to a film’s success be available to that film’s writer, director and producers and the funds be directly made accessible to whichever company made the successful film so that they can go on and try to repeat that success.

Protect British Heritage
The final suggestions from the report look at protecting the heritage of British cinema, looking to ensure the long-term safety of and access to the UK’s significant collection of films. It’s all about preservation and presentation. This includes the BFI forming new partnerships to get funding from outside investors to help digitise and exhibit classic British films and the BBC to maintain funding for archiving UK television.

Outside Investment is Key
While mostly advising the BFI on how to spend our money, the report also stresses the importance of the BFI drumming up outside support. This includes a call for all the major UK broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and BSkyB) to openly set out their financial commitments to British films, and suggest that the BFI incentivise private investment in UK film and encourage sponsorship and philanthropy for film culture.

It’s All About Balance
Recommendation number 17 pretty much sums up the report by stating that, “The Panel recommends that BFI funding for film should be broadly balanced between filmmaking and distribution activities (development, production, P&A) and activities related to film culture (audience development, film education and training, film export, lifelong learning, archive and heritage, activity in the Nations and Regions, economic cultural and policy research); and further recommends that within the two broad categories as much flexibility should be available to the BFI as possible to respond to the needs of audiences, the film industry, and film culture.”

It looks mostly good to me, any emphasis on improving distribution is key, and it looks like there isn’t too much emphasis on profits over art. Good on you Lord Chris Smith, and shame on you David Cameron for getting me worked up over nothing.

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