Kodachrome - review

Kodachrome is a film about nostalgia. Nostalgia for an older, simpler time. Where photographs were taken on a camera and not a phone. Photos of other people and not selfies.
Nostalgia is always better when it has a basis in truth, and this film is actually based on a true story article about the last few days of the Kodachrome development system in America.
Jason Sudekis plays Matt, a music executive who is about to be fired because the music industry is changing the same way as film. Moving from the physical media to digital.
He is the estranged son of Ben Ryder, a famous photographer suffering from cancer, who wants to drive across America to get four rolls of film developed before they stop developing them. Only he needs Matt's help and the two of them take an Elizabethtown/As Good As It Gets-style road trip with Ben's nurse (Elizabeth Olsen) to help administer Ben's medication and keep the peace.
Olsen delivers her usual brand of warmth, charm and compassion just as she did in Liberal Arts. Sudekis proved in Colossal that he can deliver on the dramatic side just as well as the comedic and sparks off the cranky, curmudgeonly Ed Harris.
In a movie like this, it is the journey not the destination that is important and the story takes the predictable route to its destination with the character moments and plot points signposted a mile off and you are left always wishing that something truly special develops from the material but sadly the end result is slightly out of focus.

3 stars

Finding Vivian Maier - review

In the Sixties there was a film called Blow Up where a photographer played by David Hemmings believes he has captured a crime on camera and sets out to solve it.

Finding Vivian Maier is a documentary that features a similar mystery at heart but it isn't trying to solve a crime captured in a photograph but one man's search to discover who took a photograph.

John Maloof bought a box of negatives from an auction in Chicago and discovered a series of amazing photographs from a woman called Vivian Maier.

The only problem was that neither John nor anyone on google had seemed to heard of this photographer. Maloof sets out to find out who she was and why she hadn't become a famous artist.

He discovers she had died shortly before he found the negatives and Maier worked for most of her life as a nanny and took thousands of photos whenever she could thanks to a camera she seemed to permanently keep round her neck.

Interviewing the people she worked for and looked after, Maloof begins to piece together the puzzle of who Vivian Maier was whilst simultaneously building an archive of her photographs and showcasing her work around the world.

Maier would in death find the fame she never had in life but it is clear that it is not something she would have necessarily wanted or enjoyed.

What she did enjoy however, and predating the current camera phone trend by 50/60 years, was taking "selfies". So many in fact, that she could have even coined the term.

Unlike the majority of her photos, Vivian Maier's background and personality was certainly not black and white but this film does its best to add some colour and shade to this unique character.

4 stars