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

droll comedy about unemployed Scots who hatch a hairbrained caper to steal some sinks.

the ringing phonebox is the best bittersweet ending since Midnight Cowboy

He surfaces in New York this week, after a screening of Housekeeping!

http://www.filmforum.org/films/forsyth.html

I hope the new print means a DVD is forthcoming.

If they take audience questions, the first one I can think of is "What happened to you?"

Along with The Conformist, I treasured my VHS copy of Housekeeping for years. The novel's just okay.

Comfort and Joy isn't as well known as Local Hero, probably not even as well known as Housekeeping, but it's on my short list of favourite films from the '80s.

housekeeping is a film that stays with you. i saw it once, in the early 90s, and images from it haunt me still.

anyone like breaking in?

housekeeping is a film that stays with you

I remember liking Housekeeping.

That is, in fact, the ONLY thing I remember about it.

Forsyth said at that FF appearance that he wanted to make the film so people would read the novel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-18393597

havent read the book, maybe i will now, the movie is p great

liked this title card image/font/etc

http://images02.olx.co.uk/ui/5/31/10/1268305288_69743110_1-Pictures-of--DVD-HOUSEKEEPING-1987-Christine-Lahti-Sara-Walker-Andrea-Burchill-Bill-Forsyth.jpg

is this movie on DVD?

Housekeeping is available as a Sony MOD DVD-R via the WB Shop (or more correctly, the company they sub-contract to.) They also have Being Human in the Warner Archive line, and I imagine That Sinking Feeling will eventually pop up in the MGM line.

I have the Housekeeping disc: Great film, quality transfer. I believe it got the restoration treatment in the last 5-8 years. It was on itunes at one time as well.

i dvr'd it off sony hd channel, think it's showing a few more times this month at least

that sinking feeling is basically 'bottle rocket' 15 yrs early & scottish, p good

^^trudat. I liked that scene where that guy starts airguitaring (with a real pick!) and then he and his mates begin singing "Holiday In The Sun".

YES! He's enthusing about buying a Les Paul and wahwah and amplifier and "I've already got the plectrum!"

for Britishers (and anyone else who can use iPlayer) Comfort And Joy is available to watch until Feb 9th.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01gxqg8/Comfort_and_Joy/

One of my 30 or so favourite films ever. I wrote about it a few years ago:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/if-they-move-kill-em-steven-jeff-phil-count-down-their-favorite-films/30-comfort-and-joy-bill-forsyth-1984/220608311300362

I have a used VHS that I got a store-closing sale. Watched Defense of the Realm recently, the only other film I think I've ever seen Bill Patterson in.

not Truly Madly Deeply, or Gilliam's Munchausen?

No, haven't seen either. Looked at his IMDB page, and he was also in The Killing Fields and Chaplin--again, haven't seen them.

Love Bill Patterson, and this film.

My mum texted me all excited a couple of days ago to tell me that she'd heard on radio forth that they're releasing That Sinking Feeling with the original dialogue in April. I'd tried to get her it for christmas but it was £££ on amazon, and had the anglicised soundtrack.

My first viewing of Housekeeping in more than 15 years. Forgot about the leisurely opening, the quiet laying out of the comfortable and stifling family relations. It's part of the film's strange, quiet power that Christine Lahti seems initially miscast; she's so vibrant. That sequence in the forest with the frost-covered grass and the impression that invisible children are listening is special.

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