{"id":28943,"date":"2013-04-18T22:47:17","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T21:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/2013\/04\/blood\/28943"},"modified":"2013-04-18T22:47:17","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T21:47:17","slug":"blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/2013\/04\/28943\/blood\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright  wp-image-102\" alt=\"Blood poster\" src=\"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/59bea6946b_71f8f151b12ce1f37d784d984a84d602.jpeg\" width=\"253\" height=\"382\" \/>Another film I saw at last year&#8217;s London Film Festival. Which was in October. And I last wrote about a film I saw then in&#8230; January. SO IT GOES. I made no promises. Once again, something of a list and bear in mind this is a film that I saw once nearly 6 months ago (saying that though, I saw it 6 months ago and it made enough of an impression that I&#8217;m writing about it <em>now<\/em>).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When I sat down in the cinema to see this film, I admit, I couldn&#8217;t remember what the hell I was seeing. It was a film called &#8220;<em>Blood<\/em>&#8221; &#8211; that much I knew from the ticket. Other than that? Not a clue.\u00c2\u00a0<em>Blood<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0is the kind of title that could mean anything, though in this case I think it refers to the familial relationships within the film. In the Q&amp;A with the director Nick Murphy after the film, he described it as like a Greek tragedy and I&#8217;d agree that it has that kind of scale and timelessness. The fact that this is a drama involving policemen is pretty much secondary to the relationships between the characters and their reactions to events.<\/li>\n<li>The character development and the relationship development is well-paced. As it should be.<\/li>\n<li>To digress a bit, you know how in <em>Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, there&#8217;s that moment in Act 3, Scene 1 where it&#8217;s all a bit &#8220;HOLY COW&#8221; and everything changes? The impact of that varies from production to production and depends, I suspect, a bit on how familiar you are with the play. I&#8217;m guessing that if you know a bit about this film, but not necessarily all the detail and maybe not this point (even though it&#8217;s probably the pivotal moment in the film)&#8230;uh. Lost track there. MY POINT, now that I&#8217;ve got here, is that\u00c2\u00a0<em>Blood\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>has a moment where I could hear the entire audience kind of think &#8220;Holy S***&#8221; &#8211; it&#8217;s got that kind of impact. Which I really liked.<\/li>\n<li>MARK STRONG. Ok. This film has a lot of really good actors in it. A lot of them and all really good, who have done other work that I&#8217;ve really enjoyed. Paul Bettany gives the best performance that I&#8217;ve seen him give in like&#8230;.anything I&#8217;ve seen him in (in fact, this pretty much confirms that I would want him to play John Constantine in a Hellblazer film). MARK STRONG THOUGH. I LOVE MARK STRONG. Well. Maybe not love <strong>him<\/strong> per se, but his work. My favourite thing is when he plays a normal person rather than an out-and-out villainous character (like in&#8230;Sherlock Holmes and&#8230;stuff&#8230;he&#8217;s good at it, but y&#8217;know). I think that sometimes it&#8217;s easy to forget that Strong can absolutely kill as a not-villain. Well, not\u00c2\u00a0<strong>literally\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong>;).If this was a romantic comedy, I might have swooned. As it isn&#8217;t, I only swooned a bit at his character&#8217;s competence. That and that one scene where he&#8217;s wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Sorry. I have a pulse and he&#8217;s Mark Strong.<\/li>\n<li>What else? Well, last year I saw a heck of a lot of films, but out of the films that came out in 2012, that I saw,\u00c2\u00a0<em>Blood<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0was the most awesome. You can see my list <a title=\"2012: rated\" href=\"http:\/\/letterboxd.com\/herdivineshadow\/list\/2012-rated\/detail\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0<em>Blood\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>beat\u00c2\u00a0<em>Red Tails<\/em>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>Avengers Assemble<\/em>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>The Hobbit<\/em>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>Dredd<\/em>,\u00c2\u00a0<em>Argo<\/em> and&#8230;lots of other really good films (also, obvs, the not so good ones but whatevs). I gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 (I don&#8217;t really rate many things 5 out of 5) and my end of year thoughts were as follows:<br \/>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Yes, technically this film is released next year. I don&#8217;t care. In fact, this film is so good, I&#8217;ll probably go see again next year and put it high up on next year&#8217;s ratings too. The cast in this film is astounding. I love Mark Strong. I love Paul Bettany. They are both spot-on in this film (&#8220;spot-on&#8221; has pretty much become my go-to end of year saying). The relationships between the characters are rightly at the heart of this film and that&#8217;s what makes it so good. Forget that it&#8217;s a police drama. Forget the totally amazing HOLY COW moment. How the brothers related to each other and their father. How they related to their colleagues. Everything. Best film.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n<li>Mark Strong and Paul Bettany, man. JUST LOOK AT THEM.<span><\/span>\n<p><div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-103  \" alt=\"Mark Strong and Paul Bettany in Blood\" src=\"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/1271d1d868_large.jpeg\" width=\"573\" height=\"382\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.herdivineshadow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/large-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/1271d1d868_large.jpeg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 573px) 100vw, 573px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It really doesn&#8217;t hurt that they&#8217;re nice to look at.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>Aside from Mr Strong and Mr Bettany being stone cold foxes, the setting is nice to look at too. So there&#8217;s that. If you needed something other than the plot and acting and all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=http:\/\/blog.herdivineshadow.com\/2013\/04\/blood\/>Link to the original site<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another film I saw at last year&#8217;s London Film Festival. Which was in October. And I last wrote about a film I saw then in&#8230; January. SO IT GOES. I made no promises. Once again, something of a list and bear in mind this is a film that I saw once nearly 6 months ago &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/2013\/04\/28943\/blood\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Blood<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reblogged"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.herdivineshadow.com\/journals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}