travellers | the m0vie blog

219. Dom za vešanje (Time of the Gypsies) – This Just In (#220)

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and with special guests Jason Coyle and Ronan Doyle, This Just In is a subset of The 250 podcast, looking at notable new arrivals on the list of the 250 best movies of all-time, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.

This time, Emir Kusturica’s Dom za vešanje.

Perhan lives a simple life in a gypsy community outside of Skopje. He dreams of marrying Azra, but his social standing is not high enough. Events conspire to take Perhan away from his community, embarking on a trip to Italy with local legend Ahmed and with the promise of a new and prosperous life waiting for him. Inevitably, Perhan discovers that this life is not what was promised, and faces the possibility that he might also be something different than he expected himself to be.

At time of recording, it was ranked the 220th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: communities, emir kusturica, film, gypsies, jason coyle, jay coyle, macedonia, magical realism, miniseries, podcast, romani, ronan doyle, Television, The 250, This Just In, time of the gypsies, travellers, yugoslavia | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Travelers (Review)

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

For all that the fifth season of The X-Files is building towards a major summer movie release, the production team seem surprisingly relaxed about it.

The fifth season is as experimental and as loose as the show ever got. Patient X and The Red and the Black suggested that Chris Carter didn’t even feel beholden to the continuity of The X-Files: Fight the Future, introducing new characters and concepts to the mythology that could not possibly be inserted into the film at this late stage. Similarly, the show was willing to play around with special guest writers like Stephen King and William Gibson, film an entire episode in black and white, focus on relatively minor characters, and reveal two separate secret histories of the X-files.

What do you call a baby Fox?

Of course, some of these innovations were driven by necessity or large goals. Patient X and The Red and the Black represent the beginning of the end for this stage of the mythology. Stories like Unusual Suspects and Travelers focus on characters other than Mulder or Scully because David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were otherwise engaged. Nevertheless, there is a very relaxed vibe to the fifth season, as if the show is taking an extended moment to enjoy the peak of its popularity. As well it should.

Travelers is an episode that is far from essential in many respects. It is clunky in places, indulgent in others. It feels like the production teams are just happy to root through the old costuming wardrobe and prop departments, delighted to compose over-written monologues and stock characters. Travelers is light and fun, with its indulgence and its relative lack of substance making it more enjoyable than it would otherwise be.