Well, I couldn’t find any Brecht references to Capra or It’s a Wonderful Life. I guess he was too busy with his Galileo/ Charles Laughton project at the time. I wonder what a Galileo Christmas was like? Either it was total misery as the Church continued condemning his planets orbiting the sun theory (well Copernicus actually) or he laughed his head off at a world so blind to the obvious (I know how he felt living in London) and left a trail of ‘doo-dahs’ around the Church’s majesterium. Interesting Wonderful Life blog-a-thon and Imdb gives you the whole script online.
The initial New York Times review described it as “a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes”. Maybe that was because of the NYT article Capra wrote in May 1946 Breaking Hollywood’s Pattern of Sameness. In a chapter of Capra’s autobiography The Name Above the Title he writes: “The first scientific statement ever uttered by men is credited to an ancient Greek philosopher who said ‘Man can never step into the same stream twice.’ God knows man does his best to piss off that stream. Was it Back to the Future or The Terminator where it was uttered that man cannot occupy his same material space in time? One could be very cynical, of course, and point out that the reason Clarence (the angel) ‘saved’ George was to get his angel wings back and get the hell off this planet. So that too was a ‘business’ arrangement. Nothing wrong with that but I’m just pointing it out. George fully intended to throw himself into the water and commit suicide - something he would have done had he not jumped in to rescue Clarence who he thought was drowning. Whichever way you look at it It’s a Wonderful Life is a fascinating and thought-provoking film. Believe in your own path, of course, but a dollar will always be a dollar. When those angels stop needing wings, watch out!
Channel Four’s This Is Civilisation (primetime Sat nights) written and presented by Matthew Collings has been widely criticised for its rather cynical somewhat-lacking-in-nutrition take on the world. It claims to be a riposte to its sibling’s BBC arts programming (though I can’t say I see the need to throw down a gauntlet) while at the same time being a respectful hommage re-mix of Kenneth Clark’s classic 70’s BBC series Civilisation. My feeling about Collings is that he’s quite a modest chap though obviously self-assured and opinionated enough to front an arts series. He is full of rhetorical questions and statements. Modern art is “our Delphic oracle. Know thyself,” he emphasises with a Barnett Newman painting looming behind him. “Life in the uncertain presence, this is civilisation...What will the future see when they look back?” As 5 million visitors traipse through the Tate Modern “obscurity has become glamorous” insists Colllings. “Civilisation’s models for authority have changed. The greatest irony instead of the highest authority....There is no high and low anymore, we are all below. In our world God can be anything...You must do something but you’re guided by nothing,” referring to Pollack and De Kooning. And Mondrian: “testing the idea that society can be perfected...what is purity?...it’s part of human nature to want to be shaped, to feel whole, to be connected to others.” Collings wasn’t too keen on Christianity but then it is a bit of a dying art in England these days. His passion for the art of civilisation was so that oftentimes he was almost breathless with excitement. Why jump off the bridge when you realise that most other sane people are contemplating the same thing (that’s me not Collings – his rhetoric didn’t quite go that far) only to realise it’s the same stream as before?
Where else but England would you get a Christmas No.1 contender We're All Going To Die(Malcolm Middleton)
And anyone for the BFI’s DVD Night Mail (Collector’s Edition)? Very pertinent as more and more Brits complain of their local post offices closures. There was a Royal Mail TV ad for their Broadband recently The People’s Post Office where they had to re-create a local post office for the shoot as there were none left. In another world there used to be two morning deliveries through your letterbox, but now you’re lucky if you get mail before midday.
Jesus Camp (was playing at the ICA) is a brilliant, scary Oscar nominated doco directed by Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady about an American evangelical summer camp Kids on Fire held at Devil’s Lake, North Dakota (true!) “Children are engaged in a war...so they have to be taught how to fight,” believes Pastor Becky. Soccor teams wear red badges imprinted with HWJC, ‘How would Jesus compete?’ The film’s stars are the genuinely nice kids Levi and Rachael. The mother home-schooling her child in the fallacy of global warming says, “We believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: those that love Jesus and those who do not.” In a class of confessions, one kid says, “It’s hard to believe in God. Sometimes I don’t even believe what the bible says...he makes me a faker,” as he opens the bible in front of him bookmarked by a dollar bill.
For sport lovers Bluebell Films (no link) have Real: The Movie (DVD) a part fiction/part doco directed by Borja Manso about the Spanish football club. It’s seen through the eyes of five strangers across the globe including New York, Tokyo and Senegal where the boy walks two days to get to a TV. Not very revelatory as a film but fun if you’re a fan I’m sure. Not much fun at all is Rise of the Footsoldier (DVD) directed by Brit Julian Gilbey about Carlton Leach (true story) his rise from football terrace to organised crime. None of Shane Meadows grim humour and sharp social observation here and definitely no Scorsese psychology and panache. There is a whole extra disc of extras though that I didn’t get to see and, as it’s Optimum Releasing worth watching I’m sure. Also for the fact that the production company Carnaby Films fund their films through small private investors who are also offered extra parts etc. You’re far better off seeing John (The Last Seduction) Dahl’s You Kill Me, a comedy/drama with Sir Ben Kingsley inimitably playing an alcoholic hitman who cynically tries rehab (it works) and gets a girl (Téa Leoni, a client’s widow from his day job as a mortician).
Capello named new England manager
Art of the manager: what that £10m collection reveals
Will Capello’s appointment breed some existential footballers?
Three very frustrating ‘who are we?’ films opened in the last few London weeks: Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, Martha Fiennes’ Chromophobia and Richard ‘Donnie Darko’ Kelly’s Southland Tales. Fiennes (Ralph’s sister and he’s in it) fares best with her unfashionable subject of the more privileged Brit society and the more fashionable seeds of their own destruction scenario- the title originating from a digital art work in the film whose colours change according to ambient human frequencies. Fiennes goes a long way to ‘bringing off’ this film with its starry Brit cast (and Penelope Cruz) but in the end we’ve seen it all before. Which is a shame because she almost convinces us that we haven’t.
Last Party at the Palace (Channel Four) fascinating doco on the last Brit debutantes’ season in 1958.
And sitting through Coppola’s and Kelly’s films wasn’t that bad either and was certainly preferable to enduring London’s crowded Christmas streets. Shot on HD (high definition video) Youth Without Youth looks amazing (DP-Mihai Malaimare Jr.) but wallows in its subject matter. Perhaps he should have gone the ‘whole hog’ and been more operatic and Leos Carax like. And you keep thinking Kelly will ‘pull off’ his apocalyptic, LA soap-opera Southland Tales but with its exploding mega-Zeppelin finale of society’s ‘great and goods’ you’re just left wondering what all those singers on stage were going on about rather than being mesmerised. For any readers who know about opera production it was a bit like a Robert Wilson show (not literally) with all its stylized gestures but lacking Wilson’s input.
Disney’s Enchanted is an unashamedly sentimental operetta sending itself up rotten – big apple poison and all. We’re in Disney animated Andalasia replete with singing birds et al and Giselle (the adorable Amy Adams) looks like she’s finally nabbed her cardboard cut-out Prince Edward (James Marsden), instead of the ‘Ken doll’ she’s made (don’t you just dig the disgruntled caterpillar who ain’t gonna hang around and be the prince’s lips). The scheming queen (Susan Sarandon) has other ideas for her son and dispatches Giselle down the well to modern-day New York “where they are no happily ever afters”. Rescued by slightly morose single-parent lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey) she finds her feet if not her heart in the big city. Furious, the evil queen then plunges her ingratiating love-struck jester Timothy Spall (totally brilliant as always) down the wishing well on a mission to poison Giselle. Robert's new girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel) arrives one morning after his 6-year-old daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey) has convinced dad that Giselle should stay the night. Ooops. And you can guess what happens. Almost.
What is so beguiling about this movie is that for the most part it retains an inherent logic (as do fairy tales). Only towards the end when the evil queen appears at the ball, transforms herself into a dragon and makes off with Giselle to the top of a skyscraper à la King Kong does this slightly fall apart. When Giselle wonders what to wear for the ball wishing she had her fairy godmother, Morgan produces a gold credit card that “daddy says is only for emergencies”. The film works because New York is such an anything goes ‘whatever’ place that nobody is that much surprised by the appearance of a court jester, a chipmunk (sans his Andalasian vocab and NY voice squeaked by the film’s director Kevin Lima), and a prince and a princess in full garb. The songs are by Disney favourite Alan Mencken and Broadway stalwart Stephen Schwarz (Godspell). And the final Central Park scene is akin to something out of the musical Hair. No Marxist fairy-tale critique here but Nancy follows the prince back to Andalasia where, though mobile reception is great, she promptly trashes her phone in favour of her new prince’s lips. Aaah.
Christophe Honoré’s Les Chansons D’Amour is a very French film where the characters slide into songs by Alex Beaupain, the first few having a strangely Left Bank Lily Allen lilt. Honoré’s films always border on the edge of banal without ever falling in, which is what I think he fully intends. But you may find it all far too ‘French’ in spite of the good performances.
Half way through the animated Bee Movie it seems writer Jerry Seinfeld wants to offer us a critique of globalisation and corporate greed. Erin Brokovich meets Wallace and Gromit? Alas, no but it’s a fun film with great gags though a disappointment to many. Seinfeld is the voice of Barry B Benson who breaks the cardinal rule of talking to humans discovering through befriending florist Vanessa (Renée Zellweger) that humans steal and package honey and proceeds to sue mankind in their courts. At least in Antz and A Bug’s Life you believed in the world of these insects. In Bee Movie they’re exactly the same as humans with their Honex Corporation, cars and consumer lifestyle. If this were cleverer it may just have worked. Seinfeld is a classic car collector but the cars in Bee world look more like clapped out former East German ‘Trabis’ than aspirant stingers. No clever Cars animation here. But the film’s gags ARE good and numerous and not always over kids’ heads. They’ll probably love the bees flying the jumbo jet into land and for the adults gags like Barry the gondolier gliding with a straw in a cup of Vanessa’s coffee on a sugarcube.
New look for pet cemetery
No gags in Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power (L'Ivresse du pouvoir - literally drunk with power) though Isabelle Huppert’s humourless examining magistrate succeeds in taking the smile off corrupt CEO Michel Humeau (François Berléand). Inspired by the French oil company Elf Aquitaine scandal described by The Guardian as “the biggest and most scandalous fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War” it’s familiar dark psychological territory for Chabrol but may prove a little lean for some of his fans. Nonetheless, superb performances and subtle cinematography from master Eduardo Serra with Huppert’s workaholic judge and splintered relationship wondering in the end whether it was it all worth it in an unchanging world.
Northern Rock: is time starting to run out?
Record deficit adds to fears for UK economy
Why central banks are teaming up
Mr.Majorium’s Wonder Emporium is the 243-year-old Mr.M (Dustin Hoffman, at times sounding like Donald Duck) of the title who wants to ‘give up the ghost’ and hand over his New York toyshop to his assistant (the very cute Natalie Portman). But the magical shop nor Portman won’t allow such impudence and throws a tantrum. The script is by Stranger Than Fiction’s Zach Helm and though Mr.Majorium isn’t that strange it’s full of heart and I was truly seduced into liking it if only because it puts all high street toy stores into the Room 101 of shame and boredom.
For an obvious clanging clash of religions, and supporting Collings’ opinions in Civilisation, is Beowulf. Whether ‘tis true to the Old English 1000 AD original isn’t really the point? Neil Gaiman screenwriter: “You can defeat your dragons. When everyone’s a hero, nobody’s a hero as in the David Bowie song.” “The gods will do nothing for us that we can’t do ourselves” goes the script. Great special effects with synthesized actor’s bodies and Angelina Jolie emerging from the watery depths in high heels reminiscent (though not with heels) of Peer Gynt’s warning ‘to thine own self be true’ and you’ve got yourself a youth film winner. They might even open the original text. Wishful thinking I know.
The Golden Compass (based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials) has been eagerly awaited and is thankfully not a disappointment. After Brit Anand Tucker left the project early on as director, many must have raised eyebrows at his replacement Chris Weitz of American Pie fame. But as with so many successful artists Weitz has many strings to his bow. Critics who’ve read the books have felt the film lacks their religious complexity. But the film is complex enough as it is and if you’re not familiar, then at times you have to concentrate quite hard to keep up. And whether younger audiences will really stay the course is debatable. Yet casting (Fiona Weir, Lucy Bevan – they rarely get a mention) 12-year-old Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) with her Cockney accent, and around whom the whole film turns, will hook the youngsters if nothing else. She’s a girl with attitude, blazing her path for truth to the end. The Majesterium, as in Galileo’s time, wants to control knowledge. Lyra knows better and when her friend is kidnapped she journeys to the icy north with her ‘lie detector’ compass the alethiometer, a clairvoyance of good and bad deeds. Each character has a ‘power’ animal protector, a daemon, and the Majesterium is conducting child/animal experiments to separate the pairs. As with any first-rate novel you should really read the Pullman and create your own film. But be careful of your shadow.
And BBC Four’s The Martians and Us showed the Brits such as Christopher Priest and JG Ballard were just as good if not better sci-fi writers than their American counterparts.
Sunday, 23 December 2007
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
The wolves who learnt the waltz (and how to tip-toe)
So where are we now? Cogito ergo sum? But not for me, say some. George Gershwin bought a depressed mate an upright piano in the American depression. I guess the British equivalent is getting an honour from the Queen, one of the few ‘keep on going mate’ encouragements you’re ever likely to receive in the Kingdom. My dear recently departed Mum would have loved the ‘Mam as in ‘ham’ not quite ‘corgi’s eye view’ doco Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work about Palace goings on. Even if you’re not a fan, you have to admit that Her Majesty makes you feel good about yourself (no matter who you are or where you hail from) and that you kinda trust someone who has seen more than her fair share of political shenanigans over the decades that would lead other less able mortals to far more than HM’s ‘gin debonnet’ tipple. You also believe that she has to make similar decisions about the mundane problems as suffered by her subjects such as plumbing (she doesn’t get a government handout either). Though whether that’s shown in the series remains to be seen.
London always slides as slowly as possible into Christmas around this time of year. Conspicuous consumption disguising a lackadaisical work ethic (New York remains ever vigilant as well as merry) only to wake up in the New Year and realise that it was all a succession of inebriated, optimistic one night metaphorical stands (or as Woody Allen might say, getting off on one leg is better than no leg off at all). Exacerbated this time by the gloomy economic/housing market/labour loans scandal news headlines forecast that any self-respecting, moderately intelligent undergrad laughs off as déjà vu from at least a year ago.
Pressure on Bank as house prices fall
Donorgate: 10 Labour bosses knew
However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:
Revealed: cash for honours scandal">Revealed: cash for honours scandal
"Des Smith, a council member of the trust that helps recruit sponsors for academies, disclosed that if a donor gave sufficient money, he could be nominated for an OBE, CBE or even a knighthood." The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006
Tate gets £50m for a new ziggurat
Zaha Hadid Puts the Fun Back in Funicular
If you’re feeling the blues then be heartened that Stephen Fry (a man not without numerous detractors I have discovered) won an Emmy in the States for his documentation of his own depression The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. Brave man. He’s also done the script for Kenneth Branagh’s filmic adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Not well-received at all by Brit crits but I’m yet to see it, so I’m off the hook :) Poor Kenneth, his Sleuth received a critical mauling as well last week. I guess he doesn’t need our sympathy, but I’ve always admired the man for his tenacity and very un-English ‘go-gettingness’. I don’t think he ever got much encouragement either, ‘why don’t you direct another one of those nice plays Ken and forget about all that film nonsense’ they probably said. Maybe after his Emmy Stephen Fry’s BBC QI series will now get a BBC America slot for those Yanks hungry for mental stimulus.
Happy anniversary (FT article)
Police get little ray of sunshine
But prescription drugs only work for some people, some of the time. They will never the cure the ludicrous failings of government policy inflicted upon you or the envy and jealousy of others towards you. I still believe that Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) could have been made yesterday without any historical anachronisms. It’s possible, of course, to cure or at least monitor yourself but it ain’t half easy. You’ll just have to wait for my book (and of course read this blog every week) on that one to emerge from its cocoon. Arm yourselves for the ‘Don’t kill the caterpillar!’ campaign. In fact it’s quite a pre-Christmas soul searching milieu in the cinema and on DVD without a lotta laughs. Even on Tele, Jack Dee’s (he’s the nice Brit ‘comic next-door’ who never smiles) Lead Balloon is a ‘The Office’ take on the shittiness (I’m sorry, damage limitation management) of everyday middle-class life.
Oz director Andrew Dominik (Chopper) garnered crits’ acclaim for his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (also LFF)this week. Is it worth the 160 minutes of your time in the cinema? I’d have to concur, yes. You can read the whys and wherefores of this flic elsewhere but it’s quite rare for a mainstream film to be treading the turf of say more art house Robert Altman and his McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Terence Malick’s oeuvre being the most obvious comparison. Actor/playwright Sam Shepard pops up as Frank James (brother senior) but Dominik’s film has none of the wry humour found in Shepard’s plays. Nor does it have the grit and gruellish humour you find in Sam Peckinpah’s films. Dominik’s film is a forlorn character study, one of envy and idolatry from the viewpoint of 19 year-old Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). You may start wriggling in your seat as it trundles forth but the last 50 minutes really has you hooked with its shuddering contemporality. Ford’s celebrity after shooting James, soon wanes, but as we know James’ never dies. When the legend becomes truth should we print the legend? Few directors, if any, have really succeeded in docu-dramatising JOHN Ford’s paradox. “Men must have legends else they will die of strangeness,” wrote Dominik’s compatriot Oz poet Les Murray. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is, as always, breathtaking often using one of those 3D postcard effects around the edges of the film frame. Could his work have been a little stranger, though, to reinforce the paradox? Decide for yourself.
Deakins’ Oz camera compatriot Christopher Doyle who made his name in Asian cinema (Wong Kai-Wei, Chen Kaige) is DP on Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves out on DVD. (I wrote of Pen-Ek’s latest Ploy (The Times BFI London Film Festival last time.) Invisible Waves has the same existential pace as Ploy but Doyle’s input gives the film a real strangeness. “The film is about intention,” says Doyle on the excellent DVD extras, “it’s not a film it’s a relationship.” Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano is hitman Kyoji who takes a cruise ship to Phuket laying low from a recent job in Hong Kong. Scripted by Prabha Yoon, Pen-Ek initially wanted to make a ‘Clint Eastwood’ film noir style film. “Every place in the world is an island that must be linked through human travel...and this [idea] effectively conveys many themes,” says Yoon in his interview. Chris Doyle stresses the importance of the locations and the whole film has an intriguing Buddhist/Jim Jarmusch curiosity, fluidity and calm. Well worth seeking out this DVD from Tartan Films (but there's no link on their site).
Captain Ahab (Capitaine Achab), LFF and still no UK distributor, is based on Melville’s classic C19 Moby Dick, directed by Philippe Ramos, and narrated through five characters. Though much shorter, it has a feel akin to The Assassination of Jesse James allowing the characters to seep into the camera rather than the other way round.
Doco A Very British Gangster (Sundance Fest 07) is directed by one of Britain’s best known investigative journalists Donal MacIntyre. Welcome to Manchester and the well violent world of the Noonan crime family. MacIntyre spent 3 years with this lot and the doco never sensationalises them, though there are a few too many atmospheric camera tricks and Nina Simone’s Sinner Man over the final credits is a bit much.
The Killing of John Lennon, Andrew Piddington’s film journeying into the mind of Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman is on release this weekend. (You’ll have to wait til Saturday for my pensées on that).
Hotel Harabati is French director Brice Cauvin’s first feature having worked as an assistant to many of the famous helmers. It opens with the classic script premise, an abandoned bag of money/a couple/what next? And Cauvin really keeps your interest with that even though not much happens in the first hour. With one eye on the money, you realise with the other eye that the film is much stranger and existential than you initially assumed. “I realised that there is always a betrayal in the rational explanation of things,” says Cauvin in his Director’s Statement. “Sometimes things seem to make sense, but often they just don’t. What I like in a written piece is that each spectator can chose his or her position. The truth can be found in the sum of the explanations.” He’d even prefer not giving his film a title. There’s a very simple slightly off-kilter score by Philippe Miller, too.
More existential delights with the master of them all Russian Andrei Tarkovsky and a re-issue of The Sacrifice (Offret) this week by Artificial Eye (including talks etc). I hadn’t seen this film in almost 20 years, and for those who don’t know, Tarkovsky is like a god to filmmakers. So much has been written about this extraordinary artist including his own book Sculpting in Time, Faber and Faber was the UK publisher but it's not on their website but Time Within Time is there . “Today the world is developing on a strictly material plane,” he wrote way back then. “The sole means of returning to a normal relationship with life is to restore one’s independence vis-à-vis the material things of life and consequently reaffirm one’s spiritual essence.” Watching it older and wiser, I realised why the professor feels he has to burn down the remote family home at the end of the film (probably not a good idea to take teenagers to this, unless of course, they’re like me and wrote about Liliana Cavani and Fassbinder for their A-Levels!). It becomes less about art and more about living and survival as you view it with age. But even as a youngster the poetic power of Tarkovsky’s vision will effect you. This is one director whose work you absolutely must see on the cinema screen. If you can’t attend some of the documentaries, there is a consummate Tarkovsky Companion available on DVD.
For a Lawrencian (that’s DH Lawrence) of life, Kino (in America) issues the DVD of Lady Chatterley this week, released here by Artificial Eye.
Baader’s Angels: Women’s Roles in German terrorism (ICA) is a brave and interesting pre-Christmas season of four films exploring the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1977 Germany and whether or not armed struggle is the road to freedom. Greater Freedom-Lesser Freedom (Grosse Freiheit-Kleine Freiheit, 2000) directed by Kristina Konrad is an unsensationalising double portrait of a German RAF and a Uraguay woman doing the same in her country.
Network DVD has a Cuban perspective on the class struggle with their releases from ICAIC, Cuba’s equivalent of the BFI (British Film Institute). Humberto Solás’s A Successful Man (Un Hombre de Éxito) (Region 0) follows two leftist brothers pre and post Spanish Civil war, one who compromises and becomes a senator, the other refusing to relinquish editorial control of his newspaper. This film is far more than polemic and the female roles far better observed than many of their American counterparts. Interesting, sparse music score from Italian contemporary ‘concert hall’ composer Luigi Nono.
Beloved (Amada)
Cecilia (Cecilia Valdes)
The Twelve Chairs (Las Doce Sillas)
Empties (Vratné lahve) (LFF, distributed next year by UK’s Portobello Pictures) is an extremely funny Eastern European Czech unemployment movie. Yes, really. Jan Sverák of Oscar winning Kolya fame directs his dad (also scriptwriter) as a retired teacher who gets a supermarket job as a bottle recycler supervisor in the post-Communist era. That is until he’s ousted by technology. “Historically, we’ve been between Germany and Russia and the only thing we could do is laugh!” said Sverák in a post-screening Q & A. “This film’s allowed me to buy a new shirt,” he quipped. Co-producer Eric Abraham initially clicked with Sverák at a festival because “we both agreed that awards should be given for what’s on screen, and not be about the struggles of the filmmaker.” The use of classical music in the film is also superlative with a cheeky Mahler in-joke at the end and a Swan Lake for plastic bottles.
The visually sublime Silent Light (LFF a couple of blogs ago) by Carlos Reygadas opens in cinemas this weekend. A must see on the big screen. And LFF films we may not see here are The Lighthouse (Mayak), Japan’s The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori)- Cannes Grand Prix this year, China’s Tuya’s Marriage (Tuya de hunshi) and Sri Lanka’s Sankara. These are all beautiful, meditative films about our existence, the last three perhaps too indulgent sometimes in the imagery of cinema. But The Lighthouse directed and edited by Tarkovsky devotee Maria Saakyan is just that bit more special. The grainy look she initially intended (she claims :)through post-production came spookily true when the original master negatives were lost and everything had to be re-constructed through copies. Familiar story – an unspecified war with a granddaughter trying to persuade her grandparents to leave their Caucasus mountain village for safety. In person, Saakyan has that blissful air of having just flown with the cranes and this her first feature has that same quality of cinematic dance. I very much look forward to her second, apparently a comedy.
Brit TV soap/primetime director Joanna Hogg’s first feature Unrelated (LFF and winner of the 10th FIPRESCI International Critics Award) couldn’t feel less British. Her acknowledged influences are more the likes of Ozu and Japanese cinema. “I’m not interested in plot,” she said over breakfast, “in each moment there’s a little story. The complete antithesis to the Robert McKee school of screenwriting that I feel patronises audiences.” There are only two small camera moves in the entire film; the rest are static set-ups with no music score. Fortysomething Anna (Kathryn Worth) goes on holiday to an Italian village finding a motley bunch of Brits. There is a plot, of sorts, but what I found more fascinating was watching these characters exist within the film frame. Even if you know no English, there is a universality in their reactions that would speak in those tiny ‘moments’ Hogg referred to.
Mikio Naruse (BFI DVD)
One of the DVD peaks of the decade has to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally a 13 part German TV series with an epilogue. (Criterion US set) Based on the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) gets out of jail, tries to go straight in the tempestuous Berlin inter-war years but is drawn back into the vortex of humanity’s hopelessness, waylaid by Reinhold (Gottfried John) and his schemes but befriended by streetgirls Eva (Hanna Schygulla) and his beloved Mieze (Barbara Sukowa in her first major role). I remember watching this, also some 20 years ago I think on SBS TV (Australia’s then new multi-cultural channel with the irreplaceable David Stratton as their movies guru). It’s a momentous achievement on Fassbinder’s part but above all totally heartbreaking for the viewer. If you stay the course of the 15 or so hours you will never forget the experience. There’s an excellent disc of extras (making of, interviews etc), but most interesting being the restoration process. The series was shot on tiny 16mm negative film stock and with Arri’s new digital scanning and correction, cinematography Xaver Swarzenburger could finally achieve the look he originally wanted. Though the image is sometimes grainy, this analogue grain together with the sad, mellow browns creates a perfect period/psychological state. “It was all ‘hand-made’,” says the then 22 year-old editor Juliane Lorenz, “there were no mobiles and no computers!” The tabloid press at the time dismissed the entire enterprise as too darkly shot (a forerunner technique for many mainstream films in later decades)amongst many other numerous criticisms.
The characters are all too familiar to us, a ‘dime novel’ as Fassbinder described it, but it was the director’s dream since a teenager to film this book. It’s a territory also explored by Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth whose plays I produced in London, characters caught on the dangerous edge of things grinning as they fight for a footing on the rocks. “Reality isn’t real, one day it’s this then it’s that,” says Biberkopf. Peer Raben’s score is a bittersweet waltz of the spirit; Berlin Alexanderplatz is a New World but only for the strongest swimmers. “Give me your heart so I can throw it in the dirt,” says Reinhold to Biberkopf in the hallucinatory epilogue.
Facets (US DVD) Heimat also Our Hitler
Golden Door (Nuovomondo) my blog (Optimum DVD), (US DVD)
One of, if not the most extraordinary film you’ll ever see about an artist’s life is Brit Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (Eureka DVD)(New Yorker DVD). At 210 minutes (originally telecast over two nights in 1974 and released in cinemas in a shorter version), Edvard Munch is arguably the best film there is about an artist’s life. I can think of Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon, Ken Russell’s oeuvre, The Quince Tree Sun, Camille Claudel, and Henri-Georges Clouzet’s Picasso portrait. Using actors in a documentary style – some dramatised, some interviewed to camera with an English narration (Watkins)- and using only Munch’s Diaries, Watkins succeeds in engrossing the viewer in Munch’s depressing world, his lack of acceptance by the public, disillusionment in love, and disillusionment of the sexually, morally repressive and hypocritical Norwegian society in the late C19. Maybe not a good idea to see both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Edvard Munch over Christmas. As is usual with Eureka, excellent print and large (80 page) informative booklet, but there are no disc extras.
Peter Watkins homepage
Eureka also has two exhilarating (I thought so) science fiction animation releases by Frenchman René Laloux, Gandahar (1988) and Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters, 1982). US distributor Harvey Weinstein championed Gandahar (interesting all post-production was economically done at North Korean studios in Pyongyang) but gave it an English language dub in an Isaac Asimov translation and asked for changes to Gabriel Yared’s brilliant score. The genius of these films is that they work both on a child’s imagination and an adult’s without ever compromising for either. Both explore the question of where and who is the enemy and who is it exactly we are worshipping. Maîtres has unforgettable characters. The little blobby shrews can read your telepathic “smelly thoughts”, and Piel is a child orphan from another planet forever cocooned in within the eco-system of an egg-like shell and parented through a microphone device from the outside world. The ‘baddies’ colonise by accelerating planets into the past so the inhabitants are unaware of the transition. Minimal extras but again good booklets. Not that cheery a vision of the cosmos either, so be prepared for the kids’ possibly awkward questions.
Facets (US DVD)Fantastic Planet
But there’s always Frank Capra’s comedy It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) shown almost every year on TV but now re-released in a brand spanking new digital print from Park Circus. Now there’s a good night out (nation-wide from Dec 14). It’s basically about an angel, Clarence Odbody, who’s only hope of getting wings is if James Stewart’s George Bailey stops wanting to kill himself and believe that his life truly is wonderful.
Samaritans DVD tie-in
2-Disc Collector's Set (US)
It really is a fantastic script with the simplest of ingenious moments like the opening’s alternate blinking stars in the sky speaking as angels, the crow in Bailey’s bank (did Pasolini borrow this for his Uccellacci e Uccellini? Capra was Sicilian and it might make Northern Rock depositors smile), and the Charleston scene as the dance floor divides into a pool. I hadn’t noticed this bit of trivia before but Stewart doesn’t really give the impression he’s a true smoker. And when you think about it, the idea of a studio greenlighting a movie whose star lead is committing suicide at Christmas is quite unbelievable then as of now. Is it all a bit home spun jolly American values, though? Well, not really. If anything, it chastises the worst of American consumerism and champions American’s grass-roots goodness. I can't say I believe in its world view (money does actually make you happy despite what anyone tells you) but I wonder if exiled German playwright Bertold Brecht liked it? I’ll try and find out. Till next time my loyal readers...
London always slides as slowly as possible into Christmas around this time of year. Conspicuous consumption disguising a lackadaisical work ethic (New York remains ever vigilant as well as merry) only to wake up in the New Year and realise that it was all a succession of inebriated, optimistic one night metaphorical stands (or as Woody Allen might say, getting off on one leg is better than no leg off at all). Exacerbated this time by the gloomy economic/housing market/labour loans scandal news headlines forecast that any self-respecting, moderately intelligent undergrad laughs off as déjà vu from at least a year ago.
Pressure on Bank as house prices fall
Donorgate: 10 Labour bosses knew
However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:
Revealed: cash for honours scandal">Revealed: cash for honours scandal
"Des Smith, a council member of the trust that helps recruit sponsors for academies, disclosed that if a donor gave sufficient money, he could be nominated for an OBE, CBE or even a knighthood." The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006
Tate gets £50m for a new ziggurat
Zaha Hadid Puts the Fun Back in Funicular
If you’re feeling the blues then be heartened that Stephen Fry (a man not without numerous detractors I have discovered) won an Emmy in the States for his documentation of his own depression The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive. Brave man. He’s also done the script for Kenneth Branagh’s filmic adaptation of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Not well-received at all by Brit crits but I’m yet to see it, so I’m off the hook :) Poor Kenneth, his Sleuth received a critical mauling as well last week. I guess he doesn’t need our sympathy, but I’ve always admired the man for his tenacity and very un-English ‘go-gettingness’. I don’t think he ever got much encouragement either, ‘why don’t you direct another one of those nice plays Ken and forget about all that film nonsense’ they probably said. Maybe after his Emmy Stephen Fry’s BBC QI series will now get a BBC America slot for those Yanks hungry for mental stimulus.
Happy anniversary (FT article)
Police get little ray of sunshine
But prescription drugs only work for some people, some of the time. They will never the cure the ludicrous failings of government policy inflicted upon you or the envy and jealousy of others towards you. I still believe that Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) could have been made yesterday without any historical anachronisms. It’s possible, of course, to cure or at least monitor yourself but it ain’t half easy. You’ll just have to wait for my book (and of course read this blog every week) on that one to emerge from its cocoon. Arm yourselves for the ‘Don’t kill the caterpillar!’ campaign. In fact it’s quite a pre-Christmas soul searching milieu in the cinema and on DVD without a lotta laughs. Even on Tele, Jack Dee’s (he’s the nice Brit ‘comic next-door’ who never smiles) Lead Balloon is a ‘The Office’ take on the shittiness (I’m sorry, damage limitation management) of everyday middle-class life.
Oz director Andrew Dominik (Chopper) garnered crits’ acclaim for his The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (also LFF)this week. Is it worth the 160 minutes of your time in the cinema? I’d have to concur, yes. You can read the whys and wherefores of this flic elsewhere but it’s quite rare for a mainstream film to be treading the turf of say more art house Robert Altman and his McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Terence Malick’s oeuvre being the most obvious comparison. Actor/playwright Sam Shepard pops up as Frank James (brother senior) but Dominik’s film has none of the wry humour found in Shepard’s plays. Nor does it have the grit and gruellish humour you find in Sam Peckinpah’s films. Dominik’s film is a forlorn character study, one of envy and idolatry from the viewpoint of 19 year-old Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). You may start wriggling in your seat as it trundles forth but the last 50 minutes really has you hooked with its shuddering contemporality. Ford’s celebrity after shooting James, soon wanes, but as we know James’ never dies. When the legend becomes truth should we print the legend? Few directors, if any, have really succeeded in docu-dramatising JOHN Ford’s paradox. “Men must have legends else they will die of strangeness,” wrote Dominik’s compatriot Oz poet Les Murray. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is, as always, breathtaking often using one of those 3D postcard effects around the edges of the film frame. Could his work have been a little stranger, though, to reinforce the paradox? Decide for yourself.
Deakins’ Oz camera compatriot Christopher Doyle who made his name in Asian cinema (Wong Kai-Wei, Chen Kaige) is DP on Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Invisible Waves out on DVD. (I wrote of Pen-Ek’s latest Ploy (The Times BFI London Film Festival last time.) Invisible Waves has the same existential pace as Ploy but Doyle’s input gives the film a real strangeness. “The film is about intention,” says Doyle on the excellent DVD extras, “it’s not a film it’s a relationship.” Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano is hitman Kyoji who takes a cruise ship to Phuket laying low from a recent job in Hong Kong. Scripted by Prabha Yoon, Pen-Ek initially wanted to make a ‘Clint Eastwood’ film noir style film. “Every place in the world is an island that must be linked through human travel...and this [idea] effectively conveys many themes,” says Yoon in his interview. Chris Doyle stresses the importance of the locations and the whole film has an intriguing Buddhist/Jim Jarmusch curiosity, fluidity and calm. Well worth seeking out this DVD from Tartan Films (but there's no link on their site).
Captain Ahab (Capitaine Achab), LFF and still no UK distributor, is based on Melville’s classic C19 Moby Dick, directed by Philippe Ramos, and narrated through five characters. Though much shorter, it has a feel akin to The Assassination of Jesse James allowing the characters to seep into the camera rather than the other way round.
Doco A Very British Gangster (Sundance Fest 07) is directed by one of Britain’s best known investigative journalists Donal MacIntyre. Welcome to Manchester and the well violent world of the Noonan crime family. MacIntyre spent 3 years with this lot and the doco never sensationalises them, though there are a few too many atmospheric camera tricks and Nina Simone’s Sinner Man over the final credits is a bit much.
The Killing of John Lennon, Andrew Piddington’s film journeying into the mind of Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman is on release this weekend. (You’ll have to wait til Saturday for my pensées on that).
Hotel Harabati is French director Brice Cauvin’s first feature having worked as an assistant to many of the famous helmers. It opens with the classic script premise, an abandoned bag of money/a couple/what next? And Cauvin really keeps your interest with that even though not much happens in the first hour. With one eye on the money, you realise with the other eye that the film is much stranger and existential than you initially assumed. “I realised that there is always a betrayal in the rational explanation of things,” says Cauvin in his Director’s Statement. “Sometimes things seem to make sense, but often they just don’t. What I like in a written piece is that each spectator can chose his or her position. The truth can be found in the sum of the explanations.” He’d even prefer not giving his film a title. There’s a very simple slightly off-kilter score by Philippe Miller, too.
More existential delights with the master of them all Russian Andrei Tarkovsky and a re-issue of The Sacrifice (Offret) this week by Artificial Eye (including talks etc). I hadn’t seen this film in almost 20 years, and for those who don’t know, Tarkovsky is like a god to filmmakers. So much has been written about this extraordinary artist including his own book Sculpting in Time, Faber and Faber was the UK publisher but it's not on their website but Time Within Time is there . “Today the world is developing on a strictly material plane,” he wrote way back then. “The sole means of returning to a normal relationship with life is to restore one’s independence vis-à-vis the material things of life and consequently reaffirm one’s spiritual essence.” Watching it older and wiser, I realised why the professor feels he has to burn down the remote family home at the end of the film (probably not a good idea to take teenagers to this, unless of course, they’re like me and wrote about Liliana Cavani and Fassbinder for their A-Levels!). It becomes less about art and more about living and survival as you view it with age. But even as a youngster the poetic power of Tarkovsky’s vision will effect you. This is one director whose work you absolutely must see on the cinema screen. If you can’t attend some of the documentaries, there is a consummate Tarkovsky Companion available on DVD.
For a Lawrencian (that’s DH Lawrence) of life, Kino (in America) issues the DVD of Lady Chatterley this week, released here by Artificial Eye.
Baader’s Angels: Women’s Roles in German terrorism (ICA) is a brave and interesting pre-Christmas season of four films exploring the Red Army Faction (RAF) in 1977 Germany and whether or not armed struggle is the road to freedom. Greater Freedom-Lesser Freedom (Grosse Freiheit-Kleine Freiheit, 2000) directed by Kristina Konrad is an unsensationalising double portrait of a German RAF and a Uraguay woman doing the same in her country.
Network DVD has a Cuban perspective on the class struggle with their releases from ICAIC, Cuba’s equivalent of the BFI (British Film Institute). Humberto Solás’s A Successful Man (Un Hombre de Éxito) (Region 0) follows two leftist brothers pre and post Spanish Civil war, one who compromises and becomes a senator, the other refusing to relinquish editorial control of his newspaper. This film is far more than polemic and the female roles far better observed than many of their American counterparts. Interesting, sparse music score from Italian contemporary ‘concert hall’ composer Luigi Nono.
Beloved (Amada)
Cecilia (Cecilia Valdes)
The Twelve Chairs (Las Doce Sillas)
Empties (Vratné lahve) (LFF, distributed next year by UK’s Portobello Pictures) is an extremely funny Eastern European Czech unemployment movie. Yes, really. Jan Sverák of Oscar winning Kolya fame directs his dad (also scriptwriter) as a retired teacher who gets a supermarket job as a bottle recycler supervisor in the post-Communist era. That is until he’s ousted by technology. “Historically, we’ve been between Germany and Russia and the only thing we could do is laugh!” said Sverák in a post-screening Q & A. “This film’s allowed me to buy a new shirt,” he quipped. Co-producer Eric Abraham initially clicked with Sverák at a festival because “we both agreed that awards should be given for what’s on screen, and not be about the struggles of the filmmaker.” The use of classical music in the film is also superlative with a cheeky Mahler in-joke at the end and a Swan Lake for plastic bottles.
The visually sublime Silent Light (LFF a couple of blogs ago) by Carlos Reygadas opens in cinemas this weekend. A must see on the big screen. And LFF films we may not see here are The Lighthouse (Mayak), Japan’s The Mourning Forest (Mogari No Mori)- Cannes Grand Prix this year, China’s Tuya’s Marriage (Tuya de hunshi) and Sri Lanka’s Sankara. These are all beautiful, meditative films about our existence, the last three perhaps too indulgent sometimes in the imagery of cinema. But The Lighthouse directed and edited by Tarkovsky devotee Maria Saakyan is just that bit more special. The grainy look she initially intended (she claims :)through post-production came spookily true when the original master negatives were lost and everything had to be re-constructed through copies. Familiar story – an unspecified war with a granddaughter trying to persuade her grandparents to leave their Caucasus mountain village for safety. In person, Saakyan has that blissful air of having just flown with the cranes and this her first feature has that same quality of cinematic dance. I very much look forward to her second, apparently a comedy.
Brit TV soap/primetime director Joanna Hogg’s first feature Unrelated (LFF and winner of the 10th FIPRESCI International Critics Award) couldn’t feel less British. Her acknowledged influences are more the likes of Ozu and Japanese cinema. “I’m not interested in plot,” she said over breakfast, “in each moment there’s a little story. The complete antithesis to the Robert McKee school of screenwriting that I feel patronises audiences.” There are only two small camera moves in the entire film; the rest are static set-ups with no music score. Fortysomething Anna (Kathryn Worth) goes on holiday to an Italian village finding a motley bunch of Brits. There is a plot, of sorts, but what I found more fascinating was watching these characters exist within the film frame. Even if you know no English, there is a universality in their reactions that would speak in those tiny ‘moments’ Hogg referred to.
Mikio Naruse (BFI DVD)
One of the DVD peaks of the decade has to be Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz, originally a 13 part German TV series with an epilogue. (Criterion US set) Based on the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) gets out of jail, tries to go straight in the tempestuous Berlin inter-war years but is drawn back into the vortex of humanity’s hopelessness, waylaid by Reinhold (Gottfried John) and his schemes but befriended by streetgirls Eva (Hanna Schygulla) and his beloved Mieze (Barbara Sukowa in her first major role). I remember watching this, also some 20 years ago I think on SBS TV (Australia’s then new multi-cultural channel with the irreplaceable David Stratton as their movies guru). It’s a momentous achievement on Fassbinder’s part but above all totally heartbreaking for the viewer. If you stay the course of the 15 or so hours you will never forget the experience. There’s an excellent disc of extras (making of, interviews etc), but most interesting being the restoration process. The series was shot on tiny 16mm negative film stock and with Arri’s new digital scanning and correction, cinematography Xaver Swarzenburger could finally achieve the look he originally wanted. Though the image is sometimes grainy, this analogue grain together with the sad, mellow browns creates a perfect period/psychological state. “It was all ‘hand-made’,” says the then 22 year-old editor Juliane Lorenz, “there were no mobiles and no computers!” The tabloid press at the time dismissed the entire enterprise as too darkly shot (a forerunner technique for many mainstream films in later decades)amongst many other numerous criticisms.
The characters are all too familiar to us, a ‘dime novel’ as Fassbinder described it, but it was the director’s dream since a teenager to film this book. It’s a territory also explored by Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth whose plays I produced in London, characters caught on the dangerous edge of things grinning as they fight for a footing on the rocks. “Reality isn’t real, one day it’s this then it’s that,” says Biberkopf. Peer Raben’s score is a bittersweet waltz of the spirit; Berlin Alexanderplatz is a New World but only for the strongest swimmers. “Give me your heart so I can throw it in the dirt,” says Reinhold to Biberkopf in the hallucinatory epilogue.
Facets (US DVD) Heimat also Our Hitler
Golden Door (Nuovomondo) my blog (Optimum DVD), (US DVD)
One of, if not the most extraordinary film you’ll ever see about an artist’s life is Brit Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (Eureka DVD)(New Yorker DVD). At 210 minutes (originally telecast over two nights in 1974 and released in cinemas in a shorter version), Edvard Munch is arguably the best film there is about an artist’s life. I can think of Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon, Ken Russell’s oeuvre, The Quince Tree Sun, Camille Claudel, and Henri-Georges Clouzet’s Picasso portrait. Using actors in a documentary style – some dramatised, some interviewed to camera with an English narration (Watkins)- and using only Munch’s Diaries, Watkins succeeds in engrossing the viewer in Munch’s depressing world, his lack of acceptance by the public, disillusionment in love, and disillusionment of the sexually, morally repressive and hypocritical Norwegian society in the late C19. Maybe not a good idea to see both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Edvard Munch over Christmas. As is usual with Eureka, excellent print and large (80 page) informative booklet, but there are no disc extras.
Peter Watkins homepage
Eureka also has two exhilarating (I thought so) science fiction animation releases by Frenchman René Laloux, Gandahar (1988) and Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters, 1982). US distributor Harvey Weinstein championed Gandahar (interesting all post-production was economically done at North Korean studios in Pyongyang) but gave it an English language dub in an Isaac Asimov translation and asked for changes to Gabriel Yared’s brilliant score. The genius of these films is that they work both on a child’s imagination and an adult’s without ever compromising for either. Both explore the question of where and who is the enemy and who is it exactly we are worshipping. Maîtres has unforgettable characters. The little blobby shrews can read your telepathic “smelly thoughts”, and Piel is a child orphan from another planet forever cocooned in within the eco-system of an egg-like shell and parented through a microphone device from the outside world. The ‘baddies’ colonise by accelerating planets into the past so the inhabitants are unaware of the transition. Minimal extras but again good booklets. Not that cheery a vision of the cosmos either, so be prepared for the kids’ possibly awkward questions.
Facets (US DVD)Fantastic Planet
But there’s always Frank Capra’s comedy It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) shown almost every year on TV but now re-released in a brand spanking new digital print from Park Circus. Now there’s a good night out (nation-wide from Dec 14). It’s basically about an angel, Clarence Odbody, who’s only hope of getting wings is if James Stewart’s George Bailey stops wanting to kill himself and believe that his life truly is wonderful.
Samaritans DVD tie-in
2-Disc Collector's Set (US)
It really is a fantastic script with the simplest of ingenious moments like the opening’s alternate blinking stars in the sky speaking as angels, the crow in Bailey’s bank (did Pasolini borrow this for his Uccellacci e Uccellini? Capra was Sicilian and it might make Northern Rock depositors smile), and the Charleston scene as the dance floor divides into a pool. I hadn’t noticed this bit of trivia before but Stewart doesn’t really give the impression he’s a true smoker. And when you think about it, the idea of a studio greenlighting a movie whose star lead is committing suicide at Christmas is quite unbelievable then as of now. Is it all a bit home spun jolly American values, though? Well, not really. If anything, it chastises the worst of American consumerism and champions American’s grass-roots goodness. I can't say I believe in its world view (money does actually make you happy despite what anyone tells you) but I wonder if exiled German playwright Bertold Brecht liked it? I’ll try and find out. Till next time my loyal readers...
Saturday, 24 November 2007
Australia’s Labour Party has just swept to victory after 11 years (4 terms of office, second longest serving PM) of John Howard’s Liberal (Oz Conservative Party equivalent) Party rule. New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pledged to withdraw all remaining Australian troops from Iraq. Rudd served as a diplomat in Beijing and his all-important policies on Asia will be keenly watched around the world, though in general his foreign policies are unlikely to change radically from his predecessor except for the climate change issues. A big day and big deal for the Ozzies!
And District Line tubes are pretty f**ked today (Monday). Over running engineering works. Minor delays (minor being anything up to 20 minutes or a lost limb I suppose)on the Ealing Broadway branch. Hmmm
Anyone remember the Oz Tourist Board having to explain/delete the 'bloody' from their ad campaign 'Where the bloody hell are you?'
Film ads banned for glorifying guns
Life goes on. Just.
And District Line tubes are pretty f**ked today (Monday). Over running engineering works. Minor delays (minor being anything up to 20 minutes or a lost limb I suppose)on the Ealing Broadway branch. Hmmm
Anyone remember the Oz Tourist Board having to explain/delete the 'bloody' from their ad campaign 'Where the bloody hell are you?'
Film ads banned for glorifying guns
Life goes on. Just.
Friday, 16 November 2007
The Wolves who learnt to swim (Part 5)
Once again I missed a meeting because of Transport for London appalling public service today. The delays are bad enough, but what is totally inexcusable is the fact that no announcements were made on the Piccadilly line before I boarded or even during the 10 minute delay. This has been the case for at least 6 years. I would strongly advise anyone thinking of visiting the 2012 Olympics to think again. And if the services do miraculously improve for that period, you'll know that the government didn't give a shit about the commuting public and their daily lives in the first place.
And while we're exposing some dreadful truths don't forget the utter hypocrisy of the Iyengar Yoga Centre in its treatment of me or that London housing association Dominion Housing Group that similarly buries its head in the sand hoping the outrageous mistakes of the past will just disappear. As doco maker Brit Molly Dineen often points out, the English never really have a relationship with their past, at least not the one that bears much semblance to history. Dead bodies certainly attract press attention but don't seem to change much policy.
Am I being too harsh on London transport? Ask at least 60% of commuters and I think they’ll agree with the criticisms. This week, Mayor Livingstone is promoting London on a trip to India.
ITV Local news 20 Nov and 19 Nov): Ken and the New Delhi tube.
Listen for the public address announcement “Please do not befriend any unknown person.” But only half a million commuters use the Delhi tube compared to 4 million in London. In the 20 Nov. news there’s also a nifty traffic Congestion Charge invention to help, celebs on their favourite London spots (you can also upload your own at Monumentaladventure.com) Tracey Emin on her London landmark and the mucho energy saving Regent Street Christmas lights. The full news on demand tends to remain up for about a week.
The London Transport Musuem re-opens.
TfL to axe £150m Tube upgrades
And still time to catch the last few days of the arts festival celebrating the Kings Cross St.Pancreas opening, Arrivals Festival
Indian and Pakistani art don’t get much of a look-in on the general arts scene but Aicon Gallery's London space opened roughly a year ago in Gagosian’s large former central London haunt. If the art doesn’t immediately seem as ‘cutting-edge’ as elsewhere, it must be remembered that given the state of censorship in their countries these artists are really breaking boundaries. Ijaz ul Hassan was even arrested and solitary confined for his work in the 70’s (under Pakistan’s General Zia). His seminal 1974-5 piece The Rifle Butt is in this show Figurative Pakistan. The London trained Naiza Khan explores female identity with charcoal and acrylic paintings and sculptures in galvanised steel. Easy to get to and well worth a looksy.
Wes Anderson’s latest The Darjeeling Limited
(2007 London Film Festival closer) could well annoy Indian subcontinent purists. It’s not a great film but no Wes Anderson effort can ever be dismissed or is ever boring. (The ICA Wes Anderson day Dec 1, great idea if it’s pissing down with rain outside). Three American brothers (great performances) set off on a train voyage across India to bond after their father’s death. Somewhere in the Himalayas is their mum Patricia (Angelica Huston) now a nun. Anderson has a very sure pacing and editing hand yet Darjeeling doesn’t quite achieve the pathos of his other films. Fun score of old Indian movie soundtracks and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony ,though not simultaneously.
The other new film releases this week are all based on true stories. Werner Herzog’s eagerly awaited Rescue Dawn(just out on DVD States) has huge poster adverts across central London from UK distributor Pathe. Anyone who hasn’t seen Herzog’s extraordinary unique oeuvre is strongly advised to do so. Is Rescue Dawn a little disappointing then? Well, yes and no. Herzog was close friends with the real Dieter Dangler whose plane was shot down in Pathet Lao territory (Laos) and escaped. Ten years ago Herzog made an Emmy nominated doco Little Dieter Needs to Fly. “Dieter never wanted to be a soldier, his only dream was to fly, “ says Herzog. “He didn’t want to go to war, but when he did, he was a good soldier. He was fair, conscientious and loyal. When America gets into turmoil, one misses men like Dieter.” Rescue Dawn’s cast is superb, with Christian Bale’s child-like wonder and tiger’s eye as Dieter totally riveting. What the film lacks is the ‘way-off beam-ness’ of his other work and the triumphant music of Dieter’s rescue is a bit much. But filmmaking such as Herzog’s is rare enough in itself and reason enough to see this film. And I don’t say that ‘sitting on the fence’.
Rescue Dawn the truth
Can Ridley Scott also be considered an auteur? His American Gangster with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington has just hit Brit screens, a chance to have a think about that question. There was even a New Auteurs discussion at this year’s The Times BFI London Film Festival(LFF) with filmmakers Carlos Reygades (Silent Light released Dec.7), Penny Woolcock (Exodus, broadcast this week on Channel 4 TV, Soda Pictures DVD), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop – shame I missed this), and Nadine Labaki (Caramel, released March). Reygadas: “I don’t like to see non-faces, it reduces the power of cinema to a fancy-dress party, a Nicole Kidman dressed as an astronaut...it’s normal but I don’t like it in cinema. The style is how you feel things and what is sad in cinema is that form and meaning and divorced [unlike] in music.” For Bahrani, film is “a dictatorship not a democracy. Everyone should rent Herzog’s Burden of Dreams to realise that.” Bahrani's just finished his latest film, “and by the end they [cast and crew] all wanted to kill me!” Penny Woolcock: “God is a complete bastard in the Old Testament...the dystopian vision [Exodus] wasn’t as much a fable as people might think.” Nadine Labaki: “I want to explore other realities, not as an escape, worlds different to my own reality.” But the overriding feeling from that debate was a kind of false humility – ‘we don’t want to work with celebrities, prefer non-actors, and it’s all a collaborative process’. But most film directing requires an ego at least of sorts. The only ‘socialist’ filmmaker I really trust and believe when he says that of the collaborative process is Ken Loach – he was heading one of Time Out’s free Close Up discussions, The Director and the Editor.
It's a Free World
(Sorry - but there's a large chunk missing here because my computer was f**ked. Hope to insert this or I guess I'll just have to re-write it). Well, here’s the re-write (not as good as the first- or maybe it’s better - you’ll just have to trust and ponder with me on that).
So. Is Ridley Scott an auteur or a canny collaborative artist? His seminal Blade Runner has a UK theatrical re-release this week before its world-wide ultimate DVD December outings. American Gangster looks great, feels great but doesn’t seem to originate from inside Ridley Scott greatness. This is the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) decent enough black guy in 70’s Harlem, New York made good/bad through drug running in what was then predominantly racist racketeering. The only clean NYPD cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), whose wife is deserting him with kid, pursues him. Lucas marries the stunningly beautiful, intelligent and savvy Eva (Lymari Nadal)who obviously loves him but we never experience the minute details of what this relationship is about for them. The lives are presented to us not experienced by us.
Ridley Scott is hot (Sunday Times)
Superfly guy (the real Frank Lucas)
Back to the LFF, auteurship and I Always Wanted to be a Gangster. I can’t really better my colleague Jonathan Romney’s catalogue summary suffice to say that writer/director Samuel Benchetrit seems to have seen most movies and truly re-invents them for himself. Auteurship.
I’ve been waiting and waiting and emailing and emailing the US distributor for UK release news of Fay Grim. States DVD Well, no word of general distribution but the LFF screening certainly proved that there’s no-one like director Hal Hartley. This is his first pic in a decade. Remember those films of the 90’s with non-sequitor dialogue, characters who fought like kids in a playground pushing each other around with the palms of their hands, and nifty soundtracks composed by Hartley’s pseudonym Ned Rifle? Well, here’s the sequel to Henry Fool (1998). Henry vanished after accidentally killing someone and his wife Fay (Parker Posey) is being blackmailed by CIA Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) who’s after the whereabouts of Henry’s 8-volume Confessions. We travel through Paris and Istanbul seen through Hartley’s almost perpetual 45 degree angle High Definition lens. Good or bad? Well, it’s Hal Hartley and he’s back!
Talk to Me is directed by Kasi Lemmons (initially an actress) and written by fellow actor/writer Michael Genet about his dad Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), programme director for a Washington radio station in the 60’s. He assigns a morning chat spot, much to the consternation of station director E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen), to extravert motormouth ex-con Ralph ‘Petey’ Greene (Don Cheadle). “We can’t become the establishment or they’ll turn on us,” says Dewey. The first thing Petey does is slag off Tamla Records and Motown founder Berry Gordy as a capitalist pimp for black musicians. Petey became so popular that 10,000 mourners turned out on a freezing winter’s day for his funeral even in 1984. This film is not auteurship and certainly not gritty, but Lemmons and Genet utilise their acting experience to engender fantastic performances and detail from the leads in a way American Gangster never manages. I could do without the penultimate poolroom scene duologue because Lemmons had already hooked us before this. Dewey nabs Petey a dream spot on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. But when the music intros and Petey slinks through the curtains he realises he has nothing to say to the predominantly white studio audience and leaves with a resulting punch-up with Dewey. He was “keepin’ it real” but it certainly wasn’t “just another suburb of Petetown” as Dewey assured him. There’s a great following scene where Dewey switches on the Tonight Show and says “I learnt to walk, talk and dress by watching [that show]”. Given the provocative material it may seem a tad sentimental to some. But for a fairly mainstream picture like this to start honestly addressing the issues of where do I fit in and have I compromised my integrity to do so, this a real achievement I think.
Billy Corben’s fast-moving doco Cocaine Cowboys is the true story (Scarface, Miami Vice) of the Miami cocaine trade and one which surprisingly hasn’t been told. Miami rose from being a sleepy vacation spot of the 60s to the Paradise Lost of Time Magazine’s Nov 1981 9-page cover story. There were so many murders that the Dade Medical Examiners office had to hire a refrigerated truck from Burger King to store all the extra bodies. And the police corruption so great that the entire police academy class of 1980/81 went onto jail or death. The interviewees often give contradictory stories and some very surreal ones. A fully laden boat smuggler offered to tow a US Customs vessel up the canal after its engine exploded. And while a preacher was giving an anti-drugs sermon, a bale of cocaine from a plane came crashing through the roof. “How many people had to die for the [billions of dollars worth of construction] shiny Miami skyline?” asks a TV reporter.
Another topic we thought had been extensively covered is the history of Brazilian music. Writer/producer Robin Denselow really surprises and enlightens us with Brasil, Brasil(a 3-part doco airing on BBC Four 23rd Nov at 9pm). It’s quite rare you finish watching part one of a series thinking wow, what don’t I know in the next episodes. Well, that’s how you feel after Brasil, Brasil. It traces the music’s history from the early part of the century “God is samba” says one Bahia musician, and the mad monk from the Lisboan court who introduced chorinho (crying) to Brazil, thence the Vargas dictatorship and his national unification through samba of both black workers and the middle-class, the advent of Carmen Miranda and then bossa nova. Don’t miss.
The newish distributor of Cocaine Cowboys, Slingshot Studios headed by Elizabeth Draper also releases the LFF Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) (literally, Birth of Octopuses) in Januray 2008. Set in the uninspiring Paris suburb of Cergy, it’s a FEMIS film school graduation script so impressing jury member Xavier Beauvois that he suggested Céline Sciamma direct the film herself and helped find her finance. “I wanted to get far away from the teen movie genre and erase the codes of today with no mobile phones,” said the sprightly, petite, be-spectacled Céline over an LFF breakfast. “To get in the mind of a girl...the girl’s job of being a girl, the matrix of that where everything is born. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one.”
The shy flat-chested Marie (Pauline Acquart), her chubby friend Anne (Louise Blachère) and the traditional sexy Floriane (Adele Haenel) are 15 year-olds in a synchronised swimming team. "[I wanted] to avoid the typical situation in adolescence films, in which parents symbolise a kind of law and morality, with stereotypical rebellion scenes. The real enemy in adolescence is oneself, ” said Céline in an interview with Cineuropa.
Boy A (LFF and 29 November Channel Four) from Irish director John Crowley is the harrowing Jamie Bulger like tale of Jack Burridge (fantastic performance from Andrew Garfield (Lions for Lambs) who’s been finally released from his sentence for his part in killing a schoolgirl. He’s assigned a new identity and re-located to Manchester where he finds a job with the help of caseworker Terry (Peter Mullan) and starts a relationship with his boss Michelle (Katie Lyons). But the truth finally outs him. It’s not pleasant subject matter but the moral question of whether he should ever be forgiven angers and preys on your mind long after the film finishes.
Secret Sunshine (Milyang) ( LFF) is written and directed by Korean Lee Chang-Dong (also a novelist) who was involved in South Korea’s New Wave of film and who is currently the country’s Minister for Culture and Tourism. After her husband’s death in a car crash, Shin-ae (Jeon Do-Yeon, Cannes Fest Best Actress this year) moves, with her young son, away from all her family to her husband’s hometown Milyang (secret sunshine). She opens a piano academy and tries to avoid the local Christian group’s kindly persistence yet it’s a very religious film. More tragedy strikes her and Shin spirals into mental disintegration with her ever benevolent, smiley suitor Jong (Song Kang-Ho) feeling utterly helpless. It’s quite an amazing 2.5-hour film, subtly humorous, and shot in a widescreen format that emphasises Shin’s struggle within an ordinary Korean town.
Night Train (Ye Che) (LFF,released Jan 9, 2008 in France by MK2, also Secret Sunshine's distributor) from China’s actor/writer/director Diao Yinan (Uniform) was made outside the Film Bureau framework and is another fascinating female story. Thirtysomething Wu (Liu Dan) works as a court bailiff in Western China and has signed up to a dating agency that proves a scam. She bumps into loner Li Jun (Qi Dao) who’s a security guard on a remote reservoir whose wife turns out to be a death row prisoner Wu arrested. “I admire those who can regain the strength to stand up even when their dignity is deprived, those who can confront the darkness of life with courage. It’s in them that I catch a glimpse of the sacred fire of humanity. I think that oftentimes women’s tenacity and strength surpass men’s, even though on the surface women seem more fragile and delicate,” says Yinan. Another great LFF film that alas may never again see the dark of a British cinema.
François (Under the Sand, 8 Women) Ozon’s Angel (LFF, released by Lionsgate UK next year) is the English language debut for this uniquely stylish French director. Adapted from Elizabeth Taylor’s (no relation) novel, it’s a fascinating take on Romance novelist Angel Deverell (superbly subtle Romola Garai), and inspired by Marie Corelli, an Edwardian (1905) star novelist (a kind of Barbara Cartland) and Queen Victoria’s favourite writer. The script adaptation is by one of England’s most interesting dramatists Martin Crimp.“I’m not interested in what’s real but what’s beneath,” says Angel. She marries a bohemian ‘socialist’ painter of grey canvases Esmé (Michael Fassbender) totally at odds with the lavish, flower-filled Paradise House she has bought in the country. “Angel is a prisoner of the character she’s created for herself to play, “ says Ozon. When a dissolute Esmé returns from the trenches of World War I, Angel’s writing reflects this in a newfound pacifism and she begins losing her readership. Denis Lenoir’s cinematography is highly stylised in the manner of Hollywood melodramatists Minnelli, Powell and Sirk and is totally breathtaking. Exterior carriage scenes etc are purposely shot with outdated, old-fashioned back projection with swelling music by Philippe Rombi.
The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse) (Artificial Eye picked up for UK, IFC in the States) is eternally controversial and provocative Catherine Breillat’s latest and based on the 1850’s novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly. Spanish courtesan Vellini (Asia Argento) is a femme fatale among the aristocrats outdoing almost all her coy costume drama rivals to date. Eat muff Les Liaisons dangereuses ! (not the Laclos original but the more mainstream adaptation). This film is as sexy and just as sensual (if not as hard core) as Breillat’s other contemporary takes on sexuality.
Finally earning a DVD release (no extras) after all these years is Bertrand Blier’s Préparez vos Mouchoirs (Get Our Your Handkerchiefs) from 1978 starring a very youthful Gérard Depardieu and winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. This is a bizarre rather than amusing menage a trois/quartre with Depardieu’s husband trying to cure his wife’s ennui employing the trois but not reckoning on the 13 year-old high IQ kid quatre. Hey, this was the early 70s after all but it’s probably so politically incorrect to even mention such a film in England now. Best thing about it is Depardieu and easy to see from this relaxed, oddly charismatic performance why he became an enduring star. Lots of nice Mozart in the score (Dogma style use) and knitting (not from Depardieu, though he could easily get away with that!) if you’ve got a very broad-minded granny’s stocking to fill at Christmas. Arrow also has infamous photographer David (Bilitis) Hamilton’s soft-porn, cheesy, soft-focus oddity Tendres Cousins (Cousins in Love, 1980). Not many redeeming features unless you're into the bodies of Greek statues but great for that stocking filler when everyone’s blind drunk and for your broad-minded granddad. No worse than all that Facebook stuff, text messaging and ringtones is it?
But back to higher things and brightening London’s miserable, cold, wet, grey, Sunday nights for the pre-Christmas month is the new BBC series Cranford adapted from Elizabeth Gaskell’s writings about 1840’s rural Cheshire. If you’re not really into costume drama then this is for you. Above all it is extremely funny! The Jenkyns sisters (irreplaceable thesps Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench) soak a piece of lace in a bowl of milk, turn their backs and the cat laps the milk and the lace. They grab a long Wellington boot plonk the cat in top, pop some cod-liver oil down his throat and out shits the lace and all (great sound effects) into the boot, which they then wash out. Their young relation from Manchester Mary Smith has come to visit and informs them that the best way to eat an orange is to suck it from the top: “My sister does not care for the expression ‘suck’". Moments later Judi Dench is surreptitiously sucking away. And one certainly can’t have one candle burning shorter than the other “elegant economy”. But the sisters have their redeeming features, “No woman is equal to a man, she is his superior in every single case.” Heidi Thomas’ adaptation steers this full on 1840’s feminism into harbours of constant humour. A co-production with WGBH Boston and hopefully a new era of Gaskell readers will be born through this series.
The noble art of curtain twitching (Sunday Times)
To be continued...
And while we're exposing some dreadful truths don't forget the utter hypocrisy of the Iyengar Yoga Centre in its treatment of me or that London housing association Dominion Housing Group that similarly buries its head in the sand hoping the outrageous mistakes of the past will just disappear. As doco maker Brit Molly Dineen often points out, the English never really have a relationship with their past, at least not the one that bears much semblance to history. Dead bodies certainly attract press attention but don't seem to change much policy.
Am I being too harsh on London transport? Ask at least 60% of commuters and I think they’ll agree with the criticisms. This week, Mayor Livingstone is promoting London on a trip to India.
ITV Local news 20 Nov and 19 Nov): Ken and the New Delhi tube.
Listen for the public address announcement “Please do not befriend any unknown person.” But only half a million commuters use the Delhi tube compared to 4 million in London. In the 20 Nov. news there’s also a nifty traffic Congestion Charge invention to help, celebs on their favourite London spots (you can also upload your own at Monumentaladventure.com) Tracey Emin on her London landmark and the mucho energy saving Regent Street Christmas lights. The full news on demand tends to remain up for about a week.
The London Transport Musuem re-opens.
TfL to axe £150m Tube upgrades
And still time to catch the last few days of the arts festival celebrating the Kings Cross St.Pancreas opening, Arrivals Festival
Indian and Pakistani art don’t get much of a look-in on the general arts scene but Aicon Gallery's London space opened roughly a year ago in Gagosian’s large former central London haunt. If the art doesn’t immediately seem as ‘cutting-edge’ as elsewhere, it must be remembered that given the state of censorship in their countries these artists are really breaking boundaries. Ijaz ul Hassan was even arrested and solitary confined for his work in the 70’s (under Pakistan’s General Zia). His seminal 1974-5 piece The Rifle Butt is in this show Figurative Pakistan. The London trained Naiza Khan explores female identity with charcoal and acrylic paintings and sculptures in galvanised steel. Easy to get to and well worth a looksy.
Wes Anderson’s latest The Darjeeling Limited
(2007 London Film Festival closer) could well annoy Indian subcontinent purists. It’s not a great film but no Wes Anderson effort can ever be dismissed or is ever boring. (The ICA Wes Anderson day Dec 1, great idea if it’s pissing down with rain outside). Three American brothers (great performances) set off on a train voyage across India to bond after their father’s death. Somewhere in the Himalayas is their mum Patricia (Angelica Huston) now a nun. Anderson has a very sure pacing and editing hand yet Darjeeling doesn’t quite achieve the pathos of his other films. Fun score of old Indian movie soundtracks and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony ,though not simultaneously.
The other new film releases this week are all based on true stories. Werner Herzog’s eagerly awaited Rescue Dawn(just out on DVD States) has huge poster adverts across central London from UK distributor Pathe. Anyone who hasn’t seen Herzog’s extraordinary unique oeuvre is strongly advised to do so. Is Rescue Dawn a little disappointing then? Well, yes and no. Herzog was close friends with the real Dieter Dangler whose plane was shot down in Pathet Lao territory (Laos) and escaped. Ten years ago Herzog made an Emmy nominated doco Little Dieter Needs to Fly. “Dieter never wanted to be a soldier, his only dream was to fly, “ says Herzog. “He didn’t want to go to war, but when he did, he was a good soldier. He was fair, conscientious and loyal. When America gets into turmoil, one misses men like Dieter.” Rescue Dawn’s cast is superb, with Christian Bale’s child-like wonder and tiger’s eye as Dieter totally riveting. What the film lacks is the ‘way-off beam-ness’ of his other work and the triumphant music of Dieter’s rescue is a bit much. But filmmaking such as Herzog’s is rare enough in itself and reason enough to see this film. And I don’t say that ‘sitting on the fence’.
Rescue Dawn the truth
Can Ridley Scott also be considered an auteur? His American Gangster with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington has just hit Brit screens, a chance to have a think about that question. There was even a New Auteurs discussion at this year’s The Times BFI London Film Festival(LFF) with filmmakers Carlos Reygades (Silent Light released Dec.7), Penny Woolcock (Exodus, broadcast this week on Channel 4 TV, Soda Pictures DVD), Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop – shame I missed this), and Nadine Labaki (Caramel, released March). Reygadas: “I don’t like to see non-faces, it reduces the power of cinema to a fancy-dress party, a Nicole Kidman dressed as an astronaut...it’s normal but I don’t like it in cinema. The style is how you feel things and what is sad in cinema is that form and meaning and divorced [unlike] in music.” For Bahrani, film is “a dictatorship not a democracy. Everyone should rent Herzog’s Burden of Dreams to realise that.” Bahrani's just finished his latest film, “and by the end they [cast and crew] all wanted to kill me!” Penny Woolcock: “God is a complete bastard in the Old Testament...the dystopian vision [Exodus] wasn’t as much a fable as people might think.” Nadine Labaki: “I want to explore other realities, not as an escape, worlds different to my own reality.” But the overriding feeling from that debate was a kind of false humility – ‘we don’t want to work with celebrities, prefer non-actors, and it’s all a collaborative process’. But most film directing requires an ego at least of sorts. The only ‘socialist’ filmmaker I really trust and believe when he says that of the collaborative process is Ken Loach – he was heading one of Time Out’s free Close Up discussions, The Director and the Editor.
It's a Free World
(Sorry - but there's a large chunk missing here because my computer was f**ked. Hope to insert this or I guess I'll just have to re-write it). Well, here’s the re-write (not as good as the first- or maybe it’s better - you’ll just have to trust and ponder with me on that).
So. Is Ridley Scott an auteur or a canny collaborative artist? His seminal Blade Runner has a UK theatrical re-release this week before its world-wide ultimate DVD December outings. American Gangster looks great, feels great but doesn’t seem to originate from inside Ridley Scott greatness. This is the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) decent enough black guy in 70’s Harlem, New York made good/bad through drug running in what was then predominantly racist racketeering. The only clean NYPD cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), whose wife is deserting him with kid, pursues him. Lucas marries the stunningly beautiful, intelligent and savvy Eva (Lymari Nadal)who obviously loves him but we never experience the minute details of what this relationship is about for them. The lives are presented to us not experienced by us.
Ridley Scott is hot (Sunday Times)
Superfly guy (the real Frank Lucas)
Back to the LFF, auteurship and I Always Wanted to be a Gangster. I can’t really better my colleague Jonathan Romney’s catalogue summary suffice to say that writer/director Samuel Benchetrit seems to have seen most movies and truly re-invents them for himself. Auteurship.
I’ve been waiting and waiting and emailing and emailing the US distributor for UK release news of Fay Grim. States DVD Well, no word of general distribution but the LFF screening certainly proved that there’s no-one like director Hal Hartley. This is his first pic in a decade. Remember those films of the 90’s with non-sequitor dialogue, characters who fought like kids in a playground pushing each other around with the palms of their hands, and nifty soundtracks composed by Hartley’s pseudonym Ned Rifle? Well, here’s the sequel to Henry Fool (1998). Henry vanished after accidentally killing someone and his wife Fay (Parker Posey) is being blackmailed by CIA Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) who’s after the whereabouts of Henry’s 8-volume Confessions. We travel through Paris and Istanbul seen through Hartley’s almost perpetual 45 degree angle High Definition lens. Good or bad? Well, it’s Hal Hartley and he’s back!
Talk to Me is directed by Kasi Lemmons (initially an actress) and written by fellow actor/writer Michael Genet about his dad Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), programme director for a Washington radio station in the 60’s. He assigns a morning chat spot, much to the consternation of station director E.G. Sonderling (Martin Sheen), to extravert motormouth ex-con Ralph ‘Petey’ Greene (Don Cheadle). “We can’t become the establishment or they’ll turn on us,” says Dewey. The first thing Petey does is slag off Tamla Records and Motown founder Berry Gordy as a capitalist pimp for black musicians. Petey became so popular that 10,000 mourners turned out on a freezing winter’s day for his funeral even in 1984. This film is not auteurship and certainly not gritty, but Lemmons and Genet utilise their acting experience to engender fantastic performances and detail from the leads in a way American Gangster never manages. I could do without the penultimate poolroom scene duologue because Lemmons had already hooked us before this. Dewey nabs Petey a dream spot on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. But when the music intros and Petey slinks through the curtains he realises he has nothing to say to the predominantly white studio audience and leaves with a resulting punch-up with Dewey. He was “keepin’ it real” but it certainly wasn’t “just another suburb of Petetown” as Dewey assured him. There’s a great following scene where Dewey switches on the Tonight Show and says “I learnt to walk, talk and dress by watching [that show]”. Given the provocative material it may seem a tad sentimental to some. But for a fairly mainstream picture like this to start honestly addressing the issues of where do I fit in and have I compromised my integrity to do so, this a real achievement I think.
Billy Corben’s fast-moving doco Cocaine Cowboys is the true story (Scarface, Miami Vice) of the Miami cocaine trade and one which surprisingly hasn’t been told. Miami rose from being a sleepy vacation spot of the 60s to the Paradise Lost of Time Magazine’s Nov 1981 9-page cover story. There were so many murders that the Dade Medical Examiners office had to hire a refrigerated truck from Burger King to store all the extra bodies. And the police corruption so great that the entire police academy class of 1980/81 went onto jail or death. The interviewees often give contradictory stories and some very surreal ones. A fully laden boat smuggler offered to tow a US Customs vessel up the canal after its engine exploded. And while a preacher was giving an anti-drugs sermon, a bale of cocaine from a plane came crashing through the roof. “How many people had to die for the [billions of dollars worth of construction] shiny Miami skyline?” asks a TV reporter.
Another topic we thought had been extensively covered is the history of Brazilian music. Writer/producer Robin Denselow really surprises and enlightens us with Brasil, Brasil(a 3-part doco airing on BBC Four 23rd Nov at 9pm). It’s quite rare you finish watching part one of a series thinking wow, what don’t I know in the next episodes. Well, that’s how you feel after Brasil, Brasil. It traces the music’s history from the early part of the century “God is samba” says one Bahia musician, and the mad monk from the Lisboan court who introduced chorinho (crying) to Brazil, thence the Vargas dictatorship and his national unification through samba of both black workers and the middle-class, the advent of Carmen Miranda and then bossa nova. Don’t miss.
The newish distributor of Cocaine Cowboys, Slingshot Studios headed by Elizabeth Draper also releases the LFF Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) (literally, Birth of Octopuses) in Januray 2008. Set in the uninspiring Paris suburb of Cergy, it’s a FEMIS film school graduation script so impressing jury member Xavier Beauvois that he suggested Céline Sciamma direct the film herself and helped find her finance. “I wanted to get far away from the teen movie genre and erase the codes of today with no mobile phones,” said the sprightly, petite, be-spectacled Céline over an LFF breakfast. “To get in the mind of a girl...the girl’s job of being a girl, the matrix of that where everything is born. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “one is not born a woman, but becomes one.”
The shy flat-chested Marie (Pauline Acquart), her chubby friend Anne (Louise Blachère) and the traditional sexy Floriane (Adele Haenel) are 15 year-olds in a synchronised swimming team. "[I wanted] to avoid the typical situation in adolescence films, in which parents symbolise a kind of law and morality, with stereotypical rebellion scenes. The real enemy in adolescence is oneself, ” said Céline in an interview with Cineuropa.
Boy A (LFF and 29 November Channel Four) from Irish director John Crowley is the harrowing Jamie Bulger like tale of Jack Burridge (fantastic performance from Andrew Garfield (Lions for Lambs) who’s been finally released from his sentence for his part in killing a schoolgirl. He’s assigned a new identity and re-located to Manchester where he finds a job with the help of caseworker Terry (Peter Mullan) and starts a relationship with his boss Michelle (Katie Lyons). But the truth finally outs him. It’s not pleasant subject matter but the moral question of whether he should ever be forgiven angers and preys on your mind long after the film finishes.
Secret Sunshine (Milyang) ( LFF) is written and directed by Korean Lee Chang-Dong (also a novelist) who was involved in South Korea’s New Wave of film and who is currently the country’s Minister for Culture and Tourism. After her husband’s death in a car crash, Shin-ae (Jeon Do-Yeon, Cannes Fest Best Actress this year) moves, with her young son, away from all her family to her husband’s hometown Milyang (secret sunshine). She opens a piano academy and tries to avoid the local Christian group’s kindly persistence yet it’s a very religious film. More tragedy strikes her and Shin spirals into mental disintegration with her ever benevolent, smiley suitor Jong (Song Kang-Ho) feeling utterly helpless. It’s quite an amazing 2.5-hour film, subtly humorous, and shot in a widescreen format that emphasises Shin’s struggle within an ordinary Korean town.
Night Train (Ye Che) (LFF,released Jan 9, 2008 in France by MK2, also Secret Sunshine's distributor) from China’s actor/writer/director Diao Yinan (Uniform) was made outside the Film Bureau framework and is another fascinating female story. Thirtysomething Wu (Liu Dan) works as a court bailiff in Western China and has signed up to a dating agency that proves a scam. She bumps into loner Li Jun (Qi Dao) who’s a security guard on a remote reservoir whose wife turns out to be a death row prisoner Wu arrested. “I admire those who can regain the strength to stand up even when their dignity is deprived, those who can confront the darkness of life with courage. It’s in them that I catch a glimpse of the sacred fire of humanity. I think that oftentimes women’s tenacity and strength surpass men’s, even though on the surface women seem more fragile and delicate,” says Yinan. Another great LFF film that alas may never again see the dark of a British cinema.
François (Under the Sand, 8 Women) Ozon’s Angel (LFF, released by Lionsgate UK next year) is the English language debut for this uniquely stylish French director. Adapted from Elizabeth Taylor’s (no relation) novel, it’s a fascinating take on Romance novelist Angel Deverell (superbly subtle Romola Garai), and inspired by Marie Corelli, an Edwardian (1905) star novelist (a kind of Barbara Cartland) and Queen Victoria’s favourite writer. The script adaptation is by one of England’s most interesting dramatists Martin Crimp.“I’m not interested in what’s real but what’s beneath,” says Angel. She marries a bohemian ‘socialist’ painter of grey canvases Esmé (Michael Fassbender) totally at odds with the lavish, flower-filled Paradise House she has bought in the country. “Angel is a prisoner of the character she’s created for herself to play, “ says Ozon. When a dissolute Esmé returns from the trenches of World War I, Angel’s writing reflects this in a newfound pacifism and she begins losing her readership. Denis Lenoir’s cinematography is highly stylised in the manner of Hollywood melodramatists Minnelli, Powell and Sirk and is totally breathtaking. Exterior carriage scenes etc are purposely shot with outdated, old-fashioned back projection with swelling music by Philippe Rombi.
The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse) (Artificial Eye picked up for UK, IFC in the States) is eternally controversial and provocative Catherine Breillat’s latest and based on the 1850’s novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly. Spanish courtesan Vellini (Asia Argento) is a femme fatale among the aristocrats outdoing almost all her coy costume drama rivals to date. Eat muff Les Liaisons dangereuses ! (not the Laclos original but the more mainstream adaptation). This film is as sexy and just as sensual (if not as hard core) as Breillat’s other contemporary takes on sexuality.
Finally earning a DVD release (no extras) after all these years is Bertrand Blier’s Préparez vos Mouchoirs (Get Our Your Handkerchiefs) from 1978 starring a very youthful Gérard Depardieu and winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. This is a bizarre rather than amusing menage a trois/quartre with Depardieu’s husband trying to cure his wife’s ennui employing the trois but not reckoning on the 13 year-old high IQ kid quatre. Hey, this was the early 70s after all but it’s probably so politically incorrect to even mention such a film in England now. Best thing about it is Depardieu and easy to see from this relaxed, oddly charismatic performance why he became an enduring star. Lots of nice Mozart in the score (Dogma style use) and knitting (not from Depardieu, though he could easily get away with that!) if you’ve got a very broad-minded granny’s stocking to fill at Christmas. Arrow also has infamous photographer David (Bilitis) Hamilton’s soft-porn, cheesy, soft-focus oddity Tendres Cousins (Cousins in Love, 1980). Not many redeeming features unless you're into the bodies of Greek statues but great for that stocking filler when everyone’s blind drunk and for your broad-minded granddad. No worse than all that Facebook stuff, text messaging and ringtones is it?
But back to higher things and brightening London’s miserable, cold, wet, grey, Sunday nights for the pre-Christmas month is the new BBC series Cranford adapted from Elizabeth Gaskell’s writings about 1840’s rural Cheshire. If you’re not really into costume drama then this is for you. Above all it is extremely funny! The Jenkyns sisters (irreplaceable thesps Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench) soak a piece of lace in a bowl of milk, turn their backs and the cat laps the milk and the lace. They grab a long Wellington boot plonk the cat in top, pop some cod-liver oil down his throat and out shits the lace and all (great sound effects) into the boot, which they then wash out. Their young relation from Manchester Mary Smith has come to visit and informs them that the best way to eat an orange is to suck it from the top: “My sister does not care for the expression ‘suck’". Moments later Judi Dench is surreptitiously sucking away. And one certainly can’t have one candle burning shorter than the other “elegant economy”. But the sisters have their redeeming features, “No woman is equal to a man, she is his superior in every single case.” Heidi Thomas’ adaptation steers this full on 1840’s feminism into harbours of constant humour. A co-production with WGBH Boston and hopefully a new era of Gaskell readers will be born through this series.
The noble art of curtain twitching (Sunday Times)
To be continued...
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
The wolves who learnt to swim (Part 4)
From tomorrow, the Eurostar says goodbye to its cramped Waterloo confines and moves into 5-star accommodation at the gloriously restored Kings Cross St.Pancreas. The first train out is dubbed Tread Lightly, a reference to its carbon-neutral footprint.
BBC2 TV series starting tonight- The 800 Million Pound Railway Station
The miracle of St Pancras
Waterloo sunset
But to whom will it make a difference? The London underground lines are still plagued with ‘signal failure’ as an excuse for poor service pretty much every second day. And the supposedly ‘good service’ on the Piccadilly line this morning left me standing in the cold for 15 minutes and missing my meeting. And Transport for London never even coughed up the refund from about 10 forms I filled in. Delays are so frequent for the commuting denizens of Richmond (District line) that they’ve probably given up all hope of things getting better. At times it’s almost as if someone were sabotaging the whole system. Either that, or if the system is truly in such a bad state of repair, those 2012 Olympics had better worry. I don’t want to sound churlish about the King’s Cross refurb at all. But you’d be halfway to Paris by the time your tube, taxi or bus was able to dump you at your London destination. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hoverglide off our heels through the London air?
And the mucho misery Silverlink line...
Ken Livingston and the Silverlink handover
London Overground, A new overland circle line is to be created by 2010
Computer failure leads to 'chaos' at Gatwick
Heathrow voted world's least favourite airport
One of the best docos of the Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF), and winner of this year’s The Grierson Trust prize for best full-length doco, pops up on More4 digital TV tonight, Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (Problemat s komarite i drugi istorii) from Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov. It is so funny and poignant it really deserves a much wider audience than this TV slot. It’s almost surreal realism and juxtaposition of stories from Belene and the Belene Islands is a bit reminiscent of Errol Morris’ doco Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. “You can wipe out any species except mosquitoes,” says one local. “That’s what we’re rich in, mosquitoes!” A Cuban worker at the nuclear power plant plays guitar in a field of red poppies, some learn to dance the proper Viennese waltz (180 steps a minute), a horse gallops freely through the former Communist concentration camp, the best use of the Shostakovich waltz I’ve heard as the trucks insecticide the streets, while some laconic locals watch the tourist boat glide down the river, “why go down a trip on the Danube just to be eaten by mosquitoes?”
Also tonight (at the same time) is BBC2 TV –Imagine: a profile the artist Louise Bourgeois whose Tate Modern exhibition I wrote about last time.
Fast track: Europe's rail revolution
And once you’ve escaped London for the new Albion of Europe check out Michael Palin’s BBC TV series and book New Europe.
Our Into the Wild hero obviously never met the Alaskan vampires of 30 Days of Night, vampiric heaven as the sun doesn’t rise for 30 days in winter Barrow. This is a really scary horror flic from director David Slade. No Weirdsville jollies here, and it’s no mean feat to bring to life this genre. The only cavil is that the evil ones’ characters just aren’t fleshed out thus missing the opportunity to explore the origins of collective evil.
Nosferatu: Resurrection of the vampire
If your weekend date is a couch potato then Second Sight's DVDs of the Karloff/Lugosi combo The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935) are for you (mid-price, no extras). Great prints of these must-see classics, and don’t you just love the string score swathes of mashy Brahms, Liszt and Tchaikovsky.
And, of course, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror that was initially part of the failed US release ‘grindhouse’ double-bill with Tarantino’s Deathproof. Rodriguez cancelled his LFF talk, but the film is definitley nothing to be ashamed of. You have to be into comedy/horror gore, though, or be particularly pissed off with a current or ex-date to enjoy this movie. If you’re the latter, you’ll be cheering the one-legged Cherry (Rose McGowan) as she massacres the gangrenous evil ones with her other machine gun peg-leg. If that doesn’t get rid of your unwanted one, you could always try Abel Ferrara’s Ms.45 aka Angel of Vengeance (1980).
Metropolitan police to hold London shootings ceasefire summit
Probably better not to take a blind date of either sex to see Anna M (released this weekend). French director Michel Spinosa researched his loopy girl Anna (riveting Isabelle Carré) obsessed with happily married Dr.Andre (Gilbert Melki) on the clinical pathological jealousy studies La jalousie amoureuse by Daniel Lagache. This film could seem familiar turf, Fatal Attraction or even French revenge flic Love in the Strangest Way(Elles N'Oublient pas). But because Spinosa’s direction never sensationalises or overtly dramatises the story it’s a terribly disturbing film bordering on the documenatational. Moreover, Alain Duplantier’s stunning use of anamorphic widescreen cinematography uses the unique depth of field nature of that lens to make Anna (and therefore Dr. Andre) the centre of the screen canvas wherever the location. “I place Anna in the heart of a big city so she would be lost in unknown territory...an outsider in the wrong place,” said the director. “Mystics and erotomanianiacs have the same symptoms. For them, everything starts with an illumination; the imperious and indisputable sense of being chosen...convinced they have a unique relationship with the other person.”
And anyone for the LFF’s Japanese killer hair movie from director/writer Sion Sono Exte - Hair Extensions (Ekusute). Bravura direction and a subtle (or possibly blatantly obvious if you’re Japanese) commentary on the hair obsessions of young Japanese girls.
Hairdresser sued in row about headscarf
Going even further back in time is actor/director Erich von Stroheim’s very first film from 1919 Blind Husbands (Die Rache der Berge/Blinde Ehemänner) in a magnificently restored print screened with Neil Brand’s piano accompaniment at the LFF. The greatest silent films, as seen here, were nothing to do mime and everything to do with the birth of subtle film acting. Thrilling mountaineering sequence (though obviously not Touching the Void). Find a large TV, get the DVD and cajole an improv pianist friend to conjure an evening date that you’ll remember!
Canadian director Guy Maddin, has made an entire career out of re-inventing the silent movie. Brand Upon the Brain! (LFF) has seen most of the festival circuit and like most of his auteurship defies description. If you’re a fan this won’t be so thrilling or revelatory, but if not, you’re never going to see anything else like Maddin in the cinema. A lighthouse is both family home and orphanage with children bearing strange head wounds.
American indie Wristcutters: A Love Story finally gets its UK release on Nov. 23 (Raindance Fest hit of 2006). Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (after-life passport mix-up). A black comedy about suicide with a great Tom Waits cameo, too. Catch Me When My Crumpled Angel. "I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel director of controversial Golden Gate suicides doco The Bridge (ICA DVD).
Wristcutters interview with director Goran Dukic.
Husband and wife team Etgar Keret (Wristcutters was based on one of his short stories) and Shira Geffen have directed Jellyfish (Meduzot) (Zeitgeist in the States)
screened at LFF and as part of the UK Jewish Film Fest tonight (15 Nov) at the Everyman in Hampstead (oh how I fondly remember those art-house repertory screenings). This is another film about lost souls this time set in Tel Aviv. But the directors wanted to find a Tel Aviv that hadn’t been seen before and used the very subtle cinematography of Antoine Héberlé(winner of this year’s Cannes Fest Camera d’Or for the film). “The characters are under the illusion that they can design their own destinies. But the reality is that they wander like jellyfish. In the end some will overcome the forces that determine their lives. They will make their own way down to the water’s edge.”
Ploy (LFF) by Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is about lost married souls and the search for something else. It’s perfectly crafted like a seductive thriller as the camera stalks its way through a luxury hotel in Bangkok. Young Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) is waiting in the bar that morning for her mother arriving from Stockholm. Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) platonically invites her to rest in his room much to his wife’s outrage. There are other hotel rooms with other goings-on. A low droning soundtrack perhaps adds more menace than strangeness drowning the film in a little too much atmosphere.
Valzer (LFF) by Italian director Salvatore Maira is a tour de force as the entire film is shot in a single take with the camera weaving in and out of the lies, hopes, and frustrations of a Roman hotel’s occupants. Maira was inspired by the architecture of two Roman churches: “And I imagined a unique place, where architectural space becomes emotional.”
Days and Clouds (Giorni e Nuvole) directed by Silvio Soldini explores a couple and the husband’s middle-aged, middle-class unemployment in Genoa. As the director said after the totally packed Sat night LFF screening, “it’s a snapshot of something that’s happening more and more and that people don’t really want to recognise.” Antonio Albanese (Michele the job seeking husband) is better known as a comedian in Italy, but here is beautifully understated as he struggles to keep up optimism and appearances, as even one of his old friends blatantly lies about having repaid Michele the money he’d loaned his friend. Soldini chose Genoa because of the dialectic between the couple’s claustrophobia (they used to travel abroad often) and the sea and its horizon. Genoa is also the setting for one of my favourite operas Verdi’s Simon Boccenegra, the tale of a plebian pirate who rises to become Doge, the city’s ruler, only to find the struggle for power is the same as that for the sea. Was Verdi the Ken Livingstone of opera? Italian unifier Garibaldi wrote in 1880: “Mine has been a tempestuous life, made up – like most people’s I believe – of good and evil. I may say that I have always sought the good, for myself and for my fellow men. If on any occasion I have done evil, I have done so involuntarily.”
More LFF tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow with my petit pace...
BBC2 TV series starting tonight- The 800 Million Pound Railway Station
The miracle of St Pancras
Waterloo sunset
But to whom will it make a difference? The London underground lines are still plagued with ‘signal failure’ as an excuse for poor service pretty much every second day. And the supposedly ‘good service’ on the Piccadilly line this morning left me standing in the cold for 15 minutes and missing my meeting. And Transport for London never even coughed up the refund from about 10 forms I filled in. Delays are so frequent for the commuting denizens of Richmond (District line) that they’ve probably given up all hope of things getting better. At times it’s almost as if someone were sabotaging the whole system. Either that, or if the system is truly in such a bad state of repair, those 2012 Olympics had better worry. I don’t want to sound churlish about the King’s Cross refurb at all. But you’d be halfway to Paris by the time your tube, taxi or bus was able to dump you at your London destination. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hoverglide off our heels through the London air?
And the mucho misery Silverlink line...
Ken Livingston and the Silverlink handover
London Overground, A new overland circle line is to be created by 2010
Computer failure leads to 'chaos' at Gatwick
Heathrow voted world's least favourite airport
One of the best docos of the Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF), and winner of this year’s The Grierson Trust prize for best full-length doco, pops up on More4 digital TV tonight, Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (Problemat s komarite i drugi istorii) from Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov. It is so funny and poignant it really deserves a much wider audience than this TV slot. It’s almost surreal realism and juxtaposition of stories from Belene and the Belene Islands is a bit reminiscent of Errol Morris’ doco Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. “You can wipe out any species except mosquitoes,” says one local. “That’s what we’re rich in, mosquitoes!” A Cuban worker at the nuclear power plant plays guitar in a field of red poppies, some learn to dance the proper Viennese waltz (180 steps a minute), a horse gallops freely through the former Communist concentration camp, the best use of the Shostakovich waltz I’ve heard as the trucks insecticide the streets, while some laconic locals watch the tourist boat glide down the river, “why go down a trip on the Danube just to be eaten by mosquitoes?”
Also tonight (at the same time) is BBC2 TV –Imagine: a profile the artist Louise Bourgeois whose Tate Modern exhibition I wrote about last time.
Fast track: Europe's rail revolution
And once you’ve escaped London for the new Albion of Europe check out Michael Palin’s BBC TV series and book New Europe.
Our Into the Wild hero obviously never met the Alaskan vampires of 30 Days of Night, vampiric heaven as the sun doesn’t rise for 30 days in winter Barrow. This is a really scary horror flic from director David Slade. No Weirdsville jollies here, and it’s no mean feat to bring to life this genre. The only cavil is that the evil ones’ characters just aren’t fleshed out thus missing the opportunity to explore the origins of collective evil.
Nosferatu: Resurrection of the vampire
If your weekend date is a couch potato then Second Sight's DVDs of the Karloff/Lugosi combo The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935) are for you (mid-price, no extras). Great prints of these must-see classics, and don’t you just love the string score swathes of mashy Brahms, Liszt and Tchaikovsky.
And, of course, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror that was initially part of the failed US release ‘grindhouse’ double-bill with Tarantino’s Deathproof. Rodriguez cancelled his LFF talk, but the film is definitley nothing to be ashamed of. You have to be into comedy/horror gore, though, or be particularly pissed off with a current or ex-date to enjoy this movie. If you’re the latter, you’ll be cheering the one-legged Cherry (Rose McGowan) as she massacres the gangrenous evil ones with her other machine gun peg-leg. If that doesn’t get rid of your unwanted one, you could always try Abel Ferrara’s Ms.45 aka Angel of Vengeance (1980).
Metropolitan police to hold London shootings ceasefire summit
Probably better not to take a blind date of either sex to see Anna M (released this weekend). French director Michel Spinosa researched his loopy girl Anna (riveting Isabelle Carré) obsessed with happily married Dr.Andre (Gilbert Melki) on the clinical pathological jealousy studies La jalousie amoureuse by Daniel Lagache. This film could seem familiar turf, Fatal Attraction or even French revenge flic Love in the Strangest Way(Elles N'Oublient pas). But because Spinosa’s direction never sensationalises or overtly dramatises the story it’s a terribly disturbing film bordering on the documenatational. Moreover, Alain Duplantier’s stunning use of anamorphic widescreen cinematography uses the unique depth of field nature of that lens to make Anna (and therefore Dr. Andre) the centre of the screen canvas wherever the location. “I place Anna in the heart of a big city so she would be lost in unknown territory...an outsider in the wrong place,” said the director. “Mystics and erotomanianiacs have the same symptoms. For them, everything starts with an illumination; the imperious and indisputable sense of being chosen...convinced they have a unique relationship with the other person.”
And anyone for the LFF’s Japanese killer hair movie from director/writer Sion Sono Exte - Hair Extensions (Ekusute). Bravura direction and a subtle (or possibly blatantly obvious if you’re Japanese) commentary on the hair obsessions of young Japanese girls.
Hairdresser sued in row about headscarf
Going even further back in time is actor/director Erich von Stroheim’s very first film from 1919 Blind Husbands (Die Rache der Berge/Blinde Ehemänner) in a magnificently restored print screened with Neil Brand’s piano accompaniment at the LFF. The greatest silent films, as seen here, were nothing to do mime and everything to do with the birth of subtle film acting. Thrilling mountaineering sequence (though obviously not Touching the Void). Find a large TV, get the DVD and cajole an improv pianist friend to conjure an evening date that you’ll remember!
Canadian director Guy Maddin, has made an entire career out of re-inventing the silent movie. Brand Upon the Brain! (LFF) has seen most of the festival circuit and like most of his auteurship defies description. If you’re a fan this won’t be so thrilling or revelatory, but if not, you’re never going to see anything else like Maddin in the cinema. A lighthouse is both family home and orphanage with children bearing strange head wounds.
American indie Wristcutters: A Love Story finally gets its UK release on Nov. 23 (Raindance Fest hit of 2006). Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (after-life passport mix-up). A black comedy about suicide with a great Tom Waits cameo, too. Catch Me When My Crumpled Angel. "I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel director of controversial Golden Gate suicides doco The Bridge (ICA DVD).
Wristcutters interview with director Goran Dukic.
Husband and wife team Etgar Keret (Wristcutters was based on one of his short stories) and Shira Geffen have directed Jellyfish (Meduzot) (Zeitgeist in the States)
screened at LFF and as part of the UK Jewish Film Fest tonight (15 Nov) at the Everyman in Hampstead (oh how I fondly remember those art-house repertory screenings). This is another film about lost souls this time set in Tel Aviv. But the directors wanted to find a Tel Aviv that hadn’t been seen before and used the very subtle cinematography of Antoine Héberlé(winner of this year’s Cannes Fest Camera d’Or for the film). “The characters are under the illusion that they can design their own destinies. But the reality is that they wander like jellyfish. In the end some will overcome the forces that determine their lives. They will make their own way down to the water’s edge.”
Ploy (LFF) by Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is about lost married souls and the search for something else. It’s perfectly crafted like a seductive thriller as the camera stalks its way through a luxury hotel in Bangkok. Young Ploy (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk) is waiting in the bar that morning for her mother arriving from Stockholm. Wit (Pornwut Sarasin) platonically invites her to rest in his room much to his wife’s outrage. There are other hotel rooms with other goings-on. A low droning soundtrack perhaps adds more menace than strangeness drowning the film in a little too much atmosphere.
Valzer (LFF) by Italian director Salvatore Maira is a tour de force as the entire film is shot in a single take with the camera weaving in and out of the lies, hopes, and frustrations of a Roman hotel’s occupants. Maira was inspired by the architecture of two Roman churches: “And I imagined a unique place, where architectural space becomes emotional.”
Days and Clouds (Giorni e Nuvole) directed by Silvio Soldini explores a couple and the husband’s middle-aged, middle-class unemployment in Genoa. As the director said after the totally packed Sat night LFF screening, “it’s a snapshot of something that’s happening more and more and that people don’t really want to recognise.” Antonio Albanese (Michele the job seeking husband) is better known as a comedian in Italy, but here is beautifully understated as he struggles to keep up optimism and appearances, as even one of his old friends blatantly lies about having repaid Michele the money he’d loaned his friend. Soldini chose Genoa because of the dialectic between the couple’s claustrophobia (they used to travel abroad often) and the sea and its horizon. Genoa is also the setting for one of my favourite operas Verdi’s Simon Boccenegra, the tale of a plebian pirate who rises to become Doge, the city’s ruler, only to find the struggle for power is the same as that for the sea. Was Verdi the Ken Livingstone of opera? Italian unifier Garibaldi wrote in 1880: “Mine has been a tempestuous life, made up – like most people’s I believe – of good and evil. I may say that I have always sought the good, for myself and for my fellow men. If on any occasion I have done evil, I have done so involuntarily.”
More LFF tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow with my petit pace...
Monday, 12 November 2007
The wolves who learnt to swim (Part Three)
How do I sum up the experience of seeing 50 plus films (out of 185) at this year’s 51st The Times BFI London Film Festival? Now you know why there hasn’t been a blog from me for almost a month. My eyes have been slaving over a hot screen! Let’s start by quoting Sean Penn quoting novelist E.L Doctorow who “said the greatest responsibility of the artist is to understand the times in which he lives”. And when people ask me what my website is ‘about’ I guess it’s exactly that. For many Londoners, the London Film Festival is one if not the highlight of their year. For others, even in the visual arts, it can go unnoticed. And as my little websit continues gaining readership (who’d have thought it for a site that’s almost too austere for cyber-age survival) and approaches it’s 1st birthday (all gifts accepted), I’m thinking a lot about what is that responsibility I have in writing this.
On Saturday, The Independent’s arts commentator David Lister cited Andrew Marr in his Robert Redford Lions for Lambs TV interview for the title originating from the difference between WW1 soldiers and their generals. “When Marr gently pointed out...that the correct word is not lambs but [lions led by donkeys] Redford gasped: “Isn’t it? Oh! You’d better take it up with the writer.” But Lions Led by Donkeys does rather sound like a Ben Stiller Hollywood bestiality frat-com. Godforbid there should exist such a thing, of course. And the misquotation begs a lot of questions about our responsibility to our times. We, of course, remember the famous line from John Wayne’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence “when the legend becomes truth, print the legend”. But should we? Our politicians would certainly like us to follow this dictum and Noam Chomsky consistently proves them wrong. The Lefties of the BFI Southbank still balk at the word escapism in film comment, and someone like me who dares to even think that word, is still treated with great suspicion if not at times downright derision. But let’s face it, arty cinema is still a minority pleasure, so why do all the factions continually fight over the same crust of bread? And isn’t all film escapism in a sense? Not escapism in terms of relinquishing one’s conscious but in terms of escaping that make believe world of politicians and corporations. A search for an inner light and truth for the filmmaker, the audience and history itself. In discussing ‘magical realism’ once with Brazilian director Hector Babenco (long before the current ‘mr/esoterica’ renaissance), he said that what intrigued him was that ‘magical realism’ in one country is everyday life in another. Just as a child’s world is constructed through observations of detail we adults are mostly blind to in our daily rituals, the lion on a packet of tea, the face in a tree’s bark.
Is the digital age killing our children’s Proustian development or increasing it? A whole day of the London Film Fest (LFF from hereon) was devoted to a conference Power to the Pixel. Ira Deutchman (founder of the radical Fine Line Features and now head of NYC based digital distributor Emerging Pictures) opened the day with an evangelicalism for the pixel that became a running joke for the day “a latent Messiah”. Clearly not anti-capitalist, he said, “We can now give consumers what they want. The current distribution mechanism is broke. The digital world is closer to ideas than things.” As with the music industry, filmmakers now have the power to cut out the middlemen and promulgate their art to the world. There are no gatekeepers. Or are there?
One of the characters in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild says there is no such thing as power. But clearly there is, it just depends whether you’re in power’s sphere of influence. At the lavish (compared to LFF standards) reception ironically held in Mayor Livingstone’s former Thatcherite bulwark County Hall, I met a French doco distributor who founded Veilleur de Nuit (the night-watchman). His latest project Le XV des Cités follows French Muslim Rugby players from the Paris suburbs. He was very sceptical about the romantic notion of removing gatekeepers. “Someone will always have keys. One will be awake, one asleep. There will always be at least two dimensions.” Some speakers cited Facebook as aggregating consumers in a “you’re in control” model of “empowering your audience to become part of your network”.
Matt Hanson’s A Swarm of Angels
Jeremy Nathan’s commercial South African model DV8
Lance (The Last Broadcast) Weiler’s Head Trauma case study
Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four Eyed Monsters and
David Strauss/Joe Neulight from Withoutabox
Every year, the LFF cleverly allows studios and larger film companies to use festival Leicester Square (West End) slots as a promo springboard for some of their general releases a few weeks later: Eastern Promises, Interview, Lions for Lambs, Brick Lane, Sicko, Into the Wild. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a series of duologue conversations about Americans’ involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It resembles the dialectics of a stage play rather than the vision of film and there’s little that is unfamiliar here even to a mainstream audience. And yet. Redford’s consummate skill is in his pacing and his direction of colleague actors. Tom Cruise’s toothy smile, waistcoated would-be President senator figure has been seen more often than we’d like. Yet Cruise makes us believe that this senator truly cares and believes in a Republican solution to the War while at the same time bordering on a stereotype. Meryl Streep’s ‘CNN’ style journalist is less convinced. It makes interesting comparison to the fiction/faction of Rendition with its great cinematography, performances and happy ending, well the hero’s tortured but released back to the States. “Extraordinary rendition” was American government policy to covertly shift suspect terrorist foreign nationals for torture and detention to overseas prisons, in this case Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally). Meryl Streep is the CIA honcho responsible in a scary ‘you wouldn’t want to cross her’ performance in a film that though bold and impressive otherwise lacks those childlike details to frighten and fascinate us.
Friday night, I popped my head into a Southwark shell of offices awaiting planning permission and now temporarily the Climate Change Action gallery. Three floors of very mixed quality art but with a really nice vibe. Apparently they plan to bike pedal power the electricity for the stage. There wasn’t much other energy saving in evidence, though. A poem pinned outside the entrance uttered “every breath is sacred” but most people in the waiting queue were puffing non-herbal cigarettes. Chetana Thornton had only one of her spiritual paintings popped above a doorframe but her catalogue looked promising enough to see more in the flesh.
In the same spirit but in the Marlborough Gallery’s much posher premises, is Cathie Pilkington’s White Elephant sculpture show on the theme of childhood “assembled from disparate lowly or debased sources, folk museums, souvenirs, self-taught road-side sculptors and the like” according to the press release, and the catalogue rather grandly places her in the context of Rilke and Rodin. I’d rather place her in the context of Walter Benjamin, the Baroque and the allegorical. History appearing as nature in decay, in ruins through upward lift and collapse. In the gallery window is the show’s title piece – a ‘Punch’ dressed as a chef balancing a wedding cake of cascading white elephants (for his ‘Judy’?) as he revolves on a mirrored platform. Majolica is a similarly large more Rococo Bosch-like ceramic figurine of little worlds. Gonk has a hairy troll on a polished steel motorbike. And Pantheon: figurines of naked bodies and faces of babies in a Victorian Museum cabinet. Children will no doubt see more in this ingenious show than their adults will.
Bumped into an energetic Ms. L. studying at Central Saint Martin’s resplendent in a full-length Scandinavian folky coat (it’s so nice when students make an effort to dress :) If you’re buying early for Christmas, cute if ‘girly’ earrings from her friend Hannah with the wonderful Bauhausian web nomenclature www.hannahmakesthings.com. For something more far-out and computer designed, Lynne Kirsten Murray is an ex-Royal College of Art jeweller who I met at Matthew Bown’s gallery opening. A friend of radiant ex-Slade artist Katie Pilkington whose Snow Shot from 100 Trees is the audio track of exactly what she did with a catapult in Epping Forest. An Icelandic glacier groaned on a mobile phone in Vatnajokull (the sound of) and she also transmitted Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back with the result played back on a grand piano. She’s off to excite Tokyo with that piece.
Back to the LFF and Sean Penn’s 2.5 hour Into the Wild (Kyoto Planet Gala) adapted from John Krakauer’s book about the real-life 22 year-old Christopher McCandless who abandoned his privileged graduate city existence for the wilds of Alaska. This is a really great film (with first rate cast) because Penn never judges his characters. McCandless becomes Alexander Supertramp and all the folks he meets on his travels are escaping something. One kindly old timer even wants to adopt him as his son. There’s a moment when McCandless returns to Los Angeles, is helped get a bed at a city mission, but then runs like an animal caught in the headlights of the urbane existence of suits, smiles and platitudes he sees through the city’s windows. But McCandless becomes as much as a wilderness Romantic as the urbane Romanticists he is escaping. There’s a strong similarity to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, another true story in which a disillusioned actor Timothy Treadwell goes to live with the grizzlies but transgresses the park rangers’ rules of getting close to the bears to his cost. The rules are there for good reason but McCandless is bemused at the license he needs and ignores because of a 2-year wait list, to canoe down the river rapids. He survives his transgression. The trouble is that well-intentioned rules will always ossify into bureaucracy. But maybe McCandless did, after all, find his inner light. And maybe that’s why the grizzly, sniffing him up and down in the film’s final minutes, leaves him alone.
The much-maligned Michael Moore had the Documentary Gala slot with Sicko, his expose of health care in America juxtaposed to France, the U.K. and Cuban systems. Even if you’re not so in favour of Moore’s approach and sympathies, Sicko begs too many questions to ignore and that is packaged in a film that the general public will want to see. Moore presents the social welfare systems outside the U.S. as utopias, but the effect of his film is more of a Lions for Lambs dialectic than Moore perhaps realises. I can’t speak for the French system but the U.K. system probably haemorrhages as much money, relatively speaking, to corporate and political coffers as the U.S. private health care funds. It’s a little akin to the opening two page fairy tale of Italo Calvino’s collected Italian fairy tales in which Dauntless Little John fights off the limbs of his oppresses only to suddenly turn around and drop dead on seeing his own shadow.
Ermanno Olmi famed for The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (L’albero degli zoccoli, 1978) had One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi) at the LFF and likely, he says, to be his last narrative film “summarising the meaning of [my] entire existence”. A disaffected professor drives 100 spiky nails through priceless library texts and flees his former life rebuilding an abandoned hut on the River Po and endearing himself to the small local community until judicial laws are enforced. The Jesus allegory is obvious and Olmi now wants to return to making documentaries. In Memory of Me (In memoria di me) by Saverio Costanzo, now on general release, is far more austere with a young monk finally abandoning his monastery to find his own inner truth.
Pressure is mounting on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to resign over the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.
Police not tackling serious crime due to targets
Marc Evans’ In Prison My Whole Life documents the struggle of former Black panther and radical journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal arrested for the murder of a police officer in Philadelphia 25 years ago, sentenced to death and awaiting execution ever since. What interested Evans was “how Mumia’s voice, so resonant of the great speech-makers of the 60’s Civil Rights movement, fits into today’s post-modern, post 9/11 world and how counterculture America has changed...attempting to place Mumia within that radical American tradition of the dissenting voice [asking] ‘is anybody really listening anymore?’ Harrowing is Chomsky’s observation that while some stolen Watergate tapes became history, nobody speaks of the enormous covert government operation against campaigns such as Civil Rights and the Panthers.
Israeli born Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (Bikur ha-tizmoret), now on general release, has the cash-stripped Egyptian Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra stranded on the outskirts of a small Israeli town in the desert. They would almost look camp wheeling their trolleys in their immaculate powder-blue uniforms if it weren’t for the dignity they possess. They are befriended by cafe owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) and invited to stay the night until the morning bus arrives. Tewfiq, the conductor (Sasson Gabai) loves Chet Baker, and if you find his rendition of My Funny Valentine sentimental, then I guess you’ll think the same of this film. If not, it’s a truly beautiful picture with warmth and “tons of loneliness” in Dina’s words. “It’s strange, half of Israel was fighting with Egypt, but we all sit and watch the Arab movie [on TV]”, remembers Kolirin. Tewfiq, never without his pride or his baton, opens himself to Dina that evening bitterly regretting his harshness on his son, who subsequently committed suicide.
The Band's Visit Turned Away by AMPAS, Middle East Fests
The film’s producer Sophie Dulac has also given us LFF’s Heartbeat Detector (La question humaine) directed by Nicholas Klotz (France) and screened again on the weekend as part of UK Jewish Film Festival. For 7 years, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) has been the company shrink for German chemical firm SC Farb. Deputy director, Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), asks Simon to covertly monitor the mental health of the firm's director, Mathias Just (Michael Lonsdale) who head office thinks has gone a bit doolally. His cover is to establish an orchestra in order to maintain worker productivity – Mathias Just played violin in the company’s Farb Quartet- and the film follows a Holocaust mystery trail. This is another 2.5 hour film but it’s quite engrossing: the music mix is superb (though I wish it wasn’t Schubert’s so oft heard Death and the Maiden quartet again), so too the camera and performances. And the viewer feels strangely involved yet distanced by Klotz’s director technique.
Ulrich Seidl's (Austria) Import Export (135 min) has a similar feel of an unstoppable tide beneath your feet without the spectator ever entering the water. UK released next year by newcomer Trinity Filmed Entertainment (also Heartbeat’s distributor) it’s social realism but with comic almost ‘exotic’detail that’s totally engrossing. Co-written by Veronika Franz, Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian single-mother who trains it to Vienna to better her life after stints at internet porn and nannying fail, finally getting a cleaning job in an elderly care unit. Young Pauli (Paul Hofmann), disaffected but diligent, loses his Vienna shopping centre security job after being attacked by a gang of youths himself, and is in financial hock to his stepdad (Michael Thomas). They end up in lugging a videogame machine to the Ukraine. Again, great performances.
A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (part of LFF’s Experimenta) is director Esther Robinson’s doco delving into her mysterious uncle Danny who only made shorts for about 6 months, but who was one of the very few people to whom Warhol ever loaned his Bolex. He began as an editor for the Maysles brothers, no less, and became a regular at Warhol’s factory designing lighting for the Velvet Underground shows. In 1966 he disappeared without a trace. I began my breakfast chat with Esther with memories of my own quest Hybrid Magazine many years ago (Page 2) for another failed New York legend Jack Smith. Mary Jordan was the one tenacious and brave enough to deal with the estate’s rights issues with her doco finally surfacing in last year’s LFF.
“Yes, Mary and I compared war stories. [But, of course, Danny was family]. I'm a musky American full of love. But I don't think there was much love in 60's experimental work. Artists have two families their birth and artistic. [And it's about] the choice you make. Jack Smith chose [his artistic family] well. Danny did in the beginning but it wasn't a nurturing family. When he needed something emotional from that [Warhol] world it wasn't there. Drugs derailed Danny and it didn't Warhol. The amphetamines increased that singular, narcissism in the centre where you remember yourself. Danny was much more a chronicler of what happens, watching and capturing. Jack Smith was [more about] being in the world. Jack had this spectacular frame [of existence]. Danny had exuberance through his frame - sensual and joyful. And Warhol was almost operatic because they were all kids, fighting, with promise but how do you actualise that promise. [There was] a rapid breakdown of social codes, high-class kids' world blown apart, wanting something to hang their personalities on. They didn't have scrappy survival instincts. Drugs gave them bravery.” One of Robinson’s most revealing interviewees is musician John Cale who reflects that each of the Warhol group really wanted to remember Danny in their own image, constructing the myth to fill in the voids. Esther: “I was speaking to one of my interns [about this] that nobody chooses this [profession] out of sheer ego, at some point it chooses you. The orbit of something eclipses you. But the world likes neat categories.”
To be continued...
On Saturday, The Independent’s arts commentator David Lister cited Andrew Marr in his Robert Redford Lions for Lambs TV interview for the title originating from the difference between WW1 soldiers and their generals. “When Marr gently pointed out...that the correct word is not lambs but [lions led by donkeys] Redford gasped: “Isn’t it? Oh! You’d better take it up with the writer.” But Lions Led by Donkeys does rather sound like a Ben Stiller Hollywood bestiality frat-com. Godforbid there should exist such a thing, of course. And the misquotation begs a lot of questions about our responsibility to our times. We, of course, remember the famous line from John Wayne’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence “when the legend becomes truth, print the legend”. But should we? Our politicians would certainly like us to follow this dictum and Noam Chomsky consistently proves them wrong. The Lefties of the BFI Southbank still balk at the word escapism in film comment, and someone like me who dares to even think that word, is still treated with great suspicion if not at times downright derision. But let’s face it, arty cinema is still a minority pleasure, so why do all the factions continually fight over the same crust of bread? And isn’t all film escapism in a sense? Not escapism in terms of relinquishing one’s conscious but in terms of escaping that make believe world of politicians and corporations. A search for an inner light and truth for the filmmaker, the audience and history itself. In discussing ‘magical realism’ once with Brazilian director Hector Babenco (long before the current ‘mr/esoterica’ renaissance), he said that what intrigued him was that ‘magical realism’ in one country is everyday life in another. Just as a child’s world is constructed through observations of detail we adults are mostly blind to in our daily rituals, the lion on a packet of tea, the face in a tree’s bark.
Is the digital age killing our children’s Proustian development or increasing it? A whole day of the London Film Fest (LFF from hereon) was devoted to a conference Power to the Pixel. Ira Deutchman (founder of the radical Fine Line Features and now head of NYC based digital distributor Emerging Pictures) opened the day with an evangelicalism for the pixel that became a running joke for the day “a latent Messiah”. Clearly not anti-capitalist, he said, “We can now give consumers what they want. The current distribution mechanism is broke. The digital world is closer to ideas than things.” As with the music industry, filmmakers now have the power to cut out the middlemen and promulgate their art to the world. There are no gatekeepers. Or are there?
One of the characters in Sean Penn’s Into the Wild says there is no such thing as power. But clearly there is, it just depends whether you’re in power’s sphere of influence. At the lavish (compared to LFF standards) reception ironically held in Mayor Livingstone’s former Thatcherite bulwark County Hall, I met a French doco distributor who founded Veilleur de Nuit (the night-watchman). His latest project Le XV des Cités follows French Muslim Rugby players from the Paris suburbs. He was very sceptical about the romantic notion of removing gatekeepers. “Someone will always have keys. One will be awake, one asleep. There will always be at least two dimensions.” Some speakers cited Facebook as aggregating consumers in a “you’re in control” model of “empowering your audience to become part of your network”.
Matt Hanson’s A Swarm of Angels
Jeremy Nathan’s commercial South African model DV8
Lance (The Last Broadcast) Weiler’s Head Trauma case study
Susan Buice and Arin Crumley’s Four Eyed Monsters and
David Strauss/Joe Neulight from Withoutabox
Every year, the LFF cleverly allows studios and larger film companies to use festival Leicester Square (West End) slots as a promo springboard for some of their general releases a few weeks later: Eastern Promises, Interview, Lions for Lambs, Brick Lane, Sicko, Into the Wild. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a series of duologue conversations about Americans’ involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It resembles the dialectics of a stage play rather than the vision of film and there’s little that is unfamiliar here even to a mainstream audience. And yet. Redford’s consummate skill is in his pacing and his direction of colleague actors. Tom Cruise’s toothy smile, waistcoated would-be President senator figure has been seen more often than we’d like. Yet Cruise makes us believe that this senator truly cares and believes in a Republican solution to the War while at the same time bordering on a stereotype. Meryl Streep’s ‘CNN’ style journalist is less convinced. It makes interesting comparison to the fiction/faction of Rendition with its great cinematography, performances and happy ending, well the hero’s tortured but released back to the States. “Extraordinary rendition” was American government policy to covertly shift suspect terrorist foreign nationals for torture and detention to overseas prisons, in this case Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally). Meryl Streep is the CIA honcho responsible in a scary ‘you wouldn’t want to cross her’ performance in a film that though bold and impressive otherwise lacks those childlike details to frighten and fascinate us.
Friday night, I popped my head into a Southwark shell of offices awaiting planning permission and now temporarily the Climate Change Action gallery. Three floors of very mixed quality art but with a really nice vibe. Apparently they plan to bike pedal power the electricity for the stage. There wasn’t much other energy saving in evidence, though. A poem pinned outside the entrance uttered “every breath is sacred” but most people in the waiting queue were puffing non-herbal cigarettes. Chetana Thornton had only one of her spiritual paintings popped above a doorframe but her catalogue looked promising enough to see more in the flesh.
In the same spirit but in the Marlborough Gallery’s much posher premises, is Cathie Pilkington’s White Elephant sculpture show on the theme of childhood “assembled from disparate lowly or debased sources, folk museums, souvenirs, self-taught road-side sculptors and the like” according to the press release, and the catalogue rather grandly places her in the context of Rilke and Rodin. I’d rather place her in the context of Walter Benjamin, the Baroque and the allegorical. History appearing as nature in decay, in ruins through upward lift and collapse. In the gallery window is the show’s title piece – a ‘Punch’ dressed as a chef balancing a wedding cake of cascading white elephants (for his ‘Judy’?) as he revolves on a mirrored platform. Majolica is a similarly large more Rococo Bosch-like ceramic figurine of little worlds. Gonk has a hairy troll on a polished steel motorbike. And Pantheon: figurines of naked bodies and faces of babies in a Victorian Museum cabinet. Children will no doubt see more in this ingenious show than their adults will.
Bumped into an energetic Ms. L. studying at Central Saint Martin’s resplendent in a full-length Scandinavian folky coat (it’s so nice when students make an effort to dress :) If you’re buying early for Christmas, cute if ‘girly’ earrings from her friend Hannah with the wonderful Bauhausian web nomenclature www.hannahmakesthings.com. For something more far-out and computer designed, Lynne Kirsten Murray is an ex-Royal College of Art jeweller who I met at Matthew Bown’s gallery opening. A friend of radiant ex-Slade artist Katie Pilkington whose Snow Shot from 100 Trees is the audio track of exactly what she did with a catapult in Epping Forest. An Icelandic glacier groaned on a mobile phone in Vatnajokull (the sound of) and she also transmitted Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back with the result played back on a grand piano. She’s off to excite Tokyo with that piece.
Back to the LFF and Sean Penn’s 2.5 hour Into the Wild (Kyoto Planet Gala) adapted from John Krakauer’s book about the real-life 22 year-old Christopher McCandless who abandoned his privileged graduate city existence for the wilds of Alaska. This is a really great film (with first rate cast) because Penn never judges his characters. McCandless becomes Alexander Supertramp and all the folks he meets on his travels are escaping something. One kindly old timer even wants to adopt him as his son. There’s a moment when McCandless returns to Los Angeles, is helped get a bed at a city mission, but then runs like an animal caught in the headlights of the urbane existence of suits, smiles and platitudes he sees through the city’s windows. But McCandless becomes as much as a wilderness Romantic as the urbane Romanticists he is escaping. There’s a strong similarity to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, another true story in which a disillusioned actor Timothy Treadwell goes to live with the grizzlies but transgresses the park rangers’ rules of getting close to the bears to his cost. The rules are there for good reason but McCandless is bemused at the license he needs and ignores because of a 2-year wait list, to canoe down the river rapids. He survives his transgression. The trouble is that well-intentioned rules will always ossify into bureaucracy. But maybe McCandless did, after all, find his inner light. And maybe that’s why the grizzly, sniffing him up and down in the film’s final minutes, leaves him alone.
The much-maligned Michael Moore had the Documentary Gala slot with Sicko, his expose of health care in America juxtaposed to France, the U.K. and Cuban systems. Even if you’re not so in favour of Moore’s approach and sympathies, Sicko begs too many questions to ignore and that is packaged in a film that the general public will want to see. Moore presents the social welfare systems outside the U.S. as utopias, but the effect of his film is more of a Lions for Lambs dialectic than Moore perhaps realises. I can’t speak for the French system but the U.K. system probably haemorrhages as much money, relatively speaking, to corporate and political coffers as the U.S. private health care funds. It’s a little akin to the opening two page fairy tale of Italo Calvino’s collected Italian fairy tales in which Dauntless Little John fights off the limbs of his oppresses only to suddenly turn around and drop dead on seeing his own shadow.
Ermanno Olmi famed for The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (L’albero degli zoccoli, 1978) had One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi) at the LFF and likely, he says, to be his last narrative film “summarising the meaning of [my] entire existence”. A disaffected professor drives 100 spiky nails through priceless library texts and flees his former life rebuilding an abandoned hut on the River Po and endearing himself to the small local community until judicial laws are enforced. The Jesus allegory is obvious and Olmi now wants to return to making documentaries. In Memory of Me (In memoria di me) by Saverio Costanzo, now on general release, is far more austere with a young monk finally abandoning his monastery to find his own inner truth.
Pressure is mounting on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to resign over the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.
Police not tackling serious crime due to targets
Marc Evans’ In Prison My Whole Life documents the struggle of former Black panther and radical journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal arrested for the murder of a police officer in Philadelphia 25 years ago, sentenced to death and awaiting execution ever since. What interested Evans was “how Mumia’s voice, so resonant of the great speech-makers of the 60’s Civil Rights movement, fits into today’s post-modern, post 9/11 world and how counterculture America has changed...attempting to place Mumia within that radical American tradition of the dissenting voice [asking] ‘is anybody really listening anymore?’ Harrowing is Chomsky’s observation that while some stolen Watergate tapes became history, nobody speaks of the enormous covert government operation against campaigns such as Civil Rights and the Panthers.
Israeli born Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit (Bikur ha-tizmoret), now on general release, has the cash-stripped Egyptian Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra stranded on the outskirts of a small Israeli town in the desert. They would almost look camp wheeling their trolleys in their immaculate powder-blue uniforms if it weren’t for the dignity they possess. They are befriended by cafe owner Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) and invited to stay the night until the morning bus arrives. Tewfiq, the conductor (Sasson Gabai) loves Chet Baker, and if you find his rendition of My Funny Valentine sentimental, then I guess you’ll think the same of this film. If not, it’s a truly beautiful picture with warmth and “tons of loneliness” in Dina’s words. “It’s strange, half of Israel was fighting with Egypt, but we all sit and watch the Arab movie [on TV]”, remembers Kolirin. Tewfiq, never without his pride or his baton, opens himself to Dina that evening bitterly regretting his harshness on his son, who subsequently committed suicide.
The Band's Visit Turned Away by AMPAS, Middle East Fests
The film’s producer Sophie Dulac has also given us LFF’s Heartbeat Detector (La question humaine) directed by Nicholas Klotz (France) and screened again on the weekend as part of UK Jewish Film Festival. For 7 years, Simon (Mathieu Amalric) has been the company shrink for German chemical firm SC Farb. Deputy director, Karl Rose (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), asks Simon to covertly monitor the mental health of the firm's director, Mathias Just (Michael Lonsdale) who head office thinks has gone a bit doolally. His cover is to establish an orchestra in order to maintain worker productivity – Mathias Just played violin in the company’s Farb Quartet- and the film follows a Holocaust mystery trail. This is another 2.5 hour film but it’s quite engrossing: the music mix is superb (though I wish it wasn’t Schubert’s so oft heard Death and the Maiden quartet again), so too the camera and performances. And the viewer feels strangely involved yet distanced by Klotz’s director technique.
Ulrich Seidl's (Austria) Import Export (135 min) has a similar feel of an unstoppable tide beneath your feet without the spectator ever entering the water. UK released next year by newcomer Trinity Filmed Entertainment (also Heartbeat’s distributor) it’s social realism but with comic almost ‘exotic’detail that’s totally engrossing. Co-written by Veronika Franz, Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a Ukrainian single-mother who trains it to Vienna to better her life after stints at internet porn and nannying fail, finally getting a cleaning job in an elderly care unit. Young Pauli (Paul Hofmann), disaffected but diligent, loses his Vienna shopping centre security job after being attacked by a gang of youths himself, and is in financial hock to his stepdad (Michael Thomas). They end up in lugging a videogame machine to the Ukraine. Again, great performances.
A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory (part of LFF’s Experimenta) is director Esther Robinson’s doco delving into her mysterious uncle Danny who only made shorts for about 6 months, but who was one of the very few people to whom Warhol ever loaned his Bolex. He began as an editor for the Maysles brothers, no less, and became a regular at Warhol’s factory designing lighting for the Velvet Underground shows. In 1966 he disappeared without a trace. I began my breakfast chat with Esther with memories of my own quest Hybrid Magazine many years ago (Page 2) for another failed New York legend Jack Smith. Mary Jordan was the one tenacious and brave enough to deal with the estate’s rights issues with her doco finally surfacing in last year’s LFF.
“Yes, Mary and I compared war stories. [But, of course, Danny was family]. I'm a musky American full of love. But I don't think there was much love in 60's experimental work. Artists have two families their birth and artistic. [And it's about] the choice you make. Jack Smith chose [his artistic family] well. Danny did in the beginning but it wasn't a nurturing family. When he needed something emotional from that [Warhol] world it wasn't there. Drugs derailed Danny and it didn't Warhol. The amphetamines increased that singular, narcissism in the centre where you remember yourself. Danny was much more a chronicler of what happens, watching and capturing. Jack Smith was [more about] being in the world. Jack had this spectacular frame [of existence]. Danny had exuberance through his frame - sensual and joyful. And Warhol was almost operatic because they were all kids, fighting, with promise but how do you actualise that promise. [There was] a rapid breakdown of social codes, high-class kids' world blown apart, wanting something to hang their personalities on. They didn't have scrappy survival instincts. Drugs gave them bravery.” One of Robinson’s most revealing interviewees is musician John Cale who reflects that each of the Warhol group really wanted to remember Danny in their own image, constructing the myth to fill in the voids. Esther: “I was speaking to one of my interns [about this] that nobody chooses this [profession] out of sheer ego, at some point it chooses you. The orbit of something eclipses you. But the world likes neat categories.”
To be continued...
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