Get real, dude!

Why does every week in London feel like living in a Monty Python movie? The biometric chip in new British 10-year passports was announced to be unguaranteed to last beyond two years. Heavy snow yesterday and eight underground tube lines had severe delays. But there always are whenever there's winter snow and judging from past years it's unlikely to get any better. At least the walkways were gritted, a concept that was slightly alien to parts of the city until a few years ago. And yesterday's demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament by those who'd paid into their compulsory pension’s schemes over the years only to find they'd receive virtually nothing after the companies had gone bankrupt. I found a kindred spirit in one UK Managing Director yesterday who said if you have two rooms with a few identical basic DIY resources and put the Americans in one and the Brits in the other, the former will make something regardless, and the latter will keep discussing the problems that may arise if they do. An American comedian once quipped that until coming to England he didn't realise that Fawlty Towers (the classic Brit sitcom) was a hard hitting social documentary. Having said that, watch the BBC's Alchemists of Sound for the positive side of the Brits.

And speaking of real grit, Sundance 2006 hit A Guide to Recognising Your Saints opens UK in a few weeks. Horror reality hit the screens recently in Them. Like the Oz pic Wolf Creek it too was based on a true story. While the latter is more gruesome and visceral like Saw, neither are the sort of DVD you'd particularly want the disaffected youth getting hold of as they both deliver what's promised on the can. And violent crime is on the increase in London. But is the effect any worse than say the Oscar nominated United 93, Paul Greengrass's docudrama memorial to the 9/11 hijacking? Critics were vitriolic about Michael Powell's serial killer Peeping Tom in 1960. We are all voyeuristic by nature and surely it's healthier to acknowledge that and confront it rather than to champion denial.

The Mexican press 10 years earlier were the same when Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned or literally those forgotten and in oblivion) opened, and now restored in a new print by the UNAM film archive in Mexico as part of Bunuel's retrospective at the BFI National Film Theatre in London. It's a film that could have been made yesterday by Ken Loach, and the sort of film about disaffected youth that Shane Meadows yet to be released This is England just isn't, alas. The accompanying BFI Film Classics book by Mark Polizzotti is well worth a read too. Amongst the film's wonderful poetry, championed by Octavio Paz among many others, is a scene where the kids, for a few pesos, have to push the fairground merry-go-round rather than ride it. In 2003, the original negative was incorporated into UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' programme.

That's what I like about Little Miss Sunshine: allowing and facilitating people to be who they are. As Stephen Sondheim coined it in his song, Everybody says Don't.

Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't, it isn't right,
Don't, it isn't nice.

Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't walk on the grass,
Don't disturb the peace,
Don't skate on the ice.

Well I say do, I say,
Walk on the grass, it was meant to feel.
I say, sail, till to the windmill
And if you fail you fail.

Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't get out of line
When they say that then, lady that's a sign
Nine times out of ten,
Lady you're doing just fine.

Make just a ripple, come on be brave
This time a ripple, next time a wave
Sometimes you have to start small,
Climbing the tiniest wall -
Maybe you're going to fall
But it is better than not starting at all.

Everybody says no, stop,
Mustn't rock the boat, mustn't touch a thing
Everybody says don't
Everybody says wait
Everybody says can't fight city-hall
Can't laugh at the King.

Well, I say do, I say,
Laugh at the King, or he'll make you cry
Lose your poise
Fall if you have to, but lady make a noise!

Yes!
Everybody says don't
Everybody says can't
Everybody says wait around for miracles
That's the way the world is made
I insist on miracles
If you do them, miracles, nothing to them
I say don't...
Don't be afraid!

Or as on the Sunshine's yellow merchandising badges "everyone pretend to be normal". After much lobbying from renowned artists, Los Olvidados screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 losing out on First Prize to Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan about poverty and hope. Harry Potter has nothing on those flying broomsticks at the end of De Sica's film!


Germaine Jackson in a post Celebrity Big Brother interview spoke of how some American Muslims in the 9/11 aftermath began denying who they were. A children's clothing company was banned from using pictures of children in sexually suggestive poses though I haven't had a chance to see the all the campaign. Yet Abigail Breslin's provocative dance at the end of Sunshine is deemed okay in the Cineplex’s.

The anthropologist Malinowski was revered for his notion of functionalism, the fact that primitive cultures all share the same basic needs, as we do. My former and wise arts editor Thomas Sutcliffe hit the bone on the head after seeing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I once interviewed Brazilian film director Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman) when South American 'magical realism' was all the rage in the 'West'. What he found funny was that if you walked the streets of Rio or Sao Paolo, the 'magical realism' was 'real realism'. I was reminded of these matters watching a new Turkish film Climates (Iklimler)em> released in London today by Artificial Eye (whose founding father Andi Engel died recently). And it's a shame no UK distributor co-ordinated a release of another Turk film Times and Winds (Bes Vakit)em> seen at last year's Times BFI London Film Festival with wonderful screen debuts from the three 12, 13 year-old children in the tiny Anatolian village of Kozlu. Both films are visually sumptuous to the point where you feel you're bathing in the light of the landscapes. Climates, shot on High Definition video is essentially middle-class existentialism with even a rape/rough sex scene. The director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (an exibition of his photos is concurrant at the Royal National Theatre) and his wife Ebru Ceylan play the film's protagonists' relationship break up. At times it has echoes of Antonioni's alienated figures, but Ceylan’s film has more a sense of seductive ennui than dialectic. It could almost be that the kids from Times have grown up, moved to Istanbul and lost their rhythm of the land so powerfully evoked by Times director Reha Erdem who says so much more about the human condition than the let's save the world film Babel. For all its commercialism, I think Little Miss Sunshine does a much better job of doing just that too.

More Turkish delight (sorry..) arrived with art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon's BBC TV series The Art of Eternity about early Christian art and the Byzantine - much loathed by Voltaire and Vasari. What's so engaging about Graham-Dixon is that you feel he's lost none of the excitement and passion he had when he originally pitched the idea, an 'I knew this would be exciting' feel, even if he does sometimes emphasise every word in a sentence. The investigation of the use of perspective, completely the opposite of the Renaissance view, is fascinating. How it reaches out to involve and almost choreograph the participant in an active contemplation reminds one of Francis Yates and her books about memory spaces in Renaissance art. Tai Chi for the Byzantines even!