The reason I preface most of these pieces with a public transport moan is a lot to do with the "so whatness" resigned attitude of a lot of people.
Metronet considers review on Tube overspend you'll have to pay to read this article but it's quite revealing as to the 'follow the money' adage and who exactly might be to blame. Because someone sure as hell is!
There was a peak hour fire alert at one of the west end Piccadilly line stations the other night.
And about 11am this morning, another fire, this time for real with about 700 train services expected to be axed this evening. Difficult to have an emergency infrastructure when there's not a normal one.
Chaos at Victoria station
I went to the Cineworld Chelsea cinema to catch up on a movie and the right side of the screen was out of focus for some reason - all through the trailers and on into the feature. (Not the first time I've had bad experiences with their screenings). Sorry, but it's true. If you read this blog some time ago you'll recall that the screening theatre of the National Portrait Gallery was even worse! (It's since been fixed, but the problem went on for a very long time) Some things are surmountable and some not. But the prevalence of carelessness in this city is very worrying.
I was reminded of this watching Alpha Dog. Written and directed by Nick Cassavetes (son of indie godfather John Cassavetes), it's the story of one of the youngest ever FBI's most-wanted , fugitive Jesse James Hollywood finally captured in Brazil in 2005, for the abduction and murder of San Fernando Valley teenager Nicholas Markowitz. Hollywood was still at large as production began. When Jake Mazursky (Ben Foster) can't pay his debt, 20 year old Hollywood - Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) in the film - has his mates kidnap Jake's younger half brother 15-year-old Zack (Anton Yelchin). Sharon Stone is Zack's mum, and Bruce Willis Johnny's drug czar dad. Doing Johnny's dirty work is Frankie (Justin Timberlake in a truly fantastic performance) who forms a bond with Zack in Palm Springs (Santa Barbara in the real story) where the kid loses his virginity to two girls in a swimming pool. What is scary about the film is its tone of 'everything will be alright': rich kids doin' what they do; only someone actually dies in the end. Which is how life usually is and not just for that class of kids. The expansive cinematography of Robert Fraisse evokes that illusory oasis of calm.
Out on DVD is the Australian film Candy, directed by Neil Armfield (the Richard Eyre of theatre in Oz over the years ). Candy (Abbie Cornish) and her boyfriend Dan (Heath Ledger) are middle class smack heads. "We lived on sunlight and candy bars," says Dan. Based on Luke Davies' novel, it also stars Geoffrey Rush as Casper, a college teacher and very dubious surrogate role model. But the film suffers the same problems as a lot of other Oz films. It's not that the clichés aren't true, beautifully acted or directed. It's just that you're never really surprised by anything. There's none of that eerie passive River's Edge feel that permeates Nick Cassavetes film. A shame because both Ledger and Cornish give really detailed performances, thanks to Armfield's theatre experience no doubt. Comprehensive interview extras on the DVD too. Check out Look Both Ways for a film that really shows Oz quintessential quirkiness.
If you're a little tired of well-meaning issue films about old age, Sarah Polley's feature writing/directing debut Away From Her, will restore your faith in the power of film to heal and console. An Alice Munro story adaptation (The Bear Came Over the Mountain), it deals with the onslaught of Alzheimer's on Fiona (Julie Christie) who after 44 years of marriage to Grant (Gordon Pinsent) has to be sent to a care home. Olympia Dukakis plays the wife of Fiona's new friend Aubrey (Michael Murphy) who enters into a bond with Grant. Not that Oscars interest Julie Christie (she's won one in the past, nominated for another), but her performance here is so magnificent she ought to be nominated again. She has those Vanessa Redgrave eyes, or is it the other way round, that illuminate the canvas of the camera with an entire lifetime's experience of character. Beautiful understated photography of Luc Montpellier (Guy Madden's The Saddest Music in the World) too. Made me think of Peter Sellers and Being There where every season has its beauty and its pain of death.
Grey Gardens looks at the lives of little Edie (56) and her mother big Edie Beale (79), members of the Bouvier family and cousins of former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Jackie O.) Their 28 room East Hamptons mansion fell into total neglect with cats, racoons and rubbish piled high around their ears. Directed by the Maysles brothers (Albert - camera, David- audio) in 1975 it gets a UK DVD release. So does their 1968 Salesman about Boston $49.95 illustrated bible hawkers. The first ever feature-length documentary to get a theatrical release in the States. (The Maysles are most famous for their 1970 Gimme Shelter doco about the Rolling Stones '69 tour.) The movie was included in the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1993, but it took 30 years to be shown on television (PBS) because of its controversial subject. The great shame about these Eureka single disc releases is that neither have the extras of their American label Criterion, particularly the audio commentary. And so far the publicists have been a bit sheepish in telling me why. They are such incredible documentaries, though. I remember theatre director Deborah Warner made Grey Gardens required viewing for her Royal National Theatre cast of King Lear. Salesman is all hand/shoulder held B/W camera - film NOT video, no lights. Grey Gardens colour 16mm. You never see this kind of filmmaking on YouTube or My Space.
I just caught a free (could only happen in London) third full (better than a lot of others I've been to!) concert of David Sawer's music. The NMC label has some downloads. Performed by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra and conducted by Edward Gardner (new Music Director Designate of the English National Opera) his music is some of the more 'accessible' modern music. His doesn't squeak so much as purr, tickle and creep up on you. He composed a soundtrack for that great short of the silent era, one the first American avant garde films The Life and Death of 9413-a Hollywood Extra (1928) which was screened this evening. With a budget of less than $100, most of the film was shot in Vorkapich's kitchen. Cinematographer was a certain Greg Toland. Now does that name ring a bell to anyone?
Slavoj Žižek! pronounced [jeejek] is so eccentric that he keeps his clothes in his kitchen cupboards and drawers. He's an academic rock star and self-proclaimed narcissist. But you might actually learn something about the world if you join him in staring into the water's reflection. I'd certainly much rather have dinner with him than a lot of other boring philo/pych types I can think of. Astra Taylor's short doco opens end next week at the ICA. It's more like a home video about her new passion Slavoj Žižek than an objective exploration. Nonetheless, she sure spreads the Žižek virus of philosophy to you. And that ain't no bad thing. Žižek quotes Robespierre's 'we want revolution without revolution'. And he seems to be in the same predicament.
Thursday 26 April 2007
Monday 23 April 2007
Part Two: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to break your spirit
How would you feel if you had a last minute Saturday night date, hopped on the underground, only to find that the line was f**ked due to another signal failure? This is what happened to me with the District line to Richmond that night. Do you think it might be a coincidence that the young denizens of that borough are leaning more to the Liberal Democrats in their voting? And how often is this going to happen during the 2012 London Olympics? So nice to know that the Olympic selection committee must have been comprised totally of special needs members - deaf, dumb and blind - so glaringly obvious are the transport system’s failures. And the District line is again suspended this morning on the stretch. Not to mention the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) chaos for those wishing to take part in Sunday’s London marathon.
Travel chaos for marathon spectators
Ken calls for review of Metronet
Arts leaders turn on Jowell over Olympics
Britain's transport policy goes even more off the rails
Rail commuters ponder national fare strike
Kings Cross Station to undergo £400 million transformation Shame half the pople won't actually be able to get to the station by public transport in the first place!
Bid to take rail out of private control
Maybe the artists could make the transport minister travel the London streets pulled by a pig as did Vladimir Durov to better experience the speed and hilarity of his policies.
The Durov Animal Theatre
Durov's Pig": Clowns, Politics and Theatre by Joel Schechter
Cash-for-honours: Blair aides await fate as inquiry ends
Anyone remember John Poulson? (BBC4 doco last Sat night) Interesting to hear his widow say that she thought he became the scapegoat for what was endemic corruption. Not much has changed eh....
1974: Architect jailed over corruption
A brief history of sleaze
Banksy mural obliterated by graffiti removal team
And....4 more days of the EastEnd Film Festival to go....
I'll mention a couple more indie films when I recover from my weekend travel trauma (it's no joke..)
In the meanwhile, check out this great Frank Sinatra site.
Travel chaos for marathon spectators
Ken calls for review of Metronet
Arts leaders turn on Jowell over Olympics
Britain's transport policy goes even more off the rails
Rail commuters ponder national fare strike
Kings Cross Station to undergo £400 million transformation Shame half the pople won't actually be able to get to the station by public transport in the first place!
Bid to take rail out of private control
Maybe the artists could make the transport minister travel the London streets pulled by a pig as did Vladimir Durov to better experience the speed and hilarity of his policies.
The Durov Animal Theatre
Durov's Pig": Clowns, Politics and Theatre by Joel Schechter
Cash-for-honours: Blair aides await fate as inquiry ends
Anyone remember John Poulson? (BBC4 doco last Sat night) Interesting to hear his widow say that she thought he became the scapegoat for what was endemic corruption. Not much has changed eh....
1974: Architect jailed over corruption
A brief history of sleaze
Banksy mural obliterated by graffiti removal team
And....4 more days of the EastEnd Film Festival to go....
I'll mention a couple more indie films when I recover from my weekend travel trauma (it's no joke..)
In the meanwhile, check out this great Frank Sinatra site.
Thursday 19 April 2007
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to break your spirit
Having just seen an evening TV news spot promoting London as not too expensive to visit, I wanted to make clear that I’m not trying to deter people from visiting London only to highlight some really terrible problems with the city's transport, some immediately surmountable and some not. Certainly not for those 2012 Olympic Games. It's the same with the reviews you read on this page. It's only my opinion, but unlike most critics, I have worked professional in pretty much every field I discuss: a trained classical dancer, opera singer, actor, film editor, and unwilling professional public transport user. (Very few expense accounts are going to fork out the £60 return cab fare from my home to the West End. And I live in Zone 2!).
Speaking of anarchists, that’s where American independent filmmaker (writer/director/editor) John Sayles began with his The Anarchists' Convention and Other Stories Next week the ever reliable Optimum Releasing have a 3 disc DVD set of his 3 early seminal films The Return of the Secaucus Seven(1980), Lianna (1983) and Brother from Another Planet (1984). The films are so good and so rarely available on cinema or TV due to rights issues that you can forgive the total lack of extras on the discs. If you really need audio commentary, there’s a good one on the DVD of the director's fifteenth film, Silver City (2004). A touring retrospective was presented by IFC Films in the States but included Matewan (the story of the Matewan Massacre labour struggle in 20's Appalachia). If you're into the technical processes behind restoring these films then this site will tell you all.
Return was made for $60,000 (self-financed like the others) and a precursor to Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 The Big Chill: a group of '60s 30-something radicals who rejoin for a New Hampshire weekend. It opens with the plunging of a toilet bowl. Brother opens with a hobbling mixed race alien with a bleeding stump of a leg. Later, the ‘Men in Black’ inter-stellar cops (John Sayles and David Strathairn) appear to apprehend him. “We’ll be back!” (The Terminator was also 1984, which came first? I'm not a trivia spotter :) There’s a touch of the Third Rock From the Sun idea too. And look out for the little Little Shop of Horrors homage when the Brother takes his eyeball out. (Sayles began by writing screenplays for Roger Corman, Piranha, 1978).
Lianna was ahead of its time, too, with its story of a college professor's wife falling for her lesbian night class tutor. (One of the best uses of sound in a seduction scene on film) “The things I don't like about Lianna” writes Sayles "are not so much filmmaking things as writing things. Generally the filmmaking is fine and when it's not it's because I feel that it's over-written.” It’s still some of the best dialogue around though. "Do I have to eat my peas?" asks Lianna’s daughter, to which dad replies, "Yes...what is this the riddle of the Sphinx? Do the peas change from what they were 3 minutes ago? They got a half life or something?" That’s why Sayles gets hired in Hollywood and is currently on the screenplay for Jurassic Park IV. He’s a good actor too. In Lianna he’s her husband's film professor colleague, Jerry who thinks his luck is in but is quickly given the boot from her tiny new post-separation apartment.
Sayles has an actor’s understanding of character nuance: “When people leave the theatre I want them to be talking about human beings, about their own lives and the lives of other people they know or could know. Rather than thinking 'Oh, that was like Citizen Kane, or that was like Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Sayles on Sayles (Directors on Directors)
And here's a rough cut clip from his new film Honeydripper, due out by Emerging Pictures in 2008. Even John Sayles does YouTube.
The Lives of Others, set in East Berlin in 1984, is written and directed by newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck: winner of this year's best foreign film Oscar and Best Foreign Language film at Independent Spirit Awards 2007. Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is the charming socialist-playwright-next-door type. Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) wants to ravish Dreyman's actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and assigns one of the country's 300,000 Stasi (the secret police) operatives Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) to spy on the famous playwright. Things come to a head when Dreyman writes a play about the high suicide rate in the G.D.R.
Donnersmarck: "The German writer and theatre director Freya Klier did a survey among German adolescents, asking them if they thought the GDR had been a dictatorship. The overwhelming majority was surprised even by the question, and the answer was: "of course not". The Ostalgie Shows in German television and the nostalgic comedies in our cinema had been too effective in re-writing history, and portraying the GDR as a place of humour and humanity." Probably why Goodbye Lenin did so well with its story of a family convincing their mother that the G.D.R. still existed after the fall of the wall in order to avoid her having a heart attack. Reminded me of a recent doco Dear Pyongyang (Raindance Film Festival 2006) in which a daughter now living in Japan with her North Korean ideologue stalwart father travels back with him to Pyongyang to try and understand his sympathies.
Some critics have likened Lives to Coppola's The Conversation in which Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert starts questioning his motives, tearing apart his own apartment after thinking he’s uncovered a government plot. While I admired Lives enormously for lots of obvious reasons, I think I’m in the 1% of people who haven’t enthused about it. Thinking of Ryan Gosling’s Half Nelson in the next paragraph, I missed some of the dialectics of say Christopher Walken’s character in Abel Ferrara's King of New York(1990): in many ways a despicable drug baron but who truly wants to help the neighbourhood kids.
Melbourne book launch of Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara (Illinois University Press 2007) Thanks to Greencine for the link.
Ridiculous comparison some may say. But to me that to is what Brecht is all about. His alienation technique is about getting you to stand back, see the wood for the trees and realise what ridiculous ineffectual romantics we inevitably are. Can you love two people at the same time, as Ruth ponders in Sayles Lianna? Yes you can, but there’s always a price to pay.
Donnersmark: "In an article about my film published in 2006, Der Spiegel recounts of one of the Stasi officers who monitored Wolf Biermann (the greatest East German poet). The officer was so impressed with Biermann's poems (which he was forced to listen to via his headphones every day) that he actually started writing poems himself, and founded a Stasi Poetry Group. Regularly, these Stasi employees met to read each other their ambitious new poems." The Stasi hoped to keep a file on each of East Germany's 16 million citizens. 6 million dossiers were found when the GDR collapsed.
I wish there’d been more of this real incongruity in Lives. A friend of Dreyman composes him a piano sonata "Sonata for a Good Man" (composed for the film by Gabriel Yared - The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient). There’s Brecht/Weill in the music but not in the screenplay. At times it feels like an extremely good Hollywood Cold War thriller in the wake of say The Odessa File or John Frankenheimer’s The Train.
Half Nelson (co-written by Fleck and his editor and co-producer Anna Boden) stars 13 year old Drey (Shareeka Epps)as a student and Dan (Ryan Gosling), a coke-head white history teacher and girls' basketball team coach at a predominantly black Brooklyn junior high school. Dan is big on dialectics- the philosophy of history changing through the battle between opposing forces moral forces - hence the "half-nelson" wrestling lock of the title in which the opponent’s strengths are used against him. He illustrates this on one of his pupils, "Change moves in spirals, not circles. Dan and Drey form an unlikely platonic bond and the film delivers unsaccharined hope and optimism, unlike films such as Dead Poets Society or Music of the Heart. Here you’ll find a palette of grey shades I feel is lacking in The Lives of Others. A fair comparison I feel as they’re both first features. Fleck raised the finance on the back of his similar short film, Gowanus, Brooklyn, also starring Epps, which won Sundance's 2004 Grand Jury Prize in short filmmaking. ThinkFilm distributed in the States. Both the Oscar-nominated Ryan Gosling, and David Strathairn from Sayles movies have successfully managed to traverse work in both Hollywood and indie film. Gosling can also be seen this week in Gregory Hoblit’s (Primal Fear) thriller Fracture.
Mutual Appreciation is grainy, black-and-white 16mm French art house, except Bujalski's characters seem so chilled out you'd swear they all get a daily massage. “Bujalski turns a John Cassavetes camera on an Eric Rohmer talkfest”, wrote Variety's reviewer. Alan (Justin Rice) is a Boston musician trying to refocus his career in Brooklyn, New York crashing at the pad of old friend Lawrence (Bujalski). Seeking a drummer for his band 'The Bumblebees', Alan meets DJ (Seung-Min Lee). “People who are into obscure beats and time signatures. I hate that shit." “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks, climbing on top of him not waiting for a reply. She: “You seem a little nervous." He: “I have a congenital tremor.” Later in the film when it becomes a bit rocky “I think you're a beautiful woman, girl, whatever you prefer...I just can't even do that thing where you're not my girlfriend and I'm just making out with you." And so on. Really great minutiae of life chronicling dialogue. Students young or old will love this "cool dude inclusive society club” film. His first feature Funny HaHa I reviewed is back by popular demand also at the ICA. It's just out on DVD too (trailer only extra) from the newly formed Diffusion Pictures, their first DVD since creating the distribution company in late 2006. Nick Crossley (a veteran of film finance outfit Ingenious Media and distributor Redbus) and Jono Stevens (formerly of JWT Advertising) started Diffusion to bring indie film to audiences in the UK.
If Bujalski's characters seem to be going somewhere out of nowhere, those in Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair are the exact opposite, nowhere out of somewhere. Josh (Mark Duplass, who co-wrote and produced the film with his brother) decides to purchase a 'puffy chair' recliner as a nostalgia present for his dad. Emily (Kathryn Aselton), his girlfriend and Josh's brother Rhett, a failed NYC indie rocker, (Rhett Wilkins) tag along for the ride. You could finish your drink in the bar and miss the Duplass’ supporting short, though.
Another flick you could catch at the ICA is Hacking Democracy, the 2006 documentary film by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels. It explores the vulnerability of the electronic voting machines that count the votes cast in America today. In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Florida. In 2002, Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris stumbled upon 40 download hours of unsecured out of date files on the internet belonging to the Diebold Corporation. They showed the inner workings of the company's voting system software used by government. If you thought Lives of Others was a thing of the past WATCH THIS FILM! In the finale, Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer security analyst, sets up an experiment proving to horrified, tearful government workers that the memory cards used could indeed be hacked and change election results. What's great about the film (and why it ought to be up there with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) is that even if you are still sceptical about the government's role in all this, it shows just how moo-cow placid most of us are in trusting all our data to computers. The voting machines of three private corporations are collectively responsible for around 80% of America's votes today.
If you’re reading this in the States, Everything’s Gone Green has just opened in New York through another vital indie company First Independent Pictures and was written by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland ("Generation X"). Suspended from his corporate cog-in-the-wheel job in Vancouver, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo,) tries writing magazine profiles of lottery winners only to find that they're just as corrupt as the lot he left.
Many pinned one of their hopes for Britain’s indie film on Terence Davies but as John Patterson points out in If Only (The Guardian’s The Guide), the rosettes were there but too many big pricks abounded. His latest film is still unfinanced. Distant Voices, Still Lives [DVSL] is re-released this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary and as part of a NFT retrospective. Winner of the 1988 International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, DVSL is according to Davies “about memory and the mosaic of memory” his autobiographical picture of catholic working-class family life in 40s and 50s Liverpool. Its sensibility though is through a European lens. Half the film has music of the era.
“That’s why I think if you can follow a symphonic argument, and you’re not a musician, then you should be able to go on that same symphonic journey, but with film. You can mislead with dialogue, when you don’t intend to. I do believe music and cinema are absolutely close, and when you have the right image with the right music, there’s nothing more thrilling.”
Extract from BFI Modern Classic “Distant Voices, Still Lives” by Paul Farley
Only 84 minutes, the entire film looks and feels like a piece of choreography and is shot using a coral filter to subdue all primary colours and subjected to a ‘bleach bypass process’. They don’t make films like that in America. Davies gives a talk Friday night at the NFT.
Brit champion of indie filmmaking Mike Figgis has a healthy attitude to Hollywood after his Oscar success many moons ago with Leaving Las Vegas: the more money of theirs you take, the less control you will have. His new book Digital Filmmaking is out(Faber) and there’s still time to catch a talk he’s giving tonight (Thursday) at the NFT. He’s interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves tonight, so you can catch that for a week or so. Terence Davies also.
Speaking of anarchists, that’s where American independent filmmaker (writer/director/editor) John Sayles began with his The Anarchists' Convention and Other Stories Next week the ever reliable Optimum Releasing have a 3 disc DVD set of his 3 early seminal films The Return of the Secaucus Seven(1980), Lianna (1983) and Brother from Another Planet (1984). The films are so good and so rarely available on cinema or TV due to rights issues that you can forgive the total lack of extras on the discs. If you really need audio commentary, there’s a good one on the DVD of the director's fifteenth film, Silver City (2004). A touring retrospective was presented by IFC Films in the States but included Matewan (the story of the Matewan Massacre labour struggle in 20's Appalachia). If you're into the technical processes behind restoring these films then this site will tell you all.
Return was made for $60,000 (self-financed like the others) and a precursor to Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 The Big Chill: a group of '60s 30-something radicals who rejoin for a New Hampshire weekend. It opens with the plunging of a toilet bowl. Brother opens with a hobbling mixed race alien with a bleeding stump of a leg. Later, the ‘Men in Black’ inter-stellar cops (John Sayles and David Strathairn) appear to apprehend him. “We’ll be back!” (The Terminator was also 1984, which came first? I'm not a trivia spotter :) There’s a touch of the Third Rock From the Sun idea too. And look out for the little Little Shop of Horrors homage when the Brother takes his eyeball out. (Sayles began by writing screenplays for Roger Corman, Piranha, 1978).
Lianna was ahead of its time, too, with its story of a college professor's wife falling for her lesbian night class tutor. (One of the best uses of sound in a seduction scene on film) “The things I don't like about Lianna” writes Sayles "are not so much filmmaking things as writing things. Generally the filmmaking is fine and when it's not it's because I feel that it's over-written.” It’s still some of the best dialogue around though. "Do I have to eat my peas?" asks Lianna’s daughter, to which dad replies, "Yes...what is this the riddle of the Sphinx? Do the peas change from what they were 3 minutes ago? They got a half life or something?" That’s why Sayles gets hired in Hollywood and is currently on the screenplay for Jurassic Park IV. He’s a good actor too. In Lianna he’s her husband's film professor colleague, Jerry who thinks his luck is in but is quickly given the boot from her tiny new post-separation apartment.
Sayles has an actor’s understanding of character nuance: “When people leave the theatre I want them to be talking about human beings, about their own lives and the lives of other people they know or could know. Rather than thinking 'Oh, that was like Citizen Kane, or that was like Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Sayles on Sayles (Directors on Directors)
And here's a rough cut clip from his new film Honeydripper, due out by Emerging Pictures in 2008. Even John Sayles does YouTube.
The Lives of Others, set in East Berlin in 1984, is written and directed by newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck: winner of this year's best foreign film Oscar and Best Foreign Language film at Independent Spirit Awards 2007. Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is the charming socialist-playwright-next-door type. Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) wants to ravish Dreyman's actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and assigns one of the country's 300,000 Stasi (the secret police) operatives Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) to spy on the famous playwright. Things come to a head when Dreyman writes a play about the high suicide rate in the G.D.R.
Donnersmarck: "The German writer and theatre director Freya Klier did a survey among German adolescents, asking them if they thought the GDR had been a dictatorship. The overwhelming majority was surprised even by the question, and the answer was: "of course not". The Ostalgie Shows in German television and the nostalgic comedies in our cinema had been too effective in re-writing history, and portraying the GDR as a place of humour and humanity." Probably why Goodbye Lenin did so well with its story of a family convincing their mother that the G.D.R. still existed after the fall of the wall in order to avoid her having a heart attack. Reminded me of a recent doco Dear Pyongyang (Raindance Film Festival 2006) in which a daughter now living in Japan with her North Korean ideologue stalwart father travels back with him to Pyongyang to try and understand his sympathies.
Some critics have likened Lives to Coppola's The Conversation in which Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert starts questioning his motives, tearing apart his own apartment after thinking he’s uncovered a government plot. While I admired Lives enormously for lots of obvious reasons, I think I’m in the 1% of people who haven’t enthused about it. Thinking of Ryan Gosling’s Half Nelson in the next paragraph, I missed some of the dialectics of say Christopher Walken’s character in Abel Ferrara's King of New York(1990): in many ways a despicable drug baron but who truly wants to help the neighbourhood kids.
Melbourne book launch of Adrian Martin's translation of Nicole Brenez's Abel Ferrara (Illinois University Press 2007) Thanks to Greencine for the link.
Ridiculous comparison some may say. But to me that to is what Brecht is all about. His alienation technique is about getting you to stand back, see the wood for the trees and realise what ridiculous ineffectual romantics we inevitably are. Can you love two people at the same time, as Ruth ponders in Sayles Lianna? Yes you can, but there’s always a price to pay.
Donnersmark: "In an article about my film published in 2006, Der Spiegel recounts of one of the Stasi officers who monitored Wolf Biermann (the greatest East German poet). The officer was so impressed with Biermann's poems (which he was forced to listen to via his headphones every day) that he actually started writing poems himself, and founded a Stasi Poetry Group. Regularly, these Stasi employees met to read each other their ambitious new poems." The Stasi hoped to keep a file on each of East Germany's 16 million citizens. 6 million dossiers were found when the GDR collapsed.
I wish there’d been more of this real incongruity in Lives. A friend of Dreyman composes him a piano sonata "Sonata for a Good Man" (composed for the film by Gabriel Yared - The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient). There’s Brecht/Weill in the music but not in the screenplay. At times it feels like an extremely good Hollywood Cold War thriller in the wake of say The Odessa File or John Frankenheimer’s The Train.
Half Nelson (co-written by Fleck and his editor and co-producer Anna Boden) stars 13 year old Drey (Shareeka Epps)as a student and Dan (Ryan Gosling), a coke-head white history teacher and girls' basketball team coach at a predominantly black Brooklyn junior high school. Dan is big on dialectics- the philosophy of history changing through the battle between opposing forces moral forces - hence the "half-nelson" wrestling lock of the title in which the opponent’s strengths are used against him. He illustrates this on one of his pupils, "Change moves in spirals, not circles. Dan and Drey form an unlikely platonic bond and the film delivers unsaccharined hope and optimism, unlike films such as Dead Poets Society or Music of the Heart. Here you’ll find a palette of grey shades I feel is lacking in The Lives of Others. A fair comparison I feel as they’re both first features. Fleck raised the finance on the back of his similar short film, Gowanus, Brooklyn, also starring Epps, which won Sundance's 2004 Grand Jury Prize in short filmmaking. ThinkFilm distributed in the States. Both the Oscar-nominated Ryan Gosling, and David Strathairn from Sayles movies have successfully managed to traverse work in both Hollywood and indie film. Gosling can also be seen this week in Gregory Hoblit’s (Primal Fear) thriller Fracture.
Mutual Appreciation is grainy, black-and-white 16mm French art house, except Bujalski's characters seem so chilled out you'd swear they all get a daily massage. “Bujalski turns a John Cassavetes camera on an Eric Rohmer talkfest”, wrote Variety's reviewer. Alan (Justin Rice) is a Boston musician trying to refocus his career in Brooklyn, New York crashing at the pad of old friend Lawrence (Bujalski). Seeking a drummer for his band 'The Bumblebees', Alan meets DJ (Seung-Min Lee). “People who are into obscure beats and time signatures. I hate that shit." “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asks, climbing on top of him not waiting for a reply. She: “You seem a little nervous." He: “I have a congenital tremor.” Later in the film when it becomes a bit rocky “I think you're a beautiful woman, girl, whatever you prefer...I just can't even do that thing where you're not my girlfriend and I'm just making out with you." And so on. Really great minutiae of life chronicling dialogue. Students young or old will love this "cool dude inclusive society club” film. His first feature Funny HaHa I reviewed is back by popular demand also at the ICA. It's just out on DVD too (trailer only extra) from the newly formed Diffusion Pictures, their first DVD since creating the distribution company in late 2006. Nick Crossley (a veteran of film finance outfit Ingenious Media and distributor Redbus) and Jono Stevens (formerly of JWT Advertising) started Diffusion to bring indie film to audiences in the UK.
If Bujalski's characters seem to be going somewhere out of nowhere, those in Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair are the exact opposite, nowhere out of somewhere. Josh (Mark Duplass, who co-wrote and produced the film with his brother) decides to purchase a 'puffy chair' recliner as a nostalgia present for his dad. Emily (Kathryn Aselton), his girlfriend and Josh's brother Rhett, a failed NYC indie rocker, (Rhett Wilkins) tag along for the ride. You could finish your drink in the bar and miss the Duplass’ supporting short, though.
Another flick you could catch at the ICA is Hacking Democracy, the 2006 documentary film by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels. It explores the vulnerability of the electronic voting machines that count the votes cast in America today. In the 2000 presidential election, an electronic voting machine recorded minus 16,022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Florida. In 2002, Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris stumbled upon 40 download hours of unsecured out of date files on the internet belonging to the Diebold Corporation. They showed the inner workings of the company's voting system software used by government. If you thought Lives of Others was a thing of the past WATCH THIS FILM! In the finale, Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer security analyst, sets up an experiment proving to horrified, tearful government workers that the memory cards used could indeed be hacked and change election results. What's great about the film (and why it ought to be up there with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) is that even if you are still sceptical about the government's role in all this, it shows just how moo-cow placid most of us are in trusting all our data to computers. The voting machines of three private corporations are collectively responsible for around 80% of America's votes today.
If you’re reading this in the States, Everything’s Gone Green has just opened in New York through another vital indie company First Independent Pictures and was written by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland ("Generation X"). Suspended from his corporate cog-in-the-wheel job in Vancouver, Ryan (Paulo Costanzo,) tries writing magazine profiles of lottery winners only to find that they're just as corrupt as the lot he left.
Many pinned one of their hopes for Britain’s indie film on Terence Davies but as John Patterson points out in If Only (The Guardian’s The Guide), the rosettes were there but too many big pricks abounded. His latest film is still unfinanced. Distant Voices, Still Lives [DVSL] is re-released this week to celebrate its 20th anniversary and as part of a NFT retrospective. Winner of the 1988 International Critics’ Prize at Cannes, DVSL is according to Davies “about memory and the mosaic of memory” his autobiographical picture of catholic working-class family life in 40s and 50s Liverpool. Its sensibility though is through a European lens. Half the film has music of the era.
“That’s why I think if you can follow a symphonic argument, and you’re not a musician, then you should be able to go on that same symphonic journey, but with film. You can mislead with dialogue, when you don’t intend to. I do believe music and cinema are absolutely close, and when you have the right image with the right music, there’s nothing more thrilling.”
Extract from BFI Modern Classic “Distant Voices, Still Lives” by Paul Farley
Only 84 minutes, the entire film looks and feels like a piece of choreography and is shot using a coral filter to subdue all primary colours and subjected to a ‘bleach bypass process’. They don’t make films like that in America. Davies gives a talk Friday night at the NFT.
Brit champion of indie filmmaking Mike Figgis has a healthy attitude to Hollywood after his Oscar success many moons ago with Leaving Las Vegas: the more money of theirs you take, the less control you will have. His new book Digital Filmmaking is out(Faber) and there’s still time to catch a talk he’s giving tonight (Thursday) at the NFT. He’s interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves tonight, so you can catch that for a week or so. Terence Davies also.
Thursday 12 April 2007
Hey ho, the yin and the yang
Is the government trying to help in taking over the role of the family in dealing with disenfranchised kids? The policies may be well meaning and vote catching but as a parent you’re probably better off sitting them down in front of Disney’s new film Meet the Robinsons or the new DVD sets of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2 discs) (US release May 15)or teamed with his earlier films Cronos and Devil’s Backbone (3 discs). “Organised politics and religion are much more fairy tales than fairy tales,” he reiterates in one of the copious and fascinating audio commentaries that accompany each disc. “Spiritual conceits make us equal not distant. We are destroying magic everyday.” If you’re at all passionate about the way film can achieve that, then these DVD’s are for you. Passion is something Del Toro oozes from every comment (for many films he put half his producer’s salary up front). DVD has to large extent democratised film and the background information that used to be the twilight preserve of journalists is now wonderfully available on the DVD. Devil’s Backbone is a “gothic romance with a ghost” and together with Pan’s Labyrinth are Del Toro’s “microcosms of the Spanish Civil War”, the former set in 1939 and the latter in 1944. “Horror is about context: you need to know what should be, in order to be scared of what is there but shouldn’t be there.” And who better than to spot that than kids. Del Toro admits to having an unhappy childhood. “All the kids [join their] weaknesses and vanquish adversity [though] the adults may be incomplete.” The DVD extras also reinforce Del Toro’s belief that cinema should be eye protein not eye candy and The Guardian interview at the NFT in which Del Toro is very frank is included on the Pan disc.
I wonder if Meet the Robinsons’ director Stephen Anderson had seen Del Toro’s first feature Cronos about a vampiric mechanism that gives eternal life? Based on a book, the villain of Meet the Robinsons has an evil mechanical accomplice, Doris the bowler hat, who promises to give its owner immortal revenge and crush the little boy’s dreams. Like Del Toro’s sketch book, the 13 year-old orphaned Lewis keeps notebooks of his dreams and inventions. His latest is a memory scanner to aid in the search of his lost mother. Friend Wilbur has a time machine and off they go into a film pastiching idea from Jurassic Park, The Terminator, Back to the Future, I Robot etc. It’s a helluva lot of fun, though. Lewis is forced to wear a Carmen Miranda wig to conceal his ancien spiky hair (out with the hoodies and in with the transvestites?). There’s a dinosaur topiary bar run by jazz frogs, the doorbell twins vying for ring tone business in plant pots, and consistently great production design.
If the mums and dads want a throw back to their David Cameron reefer madness days, Jodorowsky’s El Topo has been re-released by Tartan Films at the NFT. Elgin Theatre owner Ben Barenholtz saw it at the Museum of Modern Art and booked the film for midnights (1 a.m. on weekends) beginning the Midnight Movies craze in 70’s New York. John Lennon's manager then nabbed it for a full run Broadway opening, where it died a death.
Jodorowsky wrote, directed, and scored (fantastic and available first time on CD with Tartan’s box set next month) the picture as well as playing the gunslinger saint El Topo ("The Mole") who “spends his life digging tunnels to the sky, and when he finally sees the sun, he goes blind”. He does battle with the Four Masters of the Desert, dies mid-movie and is reborn in a cave of in bred midgets and cripples. The violence is far more surreal than in Peckinpah’s films following in the Mexican tradition, and I quote Del Toro, of “Dying mak[ing] sense of life.” There’s such a unique rhythm here and visually it’s amazing: shoot-out in a dead bunny corrale, touch of foot fetishism, cactus whippings and plenty more symbols and mythologies there to keep the after-movie meal live.
Being Friday the 13th and all, look forward to Optimum’s DVD of Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (April 30). Saw Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors on BBC2 the other night for the first time in decades. Not Del Toro, but hey ho the yin and the yang.
I wonder if Meet the Robinsons’ director Stephen Anderson had seen Del Toro’s first feature Cronos about a vampiric mechanism that gives eternal life? Based on a book, the villain of Meet the Robinsons has an evil mechanical accomplice, Doris the bowler hat, who promises to give its owner immortal revenge and crush the little boy’s dreams. Like Del Toro’s sketch book, the 13 year-old orphaned Lewis keeps notebooks of his dreams and inventions. His latest is a memory scanner to aid in the search of his lost mother. Friend Wilbur has a time machine and off they go into a film pastiching idea from Jurassic Park, The Terminator, Back to the Future, I Robot etc. It’s a helluva lot of fun, though. Lewis is forced to wear a Carmen Miranda wig to conceal his ancien spiky hair (out with the hoodies and in with the transvestites?). There’s a dinosaur topiary bar run by jazz frogs, the doorbell twins vying for ring tone business in plant pots, and consistently great production design.
If the mums and dads want a throw back to their David Cameron reefer madness days, Jodorowsky’s El Topo has been re-released by Tartan Films at the NFT. Elgin Theatre owner Ben Barenholtz saw it at the Museum of Modern Art and booked the film for midnights (1 a.m. on weekends) beginning the Midnight Movies craze in 70’s New York. John Lennon's manager then nabbed it for a full run Broadway opening, where it died a death.
Jodorowsky wrote, directed, and scored (fantastic and available first time on CD with Tartan’s box set next month) the picture as well as playing the gunslinger saint El Topo ("The Mole") who “spends his life digging tunnels to the sky, and when he finally sees the sun, he goes blind”. He does battle with the Four Masters of the Desert, dies mid-movie and is reborn in a cave of in bred midgets and cripples. The violence is far more surreal than in Peckinpah’s films following in the Mexican tradition, and I quote Del Toro, of “Dying mak[ing] sense of life.” There’s such a unique rhythm here and visually it’s amazing: shoot-out in a dead bunny corrale, touch of foot fetishism, cactus whippings and plenty more symbols and mythologies there to keep the after-movie meal live.
Being Friday the 13th and all, look forward to Optimum’s DVD of Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (April 30). Saw Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors on BBC2 the other night for the first time in decades. Not Del Toro, but hey ho the yin and the yang.
Wednesday 11 April 2007
I told you this city was unbelievable!
Classroom thugs told: Disrupt school and win an iPod!
Warning over 'bad tempered Britain' after noise complaints treble
Maybe we'll all get 50' plasma TV's (even further escalating the cost of the Olympics) for keeping quiet about dreadful neighbours and dreadful transport!
More commuters, but number of trains falls
Classroom thugs told: Disrupt school and win an iPod!
Warning over 'bad tempered Britain' after noise complaints treble
Maybe we'll all get 50' plasma TV's (even further escalating the cost of the Olympics) for keeping quiet about dreadful neighbours and dreadful transport!
More commuters, but number of trains falls
Thursday 5 April 2007
it doesn't matter about your name.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
Not a day this week without severe tube delays on one line or other. At least they did a better job of informing the public about alternative travel options last weekend than the previous. I did, however, spy a staff member at one station hastily scribbling options, his superiors must have known about much earlier, on a board mid-afternoon. Commuters face big squeeze as record one billion cram on Tube, wrote Dick Murray recently in The London Evening Standard. I can't find you a link for this. "An increase of 50 million in just five years. By 2016 it is estimated 25% more people will use the Underground." Peak time seems to extend later and later these days, 19.30 is what 18.00 used to be on some lines.
Transport for London website
Fenchurch St commuters risk lives, revolt and walk the line
A lot of the characters in Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk look as if they’d just spent a nightmare journey on the London tube, as in the other two of Aki’s “The Loser Trilogy", Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past. (Kaurismäki withdrew Lights from the Oscars in protest against current American foreign policy). Koiskinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) works as a night watchman for a Helsinki security firm. His only friend seems to be the girl Aila (Maria Heiskanen) who runs a mobile grill van. His love life is as bleak as the Ruoholahti landscape he inhabits in Helsinki. In a bar he picks up the blonde Mirja (Maria Jarvenhelmi). “It’s crowded here, let’s go somewhere else,” she says. Crowded is the last word to describe that bar or indeed any location in the film. Alas, he’s the patsy “faithful as a dog, a romantic fool” for Mirja’s be suited conniving boyfriend Lindholm (Ilkka Koivula). Many critics have found this film a little lean in comparison to Aki’s others (and it’s only 78 minutes). Lacking his usual editor, he does that as well as writing, producing and directing in this one. But it seems to me he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s almost A Man Without a Presence as if the bluish grey Koiskinen is being drowned in a screen full of saturated Hollywood colour (Timo Salminen, camera) with Mirja as a Hitchcock femme fatale. It’s a fantastic soundtrack as well (not yet available) “Without wings I must remain chained to the frozen earth,” sings Olavi Virta the Finnish tango legend who shares the soundscape with opera tenor Jussi Björling and Argentine Carlos Gardel. If you know the Büchner play and Berg opera Wozzeck about the little guy up against society’s closing walls, you’ll find this ‘deadpan romantic’ in spite of its stark Brechtian look (more Brecht poem than play). A quiet, sad beautiful film, never sentimental with a very dim light at the end of the sewer.
Koiskinen, needless to say, winds up in prison. “I don’t know if sentences set examples or not. I’ve always asked that question, I just don’t know,” says one of the lawyers in the documentary Beyond Hatred. Francois Chenu was a gay man murdered by three skinheads in 2002. The attackers, never seen in the film, went to Leo Legrange Park in Rheims, France, looking for an Arab to beat up but turned on Chenu instead who, when asked, admitted he was gay. They threw his body in a pond where he drowned. Director Olivier Meyrou interviews the Chenu family and friends often over lingering static shots of the park to create a documentary feel rarely seen these days. It’s a meditation: can there be forgiveness and understanding in such a case the film asks?
Interesting to see this in the same week as Days of Glory (Indigènes), another Oscar nominee, about the native North Africans who also believed in Liberté, Fraternité, Equalité fighting for France in WW2 and who were never treated as equals hence the French title ‘natives’. In January, the pensions of 80,000 veterans were raised (frozen since 1959) to the same level as their French counterparts thanks to a screening of the film for French president Jacques Chirac. I’m not a war movie person and it took me a good half hour, after many battle scenes, to get into this. Ultimately, it’s a handsomely photographed but very old fashioned British war movie with a message, though no less compelling for that. Director Rachid Bouchareb holds your attention by really getting under the skin of his characters. I couldn’t help thinking, though, of Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957)that follows a British Army platoon sent to intercept and confiscate Nazi paperwork in a Libyan desert. Quite melodramatic but profoundly existential and one of Godard’s favourite movies. "All men are cowards, in some things," says Richard Burton’s Leith to his girl Jane in Bitter Victory. And you wish Bouchared had created more shadows of existentialism in his script. Would the film have had the same success if it had? Possibly not.
What would an Alan Bennett script for Days of Glory have been like? It certainly made Prick Up Your Ears one of the funniest and unlikeliest best British films of the last, well at least 20 years since its birthday. Stephen Frears (The Queen) directs these mostly anti-social (depending which side of the fence you're on)characters with his usual curiosity. You’d have to be the greatest prudish prune in the world to be put off going to this gay love story of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) in 60’s London. Vanessa Redgrave gives one of the sexiest performances of her career (I’d just worked with her back then) as Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay. And every shot by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton looks as if they’ve spent the whole week getting it perfect.
It took me a while to catch up with Sleeping Dogs but it's politically incorrectness makes it really funny. Aki Kaurismäki’s hero should have met up with an Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton)who admits she once pleasured a canine. Written and directed by Bob "Bobcat" Goldthwait of Police Academy fame it's tone is absolutely that of American indie film. His use of accordion music is cheesy but perfect. Great date movie to sift the wheat from the chaff!
Travelling even further back in British time, BBC 4 had some fascinating documentaries this week about the BBC’s controversial Director General (1927-38) Lord Reith, a Scotsman. Ironically, he was never a great advocate of the new medium of TV. He may have had a difficult nature but he’d have made an interesting choice for getting London transport in order. When asked of his failings he reflected that he should have been more tolerant of the average in human ability. He felt a task could be achieved in 5 minutes rather than the average hour it took most people. Raises a lot of poignant questions about success, ambition and achievement in British society. Another irony is that without that average there would be no celebrity gazing, Big Brother, talent and makeover shows. As Lord Reith found out to his cost, you can never win that battle. His critics saw him as arrogant and over-ambitious. The picture you get from these documentaries, though, is that of a man who truly believed he could win a battle against the world’s mediocrity and bigotry. The doctor’s motto in Camus’ existential La Peste (The Plague) comes to mind: all we have is the certitude of the daily round.
Finally, I must plug a repeat on BBC4 starting this Saturday April 7 of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Art of Eternity.
historical process
the bay is frozen up
the trawlers are ice-bound
so what.
you are free.
you can lie down.
you can get up again.
it doesn't matter about your name.
you can disappear.
and return.
that's possible.
a fighter howls across the island.
even when a man dies
letters still come for him.
there isn't much to be lost or thwarted.
you can sleep
that's possible.
the ice-breaker will be here by the morning.
then the trawlers will leave.
the channel they follow is narrow.
it freezes up again by the morning.
so what.
it doesn't matter about your name.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger translated from the German by Michael Hamburger
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach
Not a day this week without severe tube delays on one line or other. At least they did a better job of informing the public about alternative travel options last weekend than the previous. I did, however, spy a staff member at one station hastily scribbling options, his superiors must have known about much earlier, on a board mid-afternoon. Commuters face big squeeze as record one billion cram on Tube, wrote Dick Murray recently in The London Evening Standard. I can't find you a link for this. "An increase of 50 million in just five years. By 2016 it is estimated 25% more people will use the Underground." Peak time seems to extend later and later these days, 19.30 is what 18.00 used to be on some lines.
Transport for London website
Fenchurch St commuters risk lives, revolt and walk the line
A lot of the characters in Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk look as if they’d just spent a nightmare journey on the London tube, as in the other two of Aki’s “The Loser Trilogy", Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past. (Kaurismäki withdrew Lights from the Oscars in protest against current American foreign policy). Koiskinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) works as a night watchman for a Helsinki security firm. His only friend seems to be the girl Aila (Maria Heiskanen) who runs a mobile grill van. His love life is as bleak as the Ruoholahti landscape he inhabits in Helsinki. In a bar he picks up the blonde Mirja (Maria Jarvenhelmi). “It’s crowded here, let’s go somewhere else,” she says. Crowded is the last word to describe that bar or indeed any location in the film. Alas, he’s the patsy “faithful as a dog, a romantic fool” for Mirja’s be suited conniving boyfriend Lindholm (Ilkka Koivula). Many critics have found this film a little lean in comparison to Aki’s others (and it’s only 78 minutes). Lacking his usual editor, he does that as well as writing, producing and directing in this one. But it seems to me he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s almost A Man Without a Presence as if the bluish grey Koiskinen is being drowned in a screen full of saturated Hollywood colour (Timo Salminen, camera) with Mirja as a Hitchcock femme fatale. It’s a fantastic soundtrack as well (not yet available) “Without wings I must remain chained to the frozen earth,” sings Olavi Virta the Finnish tango legend who shares the soundscape with opera tenor Jussi Björling and Argentine Carlos Gardel. If you know the Büchner play and Berg opera Wozzeck about the little guy up against society’s closing walls, you’ll find this ‘deadpan romantic’ in spite of its stark Brechtian look (more Brecht poem than play). A quiet, sad beautiful film, never sentimental with a very dim light at the end of the sewer.
Koiskinen, needless to say, winds up in prison. “I don’t know if sentences set examples or not. I’ve always asked that question, I just don’t know,” says one of the lawyers in the documentary Beyond Hatred. Francois Chenu was a gay man murdered by three skinheads in 2002. The attackers, never seen in the film, went to Leo Legrange Park in Rheims, France, looking for an Arab to beat up but turned on Chenu instead who, when asked, admitted he was gay. They threw his body in a pond where he drowned. Director Olivier Meyrou interviews the Chenu family and friends often over lingering static shots of the park to create a documentary feel rarely seen these days. It’s a meditation: can there be forgiveness and understanding in such a case the film asks?
Interesting to see this in the same week as Days of Glory (Indigènes), another Oscar nominee, about the native North Africans who also believed in Liberté, Fraternité, Equalité fighting for France in WW2 and who were never treated as equals hence the French title ‘natives’. In January, the pensions of 80,000 veterans were raised (frozen since 1959) to the same level as their French counterparts thanks to a screening of the film for French president Jacques Chirac. I’m not a war movie person and it took me a good half hour, after many battle scenes, to get into this. Ultimately, it’s a handsomely photographed but very old fashioned British war movie with a message, though no less compelling for that. Director Rachid Bouchareb holds your attention by really getting under the skin of his characters. I couldn’t help thinking, though, of Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957)that follows a British Army platoon sent to intercept and confiscate Nazi paperwork in a Libyan desert. Quite melodramatic but profoundly existential and one of Godard’s favourite movies. "All men are cowards, in some things," says Richard Burton’s Leith to his girl Jane in Bitter Victory. And you wish Bouchared had created more shadows of existentialism in his script. Would the film have had the same success if it had? Possibly not.
What would an Alan Bennett script for Days of Glory have been like? It certainly made Prick Up Your Ears one of the funniest and unlikeliest best British films of the last, well at least 20 years since its birthday. Stephen Frears (The Queen) directs these mostly anti-social (depending which side of the fence you're on)characters with his usual curiosity. You’d have to be the greatest prudish prune in the world to be put off going to this gay love story of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) in 60’s London. Vanessa Redgrave gives one of the sexiest performances of her career (I’d just worked with her back then) as Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay. And every shot by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton looks as if they’ve spent the whole week getting it perfect.
It took me a while to catch up with Sleeping Dogs but it's politically incorrectness makes it really funny. Aki Kaurismäki’s hero should have met up with an Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton)who admits she once pleasured a canine. Written and directed by Bob "Bobcat" Goldthwait of Police Academy fame it's tone is absolutely that of American indie film. His use of accordion music is cheesy but perfect. Great date movie to sift the wheat from the chaff!
Travelling even further back in British time, BBC 4 had some fascinating documentaries this week about the BBC’s controversial Director General (1927-38) Lord Reith, a Scotsman. Ironically, he was never a great advocate of the new medium of TV. He may have had a difficult nature but he’d have made an interesting choice for getting London transport in order. When asked of his failings he reflected that he should have been more tolerant of the average in human ability. He felt a task could be achieved in 5 minutes rather than the average hour it took most people. Raises a lot of poignant questions about success, ambition and achievement in British society. Another irony is that without that average there would be no celebrity gazing, Big Brother, talent and makeover shows. As Lord Reith found out to his cost, you can never win that battle. His critics saw him as arrogant and over-ambitious. The picture you get from these documentaries, though, is that of a man who truly believed he could win a battle against the world’s mediocrity and bigotry. The doctor’s motto in Camus’ existential La Peste (The Plague) comes to mind: all we have is the certitude of the daily round.
Finally, I must plug a repeat on BBC4 starting this Saturday April 7 of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Art of Eternity.
historical process
the bay is frozen up
the trawlers are ice-bound
so what.
you are free.
you can lie down.
you can get up again.
it doesn't matter about your name.
you can disappear.
and return.
that's possible.
a fighter howls across the island.
even when a man dies
letters still come for him.
there isn't much to be lost or thwarted.
you can sleep
that's possible.
the ice-breaker will be here by the morning.
then the trawlers will leave.
the channel they follow is narrow.
it freezes up again by the morning.
so what.
it doesn't matter about your name.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger translated from the German by Michael Hamburger
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