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.
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