Purgatory

N.B. Pet Shop Boys have an extra London date at the Hammersmith Apollo on June 6. Molly Dineen’s fab doco on British farming Lie of the Land is repeated again tonight on Channel Four’s More 4. And the film Soylent Green is on the BBC in the wee hours of the morning. The TT Races featured in George Formby’s film No Limit are on too in the Isle of Man.
And here's a funky band called Pink Martini to sip Summer vodka with. They played The Roundhouse on their world tour. And this DVD of Ivan Passer's Intimate Lightning sounds great (but I haven't seen it or dealt with this tiny distributor.

The International Olympic Committee(IOC) arrive for tea and biscuits in a few weeks.

Serious concerns have been raised by police over safety and access at one of the Olympic venues.(Video on right hand side)
BBC London News, 30 May 2007

I’ve just learnt that my readership figures dipped a bit last week. Could it be the post-Cannes Film Festival traumatic stress disorder suffered by my industry readers? Or was it the admission that I got drunk and depressed? Absolut verboten! Or the remark agin the Prime Minister and his transport system (hello, doesn’t anyone watch Jon Stewart’s Daily Show no more!) Or perhaps it was the ‘F’ word or the ‘arse’ word. Amazing how prevalent these are in films and TV these days. For example. Magicians (really good in parts, great female casting, but overall a bit slow) was Certificate 15 and had quite a few ‘fucks’, definitely an ‘arse’ but I can’t quite remember about the shove and the ‘hole’. Not that we should all go round with this vernacular

It’s a bit of a week for political correctness films in London. First up, two Australian films (they’ve just had their New York release too). Jindabyne is directed by Ray Lawrence, king of Oz commercials. His adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel Bliss (1985) had a mixed opening reception and we had to wait 17 years for his next one Lantana (2001). A bit like the end of Carey’s novel where the protagonist (a disillusioned ad exec) tries to track down his lost love by planting a tree only flowering every 7 years to attract the bees that make her favourite honey. Jindabyne is based on a Raymond Carver short story 'So Much Water So Close to Home' (also used by Robert Altman in Short Cuts). Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and his friends go on a fishing trip and discover the dead body of an aboriginal girl in a remote stream. Instead of immediately reporting it, they tether the body to a branch at the water’s edge and continue with their weekend. This is a really fine film. If only it weren’t for the ending of forgiveness and reconciliation (if it were Hollywood financed you could understand) but the funeral ending is in the original story. Not that these qualities are necessarily bad, but the beauty of the film (apart from David Williamson’s - no relation to Oz’s most famous playwright – stunning Super 35 cinematography) is its exploration of ambiguities and scapegoating. Jindabyne is the aboriginal word for valley and the small town and its lake were created by flooding the valley. So ghosts and stories of the past loom large in Lawrence’s film. The dead body is a catalyst for igniting all the repressed blame and emotions of the community. I’ve linked to the Oz not UK site as a little matter of protest, (great poster campaign, though). A PR for the distributor Revolver (refused to give her name) ejected me prior to a screening of a Taking Liberties, a doco about UK freedoms after I loudly complained in the foyer of my transport nightmare to get there. It’s OK to be left-wing in Britain so long as you’re quietly so. If you’re loudly so, then you have to be quiet in your loudness. Of course! I must apologise to that PR. I now understand, she was educating me in quantum mechanics dissent.

The second Oz film is Ten Canoes directed by Rolf de Heer, a Dutch Ozzie who works out of the comparatively unfashionable South Australia. De Heer (and Lawrence, to be fair) embodies what’s best about Australian talent: that ability to see the wood for the trees and really appreciate that bark. He lets these aboriginal characters be alive and present though most of the film is about the past, acting as more a facilitator for their stories. David Gulpilil (Roeg’s 1971 Walkabout) is the English-speaking narrator in a mostly non-professional cast (it’s the first Aboriginal language film hence subtitles) and the inspiration for the film originated in the photographs of Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson. It’s set in the Northern Territory and is a bit of a comedy about a bloke desiring his brother’s wife. The film looks stunning (Ian Jones) and it’s no coincidence that some of the world’s best cinematographers are Australian with that amazing contrast of light and death in the landscape. The importance and uniqueness of a film such as this cannot be overestimated in the history of Oz film and indeed political culture.

Time Magazine article on Rolf de Heer

Aborigines mark the day they became 'humans'
Aboriginal lives: Lilla Watson & Tiga Bayles
Interviews with the indefatigable Oz Exec Producer of Ten Canoes and fount of most film wisdom Sue Murray.

Rolf de Heer interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves. Thursday’s edition has a spot on the financial plight of the BFI’s publishing arm as well as John Boorman's new film. Optimum have his first feature out soon on DVD. The legendary John Calder is also being squeezed by the booming economy.
Waterloo's Calder Bookshop to close
Charade is calling for London volunteers to ‘memorise’ their chosen item of cultural history. Maybe the end really is nigh....better sort out your Donnie Darko giant rabbit coffin now.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted

Finally, Black Gold, one of Dogwoof’s biggest releases (9 screens- big for a Chihuahua distributor), is out next week. After oil, coffee is the largest trading commodity in the world with sales in excess of $80 billion per year. This coffee doco by Nick and Mark Francis hits you like its eponymous subject. An average coffee farmer receives less than 3 cents for a $3 cup. Black Gold’s Danny Glover is Tadesse Meskele who manages the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, an organisation trying to bypass the exploitative middle-men and give the union’s 74,000 members a better deal. A 1% increase in Africa’s share of world trade would generate $70 billion per year, five times more than the continent currently receives in aid. All the coffee multi-nationals declined to partake in the doco and it’s a shame the directors weren’t a touch more Michael Moore-ish in their quest, because just as in Hollywood, not all of the big dogs and Starbucks honchos are scumbags. But it’s one helluva mountain to climb and be careful of those treacherous North-left faces.

How to survive our fast-food world A Times article about Eric Schlosser and his book Fast Food Nation.