Infinity

Five years to London’s Olympics yesterday. That should be fun if the floods continue every year, and this dismal Decemberish weather is a permanent apocalyptic cloud chaque Juillet. Transport’s still a nightmare in the capital. Tried saving a few pennies the other day by catching a bus to and from home to the West End. Bollocks to that! Waited 15 minutes, then the horse-drawn vehicular was only going half way (an extra £1 on the Oyster card in order to continue the journey I suppose) so I gave up and got the tube instead. And I shan’t inflict my housing woes upon you beyond a sentence (too shattered to compose an Alexandrine). But now the Housing Association (bit like the US co-ops) is portraying me as Anthony Perkins in Psycho, only I use water to terrorise my neighbours. Never mind the crap subcontracted plumbing work and lack of proper sealant. No. I suppose I did rain dances in my room to cause the floods as well! Wish I had a voodoo doll. It’s OK to use crap, by the way, ‘cause it’s used in The Simpsons and its rated PG - more of those yellow animates Bart and Homer later. Bullshit’s OK too, ‘cause it’s in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (PG too) - about the most commendable thing in the movie, at least the half I stayed for.

I stopped my rain dances this week and
(15th Raindance Film Fest is Sept 25-Oct 7 with a fantastic jury this year including Iggy Pop and Mick Jones)
after meditating on a preening pelican in St.James’ Park for an hour, dragged myself to a free donut and preview of Sherrybaby written and directed by indie American Laurie Collyer. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Sherry who, out of the clink (slammer) after drugs offences, gets a second chance to cleanup her act in the Genesis programme. I really wanted to like this Sundance mentored movie, but can’t honestly say I did. If you’re the person who sees an indie film maybe only once a month or so, then you might be OK here. And not that Gyllenhaal isn’t great in the part. But what comes across is Gyllenhaal (and we see a lot of her fantastic naked body as she manipulates the men in the system) acting a drug addict. The script may be based on a true story but it isn’t that surprising or nasty. I haven’t had experience of drug or prison programmes (there goes my street cred) but I have had to live with people in shared and so-called supported housing that under normal circumstances I would never choose or accept. The neighbour harassing Sherry for simply making a phone call as she attempts to win back her daughter “You think you’re too good for us?” rings very true. “It’s like being in prison all over again, I can’t stay in that place,” Sherry pleads. Really fine cast, though, and particularly the little daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins).

A film you won’t have heard much of is The Minus Man (1999)produced by now defunk New York indie outfit The Shooting Gallery and just out on Optimum DVD. Hampton Fancher, writer of Blade Runner, has directed his own script about a blondish ‘guy-next-door’ serial killer Vann (Owen Wilson) who rents an upstairs room from a couple (Doug: Brian Cox and Jane: Mercedes Ruehl) in a West Coast seaside town. Junkie (Sheryl Crow) is his first victim. He’s befriended by Ferrin (Janeane Garofolo) his new work mate at the post office. “You know why in the old days sailors and fisherman never learned how to swim?” he asks her as they look out over the cliffs, “Because if you knew how to swim it would take so much longer to drown.” This is a really fantastic, honest, depressing film that weaves a tapestry with all shades of grey. Doug and Jane’s relationship has never been the same since their daughter became estranged. “You’re the daughter now,” says Cox’s character to Vann. Vann is shadowed in his hallucinations by two cops who almost taunt him with the dark side. The ending is a chilling, bizarre liberation for all concerned. Marco Beltrami’s score with Bryony Atkinson’s haunting songs is available on Varese Sarabande.

Another dysfunctional family is the documentary subject of Running Stumbled showing at the ICA when director John Maringouin returned home in 2002 to suburban Terrytown, Louisiana after 30 years. Shot on DV and Super 8, his acknowledged influence was the Maysles Brothers’ observance of reclusion and decay in Grey Gardens. Here, the home is lathered with his dad’s art work from years ago, while his stepmother lies in bed prattling and rattling with pills. Their daughter committed suicide. In the end, the irony is that New Orleans’ hurricane Katrina brought them a new house. Maringouin is an actor who made the documentary Just Another Day in the Homeland (2003) about American apathy during the Iraq war invasion. DV docs about families aren’t easy to successfully bring off but this one does with the sad humour of an old music hall.

Another must see depressant DVD release is a restored B/W print of Lord of the Flies (1963) based on William Golding’s novel. A plane load of school boys crashes on a desert island and they slowly turn feral. Directed by Brit world theatre guru (then as now) Peter Brook (now sort of exiled in his Paris theatre Bouffes du Nord), the film has one of the most fascinating audio commentaries I’ve ever heard. None of the crew, including cameraman Tom Hollyman, had ever made a feature and all cast were non-professional. According to Hollyman Brook’s favourite phrase was “what if we were to...” Brook wanting to achieve a documentary reality for the fictional realisation. “The book is not pessimistic about mankind but about culture and civilisation and what we call education,” says Brook. “Man, in his nature, has the finest and the worst.” Incidentally, Brook’s assistant director Toby Robertson gave me my first London job acting on the West End stage with Vanessa Redgrave and Tim Dalton. And interestingly, when the kids in the cast were asked if they thought other kids their age should be able to see the film (given an X rating by censors) they said no. “The horror is there is no longer any horror as you watch the news,” says Hollyman at the end of the commentary.

If I ever receive my copy of the If (1968) DVD from Paramount I’ll let you know (after requesting it many times...the independent distributors with the least resources often give the most help). Commentary by Stephen Frears, apparently. Directed by left-wing disgruntled humanist Lindsay Anderson, it’s about Brit public school (i.e. private school) kids blowing up a school. They didn’t even have to visit a desert island. Sorry to name drop again, but Lindsay, now dead, was a difficult but very generous man. I once gave him an unsolicited documentary style script, written by a colleague, about the falsely imprisoned Birmingham Six bombers and it was swiftly returned with detailed notes on every page.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s pessimistic existential world got a DVD outing last month (budget price no extras). He was criticised for making films during the WWII Occupation with a German company he’d been associated with pre-war, in particular Le Corbeau (The Raven). He wasn’t supposed to have been very nice to actors either. But The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur, 1953) really gets under the skin of desperados at the edge of the world. (Hitchcock unsuccessfully tried to buy the rights to Georges Arnaud’s source novel.) In a desolate Latin American town, four greedy men are hired to ‘Russian roulette’ wheel two trucks of nitro-glycerine over mountainous terrain to help extinguish oil well fires. It’s a 144 minute film that takes a whole engrossing hour to establish its characters before they embark on the task. The print’s a lot better than the one I remember seeing at the cinema years ago, too. I’d be great, too, to see a decent DVD transfer from somebody of his first feature, the bleak1y humorous 1942 L’Assassin habite au 21 about a serial killer. But we do get is, Quai des Orfèvres (1947- literally street of goldiggers/prostitutes) with Inspector Antoine (French stage legend Louis Jouvet) as a Columboesque cop traipsing the seedy music halls and hookers.

Optimum also just issued a must have Alain Delon set, the French star with the beautiful but dangerous face. I mentioned Melville’s Un Flic last time, but it also includes the gloriously restored print of Plein Soleil (remade as the 1999 The Talented Mr.Ripley) and based on Patricia Highsmith’s book. Music by Nino Rota. Say no more. There’s also Antonioni’s last B/W film L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) that includes an interview with critic Jose Moure.
Criterion US DVD
His take on Antonioni is less existentialism but more “he films the death, a petrification, of time through the transformation of space.” I’d agree with that. Antonioni films figures trapped in a landscape slowly being consumed by it. In his famous English language film Blow-Up (1966) the photographer becomes obsessed with extracting what he saw in the park’s terrain by constantly enlarging the image. In L’Eclisse there’s the socio-economic background. As the stock market crashes, Monica Vitti embarks on an affair with Delon the broker. In the final minutes of the film is the newspaper headline of L’Espresso ‘The Atomic War’ as the camera prowls the streets, not as a predator but as an insidious fog.

The surprise of the Delon set is Alain Jessua’s Traitement du Choc (Shock Treatment, 1972) in which Annie Girardot (a huge French star at the time) visits a Brittany (?) island rehab health clinic the Devilers Institute run, of course, by doctor Delon. Apparently at the time, French girls fainted at the sight of a naked Delon running along the beach and his butt entering the waves. Without giving the plot away, Girardot discovers that the clinic hides a dark secret beyond the seaweed steaks that facilitate its clients juvenescence. Reminded me a bit of Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety but with bleak satire not humour and without Delon being a hero. He gets away with it, though: how very lifelike. Frank, funny interview extra with director Jessua too, “They [French film industry] saw me as a UFO.” I bet they did.

And what do we make of the new Harry Potter movie (HP and the Order of the Phoenix) and The Simpsons Movie? Well, for a PG movie the latter is pleasantly anarchistic with only a few saccharine bits for the more pinky boys and girls. HP is 12A certificate and hopefully puts to bed New Labour’s ‘everyone has equal talent’ crap [sic]. I’m not an expert in either genre - a few eps of The Simpsons occasionally, and I’ve never read an HP. Have seen the rest of the HP movies, though, and this, the fifth, is by far my favourite. “If it’s just you alone you’re not as much of a threat,” says a mesmerising Irish albino girl to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) who’s been suspended (or rather set up) from Hogwarts magic school pending a formal hearing. [I know all about that (hello my former Iyengar Yoga Institute)]. The divide and rule of the dark arts is definitely order of the day here. Director David Yates has been a bit of a lefty director over the years, and has really given this HP some spunk, even if it isn’t always subtle and there’s a bit of a lull half way through for novices like me. The entrance to the Ministry of Magic is a huge Orwellian galleria, Michael Gambon’s Big Brother looming aloft. The newspaper headline of the Daily Prophet malevolently changes in front of Harry’s eyes like a covert government hacker playing games with your mind and computer. “Nothing’s pulling the carriage,” says Hermione (Emma Watson) to Harry, though he knows and sees quite clearly better through his glasses. This movie must be so empowering for kids young and those of heart old. The revolution is open to all without exception, but you must work hard for it against the lazy dark forces, is the message. And what a message. Those kids from Lord of the Flies really learnt something from that desert island experience in not wanting other kids to see that film.

The Simpsons Movie has Homer causing environmental chaos by dumping his pig crap in the Springfield lake. Great excuse for the federal government and President Schwarzenegger “I was elected to lead not to read” to try out their new isolate and control (I mean save) environmental protection dome. Homer and family, meanwhile, have hot-tailed it to Alaska but return to save the day. Who cares if the film’s not a total masterpiece? It’s composed and played by master musicians, has revolutionary tunes aplenty, and like Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, where all the instruments gradually sneak off by the end, it’s the composer who really has ultimate control and not the Emperors with their new clothes. Except here it feels like the Springfield Symphony Orch is banging out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture against the Simpson family’s revolutionary fff Beethoven.

A lot of the Royal Albert Hall BBC Proms are on BBC Four, by the way if, like me, you can’t always face the crowds at the real thing. But it is a live experience not to miss. And only £5 to hear the best musicians in the world.
Richard Fairman's guide to surviving the Proms
American readers must get their Brit friends to send them DVD’s. Ozzie ex-Berlin Phil violist Brett Dean’s BBC co-commission Vexations and Devotions was stunningly inventive and contemporary with its call centre “we know you are waiting, your call is important to us” electronic sprecht gesang, orchestral textures of monotonous ringing telephones, and the Oz kids mixed choir Gondwana Voices (who all paid their own way to visit Europe) who are better than any Vienna Boys Choir with their faultless juxtaposed intonations and quiet mousy squeaks against high violins. Contemp music flame thrower David Robertson was steering the BBC Symphony Orchestra fire truck.

A week earlier, John Eliot Gardiner with his Monteverdi choir and English Baroque soloists had South African kids Buskaid Soweto Strings playing and dancing to his Rameau opera excerpts after the witty ‘I’m just a coat-hanger’ choreography of Compagnie Roussat-Lubek. Way to go Sir John.