Sehnsucht/Seligkeit (Longing/Bliss)

Here am I in my little websit with England struggling to maintain its veneer of economic and social calm, the country's fifth largest mortgage lender Northern Rock having been bailed out by the Bank of England. I can't even get my Housing Association and its contractors to finalise basic plumbing to my flat without the rumblings of war shaking my soul asunder. A microcosm of England today? Northern Rock savers showed little faith in government assurances and withdrew over £2 billion in a few days. Given the government's broken promises over the years (remember the pension fund debacle?) it was hardly surprising. And in fairness to Northern Rock, it did only what everyone else in the country had been doing all along. Northern Rock just gambled with higher stakes by borrowing heavily (75%) from wholesale markets (i.e. other banks). (Channel Four news as always, had the most incisive coverage). In his Brighton conference speech, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell chastised the government for, among many other things, allowing personal debt in the UK to reach £1.3 trillion. Spend, spend, spend on the good ship Rule Britannia and hope global warming melts those icebergs!
Housing boom near end (FT)

I had a jovial chat with iceberg voyeur architect Will Alsop the other night "by 31 you give up on ideas, by 41 you give up on opinions, and by 51 you give up on notions". Well anyway, that was the gist after some vino. His archi-sit at Chelsea Space evokes his new hotel project honed from the trees and earth of Malaga and far away from any icebergs. Mandatory transport will be by mule. A business partner of Alsop's chastised me for my notion of dubious freedom of speech in Britain. I guess I'm neither 51 nor even 41. I'm sure the daily freedom of anyone connected with Dispatches docos is undoubtedly unquestionable. Particularly the recent one on the finances of London's 2012 Olympics by Anthony Barnett. Another martini anyone? Shaken or stirred? And again, in fairness to Lord Coe (the former athlete and spearheader of the Games), his personal capitalisation on the back of his Olympic job is no different to what anyone else is doing in the country either. Only, his is on the back of public money. I'd stick to hedge funds if I were he. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Dispatches revealed a 2004 KPMG report stating that there was a 30-40% budget shortfall. Currently a £1 billion budget shortfall (three times the original costs). I'm sure Northern Rock savers would be only too glad to assist :) There was also an amazing, inspiring and quite depressing doco (not Dispatches) about Morgan Stanley chief of security at the World Trade Centre Rick Rescorla The Man Who Predicted 9/11. Probably one of the eeriest 'I told you so' stories in history.

A strange and interesting take on the German financial psyche is Yella, written and directed by Christian Petzold. On the surface it resembles social realism, but in essence is more like a ghost ship leering out of the fog at the jolly Rule Britannia. Yella (Nina Hoss) leaves her dad and small eastern German town for job prospects in Hanover. A car accident with her obsessive ex-husband time warps the film whence an ousted exec Philipp (Devid Striesow) takes on Yella as his assistant in venture capital. The feeling of sehnsucht (longing) pervades this film and director Petzold states his interest in ghost towns and people "who have wanted a little too much and who are now on the outside...no longer belonging...of American ballads that convey being on the road."
We must look at 'root causes' of gun crime
Westerns and the 'way of the gun' have certainly stood out from the pack the last week or so in film and DVD. Aside from the rise of London gun crime, of course. (Worth checking out Dogwoof's release of Tough Enough, the debut film of German actor Detlev Buck, for his perceptive take on Berlin mean streets and their effect on a 15-year-old.) Optimum has four Western Classics Vol.2 and three Sam Fuller Classics. The breathtaking widescreen Fuller prints are the same as those for the US Fox releases though House of Bamboo (1955) has an audio commentary on the US version. Otherwise Optimum's only extras (budget price) are trailers that prove just how dullish the prints were before restoration. Bamboo concerns a gang of ex-American GI's in Tokyo infiltrated by undercover ex-army officer Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack). If the design and colour palette resemble Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965), that's because Fuller was one of the French auteur's heroes, even casting Fuller as himself in Pierrot. Fuller's cold war Hell and High Water (1954) has ex-Navy officer 'gun for hire' Richard Widmark transporting a nuclear scientist to Alaska in his submarine. He's investigating goings-on by the Ruskies and it's all in stunning Cinemascope with the swirling 'Wagnerian' strings of legendary composer Alfred Newman. Fuller's earlier low-budget B/W Fixed Bayonets (1951) is his second Korean War movie. The new US Criterion set has Steel Helmut (1950).

I'm not really a Westerns kinda guy, but I do like my Sam Peckinpah and throughout his career he never faltered from his character driven stories first delivered in Deadly Companions (1961). A brilliant almost 'contemporary music' score by Marlin Skiles (bandoneon [accordion] and guitar) opens with a melancholic ditty sung by Maureen O'Hara over the title credits and another beautiful widescreen print (William H. Clothier, cinematography). Essentially it's a two hander with Yellowleg (Brian Keith) escorting Maureen O'Hara's Kit through Apache territory. He's atoning for his accidental murder of her 9 year-old son in a bank robbery who she wants to bury beside her husband. It's almost the Western equivalent of Italian neo-realism. The others in the Western Classics set cover more familiar ground by other outstanding directors. Seminole (1953) is by the only recently re-discovered Budd Boetticher, whose fans have included Martin Scorsese. There's also another restored widescreen treat in Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James (1957) with Robert Wagner as Jesse. James Mangold's film out last week 3.10 to Yuma (a re-make of the 1957 Glenn Ford pic based on Elmore Leonard and just out on US DVD) fares pretty well agin these classics. But from a director, who made the highly original character-probing Heavy as his debut back in 1995, one expected a bit more Sam Peckinpah soul in his 3.10.

John Ford Collection on Fox DVD Oct 1
Region 1 DVD release of Ford at Fox on 4th December 2007, 24 films – 18 of which are new to R1 DVD.

No soul in Shoot 'Em Up, but Michael Davis' writer/director debut is a tour de force of scripting wit and originality. I loved every minute. Who couldn't with a 'What's up doc?' carrot munching Clive Owen outshooting Paul Giamatti's unfit bad guy to save bellissima Monica Bellucci and a baby (ricochets of Jean Reno in Luc Besson's Leon) all in under 90 minutes? More laughs with Hollywood new kid on the block, although he's probably been writing and eating Chinese for years in his dorm, Judd Apatow this week. I may not have raved about last week's Knocked Up but Superbad, produced by Apatow and directed by Greg Mottola isn't the filthy fun of John Waters, but it'll do very nicely in his absence. For a multiplex audience, there's a wealth of emotional subtlety here amidst the 'American Pie' jokes, and the adult cops are nicely characterised rather than just characatured.

To say Quentin Tarantino made a flop with Deathproof (bombed in the States) is like saying the Pope forgot his catechism. Like Scorsese, Tarantino hommages film history and if he persuades our curiosity to check out his sources, that can be no bad thing. Though many will question whether these sources are worth a braincell at all. In the first half of Deathproof he even post-effects the film to look like the original 70's American exploitation pics as seen in a divey 90's cinema, complete with scratches on the print, jumpy film frames and wonky colours. Kurt Russell is the smarmy, scarred and mean Stuntman Mike who finally squeals like a baby when womanhood get their comeuppance on his bloody antics. But when the Grindhouse double-bill with Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror flopped stateside, Tarantino simply rose from the ashes and just added some more to his part for the European release. As always, a great soundtrack.

Don't miss the 15th RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL trailer (or indeed the festival-starts Wednesday) directed by Kasimir Burgess and Edwin McGill (Australia) about a dirt poor cineaste scraping pennies together to make his 'Lone Rider' western. Their brilliantly quirky short last year Booth Story, about an underground parking attendant adopting an unclaimed egg and the duckling within, won the Diesel sponsored prize to make the trailer.

And what of the much-publicised Brit hope Atonement - wars of the emotions set against the Second World War? I haven't read Ian McEwan's source novel but the film's tone and structure seem reminiscent of Losey's Brit class classics Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1970) with Harold Pinter script adapting. Atonement screenwriter Christopher Hampton has done a fine job I'm sure, but it's not an easy film from which a viewer gains much lasting cinematic weight. Vanessa Redgrave, as always, pierces the screen with her reflective gaze as the ageing Briony interviewed about her novel. But Briony's heinous lie that destroyed the lives of Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and Robbie (James McAvoy) has no atonement for the viewer of Joe Wright's film. Impressive elements all round though particularly from Dario Marianelli's score that avoids the usual battleground bathos of Dunkirk fashioning more of a war requiem from the on screen sounds.



Vanessa Redgrave turns in another great performance in Lajos Koltai's Evening as the dying mother Ann Lord remembering the life and loves of her youth in Newport, Rhode Island one summer weekend wedding 50 years ago. Some of the film's publicity, a little misleadingly, suggests that Evening is based on material by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham (The Hours) when in fact he's the co-scriptwriter with author Susan Minot of her novel. Koltai is a former cinematography and his use of widescreen in Evening is truly breathless and together with a faultless cast and production team (A-list New York indie) you won't be disappointed. But the story is wafer thin aside these elements. The Harris of the story's 'who was Harris?' just isn't that interesting, though through no fault of Patrick Wilson's Harris. I was more curious about the other bloke, the drunken Buddy (Hugh Dancy). But maybe that's the point, as Redgrave's Ann says finally "we are mysterious characters and at the end none of it turns out to really matter."

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (calls himself Joe for ease) gives us the echt Zen effect with Syndromes and a Century. Commissioned as part of the Mozart 250th birth fest New Crowned Hope, this is not an easy film to latch onto to and I certainly felt this the first time I saw it at last year's Times BFI London Film Festival. What's Mozart got to do with it, do with it, you ask? But this is definitely not a second hand emotion when it comes to the Fest films commissioned in Herr. M's honour. I'd been unpleasantly screwed by London transport prior to my second viewing and I emerged refreshed and revitalised from Syndromes. Because of the slow pace and an unrelenting camera almost tripodded with only a few panning shots and sticking to a 35mm lens, the film seems far longer than its 105 minutes. But that's the Zen. Set in a hospital it's basically a love story, quietly and subtly comedic, about the way in which people fall in love. A doctor in her basement office keeps a bottle of stiff beverage in an artificial limb and there's a singing dentist. "I'm interested in the way things change over time, and in the ways they don't change. It seems to me that human affairs remain fairly constant," says Weerasethakul. Let his film envelop you and you'll be richly rewarded, or at the very least, allow you to breathe a little more easily than when you entered the cinema.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul BFI retrospective

And if "Joe" doesn't do it for you then David Lynch might be the answer. His Inland Empire is recently out on DVD, three hours of low res digital video (Sony PD 150, the one used for the dance sequences in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark) with 40-minute takes! There's an extras disc with five interviews; nothing new if you're a Lynch fan but always fascinating and a must have. Mike Figgis interviews Lynch at a cinematographer's fest in Lodz, Poland, Lynch walks biographer Michel Chion through his art exhibition this year at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and there are extracts from the NFT Guardian interview with his fingers conducting his speech like sea anemones. Lynch is a long-time convert of transcendental meditation "a mental teaching that allows any human being to dive within and experience bliss...experience an unbounded ocean of consciousness...modern science's unified field [the origin of all things]". As one interviewer asks "if TM creates positiveness, what about all the darkness that's in the films?" Sehnsucht..seligkeit...