Wednesday 24 December 2008

additions to last posting and those horrid spelling mistakes corected!
Hippy Holidays!



Outrage as ambulance gets parking fine - Paramedic gets parking ticket for picking up medical supplies.
20th anniversary of Clapham rail disaster but are trains any safer today?
Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails delves into the Beeching Report of 1963, which led to the closure of a third of the nation's railway lines and stations.
Beeching's Tracks
Orangutans learn to trade favours
And energy conscious in France are switching off neon lights.

Lana Vandenberghe saw files in her job at the Independent Police Complaints Commission that made her feel that the facts of the Jean Charles de Menezes were being misrepresented to the public. Her decision to take a stand and leak the story to the press would change the course of the investigation and contribute to the pressure on Sir Ian Blair to resign, but it would have huge personal consequences for her.

Ian McKellen's King Lear to ring in the Christmas cheer for Channel 4.
Also available on Metrodome DVD with interview extras.
Sir Laurence Olivier as Lear and much more Shakespeare on More 4: Othello, Macbeth and Richard III.
Casa Verdi in Milan was founded by Giuseppe Verdi as a home for retired singers and musicians from the Italian opera. Although the royalties from Verdi's work ran out some years ago, the home carries on, with Swiss director Daniel Schmid making a great film to seek out on DVD Tosca's Kiss (Il Bacio di Tosca -1984).

And Mandy Patinkin who featured recently in the indie film Choking Man sings from the musicals in January. I remember him many moons ago in Sondheim's Sunday on the Park with George on Broadway. Children Will Listen.
And a repeat of Front Row 's interview with the great Elaine Stritch.

[Saturday December 27, 2008]

Mandy Patinkin is probably best known to the world through his swashbuckling in genre-bending The Princess Bride (1987). The extras on this 2-disc The Special Edition out on Lionsgate DVD (Region 2) date back to MGM’s 2001 re-release (the film only really became a classic hit after its initial VHS release) – separate audio commentaries by director Rob (This is Spinal Tap) Reiner and the book’s author and screenwriter William Goldman, and a rather thin 45 minutes of extras on Disc 2. The uninitiated must buy (or at least rent) this joyous film. Robin Wright Penn (then un Penn’d and 19 years old) says it’s the only film that doesn’t lose her childrens’ interest after 10 minutes. The struggles to make a film (shot almost entirely in England) of the book (1973) are all detailed in the commentaries though Goldman almost looses you as a listener as he becomes totally engrossed in a film he hasn’t seen for 15 years: “I have to watch this, I’m sorry...I never watch what I write [nor] read what I write...Nobody has the least idea of what is going to work [in the movie business]...a total crapshoot.” Every performance is a gem including Brit comics the legend Peter Cook (guess which Rabbi in Chicago on whom Goldman based the reverend’s character?) and Mel Smith. Then there’s Wallace Shawn and the comic genius of Billy Crystal who reminisces on the wrestler Andre the Giant (Andre Roussimoff who dies in 1993 aged 47): “he said to me he loved walking with the animals [in the woods of his farm] because they don’t look twice at you.” The same reason he loved making the film. It was special for Patinkin too as he revenged the films’ 6-fingered villain: “I killed the cancer that killed my father; for a moment he was alive and my fairytale came true.”
Flicker Alley in the States has issued a DVD set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer
Griffith Masterworks 2 out on Kino DVD in the States

Eartha Kitt has just died.
The Independent obit

I saw her perform in very intimate surroundings 8 years ago in New York and I’m sure those lucky and savvy enough to see her performances in London last summer were equally mesmerised by this C20th legend. Remember her rendition of Toujours gai from the musical of Archy and Mehitabel?
And British playwright Harold Pinter also died of cancer at Christmas. Front Row special on Dec 26.

To cheer our post-Christmas blues is The Rutles All You Need is Cash: 30th Anniversary Edition – a 1978 Beatles mockumentary written by Eric (Spamalot) Idle born long before Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap. Fantastic extras as always from Second Sight including an audio commentary from Idle, whose character opines The Rutles musical genius sitting à côté de swimming pool in Los Angeles: “elevated them from essentially Alpha exponents of in essence merely Beta potential harmonic material into the prime cultural exponents of Aeolian cadenza cosmic stanza form.” Also learn from Idle’s commentary why God must have been a Beatles fan! Fun Neil Innes songs (Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band), fun cameos (Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, a very young Bill Murray, John Belushi), fun, fun, fun.
If you liked that film try The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970, DVD) with Peter Cook.
BBC Radio 4’s The Last Word (Dec 19)– folk-blues guitarist Davey Graham obit

Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists at the Royal Academy will also bring post Christmas joie de vivre if not cheer.
Isabelle Maeght co-runs the Fondation Maeght, the renowned art collection set up in the south of France by her grandfather, Aimé, during the 1960s.

Or if you’re anti-boyband badboy smoke in some of GSK round the back of the Academy. William Burroughs and much much more. Respectable fathers can browse the bookshop and let their hair down into their wallet and the ‘radical’ CD’s of Tom Waits and the likes. Definitely for the Brits that rather not be cheered up. A cultural panoply of Brit democratic musical culture showed in a repeat of BBC 3’s The Most Annoying Pop Songs We Love to Hate (100 of them on Christmas Eve). But the latest Wallace and Gromit – A Matter of Loaf and Death screened BBC2 Christmas evening did get 14 million viewers – more than even the soap EastEnders or Dr. Who. So there’s hope for the world after all I guess.
Creating space for contemporary art (Financial Times)

Sunday 21 December 2008

they jest at scars that never felt a wound


Sculpture and photo as always and for ever copyright 2008 Andrew Lucre

Green inquiry officer apologises for Tory slur
Police reveal failings in MP's arrest
Damian Green arrest 'like Mugabe's Zimbabwe'
Q&A: Damian Green arrest

More than 200 people attended a service to mark the 10th anniversary of the Clapham Junction rail tragedy, the last time such a memorial will be held.

Barclays boss: banks should say sorry in (Monday 22 December) Panorama: The Year Britain's Bubble Burst
Now let me find the The Sunday Times link to the 'cash for honour's Labour debacle to even up the odds for George Osbourne. Fair's fair.
Donorgate: 10 Labour bosses knew
However, does anyone remember a lead article in The Sunday Times Jan 15, 2006:
Revealed: cash for honours scandal

Remember: author Ian Sinclair had planned to unveil his new book Hackney, That Red Rose Empire at Hackney Library. But the talk was cancelled by Hackney Council on the grounds that Sinclair had been critical of the London Olympics.

Toyota sees first operating loss ever since 1937 as sales slump


And as most major businesses seek government handouts and 'go on welfare' now's the time to re-cap New Labour's policies that will see some needy probably die over the festive season. That'll reduce the numbers nicely: the government recently announced its “revolution” in welfare reform. The DWP's technology strategy is one of the government's largest and most complex. The Employment Support Allowance, which is to replace the Incapacity Benefit, will go live at the end of October - and with it the £295m technology programme to run it.
James Purnell MP, and Work and Pensions Secretary outlined his ‘vision’ on BBC TV’s The Andrew Marr Show: transcript, (there’s also video of Conservative opposition leader David Cameron on Tory tax plans).
James Purnell's reforms of incapacity benefit are inspired by a US company with vested interests and a murky record. Now, that's really sick." (The Guardian, March 2008). "In the US, Unum claims management had been coming under increasing scrutiny. In 2003, the Insurance Commissioner of the State of California announced that as a matter of ordinary practice and custom, it had compelled claimants to either accept less than the amount due under the terms of the policies or resort to litigation. The following year, a multistate review forced Unum to reopen hundreds of thousands of rejected insurance claims. Commissioner John Garamendi described Unum as, "an outlaw company. It is a company that for years has operated in an illegal fashion".
Purnell, Blair's true heir? (The Guardian,17/3/08)

Perhaps in these troubled times the Japanese film Love and Honour (Bushi no ichibun) (trailer)should get a ‘look-in’. It wasn’t widely praised by Brit crits on its release last week except for a relatively lone voice in the Sunday Telegraph review supplement that likened it to the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Worth considering geo-cultural boundaries too given that it’s director Yamada Yôji’s 79th film and that he launched in 1969 the world’s longest theatrical film series (48 films) Tora-san. But who he outside of the Japanese audience!? Love and Honour is the final film in his Samurai Trilogy – the first, The Twilight Samurai (2002) was Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Film. If Love and Honour were directed by Ken Loach, the Dardennes brothers or an up and coming ‘realist’ indy US director the film would be bestowed with far more ‘chatter’. These days the ‘West’ is so used to seeing ‘art-house’ martial arts movies e.g. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that a certain déjà vu has set in. But Love and Honour is a slow, simple, quiet, unadorned and restrained film much needed for these economic times both in Japan and the West. Mimura (Takuya Kimura) is a low-ranking food poison taster but this is his unlucky day when he goes blind after eating dodgy shellfish that accidentally found its way into his samurai boss’ lunch. Without spoiling the plot – and it is quite taxing watching the subtitles with crucial plot points easily missed- it centres around man’s desire and greed. It’s a shame the film’s ending didn’t retain more enigma and reflection but it’s the ICA’s Christmas offering and one for which many viewers will be very grateful.

Derek Jarman’s film (1988) of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem oratorio (released on DVD) is according to the film’s producer Don Boyd who supplies a gentle, informative audio commentary: “Jarman’s masterpiece – and I say that knowing a lot of his other films are great films and wonderful films that will last.” Jarman melds the words of the Latin mass with the verses of WWI poet Wilfred Owen and uses his unique visual style to create a “metaphoric cinema”. Boyd notes that the recent transfer from 35mm film to High Definition video creates “a clearer, crisp, constructed atmosphere” that Jarman would have loved. These scenes with silent actors (most memorably Tilda Swinton) are mixed with archival footage with one of the most harrowing segments edited by John Maybury who later also became a director (Love is the Devil, Edge of Love). The opening scene with the old soldier reciting Owen’s verse proved to be the great Sir Laurence Olivier’s final role before his death. Written by Britten (1962)for the post WWII re-building of Coventry Cathedral, a DVD extra documents the oratorio’s recent performance with an Anglo-German mix of musicians in Liverpool Cathedral as part of the city’s 2008 European Capital of Culture.
The Derek Jarman Collection: Sebastiane, The Tempest, War Requiem (out on Reg 1 in the States)

The BBC’s 3-hour The Fallen about Britain’s most recent 300troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was one of the most moving documentaries of the year.

Watching Park Circus’ re-release of White Christmas(1954) makes you realise you’d never seen it properly in the first place – every Christmas on TV thinking you’d seen it all when in fact you hadn’t. Just another old ‘warhorse’ movie you pass over. And you forgot that’s it’s directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). And though not a film to stir as much debate as It’s a Wonderful Life, the script is good (Norman Krasna/Norman Panama/Melvin Frank) with terrific performances and musical numbers that still zing. Cine-cynics may snigger in the corner at the surprise party arranged for the old army general(Dean Jagger), but the the whole shebang can still bring a tear to the eye as cliché is always based on a truth. And Curtiz found that deep vein of humanity.
New York Times film critic recommends the Fred Astaire/ Bing Crosby pic Holiday Inn (1942).

'Don't panic' - comedy classic is restored

Walter's War a drama inspired by the life of Walter Tull who, after years in an orphanage, went on to become a professional footballer and then the first black commissioned officer to lead British troops during WW1.
War Stories is on BBC 2 17.20pm 27 Dec

If you still haven’t found a present for your quietly risqué grandparents then the Dear Ladies TV series out on Acorn DVD is at hand. First broadcast on BBC 2 in 1984, George Logan and Patrick Fyffe were the men who dressed in drag as Dr Evadne Hinge and Dame Hilda Bracket, denizens of a serene English country village. Scripts were written by Gyles Brandreth (who was a Conservative Member of Parliament in thye 90s amongst many other talents and even dressed in suspenders at the Edinburgh Festival) and the comic timing on view is superb if a tad dated. The sexual innuendo and small town shrubbery and prudery take on a new lease of je ne sais crois in the wake of the Pope’s comments on homosexuality.

Britten didn't think much of Puccini, though they shared a love of narrative/pychological orchestration, but the Italian opera composer’s 150th birthday anniversary is currently being celebrated and Axiom Films UK have just released a film version of his 1896 La bohème about the struggling lives and loves of mid C19th Parisian artists. Derek Jarman this isn’t and I half jested with the film’s publicist that it’d be fascinating to see a Wim Wenders version. But director Robert Dornhelm delivers a fairly enjoyable un-cringeworthy experience – and that’s not meant to be damp praise. The arguments over filmed opera are endless – how true to the stage experience should it be or not. And in Puccini’s case even more difficult because he was your man for verismo (real-life) opera although compared to Verdi’s ‘socialism’ he was considered a bit of a wealthy ‘toff’ (he enjoyed hunting too). Yet he was also highly critical of his own work: “All my music till now seems to me a joke, and I no longer like it,” he wrote when composing his final opera Turandot. La bohème is known for its lush soaring melodies and warm-hearted love in a cold uncaring world. In BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, the Royal Opera House’s music director Antonio Pappano describes how Puccini turned the orchestra into a dramatic protagonist and singers relate how 15 minutes of Puccini is more exhausting than a Verdi opera. (BBC Radio 3 have a Puccini season and Pappano conducts the great 1910 opera La fanciulla del West(The Girl of the Golden West) on Dec 27. Dornhelm’s film, though somewhat conventional, does possess this epic sweep as if the lovers are surfing the waves of destiny. And before Turandot, Puccini was planning an opera Fanny based on Dickens’ Bill and Nancy in Oliver Twist. In Dornhelm’s La bohème we get up close and personal though never embarrassingly so and with most singers decently lip-synching. And at the end of the day, most of us would rather die in the waves of Puccini undertow than in New Labour Britain’s social welfare state where the artist must be justified as a viable commodity or else.
'making of' on YouTube but only in German, TV trailer

BFI Metropolitan Opera live relays. Cineworld does them too, but well worth the money to watch opera live in crystal clear High Definition on the IMAX screen with great sound.
And lovers of the mad genius director Werner Herzog might like to know he directed Wagner’s Parsifal (normally an Easter opera) recently in Valencia, Spain.

What angers me about New Labour’s reforms is that if they were really serious about them (i.e. serious about helping people not just catching votes or outsourced contracts) they wouldn’t have allowed the often ridiculous medical assessments to continue. A couple of close friends who initially failed their assessments showed me the questions and ‘Yes/No’ boxes on their forms that bore little relationship to their problems. Here’s what just an hour on the internet dug up, so I guess my ‘Chomsky moment is in’:) Much of this information comes from the website Benefits and Work the encourages people to subscribe for a fee though a lot of their info is freely available. There are some sites that are there for the sole purpose of ‘scrounging’ but these guys seem very genuine about informing people, even going to the trouble of demanding government documents under the Freedom of Information Act. And for the government to say its hands were tied in contractual terms just doesn't wash. Their hands shouldn't have been tied in the first place.

Paris based French IT services company Atos Origin has been one of the fastest-growing IT operations in Europe, having been created by a series of mergers stretching back a decade. Formed from the combination of Axime and Sligos in France, it came together with Origin in 1997. At the time, Origin was owned by Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. They bought KPMG's consulting business in the UK and the Netherlands, and Sema, the Anglo-French telecoms and IT services group, which was previously owned by Schlumberger. That purchase left the group employing more than 46,000 staff worldwide, with almost 5,000 in the UK alone.

Otar Iosseliani’s film Gardens in Autumn (Jardins en Automne) took a 2year hibernation since its 2006 London Film Festival outing but its release this weekend is quite timely. French government minister (right wing conservative? though he could easily be New Labour ‘left’) Vincent (Séverin Blanchet) is booted out of office and we see him enjoy life, though he has to rid his apartment of its racially diverse squatter occupiers. Critics have likened the film to Bunuel’s bourgeois surrealist satire though it never quite goes that far. Iosseliani, originally Georgian and for the last two decades Paris based, is more an observer of human foible rather than its satirist. The protests we hear on the streets and see on the TV seem as energised and espritious as does Vincent rather than suggesting a political statement on class. When the homeless are ejected from his flat he joins them under the bridge on the Seine, “at that point their differences don’t count, they are mortals. They are not angry at each other,” said Iosseliani in an interview. Now, superficially, one could take this statement and the film to purport a ‘liberal right wing’ view of life. Rather, the director seems to be suggesting that we all have our obsessions, some seen by others to be essential some frivolous, but essentially they all boil down to a misplaced energy. “What is important to me is when I show the film to the Russians. They didn’t speak a word of French, and they understood everything, maybe even better than us who are fluent in the language.” If anything, Iosseliani is Checkovian (as in the playwright): Vincent stays in Paris after losing office but his new Paris suddenly seems as distant as are Checkhov’s characters from Moscow. Even to the point where everyone borders on the edge and round the corner and up the path from a wacky Michel Gondry film. (French star Michel Piccoli appears in drag as Vincent’s mother). Perhaps all this became more apparent on a second viewing: where given the current state of the world no one is quite one of anything anymore but like animals our instincts wed us to our burrows while our humanity searches for ‘the other’.
Julie Bertuccelli (assistant director) made a 2006 documentary Otar Iosseliani, The Whistling Blackbird. Be great if that were on the DVD - but it all costs money.
Mark Rowlands book - The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness
A BBC Radio 3 broadcast from April 2007 has historian Theodore Zeldin’s views on happiness.

In 2005 The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) awarded Atos Origin a £500m seven-year contract(originally signed by Sema in 1988, the company Atos bought for $1.5bn in 2003 from SchlumbergerSema) for the delivery of medical advice and assessment services (also to the Ministry of Defence Veterans Agency). The company had just signed a $400m application management outsourcing deal with car manufacturer Renault. Atos’s longer-term aim was to eliminate paper from the DWP system. The contract was extendedable by a maximum of five years under two separate extension clauses: the first for three years, and the second for two years. These took the potential total contract value to in excess of £850m over 12 years. The original deal SchlumbergerSema signed in 1998 was a five-year contract worth GBP305m ($588m) which was extended by two years in 2003.
“Atos Origin will also focus on the recruitment, training, and career development of the DWP’s medical staff to ensure that it retains and attracts medical professionals with the qualifications, experience, and skills needed to carry out such assessments.” The DWP refers over two million cases to Atos each year, and these result in over 600,000 face-to-face examinations.

Atos’s Sema acquisition
and the company’s annual report for that.
Atos has another lucrative contract:
Personal carbon trading goes real time (The Guardian,9 June,08) "Drivers filling up with fuel will, from today, be able to participate in a trial for the world's first real-time personal carbon trading scheme. Up to 1,000 volunteers will be able to use their Nectar shopping loyalty cards at any BP garage to record how much fuel they have purchased - and, as a result, create an electronic record of how much carbon dioxide they will consequently be emitting into the atmosphere." The software and computing infrastructure is being supplied by Atos Origin.
British IT jobs at risk as Euro merger draws closer (2005)
Atos Origin is the major IT supplier for London's 2012 Olympic Games. More deals include a five-year $99m contract to manage desktops for BNP Paribas and a $40m infrastructure hosting deal with Capita.

The minutes of an All Party Parliamentary Group meeting from 16th November 2006 discussing the illness M.E.
This was the last incarnation of welfare reform (the Welfare Reform Bill)headed by John Hutton MP (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions).

Outrageous secrecy as DWP protects multinational
details the government’s total confusion as to whether the intellectual rights to Atos’s software belonged to them or the DWP. ”The DWP has made the astonishing claim that it doesn’t have a copy of the software, used to assess people’s capacity for work, and doesn’t even know, except in the most general sense, how it works.” LiMA (Logic integrated Medical Assessment) is the computer programme introduced by SchlumbergerSema (now Atos Origin).” If most of the cost of developing the software had been borne by the private sector company, why would they give away the ownership?” asks the site.” SchlumbergerSema do not own the copyright of the software,” was Maria Eagle’s reply on behalf of the Secretary of State in Feb 2004.“Sema Group UK...has always held the Lima computer system copyright,” replied the DWP in another letter.

Furthermore on the Work and Benefits website, “DWP doctors are hired on a self-employed basis by a company called Nestor, who provide private medical staff for a range of companies. Nestor are sub-contractors to Atos Origin... what about incapacity for work personal capability assessments? These are carried out at Medical Examination Centres. According to Nestor, doctors have the potential to earn more than £300 a day carrying out examination centre work. They also explain that on average doctors examine 4 to 5 clients within a 3.5 hour period of work in the centres. So a reasonable estimate is that a doctor doing two sessions a day would see up to 10 clients in order to earn that £300. So that’s around £30 a time for incapacity medicals. But the faster the doctor can zip through them – the fewer questions they ask and the less typing they do – the more money they can earn.”

Claimants given mental health therapy by computers“A company called Ultrasis has won contracts to provide computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to claimants in Doncaster and Newham. Benefits and Work understands that claimants with mild to moderate depression, anxiety and schizophrenia will be offered the opportunity to get help from a computer terminal. The software programme, 'Beating the Blues', provides 8 sessions of CBT which uses animation and voice-overs to help 'motivate and engage the user'. According to Ultrasis the treatment results in an 30 additional depression free days in the six months after treatment.”
Tribunal chief slams 'absurdity' of computerised incapacity medicals21 incapacity benefit medical centres axed
“One of the issues that disability benefits campaigners are now particularly keen to explore is whether amongst the assets transferred to Atos Origin were any of the 21 medical centres that Atos is now seeking to close down. Unless the terms of the original contract are made public, the fear that the DWP may now be being asset stripped by the private sector will be difficult to dispel.”

Benefit discs missing for year
Government must learn to curb its enthusiasm
The real cost of contracting out: "Most large government departments have, in one way or another, outsourced large parts of their IT. That is not something you could say of anywhere else in Europe," said David Tait, an executive vice-president of IT services firm Atos Origin, last year. By comparison, Atos Origin was contracted to revamp, not run, France's VAT computer system.” "Whitehall spends just under £5bn on corporate and support services contracts. By 2009 this will have risen to £7.4bn. Some 42% of support services are outsourced, with central government spending £2bn on estate management contracts alone. Most security, portering, mail and catering are provided by private firms."
DWP reviews £4.5bn IT deals (The Independent, 2/7/08) “The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is looking for suppliers for up to £4.5bn-worth of technology deals to run from 2010 to 2015...The replacement of desktop and datacentre management contracts, which are currently held by EDS and BT and will expire in 2010, will be worth about £3bn. But the design and deployment of future applications may be worth up to £1.5bn, and the DWP is following the trend set by the Home Office's identity card programme with plans to sign up a small number of companies to a framework contract of standard terms and conditions, so that new developments can be put together more quickly than the traditional European procurement regulations enable.”
Mental health in parliament
Stand to Reason
Lunatics take over Westminster asylum

Living in England now seems to resemble the artificial life in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (now out on Blu-ray in the States). If the government told you the sun was shining you’d want to get a ladder and climb to the clouds to see if they were real!
The new Tony Towers: Blair buys £4million stately home after Cherie 'fell in love with it'

Monday 15 December 2008

A most secret passage find to the inmost mind


Crime and punishment, forgiveness and perpetual remembrance, pacifism and revenge. Are these feelings any different in London to any other ‘Western’ capital in the world? I can vouch of New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and Berlin with assured comparison and answer Yes: London is different. Very different. As the jury
verdict
in the Jean Charles de Menenzes (the innocent but suspected terrorist shot dead on the Underground some years ago) inquest was handed down I, like many, heaved a sigh of relief. Relief that some justice seems possible in this city. Even for die-hard cynics. And yet equally there was a sense of frustration. Frustration that overall the sensibilities of this city never seem to change.

The Menenzes family doesn’t have that sense of ennui. They will continue to fight and find someone to blame for their son’s death. And in their position I would probably do exactly the same. I certainly feel the same way about many of my injustices. But in England the pot can boil over as long as the house doesn’t burn down. And even then...
The world admires the fact that justice is often seen to be done in England as in the Menenzes case and not plea-bargained by market capitalism. But it’s a long, arduous road to that legal comfort. And if you fall within the middle-class poverty trap then you’re basically stuffed. No free legal aid for you in the UK! The Menenzes jury were told that a verdict of “unlawful killing” would be unacceptable. Yet everyone hearing the judgement handed down knew full well that is what it amounted to.

Initially after the shooting, police spokesmen denied there ever was a shoot to kill policy. Much evidence since shows exactly the opposite: indeed a police officer interviewed on Channel 4 News recently admitted exactly that. Something he would have been raked over the coals for three years ago. And given the state of terrorist alert in the city of London such a policy did indeed have reasonable cause. Scapegoating is always an easy option but often senior members of staff in any organisation should be held to account for their actions. Only death or multiple people being severely injured ever lead to inquiries and inquests. But what about the myriad number of wrecked lives, professions, relationships, enthusiasms all caused by organisational negligence? ‘That’s life’ is usually the only answer for those individuals. Incidentally, Britain is one of the only European countries where students didn’t demonstrate in support of their Greek counterparts over a police shooting. Rather embarrassingly, More 4 News interviewed students at the Kings College London student union bar and most didn’t have a clue about events in Greece.

There was a film loosely based on the Menenzes shooting released by Metrodome in the slowest week of summer, Shoot to Kill. A much quieter, more chilling Ken Loach-like film is yet to be made about this story, though. Or perhaps it should be a comedy/drama with Ricky Gervais (The Office...do we need parentheses any more - Ricky hasn’t been obscured by the mindless more ‘famous’ ‘social networking crowd’?) as a senior honcho manifesting order and control. While all the while a hapless Jack Dee – too bright to be promoted – carries out the commands all along secretly wishing he’d accepted that ‘quick drink offer’ from the ’Brian Paddick’ (the gay policeman/unsuccessful London mayoral candidate) character. Yet only really finding solace in choosing colours for his new tiny one-bedroom flat in Belsize Park (des res North London) painting out of his mind the violence he encounters on Southwark (south London) council estates by day.

Jack Dee’s Lead Balloon still isn’t loosing its advent calendar periodic table even though The IT Crowd won all the Emmys. Or was it only half-a=one as Rick Spleen (Lead Balloon’s character would say) would say. Strange: as a former comedy script reader (I might as well blow my own trumpet ‘cause I don’t trust anyone else’s saliva) Lead Balloon seems more Channel 4 (though it’s on BBC 2) and The IT Crowd (on Channel 4) feels more BBC 1.
The IT Crowd: Series 2 on DVD
Britain sweeps the board at Emmys
BBC One and BBC Two now streaming live online

The world is topsy-turvy anywhere. Who is Mike Leigh somebody asked me the other night! Oh, how times have changed. See
Happy Go Lucky on DVD.

The Man from London (Trailer) is possibly an art house film approach to such ‘Menenzes’ things. A man, a crime, a suitcase of money, the foggy waterfront. Director Béla Tarr is known for his lengthy camera takes, abstruse stories and his latest film is no exception. Most certainly it wraps itself around the viewer fog-like and inescapable. Based on a Georges (the great crime writer) Simenon novel L’Homme de Londres, though not having read it, it’s most probably a brilliant literary adaptation precisely because the film doesn’t try to explain the plot - opting instead to envelope one in the psychological aura of the characters. Shot in breathtaking black and white by director/cinematographer Fred Kelemen, a week later you actually want to see this film again. And the Menenzes connection? What Béla Tarr achieves (directors Jim Jarmusch and Gus van Sant are fans) is a questioning of human motivation, frailty and indecision without external judgement. Someone was obviously murdered, money stolen but human action is usually more translucent than transparent. One’s frustration with Tarr’s film is more one’s frustration with real life. The blood is always going to be there even if you’ve chosen to ignore it. The lead actor’s English dubbing is by James Fox further adding to the gravitas and strangeness.
Interview made during the 12th Sarajevo Film Festival
Renior Cinema in London (20 min),Part 1 , Part 2
Trailer

For many though, this film will move at a pace that not even the laziest London postman would ever consider:
Royal Mail's 4mph marching order gets a postman's knock
The Times

Producer/writer/director Steve Barron’s Choking Man, trailer released by indy UK distributor Soda Pictures (soon on DVD) is a great sensitive date movie for London’s foreign workers who wonder why they bothered toiling away in the first place. Catchy opening titles (Marina Zurkow) and music (Nico Muhly) take us to a diner in New York borough Jamaica where owner Rick (Mandy Patinkin) boasts there are “more languages spoken per square foot than anywhere else in the world.” Performances are strong and while the film never transcends a certain feelgood ‘parochial indyness’ it’s not a film you’ll forget.

No relation is Clark Gregg’s literary adaptation Choke. We’re in surreal Charlie (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Kaufman territory here and if you happen to share that view of the world (which you no doubt do by reading this blog) then it’ll be a zingy experience warming your cockles with weird is good.

After Hunger and Man on Wire (now out on Region 1 Magnolia DVD),Philipp Stoelzl’s North Face almost forms a pre-Christmas trilogy. Retelling the true story of the first successful 1938 ascent of the Eiger North face (the ‘Murder Wall’ of the Alps), I almost left 20 minutes in and was ultimately horrified that I even considered doing so. What begins as a period ‘bio-pic’ with dinner parties etc at the Eiger resort transforms into a harrowing gaze into man wrestling with the indomitable world. The production team consulted on mountaineering with Touching the Void ’s director but I preferred Stoelz’s film precisely because it never ‘pretended’ a documentary reality. In some ways it reminded me of the ‘reality’ von Stroheim tried to create in his 1919 Blind Husbands shown in last year’s London Film Festival (out on DVD). North Face too has ‘love interest’ with one of the climbers’ old flames Luise gritting her smile and penultimately trying to blow the last wafts of life into her beau. And it’s these fictional constructs that make the mountaineering scenes so viscerally devastating and more akin to a horror film than a ‘bio-pic’. All the more so because of the event’s Nazi politicisation. Everything begins so charmingly, innocent and brave and though you know there’s horror looming you’re still whipped back in your seat when it happens. The ‘fiction’ is that you still believe the climbers will reach the summit, and the viewer hangs onto that hope for dear life, even though one knows they will never achieve it.
The many faces of evil (Guardian article)
Sunday Feature: How Far Would You Go For A Dance?: The Puppet Masters
Who Wears the Red Shoes? (21 Dec)

That’s why the award winning Trouble the Water didn’t effect me as deeply as it did for others. So inundated already by reality footage of Hurricane Katrina that Kimberly Rivers Robert’s home video footage of the already poverty stricken 9th Ward devastation just didn’t have the impact it should have for me. I’d already seen on news outlets how bad things were that there remained no ‘fiction’ with which to create a dialectic. Hearing Kimberly’s rendition of her aspiring rap song just didn’t do it for me. Yet it was an event that should never be forgotten. The question is how do you repeat such a story so that you feel the need to hear it again. And again. And again.

Lakeview Terrace is that very rare breed - a Hollywood film handling race and neighbourhood dispute with subtlety, though it never really borders on wonderment. Dystopian writer/director Neil LaBute is a gun for hire here but with scripting ammunition from ‘lift that rock up and see what’s beneath’ Los Angeles playwright Howard Korder. This may not be Shakespeare but there’s more nuanced inflection and observation than you’ll see in your multiplex for quite some time. Again, you expect the worst to happen and it does: mixed-race couple move next-door to single black dad cop Abe (Samuel L. Jackson). What makes the film work as ‘entertainment’ is that you think - that’s me, or that almost was me. Do you be nice to your neighbours or keep a safe distance? Does one have a choice? Is there ever a middle-ground?

What makes the film work as more than just scary entertainment is the character complexity - the friendly white neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) is potentially just as strung out and up tight as the tough cheerie hard-working, single dad Abe. His LAPD precinct is not the leafy-green poolside bonhomie of this middle-class neighbourhood. And there’s an upward mobility that Abe both resents in himself and takes pride in. Is that where his ex-black wife comes in? We hardly see her but she eats away at him until there’s nothing left. Essentially he’s a good man and a good cop – better at least than most. Yet like most of us, if you put up with the shit of ‘the other’ for long enough - whatever race or creed - it starts seeping into your veins. In Abe’s case the Othello catalyst, though not the jealous cause, is Chris’ black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington): that female black power has married white wimpy liberal (he’s management in organic retail). The film’s bitter irony is that neighbourly dispute is exactly what the police have no control over - no control over human disposition. In London noise nuisance is handled by the local council not the police as are other disputes. Not until there’s blood on the carpet or emotional damage done do they/can they step in. Los Angeles is slightly different and the neighbourhood is glad to have Abe ‘on site’ but while they welcome him he’ll never feel ‘one of them’.
Paris mega-rich raise barricades against urban poor neighbours
Demolition of the Aylesbury Estate: a new dawn for Hell's waiting room?
Why wealthy children are giving their inheritance to charity
Malcolm Gladwell interviewed in The Observer

The mix-matched neighbours of Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree (Trailer) are Salma, a Palestinian widow on one side of her lemon grove and the green line border between Israel and the West Bank, and on the other, Israel’s Defence Minister and his wife. The Lemon trees imposition on sightlines pose a security threat but Salma isn’t about to give up on them and takes her case all the way to the Supreme Court. Like Lakeview Terrace, this is a film with broad appeal, tremendous performances, and though you can sense the ending of this one too, it goes a long way in showing how ordinary ‘nice’ non-politicised people can gradually be prodded into activism. Moreover, how simmering hatred has the potential to boil into all out violence.

Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir uses the abstraction of animation to comprehend the conflict of the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war, particularly the massacres of the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps - revenge for the death of Christian Phalangist leader Bashir. Folman fought in that war and his film surprisingly conjures a meditation on memory, loss and retribution. You’d think the use of Schubert in one scene would mire the experience but it only serves for further reflection on the inexplicable. The cavil is the ultimate switch to live-action documentary footage when what we most needed was to remain reflective.
Beaufort giving an Israeli perspective is out on Kino DVD
Syrian wedding lingerie: veils of the unexpected
'Don't call me eccentric' - Vivienne Westwood interviewed for The Guardian
Is water the new oil?

Based on a novel, The Secret Life of Bees (LFF) was probably just too sweet for many tastes in spite of its attractive talented cast but its sensibility is certainly from the hive and not the supermarket.
Medicine for Melancholy, that I mentioned last posting from this year’s London Film Festival (LFF hereon), managed to say far more about racial history, boundaries and transgressions. Wyatt Cenac (better known from his wacky The Daily Show appearances) proves just how good comedians can be in straight roles as they’ve felt the pain but don’t often get to show it.
The plight of the honey bee
A Life in the Day: Gloria Havenhand, beekeeper

Kent Mackenzie's 1961 The Exiles documenting urban native American Indians was restored for this year’s LFF.

A French take, not so much on neighbourly behaviour but certainly about social fencing, was Conversations with My Gardener released in cinemas about a month ago and directed by Jean Becker. Who he? Well not Jacques of classics Touchez pas au Grisbi and Le Trou but Jean who helmed, decade or more ago, Depardieu and Vanessa Paradis letting loose on each other in Elisa, a revealing Isabelle Adjani vehicle in One Deadly Summer (Césars 1984 – French BAFTA’s- for Best Actress), and some Belmondo pics in the 60s.

Daniel Auteuil, originally Algerian, plays a reasonably successful artist (Auteuil’s third wife is a sculptor) maybe brushing for the first time with reality in the form of his gardener (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) who he treats as somewhat of a surrogate brother and is in fact an old school friend. The film passed by without barely a whisper in London but is one of those many French films that oozes with honesty, fragilty and warmth. The ending may seem somewhat contrived yet you wish at least more of the world would aspire to such simplicity. One definitely to catch on DVD for a ‘family affair’. And whoever did the subtitling is a true connoisseur of the English language e.g. the Cockney rhyming slang berk (Berkeley Hunt for cunt). Better than most French expletive subtitling that settles for what often amounts to a lazy equivalent of ‘oh bother’.

Another man coping with loss is Italian actor/political comedian and director Nanni Moretti in (LFFQuiet Chaos (Caos calmo) ), relinquishing the directing job to Antonio Luigi Grimaldi. Everyday a recent widower waits in his car outside his daughter’s school attempting to reassure and comfort her. She learns the meaning of a palindrome, which in a sense, is also the meaning of the film. That life can be read the same forwards or backwards, or in Shakespeare’s words in The Tempest “our little life is ‘rounded by a sleep”. It’s what we do and feel in between that really matters. Or as Zorba the Greek said (or sung in the musical version, yes really): “life is what you’re doing while you’re waiting to die.”

Moretti 2001 interview


More intriguing work from New York writer/director David Auburn with The Girl in the Park (Trailer )and a young daughter Maggie who suddenly disappears from Julia Sandburg (Sigourney Weaver) in Central Park one day. 16 years later wayward teenager Louise (Kate Bosworth) whirs into Julia’s life and strangeness ensues. The film’s eliptical quality and incisive performances shimmer with touches of novelist Paul Auster’s New York.
Manga’s DVD of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - Manga Entertainment is now out.

The Rivals (Les Liens du sang), Optimum stars Guillaume Canet and François Cluzet of the arthouse thriller director and lead actor of Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) that became somewhat of a hit in London. Set in late 70s grey Lyon (setting for Tavernier’s first pic The Watchmaker of St Paul), Canet plays workaday police inspector François obsessed with another man’s wife, whilst Cluzet is his just released jailbird older brother Gabriel trying to go straight. Based on real life characters Jacques Maillot’s film can be quite intense to follow if you know no French and must resort to subtitles. But the DVD is out soon and well-worth one’s attention.

Let's Talk About the Rain (Parlez-moi de la pluie) (LFF) rather divided the Brit critics. (The title originates from a Georges Brassens song lyric, “Fine weather drives me mad and makes me grind my teeth.”)

This is Agnes Jaoui’s third film as actress/director and co-writer (with Jean-Pierre Bacri) and given that, lacks no attention to character detail nor indeed to using the cinematic canvas (she opts for wide-screen Cinemascope to create a theatrical dialectic for the intimacy of the story). Jaoui plays a politician forced to return to her family home and sister after her mother’s death and what is for her a bête noire- the South of France. The sun just doesn’t shine there like it used to in August. If that wasn’t enough, the Algerian housekeeper’s son is trying to make a doco about her for a series of programmes on ‘Successful Women’ saddled with a dull as dishwater producer (Bacri). “The problem is that everyone thinks they’re more of a victim than the next person,” said Jaoui in an interview, “we will have more sympathy for the weak, even if their complaint is unjustified, rather than for the strong who put them in the situation to complain.” “Working 15-hour days for [constituents] who’ll be disappointed anyway,” according to Jaoui’s character Agathe. Great use of music, too.

Also from Artificial Eye and out now on DVD is Couscous (La Graine et le Mulet- The Secret of the Grain) [here’s my blog review some months ago of the film]:
– with the last word a play on the mullet fish and the stubbornness of a mule)- is written and directed by former actor Abdellatif Kechiche and set in the sleepy French seaside town of Sète. Like most cities on the southern French coast, Arabic immigrants and French inhabitants rub along as best they can. Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares) is a 60 year-old divorcee who’s repaired ships all his life, and like Willy Loman, is being forced into semi-retirement or else. But he has a dream to open a restaurant on an old cargo ship in the harbour specialising in the unbeatable coucous cooked by his female relatives. Shot mostly in documentary close-up style with a script that seems effortlessly improvised (but isn’t), this film is surprising gripping even at 2.5 hours. The comparison would be Kechiche’s fellow director based in Marseilles, Robert Guediguian, but Kechiche is funnier, less depressing though no less poignant; Coucous never lectures, preferring to ooze with the esprit and sun of the South. Like Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Couscous is rooted in the precise nature and locale of its characters yet it’s these qualities that allow the film to resonate universally for a wider audience.
Jean Cocteau’s classic 1950 Orphée about the muso who journeys to the Underworld to reclaim his wife from Death is now out on BFI DVD
France on the crest of a new New Wave

The films of Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (still alive and directing at 100 years old) are rarely seen in Britain either in the cinema (not since early 90s) or on DVD. “Oliveira's Portugal is an idea predicated on singularity, isolation, loss, memory and eclipsed glory,” writes Jonathan Romney in his recent Sight and Sound article. During the Salazar dictatorship Oliveira was forced to give up feature filmmaking for 21 years and become a farmer. Like Bela Tarr, Oliveira’s films are an acquired taste but his latest proves he’s never lost his individual sense of cinematic pace. In Belle Toujours, Michel Piccoli reprises his sadistic and vengeful character Husson from Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour. Definitely a film for the cineastes but worth seeking out.

Very different paces from another 100 year-old, as of 11 December, is contemporary ‘classical’ composer Elliott Carter interviewed by the indefatigable Stephen Johnson for BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music in a 2 hour special. One not to miss (but only for 7 days). A French coal-miner on hearing one of his works penned him a letter saying who he thought Carter’s music sounded just like digging for coal.

Highly original French director Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours is out on Artificial Eye DVD and his Irma Vep (Essential Edition) on DVD in the States.

Yet another fine Artificial Eye release Times and Winds is also out on DVD
9th London Turkish Film Festival

Adapted from Émile Zola's novel, L'Argent (1928) is the 40th in Eureka's Masters of Cinema DVD series. Marcel L'Herbier’s silent film is a real treat: transferred at the correct speed (20 frames per second), in a beautiful print and with Jean-François Zygel's intricate piano score.
Some silent films can seem like a moral duty to watch but the 164 minutes of this fly by. Saccard (Pierre Alcover) and his rival Gunderman (Alfred Abel) are the money gods fighting over their spoils in the Bourse (Paris's stock exchange, and L’Herbier filmed on location over one Easter break with dozens of cameras). The aviator Jacques Hamelin (Henry Victor) is the foil in Saccard’s greedy plot to inflate share prices using an oil hoax in Guyana. He then attempts seduction (it’s actually a rape scene!) on Hamelin's wife Line (Marie Glory). Notorious ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ playwright and actor Antonin Artaud also pops up along the way and Brigitte Helm from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis also stars. As always, Eureka’s DVD extras are great: including an inventive ‘making-of’ from the time by 20 year old amateur Jean Dréville Autour L'Argent (40:11) and a 50 min doco Marcel L'Herbier: Poet of the Silent Art along with the 80-page booklet. “Everywhere around me I saw a deep-seated lack of regard for filmmakers at that time,” L’Herbier says in a 1969 interview. “Cinema was an art of the fairground – it’s fine for circuses but not anywhere else.” And as one critic put it L’Herbier wanted his cinema “to endow humanity with an entirely new way of expression ...that should be seen in the context of modern art.” And though some critics have argued that L’Herbier was not so much inventive as more a champion of modern cinematic techniques, yet the excitement of his vision still wipes the floor in comparison to much of today’s Hollywood entertainment.
L'Herbier's El Dorado
The battle for the soul of microfinance

I buy therefore I am


Arguably more innovative than L’Herbier, Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 sound film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is re-released by the BFI. The director claimed that his 360-degree pan of Jekyll turning into Hyde was the first of its kind in Hollywood and even used a recording of his own heart-beat to overcome soundtrack problems. And it’s a film far more terrifying than many a modern horror flic and more on par with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Indeed, in 1935 several cuts to the film were ordered by the censor. “For me, art abhors the obvious,” Mamoulian said in a 1972 interview. “ There is nothing wrong with the appeal to the eroticism in us any more than there is to an appeal to beauty, goodness, to anything of that sort. But then eroticism is always indirect...and much more interesting.” The director also stresses that Hyde is the animal in Jekyll “not the evil but the animal...he knows no evil he simply gives vent to all his instincts...gradually Hyde changes from an innocent animal into a ...human monster, a monster that is part of us but which we usually keep under control...I think the destiny of mankind lies in our ability to control certain basic elements in our nature...we fail to dominate ourselves which is why we have murders and wars.” Extraordinary is not a description one can very often use about a film but Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is most certainly that and in spades. Jean Renoir’s Le Testament Du Docteur Cordelier (1959) fascinating though it is just isn’t a patch on it. Architects, scientists, doctors – everyone will find something in Mamoulian’s film to grip their mind.
Stop using 'dearie', nurses told

Black God, White Devil (1964) (DVD) is Glauber Rocha’s film about remote Brazilians surviving in the country’s 1940 drought with B/W poetry reminding one of Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St.Matthew of the same year. Many deaths occur on their way to the ‘promised land’: “the horses eat flowers, children drink milk out of the rivers. Dust becomes flour..the abundance of heaven.” On the other side of the mountain “the land will become sea and the sea will become land.” A wholesome double-bill with Mr. Bongo’s Cuban release Memories Of Underdevelopment (1968).

Spanish director Albert Serra’s Birdsong (El cant dels ocells) (LFF) follows the pilgrimage of the Three Wise Men to the birth of Jesus with a cast of non-professional actors including Canadian film programmer and critic Mark Peranson as Joseph (he made a feature-length doco Waiting for Sancho about the production). Shot in the volcanic mountains of the Canary Islands it looks stunning in black and white and the pace is often numbing. But it’s a fabulous film with almost a touch of Jim Jarmusch humour at the end. Still no word of a UK release.
BFI interview

Tigrero (1994) (DVD) by Aki Kaurismaki’s Brazilian based older brother Mika follows directors Jim Jarmusch and Sam Fuller into the Brazilian jungle as they unearth memories of Fuller’s aborted 1958 John Wayne/Ava Gardner film for Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox Studios. The opening and closing titles would be “crocodile eats bird, piranha eats crocodile, another bird comes down and eats piranha.” “The story of mankind, not civilisation,” says Fuller. It’s a fascinating tale and as always Fuller is rivetingly opinionated and compassionate. Watching the tribe’s ceremonies Jarmusch notes that “the laughter and joy of their religious experiences is so different to the ‘seriousness’ of Western religion.” Fuller: “In the war [WWII] every dog-face [soldier] was only worried about one thing- death. I never met one that wanted to go to heaven. I never met one in that three years that believed in heaven...the only thing that can save him is that the guy [next to him] gets hit instead of you! There’s nothing wrong with religion- if somebody really believes it and there is a heaven then I think it’s wonderful. So if you can convince me that I’m going to go to heaven and see girls in bikinis [then] you’re going to have a tough guy to convince.”
YouTube: Part 1, Part 8, Part 9

German artist Thomas Demand has a new show in London. His thing is to create simulcrae of reality out of cardboard, photograph them then destroy the models. This time it’s a commission from The New York Times to ‘re-create’ the U.S. Presidential Oval Office. Is their impact greater in singularity than in multiple? Once one shifts the dialectical relationship with one image dispersing it amongst other representations does it lessen the impact of the enterprise? “I look for a way of re-privatisating that which is constructed as a public opinion,” Demand has said. “I wanted to have one image which shows the cause not the effect of an incident,” he said of his 2005 piece Attempt “constructed from photographs of the studio of an artist whom Baader-Meinhof terrorists targeted in the ‘70s in order to blow up the house of the state's prosecutor next door.”
The Independent article

As well as a recreation of Saddam Hussein's hidden kitchen, Demand made a photograph about the destruction of three Qing-dynasty vases by a wayward Fitzwilliam Museum visitor in Cambridge. The museum is celebrating Sir Sidney Cockerell’s centenary, "I found it a pigsty; I turned it into a palace," he declared having taken the helm in 1908.

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni went so far as to repaint reality even grass. Good DVD’s and prints have been hard to come by over the years and Red Desert is now out on BFI DVD (also Blu-ray which I’m told looks stunning)

Caught the last day of Wallace Berman’s very impressive retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre last month. Little known outside his Beat peers he was featured in a Whitney Museum of American Art Beat Generation exhibition as the ‘father’ of Californian assemblage. Peter Blake included his portrait on the cover of Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Much of his work uses an early form of photocopying the verifax with inscriptions from the Kabbalah and his use of these reproductions is often more fascinating than much Andy Warhol. His only film Aleph (16mm) was also screened on a loop.

In February, the BFI are releasing 9 hours of Jeff Keen's 45 short films. A self-taught pioneer of Brit independent film in the 1960s, a preview screening the other night of selections confirmed the BFI National Archive’s interest in him. Do they stand the test of time, though, apart from their historical interest? For the internet generation the innovation of the later video work obviously pales in modern comparison. But some of Keen’s relatively unknown work certainly deserves to be discussed in the same breath as his American counterparts.

GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen

The Street Art Awards in London

Stone of Destiny written and directed by the multi-talented actor Charles Martin Smith tells the true story of four Scots uni students who in 1950 broke into Westminster Abbey to steal back Scotland’s stone symbol of nationhood. The film breaks no cinematic boundaries but the cast is good (Robert Carlyle yet again – does he ever sleep) in a solidly made film that’ll send you out of the pre-Christmas cinema with fire in your sporran. Thank heavens there’s an antidote to the festive ‘credit crunch but biscuits are really OK’ propaganda: denizens with dentures not welcome near the mistletoe.
Tough with the smooth: Robert Carlyle
Edinburgh Film Festival Red Carpet
Scotland's iconic Stone of Destiny is a medieval forgery, claims minister
Times article, opens in Canada Feb 20.
Andre Tchaikowsky's skull was dropped from the RSC production of Hamlet - David Tennant’s ‘Dr.Who Hamlet’. And now he’s off with a back injury disappointing his fans until the New Year. Spooky...

Brit archaeologists have unearthed an Iron Age brain

The living dead

Last chance to see Richard Serra’s amazing sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery by the way. But perhaps the very last word this week should go to Hunter S. Thompson whose life is the subject of Alex (Taxi to the Dark Side) Gibney’s film Gonzo : “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” and “Buy the ticket take the ride. Inspiring advice for Christmas.
Our crazy gonzo life
Alex Gibney in the Sunday Times

One more posting to come before Christmas...the woods are dark and deep..promises to keep...arghhhh..

Thursday 4 December 2008

The gentle giant gave me his beans sighing, “wish every... e..e.e


As Monday night’s 2008 Turner Prize winner was revealed –northerner Brit Mark Leckey', I pondered much about how I was piecing together the next jigsaw of my many cultural rumblings. According to a techno whiz on Start the Week (1 Dec), one of the impossible tasks (and one you’d think was easy) for a computer is constructing a 25 piece jigsaw, which is where quantum computing comes into its own. Like many of his fellow humans, Mark Leckey is involved in what many other humans consider to be the ‘uselessness’ of art. Indeed, even agent art provocateur Mathew Collings deemed this year’s Turner selection “faked braininess” on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row . You can hear Tues night’s (Dec 2) interview on the same programme with Leckey himself. Ironically though for many art novices, Leckey’s work might just be the place to start. We are in a time when nothing in the world seems particularly real, either on TV in the newspapers, in advertising or indeed the act of socialising itself. People would rather have a Facebook or similar social networking relationship than the real thing. When people meet ‘in reality’ the experience is something akin to the idea of simulacra - not originated by but certainly promulgated by Umberto ‘Name of the Rose’ Eco in his ‘waxworks’ essay. When confronted by an original rather than a representation of the person or object, people are ‘disappointed’ because of the déjà vu (already seen). Now many will say what utter rubbish I write. And many of those nay-sayers will be the ones who would rather email a colleague than walk the 20meters down the office hallway stretching their legs in the process. They are on a conveyor-belt of commodity culture, Henry Ford’s dollarisng democratisation. As the great Walter Benjamin pointed out in his unfinished Arcades Project of the early C20th,“commodities were appropriated by consumers as wish images within the emblem books of their private dreamworld.” He goes on to cite the French poet Baudelaire, “he showed not the commodities filled with private dreams but private dreams as hollowed out as the commodities.”
BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves (Wed Dec 3) has an interview with French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy

Turner Prize 2008: runners and riders
The Guardian report
Young British sculptor Roger Hiorns transforms a south London council flat.
The man who made Vermeers: Han van Meegeren was one of the greatest art forgers of the 20th century
Outrage in Venice as giant ads smother cultural jewels
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle’s London Film Festival’s rousing closer, opening in January):
Film-makers driven to spend a mint removing car brand from slum shots

Akin to the animated film character WALL-E (DVD), Leckey is sifting through the ruins and detritus of our society past and present: “dynamic questionings of the connections between surface and dimension, appearance and self-determination, location and presence,” thus spakes the Tate’s catalogue essay. And while this could said to be true of most interesting art, in Leckey’s case it is actually worth saying. An early work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) is sourced from TV and fansites about UK’s underground dance culture. Parade (2003) is his take on high street commodity. One of his latest works in the Tate show Cinema-in-the-Round (2006) takes the form of him filming his own art lecture with its musings and collaging of images and ideas from Homer Simpson, Felix the Cat, and artists including Philip Guston and Baselitz. Are you really seeing or simply believing what’s on the can and labels in the art museum?
Are virtual worlds destroying the brains of children?
The death of a Wal-Mart worker who was crushed to death by a crowd in a Thanksgiving Day sale.

Unbelievable! This week, for the first time in British parliamentary history, police arrested a Member of Parliament (MP) serving on the Conservative opposition benches (Shadow Immigration Minister) and raided the MP’s office (without even a warrant) for ‘suspected’ leaks of information. The police then had access to the House of Commons main computer server. Hmmmm....After my experiences with the Metropolitan Police - though I can’t judge - I can certainly empathise. In my case, lack of communication, lack of co-ordination and lack of judgement: none of which inspired much confidence. Particularly as they were investigated unsubstantiated claims when none of mine towards the other party had been taken very seriously at all. Did they have a warrant either? They said they did but I never saw one. I wonder whether I could obtain a warrant to search the police’s computer for my suspected ‘leaks’ – like the man who successfully got a court order against a leading bank to seize their computers because of unfair bank charges. 1968 shaken not stirred with a twist of lemon and a dash of ginger if you please. The stress such incidents cause is always underestimated and never taken very seriously. Particularly in my case when one’s mother had just passed away.
Cameron furious after senior Tory MP arrested
Brown denies role in arrest of senior Tory MP
MP's arrest not Stalinist
Newsnight : watch Tues 2 Dec for a discussion and Wed 3 Dec on this topic BBC iPlayer
Clare Short (Former International Development Secretary in the British Labour Government) and others speak of the compromises they made as they rose through the political ranks
The government finally introduced its much-heralded points system to decide who can and can't come to Britain
In Our Time (Thurs 27): The Great Reform Act (1832) which extended the political vote and gave industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham political representation for the first time

Which brings us to the coroner leading the inquest into the police shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on the London underground some years ago (the grounds of suspected terrorism) advising the jury not to bring a verdict of unlawful killing. I see both sides but as usual in Britain, no one ever seems to accept or be blamed for serious ‘errors of judgement’. We are supposed to forgive and or forget, learn and move on. Yet isn’t that how deeply ingrained hatred is allowed to incubate?
Council chiefs lose their jobs over Baby P death . Not an isolated I’m very sure, just one that saw the light of day or rather death.

Clint Eastwood’s new film The Changeling is so important in this regard. In no way does it break any boundaries of cinematic art: quite the opposite it reinforces them, the complete opposite of Leckey’s art. Yet ironically, like Pixar’s WALL-E animation, it exists in the popular Hollywood medium to help us see through and beyond the received notions of what is constantly presented to us as ‘the truth’. In The Changeling, the case of a boy’s disappearance has been solved, promulgated in the newspapers and closed in spite of the mother’s (Angelina Jolie in her Oscar tipped performance) protestations thence confinement to a mental hospital. Based on a true story, most viewers would also like to close that page of history and pretend that humanity had moved on. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper’ goes the old adage. But people still do. And not necessarily because they’re stupid either, though some clearly are. That’s why Eastwood made the film. How could that mother’s side of the story possibly be true, they asked? But it was, and for some of us still could be.
The other side of Angelina Jolie

Blindness is not reality but a moral fable directed by Fernando Meirelles who exposed Brazil’s urban reality in the widely acclaimed City of God. His latest film from hard to adapt Portuguese novelist José Saramago (he’s ultra choosy about giving away film rights). But the film’s problem is that it favours ‘realism’ over fabulation in a city where a virus blinds everyone except Julianne Moore’s character and humans’ basest and best qualities come to the fore.

As the upcoming 2006 first Congolese democratic election draws closer, Victoire Terminus (winner of this year’s London Film Festival Grierson documentary award) follows women who’ve chosen a boxing career as their way of surviving their men and mayhem in Kinshasa.
Divizionz: An authentic portrayal of life in Kampala's inner city, in which four friends set out to make it as hip hop musicians.

The frustration, particularly for women, of being held back and trying to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ of male dominance is at the heart of Michael Radford’s new film Flawless. Critically it didn’t fare well after last week’s opening. Perhaps many responded only to the film’s heist plot. But Radford is too good a director to settle for commercial fare. His Oscar winning Il Postino may have been a stroke of good fortune surprising no one more than himself, yet his whole career has concerned itself with characters who are out of place and out of time e.g. his first feature about WWII Italian POW’s in Scotland Another Place, Another Time. Demi Moore is brilliant casting and all the more so because she’s worked with Michael Caine before. The often much maligned Moore, Hollywood star yet always somewhat at odds with that environment, is clearly out of place in the man’s world of diamond trading where she is constantly passed over for promotion. Her Laura Quinn is prim, edgy, somewhat introspective yet quietly feisty. Radford and his cinematographer frame her as trapped in her modest living room, its contents often claustrophobically foregrounded edge of left frame. Radford also often frames by cutting off the tops of people’s heads as if their whole world was not quite there. The production design is very subtle retro-futuristic though the story is set in 60s London. Could Radford have gone further with the script by newcomer Edward Anderson? The top and tail of the film is rather Hollywood and cringe-worthy and Anderson was lucky to get Radford interested in refining his script. Yet inside this film and many of its predicabilities is something so English and so true to their relationship to history that it morphs from sheen to mould to quiet, ever so-slow burning rage and transfiguration- something in which Michael Caine excels. Not a great film, but a very far from crap one.
At least it's big in Japan: Mike Hodges explains what it's like to make a "lost film"

Radford directed another under-rated film White Mischief (1987) about the decadent self-destructive ‘Happy Valley’ whites in WWII Kenya. Shot secretly in South Africa, the rarely screened first anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa(1959) directed by the amateur Lionel Rogosin shows tonight Thursday Dec 4 as part of the The London African Film Festival . Nightwaves has a discussion with film historian Ian Christie.

The Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF hereon) mid-week-mid-afternoon screening was fairly packed for Kaspar Barfoed’s Danish thriller The Candidate, trailer. And rightly so. Imagine a Hollywood thriller version of dysfunctional family hit Festen turned inside out by a Dogma styled Dane. “It is about a man who has to choose between the easy lie and the difficult truth...combining the disciplined plotline of the American thriller with the more Bohemian European cinematic tradition with its rawness and its edginess...documentary expressionism.” “I don’t see myself as an auteur,” he told me over breakfast, “...but I fought hard [in the production process] to get a strong POV (point of view) [fighting against the idea that you] can’t be too dangerous. It was hard to finance – Euro’s 2 million against the usually low-budget social-realism.” “I started off as an actor [Liv Ullman’s first film Sofia, 1992] but I was thinking too much!” If there was a British equivalent to The Candidate it could be In Bruges (a very different film indeed, though) considering Kaspar’s film in relation to its Danish counterparts.
Lars von Trier's Europa (now out on Reg.1 DVD)

Julia, French site, German trailer, is by
French director Eric Zonca (he of the tragic poetic realism of The Dreamlife of Angels. His latest is set in Los Angeles, normally certain death for all ‘art house’ directors except for perhaps Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. And Zonca’s film does play rather like a Wenders’ ‘road movie’. At almost 2.5 hours it surprisingly doesn’t outstay its welcome. Is this due to Tilda Swinton’s, arguably, best performance ever? I’m still not sure. Absolutely no slight on Swinton’s performance intended, I think Zonca’s direction is so exceptional another actress could have also made it her own. But as Zonca pointed out in an interview it was Swinton’s willowy physicality of the alcoholic black mask pistol toting child abductress character that sold it for him. Swinton is mesmeric supported by a fantastic cast. Try not to read too much in advance about this film. Just go see it. The world doesn’t always have a ‘time perfect’ equilibrium, but in Zonca’s film it does tossing in all the storms. The film also plays on Sky Box Office Friday night (5 December).
Tilda Swinton interviewed in The Guardian ,
and Erick Zonca interview.

Courtney Hunt’s debut Frozen River (LFF) has just earned another award in the States in addition to its Sundance Grand Jury Prize. A woman (another captivating performance from Melissa Leo) turns to smuggling Chinese illegals for a Mohawk (Misty Upham) across the frozen Saint Lawrence River from the States into Canada in order to feed her child pre-Christmas.

The much touted, starry ‘indie/major’ cast of Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married premmed at the London Film Festival and is out in London after Christmas. One thing’s for sure from this somewhat frustrating film, Anne Hathaway is one helluva an actress (Rachel emerging out of alcho rehab realising what her family really are, possibly were, and possibly could be) and manages to be a nice, balanced person (whatever that really is) as well :) Hathaway that is.
Anne Hathaway recently interviewed on The Daily Show
Hathaway in Get Smart out on DVD in the States
and so is the original TV series

The Silence of Lorna (Le silence de Lorna), French site (Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Fest) from the very socio-realist Belgium Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne brothers takes a while to get going but as the second takes hold with Arta Dobroshi (as Lorna with her unborn child) it’s surprisingly captivating, ultimately leaving you quite numb, silent and introspective as do most of their films. Sometimes ‘art house’ reality, in the right directorial hands, is more interesting than a fiction helping you understand the one outside in the world that you’re about to step back into.
Les frères Dardenne in Cannes
Dardenne Collection out on Artificial Eye DVD

Raymond De Felitta director of Tis Autumn tells jazz singer Jackie Paris' story of unfulfilled promise (mentioned in my last posting)

Kenny Glenaan’s film Summer also musing on survival isn’t quite as Dardennes ‘cinematic’ but deservedly garnered several awards at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival. It sounds ‘worthy’ but the script (Hugh Ellis)and performances transcend that sense of moral duty.

Same distributor Vertigo also releases this week The Children, a sort of Children of the Damned script by London to Brighton’s Paul Andrew Williams raising the question how are we horrified. Is it through identification that by understanding the situation/character we somehow know what might be coming therefore cringing in our seats with prescience? Or is it something out of the blue, the totally unexpected that suddenly grabs us from behind. Early on director Tom Shankland signals to us via the ‘spooky’ score that something’s afoot and you think, oh no, you’ve blown it for us. Then it seems to get cleverer than that, but then doesn’t. And while the end of the film is sufficiently gory for one not to start fondling your date’s elbow in boredom, it never really got beyond that initial spooky music. Perhaps the problem is that we never quite knew which hell the kids were from if indeed they were there in the first place. One leaves the cinema yukky but unperturbed unlike the disgustingly, horribly brilliant Eden Lake (out on DVD in January) that leaves you permanently terrified and despairing of humanity.
Killing children in movies is a definite no-no, right?

The handheld DV first feature of Delphine Kreuter 57,000 Kilometers Between Us(57000 km entre nous) (LFF) is a quite remarkable comment on the dichotomy of our age of wanting to be seen on the internet yet also wanting to retain some privacy: a family putting its ‘happiness’ on spycam while elsewhere a bedridden boy is online (no image) with their pissed off daughter. But there’s an even eerier Brit DV flic that nobody seemed to care much about from last year’s Raindance Fest ’s Dom Rotheroe’s Exhibit A – a tiny poisonous Eden Lake.
Another first time director Antonio Campos’ Afterschool (LFF) has teenage American East Coast Robert masturbating to extremely violent sexual acts online. He teems up with schoolmate Amy to make a video project that goes one step too far. “I was more interested in...how people deal with death,” said the director. “Not the death of a family member or someone you were close to but rather someone you maybe saw from time to time or you knew of but weren’t close friends with. You feel something but you’re not quite sure what.” A very impressive (with haunting use of wide-screen) film picked up for UK distribution by Network next year. In his spare time the director performs comedy stand-up on the New York circuit.

The detachment of Eva Sørhaug’s Norwegian first feature Cold Lunch (Lønsj) (LFF),(trailer, left some critics emotionally cold but it was exactly that Bressonian edge of detailed human observation laced with offbeam Godard humour that intrigued me. Is there hope that it’ll be picked up for UK release?
Norwegian site
Indiewire interview

A new biography of the man behind the company behind the newspaper co-sponsoring the London Film Festival is out by Michael Wolff - The Man Who Owns The News. BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves has an interview with Wolff.

Some belated thoughts on Oliver Stone’s W. :
The Guardian interview with Oliver Stone
Josh Brolin on playing George W. Bush
Ioan Gruffudd on playing Tony Blair in Stone's W.
Dubya's reign is nearly over. What impact did he have on the artistic life of his country? Twelve prominent Americans give their verdict in The Guardian

more vvvery soon...................