a bit more ruin

Vivienne Westwood's Red Label at London Fashion Week. Saw her on a recent talk show being as feisty as ever.

From the Margins to the Mainstream - Government unveils new action plan for the creative industries

Northern Rock nationalisation in turmoil over offshore trust, news we hadn’t heard about until now that also includes Sovereign Wealth Funds (BBC's Newsnight).

169 local Post Offices may close, BBC link. I’m not against modernistaion but my sympathies here are with the elderley.

Head to the East End advice to London tourists, if only the transport links were better says I.

Pina Bausch and her company Tanztheater Wuppertal have their final show tonight at Sadlers Wells with her two most famous pieces Café Müller (1978) and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring- 1975). It’s a shame she wasn’t well enough to perform herself in Café Müller such is her primal, haunting stage presence. She totally transformed my vision of dance when I saw both these shows in her Wuppertal theatre many moons ago. And her Sacre is one of the most extraordinary stage works of the 20th century and the closest one will probably ever get to the spine-wrenching experience envisioned by its creators Stravinsky and Diaghilev.
No substitute for the real thing but quite a few good YouTube vids including the amazing Nelken with its stage bursting of red carnations.
Pina, Queen Of The Deep

Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview spine-wrenches you for pretty much the entirety of There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! It’s a strange experience that almost feels more like watching, I was going to say Lawrence Olivier on the National Theatre stage, but probably even more akin in bravura, going further back in time to the great tragedians of their day Garrick and Burbage. You feel like you’re riding within the gushing Plainview oil wells with this man rather than merely being a spectator. As wonderful as are his co-stars Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) and H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview has little interaction with them beyond the mechanical; for here is a man whose veins now run with oil not blood –a ‘Futurist’ machine finally plummeting off the rails and sucked back into the earth from whence gushed this demonic force. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead provides the tectonic score along with the strange but perfectly chosen Brahms Violin Concerto for the film’s finale with all its turbulence within an earthed classical structure.

A reminder that The Complete Coen Collection is out this week at unbelievably good value and a primer for No Country for Old Men in Sunday’s Oscars.

Survival finally came to a head in my mind this week after watching Sylvester Stallone’s (writer/director) new Rambo movie and David Attenborough’s reptilian Life in Cold Blood in close succession. As in nature’s survival of the fittest, Stallone has keep his career ticking through the decades without stamping the sell-by date many of his detractors would wish him (he’s now 61- and Rocky Balboa (2006)wasn’t that bad. He wisely chooses a civil rights violating country as a backdrop to his violence that unrelents until the final ‘homecoming’ shot of green fields and horses, a wowsy end to the cinematographic and editing rollercoaster ride. No lingering Terence Malick wildlife shots here. “Who are you boatman?” asks one of his crusading Brit mercenaries as he stolidly helms up river to Burma, the closest he’ll probably ever get to playing a Bergmanesque figure of death. A shame his production team weren’t braver in pushing through a more inventive, innovative score for the film giving it more of a redeeming feature. Rambo is probably far less a cultural time bandit than the mindless video clips of ‘farting female fannies’ and everyday human mishaps that attract millions of hits on the internet.

And the word misanthropic takes on new resonance when watching Attenborough’s animal kingdom. A salamander who didn’t stock up on enough food for the breeding season is seen marauding his fellow sal’s eggs. And the golden tree frog, on the brink of extinction, gives a slow wave of its arm (well, leg) to indicate sexual interest. Like many humans, the little frog is fooled by his own image waving on a video screen and even fooled by a manipulated plastic replica. At least animals don’t kill for pleasure but watching killer whales toss baby dolphins (no, seals I think -it was in a far away other series) between them like salad might make one ponder further upon the cosmic evolutionary chain.

Another contender for saddest music of them all is Attenborough's now famous Oz Lyre bird vocal impersonator who even mimics the chain saws decimating its forest.

Attenborough sparks reptiles sales boom, that’s humans for you!

So who are you calling fish-face?

The animated Ratatouille deserves a mention even though I haven’t seen these DVD’s bulging with extras. deservedly won a Best Animated Feature Film BAFTA for its director Brad Bird and a delight to recently catch up on screen watching its star, Rémy (Patton Oswalt) a rat with a taste and nose for haute cuisine, save the world of cordon bleu and leave the viewer simmering over the narrative’s sociological piquancy .

The body count of Inglorious Bastards (Quel maledetto treno blindato) 1978 (DVD), being re-made by Tarantino, is probably more than equal to Rambo (I’m no good with an abacus) but has characterisation close to the work of late Sam Fuller (The Big Red One 1980)but a touch more tonge in cheek. Bo Svensson (the Steve McQueen type) leads a motley crew of army badboys including Fred Williamson (the Samuel L. Jackson type), and Nick (Michael Pergolani) the roughneck hippie, to hijack a Nazi train with a new V2 rocket gyroscope aboard. This film is so bloody good it’s really a shame to re-make it - as good if not better than more well-known war movies – and absolutely gripping from the opening blue and red title sequence more than compensating for the lack of disc extras (except for trailer).

More of Tarantino’s favourites in Italian Kings of the B’s: Secret History of Italian Cinema 1949–81 (Tate Modern, 2006)

Wacko Spanish director (are there any who aren’t) Álex de la Iglesia has two older films out on DVD: Acción mutante (1993, his first feature) and 800 Bullets (800 balas, 2002), official trailer, both with Making Of doco extras. “Enough of colognes, car commercials, mineral water. We don’t want to smell good or lose weight,” declare Acción mutante’s space-ship rebels as if defying Brit New Labour’s nannying policies. They kidnap an heiress with a sympathetic Stockholm Syndrome ear whose dad tried to “buy her off with a pink pony”, and the film hurtles forward like an episode of Dr. Who on acid. If that’s all a bit much, 800 Bullets is a lot of fun for a Saturday night in and centres around a kid from Madrid on a mission to find his Spaghetti western actor grandpa - a stunt double for Clint Eastwood. The background is fascinatingly true. Spanish Almeria “Texas Hollywood” is where American studios shot scenes for their westerns in the 60s and 70s later surviving only as a tourist sideshow and the film’s end, though a touch cheesy, is quite touching.

Toshiba hits eject for HD DVD

Black Water is an Oz film with man-wrenching crocodiles. The structure is all too familiar – nice day out suddenly turns into hell on earth (or in this case hell on tree trunk) in the blink of an eye. It does what it says on the tin very well (and that’s not as easy as it looks on a low-budget –editing, camera angles, a revolver still able to fire underwater etc) but I kinda preferred the film Adrift (2006) where the youngsters carelessly forget to leave someone on the deck of the yacht consequently having no way to get back up – the so near and yet so far agony. But neither film utilises fear and blame as an existential cinematic coathanger.

Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) won best screenplay at last year’s Cannes Fest and is Germany’s Oscar entry this year. It also won the Ecumenical Cannes prize and I did feel I was being gently preached at for most of the film as good as are all its elements. The solitary beach shot lingering under the final credits made me wonder whether the whole idea would have been better served if done as some sort of triptych video installation. But that wouldn’t reach a wider audience. While life is full of good as well as bad coincidences, there are a few too many happy accidents here to offset the bad ones. The film is devout, though beautifully observed social realism. But whenever Schygulla’s mother appears on screen, her face full of gentle ‘former zeitgeist’ fascinates us. Asylum seeking in Germany remains a difficult subject to broach there so a non ‘arty’ more middle-stream film like this can only further the debate to good ends. It’s simultaneously released on Sky pay TV.
Scene on Youtube with Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) and Ayten(Nurgül Yes¸Ilçay).

Orhan Pamuk interview (for 7 days only)

Good Newsnight vid on the currect state of Kosovo independence.

Robert Siodmak's B/W The Killers (1946) is on re-release in a new print (Opening scene on YouTube), and if that doesn't wet your appetite nothing will! Based on a Hemingway book, this is Burt Lancaster’s debut film where he exhibits all the haunting vulnerability of a young Henry Fonda in strong contrast to Lancaster’s later tougher persona. This too, is a great film that repays repeated viewing. It has all the artifice of film noir including a big Miklas Rosza score (ingenius demonic boogie-woogie piano in the penultimate bar scene) yet the characters and plot motivations are 100% believable. Without fact checking, I’m sure this must have been on the list of Jean-Pierre Melville’s favourite flics and Ava Gardner is, well, the woman all men dream of.

Another couple of historic gems in Eureka’s Master of Cinema DVD series Der Letze Mann (YouTube) and Frau im Mond (YouTube).

F. W. Murnau's 1924 Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh , retitled for the US because of a similairly named film) stars Emil Jannings as the head doorman of the Atlantic Hotel demoted to a washroom attendant when he starts huffing and puffing over the suitcases. Image and appearance are everything here with the film hinging on his gold buttoned uniform that both portrays depressed post-war German sociology and precursors the importance of uniform in nurturing Nazi image. Like most Eureka releases, the Making Of doco alone makes it worth getting hold of this disc. As Luciano Berratúa’s 40 min doco shows, fascinatingly, there were three negatives shot - the best for domestic German release, and one each for Europe and America that differ radically in quality. The other fascination is Murnau’s ‘early CGI’ use of cut-out figures instead of background extras and tiny model cars and other props to create depth of field and perspective. Brilliant release.

Fritz Lang's 160 min 1929 Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) bills itself as “the first Utopian film based on scientific fact” filmed 2 years after Lang’s iconic Metropolis. Lang worked closely with the very young Hermann Oberth, author of The Rocket into Planetary Space (1923) and the Making Of doco compares Oberth’s ‘spot on’ theories with actual footage of the first manned Cape Canaveral launch. Though the plot becomes quite daft resolving in a battle of greed for gold and love, Frau im Mond shouldn’t be missed by anyone who loves cinema. As with all Eureka releases, the transfers are beautiful and both DVD’s come with booklets.

Interesting to compare this with the quintessentially English daftness and eccentricty of The First Men in the Moon (1964) directed by former art director Nathan Juran and based on H.G. Wells’s 1901 novel with ‘ancien Dr. Who-esque’ stop-motion animation aliens by legendary Ray Harryhausen speaking before a LA screening of this movie in 2007 (YouTube). An ‘anti-gravity’ molten composite of helium is painted on the wings of the ‘garden shed’ space vehicle.

How to catch a falling star (Channel Four)
Lift off for UK space missions
US missile blasts dead satellite

At their most ‘triffid’ entangling, the paintings of Brit Peter Doig at Tate Britain (thence Paris and Frankfurt) represent human society at the mercy of nature and the cosmos’ enervative power. As Doig says, his interest is in "peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world. Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices" and how there "are a lot of 'voids' in the paintings." Equally, they have a lot to do with our social contract with the natural world. One of his very early paintings Hitch Hiker (1989/90) is painted on postal bags found outside his studio and shows a red lorry on a rural road trapped like an animal in the headlights within horizontal planes of colour. There’s something very eerie about this and Doig’s later Canoe series visually quotes a still from the film Friday the 13th. Moving through the exhibition it becomes apparent that man and his markings are being seen through nature’s palette. His Concrete Cabin(1994) (Sotheby's auction 27 Feb) series was inspired when driving across France for the first time, “I drove through graveyard after graveyard after graveyard from the First World War. . . Whereas other buildings had represented a family or maybe a person somehow, this building [Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse] seemed to represent thousands of people" Built in 1957, the Unité d'Habitation development in Briey, France was a utopian, urban project built in the middle of a forest but left abandoned in the 70’s.

Man’s corporeal form then enters the picture in Doig’s first skiing paintings “made as a reaction to things I had made previously, paintings with a proliferation of matter on the surface of the canvas. I had wanted to get away from that device of always 'looking through'..” White Creep (1995/6)(Sotheby's auction 27 Feb). Blotter (1993) has man in a pond rippling with ice and Reflection (What does your soul look like) (1996) with feet and ankles atop his image in the water subsumed by an autumnal reflective sea of colour. In one of the last rooms we’re confronted with Girl in White with Trees (2001/2), her image bleached white like a fly caught in the red veins of nature's web.

Intermission