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National Science Week: alien life begins at home. Jodrell Bank webcast Fri night (14th)

Nightwaves 45 min interview with Richard Rogers. Don't think he's had the same horrible experiences as me living in London, though.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudí out now out on Criterion DVD

ITV London -The London Nobody Knows: Revisit of James Mason’s documentary from 40 yrs ago.

You may not agree with the Evening Standard’s art critic Brian Sewell, but he certainly poses some good questions: Cranch the Crude

The new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, announced the end of the blockbuster exhibition. A gamble on multiple divisionists.

Mindless babble of the robots on the Tube Not even an apology or an announcement this morning on the 94 bus that went on a diversion to the Westway roundabout on its way to the West End. Unbelievable.
Record £14m fine - plus knighthood - for Network Rail

Assembly (集结号) (Ji jie hao) (YouTube), Official trailer is directed by Feng Xiaogang, China's most commercially successful director. This is winter of 1948, during the civil war between the Nationalist KMT and the Communist PLA, its Ninth Company soldiers led by Capt. Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu). His Lieutenant, Jiao Dapeng claims to have heard the assembly bugle call for retreat which Gu denies and the rest of the film is largely set in a retirement home being built for army veterans in 1955 peacetime China. Based on the 3 page short story Guan Si (Lawsuit) by Yang Jingyuan and adapted by Liu Heng (of the now classic Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and The Story of Qui Ju) it’s surprisingly gripping with the director acknowledging in interviews the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. There are hints too of Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem in its search for truth and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers in its re-writing of history. Even having to read subtitles these characters are engrossing.

Black and White is far less successful as ‘Bollywood’ tackles the serious issue of a young suicide bomber. Worthy, well acted but predicable.

I was initially excited when I read that Robert Sarkies’ Out Of The Blue was using an old soft focus lens that Kubrick has invented for Barry Lyndon to evoke David Gray’s view of the world. One nice November in 1990, Gray (Matthew Sunderland) used a high-velocity rifle to shoot dead 13 people in the sleepy New Zealand seaside town of Aramoana. Though the film is an excellent re-construction of the event and the ensuing police stand-off, what is lacking and disappointing is a sense of Gray’s place in the world. Not an explanation of his deep anger (initially sparked by a charge on his cheque at the bank), nor a forgiveness, but a sense of a man’s pent up release at the world against him. As horrific a suggestion as it may sound, I almost wanted a perverse inverse use of Kubrick music (e.g the Blue Danube Waltz or something) to complement the special lens use. Austrian director Michael Haneke achieves better results in his sparse, abstract 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance Amok (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls-1974),
Kino DVD in the States (part of Tartan’s Haneke Trilogy in the UK).

A shame Haneke’s 2006 Paris Opera modern dress production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni isn’t available on DVD: (FT review )
Don Giovanni ist ein höherer Angestellter

But we do have Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of the Paris Opéra’s Don Giovanni using the original cast lip-syncing on Venetian locations and Palladio’s magnificent Villa Rotunda. Losey insisted that the recitatives (sung dialogue) be recorded live with an on set harpsichord. The cast is a dream list of performers: Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi), Leporello (José van Dam), Donna Elvira (Kiri Te Kanawa), Zerlina (Teresa Berganza), Donna Anna (Edda Moser) and Don Ottavio (Kenneth Riegel). Though it was Paris Opéra director Rolf Liebermann who initially suggested the project to Losey, its class politics was perfect material for him. The opera was written a few years before the French Revolution and the film opens with a quote by Antonio Gramsci (a founder of the Italian Communist Party – Losey left America for England because of his political allegiance) scrawled on a wall: “The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interum a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth.”

When as a teenager I saw this film on its big screen release I was bowled over. It must be remembered that though opera was a ‘people’s popular’ form in Verdi’s Italy, the 20th century didn’t catch up until the World Cup Three Tenors in 1987, TV commercials, and the advent of the CD. Amadeus wasn’t released until 1984, and the only significant opera films came later too, Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982) and Zefferelli’s La Traviata (1982). So Losey’s Don Giovanni must be seen in this context. It remains a little ‘stage bound’ but always gloriously in Gerry Fisher’s cinematography. It’s good value too (3 discs) considering the quality of the product recently restored by Gaumont. As for extras, there’s “a thematic analysis” by Michel Ciment the French film critic, a not so interesting making of with a lot of Losey wandering around set without explanation, but the fascination is The Sound Odyssey 1978 – 2006, an adventure in itself, showing how the film almost never saw the light of day due to the problems with poor Dolby sound. Sony couldn’t find the masters but the sound recordist unearthed illegal reference reels in his cellar, and eventually hey presto, the new DTS 5.1 surround sound mix. Conductor Lorin Maazel recently led the New York Philharmonic to North Korea. (BBC Newsnight vid) Picture restoration site, Gaumont French DVD site. And Losey's Don Giovanni on YouTube (if you must :)

For something a little different, Later with Jools Holland had the sparky Southern kitten Devon Sproule (MySpace), NPR interview (National Public Radio)

Leonard Rosenman obituary: Oscar-winning film composer who introduced modernism into Hollywood movie scores

Gérard Depardieu’s character Alain Moreau in The Singer (Quand J'étais Chanteur), my blog review keeps himself and the world moderately happy and alive through singing French crooners from the likes of Christophe and Michel Delpech (Les paradis perdu). I loved this film when it was first released last year and I love it even more hearing the 50 min interview extra with director Xavier Giannoli. “One fight too many,” says Moreau. “My characters fight for love.” Giannoli champions Stallone’s films like Rocky “as French director Jean Vigo put it, ”These movies eat meat.” He says in English to camera, “I’d like to make a film with you Sylvester Stallone.” There’s also an engaging extra about Alain Chanone: The Real Singer who inspired Depardieu’s character. Giannoli: “The question I asked myself was can beauty and grace still remain in a world obedient to local dance, to popular culture and entertainment. Can we see traces of beauty.”

Luchino Visconti was always in search of beauty and Rocco and His Brothers [Rocco e i suoi fratelli] was released the same year as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Out on Eureka DVD (2 discs), you get not only quality but a real bargain here: the entire un-cut 3 hour film in a gorgeous transfer, 3 hours of extras, (the CD of Nino Rota’s soundtrack had to be withdrawn, still a bargain set though), and a great booklet. I last saw this film in a print as if through a perpetual hailstorm of scratches. So what an unforgettable joy was this DVD. A mother and her 5 sons move from rural southern Italy to the metropolis of Milan. So topical and close to bone was the film that the City of Milan initially refused to distribute it. Visconti began in theatre staging several of Arthur Miller’s tragic observations of family life including After the Fall and A View from the Bridge. Oh to have seen those. When Tennessee Williams saw Visconti’s Rome production of A Streetcar Named Desire he thought it came closest of any staging he’d seen to what he intended. Composer Hans Werner Henze who saw Visconti’s La Traviata at La Scala with Maria Callas credits the director with coaching Callas into the actress we know of legend. And the citations go on and on including Burt Lancaster “the best experience of my life both as a man and as an actor”. Rocco (Alain Delon) succeeds in boxing to success getting his face onto street posters while his dearest brother and enemy is seduced and destroyed by the bourgeois ideals of the Milanese. Lots of Rilke’s terrible angelic beauty here.

Lionsgate DVD in the States has just issued The Alain Delon Collection that doesn’t overlap with Optimum UK’s fine set. (My blog review)

Also in stunning B/W anamorphic is The Round Up (Svegénylegények) (Miklós Jancsó, 1966) now out on DVD (Sight and Sound gave it a place in its Best 365 Films of all Time). London Q&A with Jancsó, John Cunningham’s Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex - he gives an illustrated talk Sat (15 March). Like Josie in the Irish film Garage, Jancsó’s characters also seem caught out in a world they thought they knew: “It seems that life is a continual movement. In a procession, a demonstration, there’s movement all the time, isn’t there? It’s physical and it’s also philosophical: the contradiction is founded on movement, the movement of ideas, the movement of the masses...A man is always surrounded by movement, threatened by oppression: the camera movements I create suggest that too.” The film is set after the 1848 Hungarian defeat against Austrian domination and a number of ‘Robin Hood’ resistance rebels rounded up (the Hungarian title literally means The Hopeless Ones). The stunning anamorphic widescreen transfer is so crisp it resembles high definition at times. In the short but detailed accompanying booklet, Jancsó is quoted from a 2002 Riverside Studios festival: “Now I have realised that the only thing that you can do about the world is to laugh at it. In the old times I tried to take myself very seriously, because I thought it was possible to change the world, but not anymore.”

BBC Four's The Curse of Comedy series airs this week.

Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay as part of its 20th anniversary, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien’s French-language directorial debut. Juliette Binoche is single mum Suzanne who works at a Chinese puppet theatre and lives with her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu) and nanny Song (Fang Song) in a higglety pigglety life and Paris flat with a problem tenant (Hippolyte Girardot) downstairs. Song is a film student video hommaging Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s classic short The Red Balloon and Simon has created for himself an inner world of beauty and magic. You’ll either find it too slow or very zen. Hsiao-hsien’s regular cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing beautifully evokes the mixed metaphor of the red balloon’s loneliness and childhood. New York’s Janus Films’ (through Criterion DVD) re-releases Lamorisse’s Red Balloon and White Mane in April.

Juliette Bincoche Q & A Toronto Fest (YouTube,Part 1)(Part 2)
French trailer

Bad boy of cinema and bars Harmony Korine has his latest film Mr.Lonely on release. A Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a similiar Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) in Paris inviting him to her Scottish retreat full of other lonely impersonators including the Pope, the Queen, Lincoln, Chaplin and Shirley Temple. I only managed to see about half at last year’s London Film Festival. And though Korine is certainly an acquired taste the minute the images start hitting the screen it’s quite different to anything else you’ve seen.

Acclaimed Brit writer/director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) airs his comedy horror The Cottage that he’d previously written, and it’s pretty (well, uglyishly) impressive using fantastic anamorphic camera work (Christopher Ross). Reminded me a bit of Brit break out Hot Fuzz. With no pretensions to ‘genre’ political overtones it’s far funnier than you’d expect. And that’s not meant a backhanded complement. It probably wouldn’t sustain repeated viewings like the classics, though.

But one of the few movies on the planet that you could enjoy a successful date even with kids in tow is, finally, a successful and faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel): Horton Hears a Who! fashioned by the astute and magical team that brought us the clever Ice Age animations (the original just out on Fox Blu Ray disc with commentary). Horton (Jim Carrey) the elephant with a trunk of gold becomes the elephant with a trunk of one pink non-decidious dandeloin flower and destined for the forest psychiatrist’s log by his fellow fauna. On the flower’s tippy tippy top is a speck from which he claims he hears the voice of a Who (Mayor, voiced by Steve Carrell) – a citizen of the world of Whoville. Surely a story that shows that elephants too can overcome the obstacles of mountains should be required screening at all political summit meetings re-iterating the delicate balance of planet earth. After all, aren’t most politicians just kids who never really had that childhood? The ageing vulture (in need of his annual preen) and the kangaroo get a bad press but her joey saves the day. Can’t reform everyone I guess.

BBC's Nightwaves :The cultural history of the Soviet Pioneers and Peter and the Wolf (and it seemed so innocent) is discussed with film historian Ian Christie and Catriona Kelly whose book on the subject was published last year. Easter bunnies will never look the same after listening to this.