Castles in the sand, ghosts in the shell

BBC Radio 3’s weekly Saturday Review has the ‘best’ discussion I’ve heard on Brenton’s new Royal National Theatre play, Michael Cockerell (political documentary maker who met Harold MacMillan). There’s also a review of Wolf Totem Jiang Rong’s massive best seller in China (over 2 million copies and an estimated 6 million more pirated versions).
China in London: Spotlight Beijing at the ICA.
New Zealand comedy horror Black Sheep is out on DVD with director’s commentary.
Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles
Consumer confidence falls to 15-year low
Get your skates on if you want to see Tate Modern's latest installation
Last weeks of the Royal Academy of Arts’ From Russia show.
Simon Calder: Terminal 5 is a breathtaking display of institutional hubris
And London's 22nd Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is now on.

In Daniele Luchetti’s Italian ‘68 student protest era film My Brother is an Only Child(Mio fratello è figlio unico ), the Communist sibling Manrico amends the perceived “Fascist” Ode to Joy ending of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at a student concert to a ‘Communist manifesto’ of placards akin to the video of Bob Dylan’s song: art without ‘the people’ “is a huge two-fisted jerk-off” claims Manrico. In march his brother’s Fascist supporters to disrupt proceedings. It’s quite a wonderful love story and more than worthy of being dubbed a descendant of Visconti’s class struggle cinema given its fine acting, script, cinematography and direction.

All in all, it’s quite a disturbing, thought provoking week of film and DVD releases. In addition to which, I had my almost never utilised Facebook account suspended. Having sent roughly two messages in about a year, I thought I’d see if I had any potential friends by choosing what I thought to be a suitable and specific ‘network of friends’ and sending them a note and link to this website. This was deemed to be ‘spam’ and my account closed forever (so far). Yet isn’t this the raison d'être for Facebook’s existence? If you don’t say hello to the bunch of beautiful, weird and wacky strange girls and boys at the bar how do you know whether or not they’re interested? Do you sit in a corner by yourself with a sign on the table saying please talk to me I’m interesting? And one obviously haven’t gone to the ‘bikers from hell’ club in Deathville dressed in a three-piece suit and bowler hat or the bar at the local bingo hall brandishing a machete. One has chosen ‘a bar’ at which you think like-minded people might be congregating and you try to network. How could what I did be equated to coldly knocking at people’s doors and leafleting?

There was an interesting Facebook harassment case verdict last week in Birmingham; a story you needed to piece together from about six different newspapers. The chap had sent the girl a message, someone he’d previously had an 18-month relationship with, even though he was under a restraining order. But the judge ruled that the Facebook message hadn’t constituted ‘harassment’. Actress Samantha Morton complained of text messages in a separate case which she won. When does love become a dangerous obsession? Become stalking? And when do obsessions become destructive? More of that anon.

Funny Games is director Michael Haneke’s almost shot for shot American remake of his original 1997 Austrian film. It is totally repulsive and totally compelling. All the more so because there are no subtitles to distance the viewer from the image. All the more so because we know these faces up there on screen. There’s Naomi Watts and there’s Tim Roth. And into their leafy vacation suburbia stroll the two clean white faced, white clothed intruders who innocently ask to borrow eggs and end up terrorising the couple and child. It’s as if they’d read the ‘Talented Mr. Ripley Handbook’ (Patricia Highsmith’s charismatic charlatan) and become Bret Easton Ellis clones from his American Psycho novel. All the more repulsive because these idol belle rich boys have been desensitised not only to violence but even to sex. For them what they do seems no more than kids’ pulling off the legs of grasshoppers.

Michael Haneke Interview on Funny Games, Part 1, Part 2, 2008 trailer.
The Film Programme (BBC's Radio 4, 28/3) has a Naomi Watts interview along with other goodies.
Sunday Times article and Why Naomi Watts is a glutton for punishment


Oz film The Book of Revelation first aired here at last year's Raindance Festival. Directed by Ana Kokkinos and co-scripted by Kokkinos with Andrew Bovell (Lantana) from Rupert Thomson's novel, a dancer Daniel (Tom Long) is kidnapped by three hooded femmes and kept as a sex slave for almost a fortnight. When released he abandons his high profile career with choreographer Isabel (Greta Scacchi) - Oz Olympics Meryl Tankard’s choreography. It’s a shame this film doesn’t quite fulfil its strangeness because it’s one of Australian film’s most interesting and rarely invoked characteristics. Not Aboriginal dreamtime, exactly, but a sort of ancient shared consciousness of unresolved strangeness (cf Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) or the more recent Look Both Ways on Tartan DVD).

The Book of Revelation interview (The Movie Show, Oz TV), Oz site, Oz distributor Palace Films trailer.
Narcissism
The Loss of Sadness, one psychiatrist claims that are we increasingly medicating for what was once viewed as normal sadness.

Son Of Rambow ,
Official Trailer, with its poster adorning many London buses, has been a festival fave throughout the world. And it’s easy to see why. A nifty idea: set in 1982 England, 10 year-old Lee (Will Poulter) wants to win the BBC Screentest Young Filmmaker’s Award by making his very own Rambo on video starring his tearaway schoolmates. Brought up by his mum (Jessica Hynes) and surrogate stepfather (Neil Dudgeon) in a strict ‘Plymouth Brethren’ family, the more demure Will (Bill Milner) is blackmailed by Lee into his project but quickly enjoys being the stuntman. It’s a film throwing up a lot of questions yet leaves them dangling on a tree. On the one hand, it’s an inspirational film for kids (12A certificate) showing that one needn’t be trapped by society and that self empowerment is closer than many want them to believe. On the other, it never really addresses the questions of violence it raises. The two kids forge their bond by literally cutting their palms and becoming blood brothers rather than letting the script thread this through emotional. The brethren “protect their way of life” by retreating from the world just as Stallone’s Rambo tries to forge a better one by utilising its inherent violence. Will’s mum finally throws off her head shawl in exasperation of Joshua’s strictures on her son and though Lee misses out on the BBC gig he does get a final delight. The fact that Streisand’s Yentl is playing at the cinema can’t be simply a cheap screenwriter’s twist (writer/director Garth Jennings). And the fact that it feels like half a script is all the more frustrating because of how fantastic the ‘existing half’ feels. The uncanny Stallone casting resemblance of Lee’s ‘old-man Rambo’ is one of the myriad script delights.

Britain's Mean Streets (Time Magazine, March 26)
Teenage knife crime 'is one of biggest threats to London

After offending many with his radical views in papers and periodicals Dutch writer Theo van Gogh gained independence by launching his own website De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker). He supported the Iraq invasion but offended both the Jews and the Muslims referring to the latter as “geitenneukers (‘goat-fuckers’)”. His friend and ally was conservative Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002, and the subject of Van Gogh’s film Sixth of May now out on that enterprising indie Bluebell DVD (no website). Van Gogh’s 10-minute film Submission, on the violence against women in Islamic societies broadcast on Dutch public TV, finally got him killed on November 2, 2004. Theo van Gogh was great-grandson of art dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent van Gogh, and Theo’s father a member of the Dutch secret service (AIVD, then called BVD). So he knew what he was talking about when making a conspiracy thriller. Pete Travis (who forged the harrowing docu-drama about the Irish Omagh bombing) recently received relatively dismissive reviews for his American studio US Presidential assassination conspiracy film Vantage Point. And I hate to say it but the film’s details rang a lot of truths for me while obviously remaining a fiction film. I think I wrote this many months back, but when novels talk of governments and companies bugging each other, nobody bats an eyelid. But when Brit MP Clare Short declared some years ago that Koffi Annan’s United Nations office was being bugged there by the Brits was uproar. And I felt the same about Van Gogh’ Sixth of May. It is well made, well acted, well editing, really nice father/daughter relationship but not particularly ground breaking in any other way. However, if you read up on Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, the script’s fictional conspiracy theory starts to niggle in your mind. One thinks of the Brit film Defence of the Realm (1985) and the BBC series Edge of Darkness (1985)(ah those were the days..) And there’s a lightness to Van Gogh’s script that is a little eerie - the almost comic ease with which conspiracy evolves. Great use too of Gabriel Rios - Broad Daylight.
London’s Mayorial elections
London transport crawl the worst in 40 years
The amazing and in many ways prophetically contemporary The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is now out DVD (my blog review).

Beaufort is directed by Joseph Cedar, US born but Israeli since a child, and adapted from a novel by Ron Leshem, who co-wrote the screenplay. A 12th century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon, Beaufort (Beautiful Fort) has survived the bloody scars of centuries of war. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 the Israeli army captured the fort from the PLO and Cedar himself spent time in Lebanon as an infantry soldier, paratrooper and medic. The film shows the lead up to the soldiers’ withdrawal from the fort under the Hezbollah shelling and their orders to destroy it. In reality this was done in May 2000 but the ancient castle remained unharmed. I was truly mesmerised by this film. Like Van Gogh’s film it does nothing particularly new or inventive cinematically. It is, however, shot in Cinemascope (Ofer Inov) and that’s what really compels the viewer into the soldiers’ world. The wide periphery of the screen is there to draw you into its centre, almost hypnotically like a crystal ball, in which the soldiers become Everyman – soldiers of every war, every country, and every epoch. I urge you to see this film whatever your creed. The slate of its distributor the new Trinity Filmed Entertainment is shaping up impressively. In the near future they’re also releasingHeartbeat Detector (New Yorker Films) that’s just opened in the States.

ICA Israeli season
Neglected poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg Ben Uri Gallery, Front Row Thurs 27 March, Nightwaves
Robert Fisk: Where is our man for all seasons?
His new book, The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings from Fourth Estate. (Southbank talk Monday 7 April 2008)
Lebanon boycott underlines divisions ahead of Arab League summit
Rageh Omaar on Iraq: A nation in pieces

The haunting El Violin about Mexican civil war is now out on DVD (My blog review).

Under the Bombs (Sous les Bombs) filmed partly during the 2006 summer conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is directed by French-Lebanese Philippe Aractingi who combines actual footage with his story of a well heeled Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) arriving in Beirut from Dubai and wanting to head south to see her son. Her only hope is the Lebanese Christian taxi driver Tony (Geroges Khabbaz). And off they go into the war-torn danger zone. Most of the cast are non-pro and some may well prefer this film’s tone to Beaufort. Though engaging and heartfelt, I wished for more of a Kiarostami quirkiness as we journeyed on.
Nick Broomfield’s Iraqi docu-drama Battle for Haditha (recently screened on Channel Four is now on Contender DVD)
Abbas Kiarostami’s meditative Five is out on BFI DVD with an extensive Making of extra.

British Silent Cinema Festival this week (the one and only!)
Ben-Hur (with Carl Davis’ score) screens Saturday 19 April.

On the Black Hill (1987) (DVD Region 0) hails from the Brit era when Channel Four television was at its new and most adventurous height as well as the BFI (Terence Davies’ 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives ). Writer/director Andrew Grieve was told by the BFI, we have some money, make it now or you’ll never get another chance anywhere else. And it’s a really funny, beautiful and enduring surprise. The difficult adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel spanning 80 years of ‘Vision’ farm’s family in the Welsh hills never feels pushed or abutted. With Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s (later turning director himself) widescreen anamorphic cinematography we glide though history and the twin brothers struggle to retain the farm. “In a world of constant and extraordinary change, how do you make a film about things that don’t change: the rhythm of the seasons and the circularity of time...no matter how far we travel we never really leave home,” writes Grieve in the DVD’s accompanying leaflet. “How do you imagine hell...and hellfire?” asks the German girl Lotte. “Something like London I expect, replies the twin Ben. There’s also a 10min short by Pinny Grylls Peter and Ben about Peter and his sheep Ben. A DVD that makes a great perennial parental gift.

Last Word has an interesting aural obituary for Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths as well as Mikey Dread (honorary 5th The Clash member and well at the roots of Brit Dub and Reggae), Shusha Guppy and Nigel Acheson.

And last week’s In Our Time (BBC Radio 4):
The Dissolution of the Monasteries

Only one fleeting afternoon of Brit springtime so far this week but one of the glories of the spring DVD season blossoms from France and director Bertrand Tavernier who hails from the beautiful but drizzly Lyon. Optimum have five single releases each with the same 15 min intro interview with Tavernier speaking in English about his career and then a specific interview for each disc. Tavernier is a wonderful raconteur even in his second language and it’s well worth listening to the two audio commentaries. The first is on his debut 1974 feature L'Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul), the well connected ex film publicist Tavernier convincing Philippe Noiret to star. The star’s agent didn’t want him to do it and he and Tavernier kept getting ‘patronisingly’ rejected by every finance company even though it was based on a Georges Simenon novel. It’s a film that Tavernier would remake again and again in terms of its esprit de coeur. A quiet, working man and unerring cog in society’s wheel one day stops turning in the same direction as the others: only a tiny cog but enough to unbalance the motion. In this film Michel is literally a watchmaker whose son one day commits a murder. When Tavernier, wanting to dedicate the film to the great French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, explained him the story Prévert said, “well it’s not the worst thing he will do in his life.” Tavernier denies being a ‘political filmmaker’ and its true that Tavernier’s most lingering films are those where an extraordinary man stops turning in an ordinary world. Or at least will never keep time in quite the same way ever again. In the Simeon novel, Michel is simply a lonely outsider but Tavernier wanted him to be lonely when to all intents and purposes he’s one of the friendly crowd. Tavernier also tells the lovely story of his little daughter (used in the ‘studio’ interior opening scene) seeing the cut to the moving train on screen and thinking for years that her Dad was a magician.

Le Juge et l'Assassin (The Judge and the Assassin) 1976, begins with a crime passionale set in 1893 with the killer Joseph (Michel Galabru), two bullets lodged in his brain and released as ‘cured’ from a mental asylum, going on a serial rapist rampage through rural France. The judge assigned to the case is Noiret again. Joseph is captured and argues his case against the society that originally released him, “I served justice. France is the offender.” Society’s response is “a madman who knows he’s mad is a cured madman.” The historical backdrop is the anti-Semitism of the time, and anti Émile Zola and the novelist’s support for Dreyfus.

This idea is furthered in Coup de Torchon (Clean Up) inspired by Jim Thompson’s novel Pop.1280 that Tavernier transplants to a French African colony in 1938, again with Noiret, this time as the corrupt, faded local police chief Cordier who eases into violence, “all crimes are collective”. If this wasn’t clear enough then L.627 bears out Tavernier’s view, again with engrossing audio commentary. The script was co-written with a working cop and shows Paris cop “Lulu” Marguet (Didier Bezace) beating his head between the corruption on the street and the corruption in the force, “Nothing has changed in the French police since the film was made,” says Tavernier wryly. For half the actors it’s their first film and Tavernier insists on doing the casting himself on all his films. Great score too from his regular collaborator Philippe Sarde.

Ca Commence Aujourd'hui (It All Starts Today) 1999, is set in deprived modern day Valenciennes in northern France, the same bleak area of Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal (Germen or seed, the name of the seventh spring month of the French Revolutionary Republican Calendar) in which a young migrant worker tries to scratch out a living as a coalminer. Daniel (Philippe Torreton) is schoolmaster of a kindergarten who struggles to keep the building and his kids afloat. “A year and a half after the film’s release, the left lost most of the cities in the election because they weren’t in synch with the [film’s] problems. I don’t want to be branded a ‘political filmmaker’ [though]. In all my films there is one desire [and that is] to learn,” says Tavernier quoting his English film mentor Michael Powell. If ever a Making of extra needed to be made it was certainly true for this film, and the 50 minutes footage of the incredible life changing effect of the film in unforgettable. “You gave me two years of courage,” said one mother to Tavernier.

new Mike Leigh DVD set
Sally Hawkins: life as Mike Leigh's muse
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh

Koch Lorber has the Taviani Brothers films of ‘existence’ out on DVD in the States: Fiorile, Kaos, and The Night of the Shooting Stars

For a touch of comedy try ITV’s Teenage Kicks
Ade Edmondson plays a not so Young One in Teenage Kicks
And last night’s (Wednesday 2 April) Newsnight on BBC2 had a chat about comedy and religion.
Podcast of the Week: The story of a lost episode of Fawlty Towers

And for horror try the lost children’s voices of The Orphanage trailer , produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and a stunning thoughtful directorial debut for Juan Antonio Bayona. “What sparked the idea for The Orphanage was [an illustration] on the copy of Peter Pan that I read as a kid. It was [an illustration] of Wendy's mother sitting by the window, waiting for her children to come back. I thought it would be interesting to re-tell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother,” says screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez in this interview. It’s released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by New Line in the States April 21. The ‘normal’ cinema audience watching with me shuddered every time.

Concluded tomorrow...
"If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow...after all... tomorrow is another day."