We are the bees of the invisible

‘What’s happening to the world?’ many of us are now asking and mankind has always asked throughout the centuries. Oftentimes, though, the obvious needs to be stated in order to provoke human debate. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) promulgates this question through the multiplexes with his new film The Happening (trailer). Setting himself the challenge of making a scary movie “outdoors in daylight” and inspired by scary movies based on real events, in particular Hitchcock’s The Birds, the manner in which questions are posed by Shyamalan is far more interesting than any answers responding to ‘is this successful filmmaking?’ The honeybees are disappearing and teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) doesn’t have an answer for his class. "We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding." As the denizens of America’s upper eastern districts start going haywire, forced to suicide by something unknown, Elliot and Alma (Zooey Deschanel) flee New York with a child in tow like fugitives from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Seemingly there’s something in the wind blowing ill. As for the acting, the usually impressive Wahlberg is a bit ‘one-note’ here and Deschanel, though well-cast as an ‘everywoman’ figure, has a few too many irritating ‘concerned’ reaction shots. But there’s no mistaking the individual tonality of The Happening even though its score may not enthral one as much as others in the repertoire of composer M. Night Shyamalan.
La Scala to stage Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as an opera in 2011.
Ecotowns: for and against
Last flight of the honeybee?
Bees translate dances of foreign species
Nim Chimpsky: the chimp who thought he was a boy
And yet another proposed 'lease of life' for the London landmark Battersea Power Station that closed in 1983.

The dialectic of man vs natural forces is always the concern of director Michelangelo Antonioni with L'Avventura(B/W-1960) and Identification Of A Woman(Identificazione di una Donna ) [or should that be Identità](colour-1982) out on Mr. Bongo DVD this week (mid-price, no extras). The Cannes premiere of L’Avventura outraged many in the audience who deemed it incomprehensible. But for Martin Scorsese it “gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies...[it] changed my perception of cinema and the world around me and made both seem limitless.” A bunch of Italian bourgeois is on a Sicilian boat trip when one of them disappears on an island. Her lover Sandro and her friend Claudia then begin a relationship. And that’s it for the plot. Antonioni said that the film charted a world in which “we make use of an ageing morality, of outworn myths, of ancient conventions” with his characters finding no way to relate to one another except “at a sort of reciprocal pity”. They are weathered like rocks on the coastline; some desolate, some becoming the refuge of other plants and creatures with Antonioni the geologist/oceanographer - goggles on. Personally, I prefer his last film Beyond the Clouds to Identification but it’s nonetheless fascinating with its alluring somewhat androgynous woman, one of whom Enrico Fico becoming Antonioni’s wife. There was outrage when UK’s Channel Four screened it years ago (those were the days). And as far as I know, the film’s first time on DVD either in the UK or the States (Facets issued a 2001 VHS, and there is an Italian sub-titled DVD with extras).
Criterion’s L’Avventura DVD in the States (very 'funny' voice-over on American trailer "a new experience in motion picture eroticism")
Story Of A Love Affair(Mr. Bongo DVD)

In the same year 1960 when L’Avventura opened, American painter Cy Twombly had consummated his love of Italy by occupying a Roman palace and opening another show in the city. And the Antonioni similarities are many. Tate Modern’s retrospective of his work is long overdue. It’s been 16 years since the artists’ catalogue raisonnes (complete works) began emerging and with the exception of a 2004 works on paper show at London’s Serpentine Gallery (touring from St.Petersburg’s Hermitage) and a concurrent show to open London’s Gagosian Gallery, there’s been nothing in the UK. Twombly probably isn’t known outside the art world, but for years he’s been mentioned in the same breath as other American art icons. (He was nicknamed ‘Cy’ after his pro baseball player father’s hero the legend ‘Cyclone’ Young). Why has it taken so long then? Well, as Tate director and co-curator of the show Nicholas Serota said at its opening, he’s often seen as an “intellectual and cerebral artist” whose work “doesn’t shriek immediately”. When his life’s work (he’s 80 this year) is seen in totality like this it engenders something very strange and meditative in the viewer, not unlike an Antonioni experience. So the show needs you to offer it your time.

And from Room 1 it’s easy to see why fellow artist and Black Mountain college grad Robert Rauschenberg was so encouraging. The small DIY sculptures are intriguing in their own right not merely historically so. And here are the beginnings of Twombly’s ‘scribbles’ - his graphic lines with lead and coloured pencil, pastel and house paint and ‘automatic writing’ (the year prior his U.S. army assignment was as a cryptographer). There’s even a concealed “Fuck” in the 1955 Academy. Moving through to the early 60’s of Room 3 his later recurrent themes of water, the sea, life and it’s detritus appear, “the grit of everyday life even when referring to the past” according to Serota. “I have known the madness of my scattered dreams” eddies its way to the bottom of the Herodiade canvas of 1960. Room 4 has the Ferragosto series (1961) inspired by the Roman holiday of fertility and maturity, his hand-smeared paint “flowing through the body...excremental” says the audio guide and Twombly using paint at his most ferocious. More streams, more rivers of calligraphic line glide the show on. Peek at the Aurora sculpture named after the Russian Revolution battleship with its plastic rose prow before sailing through the doomed drownings of Leandro. Respite and seclusion arrive with “my ponds” paintings as Twombly liked to call them or ‘green paintings’ as they’re known from the 1988 Venice Biennale inspired by the Rococo Venice of Tiepolo - one inscribed with lines from Twombly’s favourite poet Rilke. The large Four Seasons (Quattro Stagione) from the Tate’s own collection and New York’s MoMA lobby are re-united in Room 11 and if you know the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, Untitled (In memory of Alvaro de Campos) is a memorial sculpture to Pessoa’s fictional personae and a very fitting tribute considering it almost melts away unnoticed. The Iraq war and Homer’s Illiad inspired the last room of enormous red loops (Gagosian, New York) dripping down the canvas. The voyage may be over and though it didn’t seem that eventful, memories of the trip continue flashing through your mind for some time to come.
Slide show, writings on Twombly
Front Row discussion with artist Maggie Hambling(17 June) and Nightwaves(17 June)
Getting the hang of it (Financial Times)
The new Da Vinci Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel
Blek le Rat, the man who gave birth to Banksy
Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column- the Royal Academy

The Ruins trailer director Carter Smith started out with gritty documentary-style portraits of teen life in America’s mid-West, fashion photography and then high profile commercials (Lancome, Hilfiger, Tiffany’s). And The Ruins team comes with the sort of pedigree many films only dream of: based on Academy Award® nominee Scott Smith’s (A Simple Plan) other book The Ruins, Darius Khondji (too many amazing credits to mention) as cinematographer, Grant Major (The Lord of the Rings and King Kong) as production designer, Lizzy Gardiner (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) as costume designer, visual effects supervisor Gregory L. McMurray (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Sphere, Broken Arrow, The Core) and Graeme Revell (too many to mention) as composer. See what I mean! If you didn’t know all this then you’d have an OK time. But if you are in ‘this’ know then the film comes as a crashing disappointment. It’s a serious horror movie about a vine growing on Mayan ruins seeking sustenance from its human visitors: easily a double-bill player with The Happening. Prosthetics designer Jason Baird conjures some fairly gruesome flesh removal it must be said, and the ‘talking’ flowers on the vine aren’t as corny as they sound. The cast, particularly the talented and awarded (Independent Spirit Awards) Jena Malone (Into the Wild, Donnie Darko, Cold Mountain, Pride and Prejudice) keep alive the fear but while the sang-chaud vine terrifies the cast, it just ain’t enough to terrify an audience. There are no jokes, even tongue or genre in cheek, to be had here. And if ever there was a man-eating cinematic plant requiring back-story, this most certainly is one, because none of the characters share any emotional dialectic beyond present danger.
Robert Altman,not the director but the photographer of the 60s, more info has a London show in July.

It’s not very fashionable to admit I know, but I had a far more exciting time seeing Stallone’s Rambo again at a screening of the Sony blu-raydisc due out on Monday (DVD). I’ve always thought it ridiculous that the Rambo franchise should be relegated to some blood-thirsty niche rather than strung up in the lineage of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. “Fuck the world,” is John Rambo’s greeting to planet earth. “You’re trying to change what is...That we’re animals. Like the war that’s going on up there, anywhere, it’s in the blood. War’s natural, it’s peace that’s an accident. It’s what is.” Emotional subtlety, of course, isn’t what Rambo’s about. You never peer into the soldiers’ souls as in a Peckinpah pic. All you get is the primal urge to survive. Yet Rambo does make clear very early on that one dead person is one too many for him. But he ends up doing what he has to do. And wow, is it a helluva well-made rollercoaster movie. Does the world really need to have its face rubbed in its own violent excrement, though? Sure beats political correctness and the ostriches of both Left and Right and the Centrists who pretend the sands will disappear.

Had a fun chat to John Schoonraad and Alistair Anderson (special effects on the new Terry Gilliam The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, The Mummy Returns and Vertical Limit) at the screening. The latter’s been unemployed for quite a while (I mention this to stress how hard and precarious a business it is). John (prosthetic and makeup effects on Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, the recent Bond Casino Royale, Branagh’s The Magic Flute and many more including Björk’s Hunter video) was in better spirits as he’s doing prosthetics on the Benicio Del Toro /Anthony Hopkins The Wolf Man. Mark Romanek of the Robin Williams One Hour Photo was to direct but now its Joe Johnston from Jumanji. John’s eyes were bulging (it wasn’t just the hayfever) when enthusing about the production design (Rick Heinrichs) and Del Toro’s star stunt double. Mucho gossip but there’s such a thing as a confidentiality agreement. And we also lamented the passing this week of the great Stan Winston, more, Skinwalkers.
The Times obituary

Optimum releases the Ultimate Rambo Collection with all four films in a blu-ray box set including Sony's great array of extras (most on the DVD too): Rambo IV has audio commentary with Sylvester Stallone, Courage and Inspiration: The Musical Legacy of Jerry Goldsmith (the composer), and audio commentary with branching featurettes on all the film’s special effects.

Teeth (official trailer) is another first time feature writer/director on a microscopic budget - actor turned helmer Mitchell Lichtenstein and oh, does he impress with this film. I began by wondering if it was just a ‘one-gag’ movie based on the female vagina dentata myth Lichtenstein had picked up in literature class from prof Camille Paglia. But this film’s right up there in the ‘Shakespeare’ pantheon of religio-comedic-horror. Dawn (Jess Weixler) has a toothed vagina and attends a local chastity group. She meets nice boy Tobey (Hale Appleman –his real name!) who [Spoiler alert] in an idyllic waterfall cave can’t resist any longer his urge for the Eve in front of him, losing his ‘member’ in the moment of bliss. (Great prosthetics in this film too). Thus arises the tip of Dawn’s iceberg on its voyage of discovery. Bear in mind that a Virginia school board were still censoring textbook drawings of the inner vagina (never the penis of course) in the year 2000 and the US government spends an estimated $100 million annually to fund sexual abstinence programmes (a throw back to the Adolescent Family Life Act of the 1980s).
Front Row discussion (18 June)
Understanding... Vagina Dentata
The doco Jesus Camp (ICA DVD) about exactly that for pre-teenage Christians must be seen to be believed (trailer).
Girl goes to court over her 'silver ring thing'. She lost her case.

[Addition]
The Cement Garden (DVD) harks back to the radical experimental days of Brit cinema in the early 90s. Its sensitive cross-dressing scene prompted Madonna to pen a fan letter to writer/director Andrew Birkin and use the scene in one of her videos. Ian McEwan’s [YouTube Part 2)books (Atonement) on our dark, unspoken urges aren’t ever easy to adapt for the screen and Birkin won top directing prize at the Berlin Film Fest for incest themed Cement Garden. After this success (and irksome Hollywood experiences) Birkin has never made a film since (although he still writes screenplays e.g Perfume (2006) with Cement's producer). The DVD’s loaded with fascinating extras: compelling full commentary with cast and crew (unfortunately not including Charlotte Gainsbourg), screen tests, designs, and a short pre-screening Q & A from this year. Listen out for the score by a then unknown Edward Shearmur who stepped in to replace the Charles Ives and Wagner Birkin initially had in mind. Using young child and early teen actors also raises interesting moral questions that many would prefer to remain hidden and unanswered.

Worth checking out too is Simon Rumley’s recent low-budget socio-horror The Living and the Dead (DNC DVD) with its ‘how to make one of these yourself’ audio commentary plus one of his early shorts.
And the hitherto untold story of the British 'B' movies, Truly, Madly, Cheaply on BBC Four TV with films: so far the unmissable seriously warped Psychomania (1971) (flower-power bikers anyone?)and Cover Girl Killer (1959)showing how wonderful actors often get stuck with their TV roles, in this case Harry H. Corbett (Steptoe and Son).

In Search of a Midnight Kiss (trailer) is an indie B/W pic set on Los Angeles’ New Year’s Eve with nice guy Wilson (Scoot McNairy) forced to post on Craig’s List ‘Misanthrope seeks misanthrope’. Depressed but definitely not dissolute actrine Vivian (Sara Simmonds) replies. The film’s a bit of a throw back to indie relationship movies of yesteryear (Woody Allen’s ghost still looming), but there’s never a false note here from writer/director Alex Holdridge. Predictable? Well, maybe, but human life is most of the time. And Holdridge’s mastery of traditional dialogue and pacing is quite refreshing after years of meandering ‘mumblecore’ in the cinema. And if you haven’t got Wilson’s ‘blag’ to get into the magnificent, crumbling old picture palaces of LA, make sure you buy a ticket for one of the tours and hope there’s a girl for you in the group. You can’t help but fall in love once inside these magical pleasure domes.


Mouth to Mouth , US site, (trailer) (now on DVD)is Alison Murray’s indie film that brought Ellen Page to the world’s attention. She plays a young runaway kid Sherry who joins SPARKS (Street People Armed With Radical Knowledge) on its journey across Europe. They find their utopia in a remote Portuguese vineyard, even joined by Sherry’s ‘right-on’ reformed mum. But like all utopias they begin resembling the workaholic rat race they despised. “You know you can’t go on living the same so called life you’ve been living.” Exec produced by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, Mouth to Mouth, though a nice little film, has none of Egoyan’s acute ‘strangeness’.

Ellen Page in Juno with audio commentary from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody is out on DVD. And
Ellen Page on David Letterman’s show
And the now classic American indie gem Variety is out on (Kino DVD) in the States. IFC Films article

Writer/director Rupert Wyatt has been on the horizon for a while developing features and directing TV so The Escapist arouses a lot of interest and thankfully doesn’t disappoint too much. Frank (Brian Cox) wants to jail break to see his daughter and the escape is told through flashback. Therein lies the problem. Cox plays crims standing on his head (see Michael Mann’s Manhunter that pre-dates the more successful Hannibal Lector films) and he’s well supported by this crème Brit cast. But they’ve been some pretty stunning prison break movies out on DVD lately e.g. Runaway Train for a Hollywood take and Jacques Becker’s 1959 art-house Le Trou. Wyatt’s escape scenes are really riveting (you could be watching a Hollywood budget), so much so that when you return to the prison’s mundanities you feel quite deflated. You wonder whether it’s all been a dream for Frank. A touch of Polish director Andrzej Wajda is needed here to balance out the film. Impressive Brit filmmaking nonetheless.

Painter/writer/director John Maybury has been a long-time darling of the Brit art-house through his work with director Derek Jarman and his brilliant evocation of painter Francis Bacon’s world in Love is the Devil. The Edge of Love is the world of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas according to playwright Sharman MacDonald (Keira’s mum) and seen through the eyes of two woman Vera (Keira Knightley) and his wife Caitlin (the very impressive again, Sienna Miller). As you’d expect from Maybury it’s beautifully filmed but lacks the sensory smells, tastes and touch of Love is the Devil. Alcohol was like an intravenous drip for Thomas yet you never get a whiff of it in this film. High hopes as David Lynch’s composer Angelo Badalamenti writes the score but there’s none of the woozy eraticism that might characterise Thomas’ world. And though the film is more about his women rather than Dylan Thomas himself, the sense of him as their ‘D.H. Lawrencian’ anchor becomes rather lost amid cinematic design reverie.

Another problem, without giving the plot away, is the fact that Thomas is portrayed to be something he wasn’t- a bastard of a friend to Vera’s husband Captain Killick. Poetic license with his love-life (did Vera really have an affair with Thomas?) is one thing, but as the script rather prosaically notes, poets “feed off life”. So by promulgating to a possibly new readership in a major film that Thomas the man couldn’t condone Killick’s actions obviously gives the wrong impression of Thomas the poet. Exactly the opposite was true. While art doesn’t always imitate life, Thomas’ most certainly did. One of my favourite Thomas quotes comes from a lecture he was giving in the States when blind-drunk he began his address by asking the audience, “If every hermaphrodite was a schizophrene, which half would you choose?” Maybe Sharman’s script should have used that quote to at least defend her case.
Aeronwy Thomas on The Edge of Love and her father, Dylan Thomas
Sienna Miller: a sense of theatre
Once we had Britten and Bacon; where are the cultural giants now?

Zeitgeist in New York have released some Derek Jarman on DVD, Caravaggio , and Wittgenstein
Bill Douglas Trilogy (BFI DVD) and Julie Christie talks about her career in a rare interview.

What was supposed to be Britain’s New Labour tropical cruise of a lifetime has somewhat turned into an Antarctic fact finding mission. A wee chilly on the deck of the unruly Britannia as its captain Chancellor Alistair Darling calmly assured passengers of the country’s financial stability at a Mansion House dinner Wednesday night. He must have been pleased at Thursday’s announcement that the retail spending index had its biggest monthly gain in 22 years (or possibly a bit perturbed that passengers might be about to don life-jackets and jump ship with as much bounty as they could carry). Anyone seen the stoker from the boiler room?

Brown wins 42-day detention vote by a whisker

And another of the banes of London life its local councils are also circling the ship. A bit like the seagulls – I’m sure they do some good in life but all we see are their droppings on the poop deck.
Teabags banned from compost
Now bin police get tough over... a teabag
Councils send in bin snoopers

And I more than commiserated with the woman who thought that a refund she received was odd but after checking it out by telephone started celebrating only to be brutally told to repay it:
Littlewoods demands return of £700 refund
Victory in Littlewoods battle
I received a council demand the other day for several hundred pounds they overpaid me dating back 6 years. Could it be that I started rocking the boat? Surely just a co-incidence. And when things like this happen:
Oyster ordeal
you wonder why we can’t easily sue Transport for London for all the delays and signal failures tube commuters still suffer every second day. Flowers and chocolates just won’t cut that mustard. And with all the budgetary stress of the Olympics, have a listen to BBC Radio4’s The Archive Hour The Ration Book Olympics on how the 1948 Olympics was staged on a shoestring. Maybe I could stage an alternative LucresLondon Olympics. Competitors could dress like tube trains and ‘bendy’ buses. The hurdling events would be fun.

British troop presence (many of whom will be advisors rather than combatants) in Afghanistan was increased (just after President Bush had made his last visit to these shores) only to see more deaths including the first female casualty. And a glass/steel sculpture by artist Jaume Plensa, situated on the roof of the new wing of BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place (adjacent to the spire of All Souls Church), entitled Breathing opened this week. It commemorates the journalists who have died in the war zones and every night a light beam extending one kilometre into the sky will illuminate the sculpture for 30 minutes, in tandem with the BBC's ten o'clock news bulletin.

The Independent’s stalwart war correspondent Robert Fisk reveals the classical music that consoles him- BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions last Sunday. Only 1 more day to listen again to this.

Based on Michael Rudman’s 1984 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's 1949 play Death of a Salesman (now out in a Special Collector’s edition in Metrodome’s Classics DVD) was directed for TV by radical German Volker Schlöndorff retaining the artificiality of the stage. The extra is a riveting feature length making of doco. Willy Loman (Dustin Hoffman) is an Every ‘American’ Man figure who having worked all his life as a travelling salesman is too proud to retire and take a job offer from his old (now successful) friend Charley (Charles Durning). For many, Miller’s plays will be a new experience and watching this DVD is an experience you are not likely to forget in a hurry. You could watch this film as a late teenager, middle-aged, or old as the hills and all would be moved to tears. I must have seen this play dozens and dozens of times (including a remarkable Biff from a then unknown Mel Gibson opposite Warren Mitchell- YouTube of his 1996 performance) yet it never fails to lose its relevance or devastating power. Willy has such hopes for his sons Biff (John Malkovich) and Happy (Stephen Lang) but ends up suffocating them. He has apparitions of his successful Uncle Ben who advises Biff, “never fight fare with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.” For all their faults, the Lomans are one of the most honest families you’ll ever find. And therein lies the tragedy. Willy only wants to better them all out of suburbia, “you’ve got to break your neck to see a star in this yard”. Biff: “Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous begging fool of myself when all that I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say, I know who I am...I’m just what I am that’s all...Would you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens. ” The play is about following your own dreams and not those of others or America:
“Willy Loman never earned a lot of money, his name was never in the paper, he’s not the finest character that ever lived, but he’s a human being. And a terrible thing is happening to him, so attention must be paid. He must not be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention. Attention must finally be paid to such a person...a small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”

[Addition]
Couscous (La graine et le mulet- The Secret of the Grain) – 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. (Trailer in French)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 Guédiguian, 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.

Great Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) live video singing his song Hurt
Johnny Cash's haunting version

Ikiru (Living) (B/W 1952){Criterion YouTube trailer) is Akira Kurasawa’s magnificent Japanese classic given a new print for its BFI run next month. Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) is an ageing civil servant (he likens himself to an Egyptian ‘mummy’) who's given his life to his job in town planning when one day he learns he has inoperable cancer. His son is not too pleased about his ‘friendship’ with young toy maker-ess (Miki Odagiri) but it gives him a lease of life prompting him to build a kids’ playground on a disused plot of land. “If his zeal cannot be understood then the world is dark indeed,” reflects a colleague after his death as they join in a sake wake debating who actually created and thought of the playground. Still as haunting and relevant today as it ever was. Treat yourself to this one summer evening at the BFI.
Japanese Gems BFI season
Tatsuya Nakadai tribute at New York's FilmForum
Syndromes and a Century BFI DVD (trailer)
blog on the Thai censorship of this film
One of the best American family dramas in a long-time, The Savages is out on DVD.
Killer of Sheep (1979)written, directed, produced and shot by Charles Burnett exploring urban African-Americans in Los Angeles' Watts district. Often likened to Italian neorealism, it was selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress for its cultural importance.

Irish Film Season 2008 at the Riverside Studios in West London including Alfred Hitchcock’s rarely seen film of Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock (1930) and Poitin the first feature to be made entirely in the Irish language.

The relatively unknown Italian school of late C20th painting Italy’s Divisionist Painters opens at the National Gallery. More on that in a couple of days when I’ve seen it. There’s an excellent accompanying film season all with shorts (cheap seats, though some will be DVD projections): L’Avventura, Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, plus the rarely seen Bertolucci La Commare secca (The Grim Reaper) and Olmi’s Il posto (The Job) .
Italian Divisionists bring Radical Light to National Gallery

And for a funny take (and totally revolutionary filmmaking) on daily life, watch out for the cameo of depressive Dane Lars von Trier in The Boss of It All (out on DVD), IFC (US trailer) and Zentropa's really wacky trailer.
Lars Von Trier's funny turn
I'm a control freak - but I was not in control

Interview with classical music’s bad boy Nigel Kennedy:
'I didn't want to be the Des O'Connor of the violin'
And Jonathan Miller directs Purcell's opera Dido & Aeneas for the Chelsea Festival (Tues 24 June) conducted by Philip Pickett and New London Consort with some recently discovered new material. As always with Miller I'm sure it'll be quietly provocative.
And BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time Music of the Spheres gives you much to think on’t.

Addition

Last night, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that 3 more British soldiers died in a suicide attack in southern Afghanistan bringing the total dead in that country to 100. In The Valley of Elah (out on DVD and Blu-ray) starts as a slow burn murder mystery that evolves into a moral mystery as Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a former military MP, doggedly pursues the cause of his son’s death – a recently returned soldier from Iraq. Based on the true story of Richard Davis(who returned with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), this is a deeply moving and incredibly brave film for Academy Award® winning Crash writer/director Paul Haggis and his cast. The title derives from the story Hank tells the young child of Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a police detective slowly roped into helping with the investigation. The Israelites were on one mountain and the Philistines with Goliath on the other, the Valley of Elah below: “the first thing David had to fight was his own fear”. “What happens when they [the soldiers in Iraq find out that they’re] not David but the Goliath?” asks Haggis in the interview extra. No one would touch the idea in Hollywood until Clint Eastwood put in a word at Warners. They’ve been so many ‘Iraq’ films by now, but this one will really haunt your thoughts as there are no histrionics only characters who begin their journey, like most ordinary citizens, in a state of thinking they know where they are with the war only to be thrust into a far deeper plane of rage and understanding. The ending is so unbelievably brave for an American film let alone one released by a studio and made all the more poignant as Annie Lennox’s song Lost plays out.

And this weekend's Financial Times has an article on the 9/11 conspiracy theories:
The Truth Is Out There - Part I

the texture of men's souls

A character in David Lean’s film The Passionate Friends quotes from John Galsworthy’s The Forsythe Saga (1918): "By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls." It’s an inversely very apt way to describe Lean’s work. When his Brief Encounter was re-issued last year (Park Circus Lean tour), I mused on how the film would play using just sound-effects (in Jean-Pierre Melville French film mode) without the ‘now-classic’ use of the Rachmaninov piano concerto. And watching this glowing restored B/W print of The Passionate Friends(1948) (for the Lean centenary celebrations) I mused even more upon this. It’s both inverse and somewhat perverse because one of the most recognisable elements of a David Lean film is his soundtrack music and theme e.g. Maurice Jarre for Doctor Zhivago (YouTube), Lawrence Of Arabia (YouTube) and Ryan’s Daughter. Yet Lean was so cinematically articulate that music seemed more a concession to his popularising cinema. Adapted by suspense writer Eric Ambler from an H.G. Wells novel, Passionate Friends opens by resembling that Edward G. Robinson Brit flic (the title of which I couldn’t remember the last time I tried to remember) in which the doctor husband discovers his wife’s affair and almost gets away with ‘doing in the blighter’ after imprisoning him in a bunker for several months. In The Passionate Friends, Claude Rains is the much less malevolent banker husband who discovers his wife’s affair, Mary(Ann Todd who became Lean’s wife) a passion for first love Steven (Trevor Howard) who she meets him again on holiday by accident after WWII. For respected film historian David Thomson this film is “the kind of thing Lean was made to do” and he’s always urged its restoration. I’d never seen The Passionate Friends before and viewing it in the cinema proved to be absolutely fascinating for all the reasons many critics at the time found irritating: “a maze of flashback sequences that might cause even Einstein’s brain to spin” (The News of the World), “such a wild mêlée of retrospection and reminiscence that it would appear to be shot with a time machine instead of a camera” (The Evening Standard).

Many actors didn’t enjoy working with Lean and in The Passionate Friends you certainly sense a ‘detachment’ - rather like that of an artist whose interest is in representing the model rather than in engagement. “I want to belong to myself,” says Mary. Early on in the film, Mary’s flashback in the back seat of the taxi is more her face being sculpted in light (Guy Green’s cinematography) and time (Lean began his career as a film editor) than a normal ‘Hollywood effect’ of the era that would cut a scene long before Lean does. You often see modern video/film art that re-edits Hollywood movies to accentuate film semiotic themes of feminism or whatever. But Lean got there first. Unusual too, is the moment in the theatre when her husband twigs at the affair as he spies their two empty seats and later his enraged “Get out!” is off-camera under a two-shot on Mary and Steven. “Nearness, belonging, fulfilment. That’s not the kind she wants,” sagely advises her husband to Steven. Lean uses the white of his film stock to accentuate Mary’s beautiful distance from the ‘real’ world. First in the close-up flashbacks, then with the white of the Swiss Alps and the fog that envelops Mary and Steven in the cable-car after their impromptu meet. “My love isn’t worth very much,” could be uttered by either Mary or her husband in affluent pragmatism. Many said Lean never had ‘the gift of friendship’. Maybe that was his way of surviving a cruel, unjust and indifferent world. Quintessentially English, there’s something terribly cold, terribly sad and fractiously beautiful about The Passionate Friends. For ultimately deep within those crevices is clinging the lichen of love.

David Lean Centenary Season
Julie Christie (Dr. Zhivago) gives a rare interview to BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves about her Human Rights Watch event at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on Sunday(Cries From the Heart: Tyranny), and a discussion of Lawrence Of Arabia on Thursday’s programme.

Lawrence of Arabia (Collector's Edition, 2 discs)
Great Expectations ( ITV DVD Blu-ray out June 16)

Re-issued in a new B/W print for Jeanne Moreau’s 80th birthday, François Truffaut’sJules et Jim(1962) based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1953 novel (best-known as ‘the man’ who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso) also concerns the forces of the soul. As Richard Roud noted in his 1962 Sight and Sound review: “Friendship, Truffaut seems to be saying, is rarer and more precious than love. Or perhaps he is also saying that friendship, not being as natural or as innate as sex relationships, must always be destroyed by the forces of nature re-asserting themselves- just as in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, to which several references are made in the film, the wilderness is always waiting to destroy the carefully nurtured garden.” Catherine is “a vision for all men, not a woman for one.” Both the Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and the Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre, also a young avant-garde theatre director) fall for Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) but she marries Jules. Both men fight on opposing WWII sides and Jim subsequently visits Catherine forming a ménage à trois. Truffaut began as a film critic and seems to be emulating, in his very own way, the ‘emotional canvases’ of Cinemascope Hollywood films such as Minnelli’s Some Came Running(1958) – a film he must have seen. Truffaut triumphs in his third film as a cross between David Lean and Godard’s jump-cutting nouvelle vague (New Wave) with Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Georges Delerue’s score intrinsic to the mix. Oh for the £3 double bill repertory picture houses of yesteryear (Ed Lewis’ Riverside Studios was the closest and still lives in his absence as he peers through clouds of cigarette smoke from heaven). The Passionate Friends/Jules et Jim double bill anyone?
Criterion DVD in the States

Jeanne Moreau BFI season

“The real story always lies between the [editing] cuts...the most interesting thing about film is not what you show but how you cut from one scene to another. The audience’s imagination brings a whole new dimension to the film as they start filling in the gaps,” explains Indian director Shekhar Kapur who never really got along with his Brit cinematographer and “the art design, European way of shooting films”. Luckily he had an Indian one as well to make his “film of the earth”. Bandit Queen(1994, now out on DVD) is the true story of Phoolan Devi (the Goddess of Flowers) “a low caste bitch” who was sold into marriage aged 11 never enjoying a childhood, was gang raped, and formed a makeshift army in a 5-year reign of bloody vengeance. After imprisonment for massacring the high castes at Behmai, a low-caste Uttar Pradesh government finally came to power. This is an extraordinary film with a blisteringly incisive commentary by the director who hadn’t seen the film for 12 years. “After the film was released in the West everyone started to say I’m the new Sam Peckinpah. I’m not but I can understand...Thank God I’ve seen this film again [because I’ve realised] I’ve become a captive of that system of world cinema. Whatever film I make now after having seen this film again, I must now unshackle - unshackle the other system that has taken over [me]. Seema Biswas is unforgettable as Phoolan Devi and music score is by the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Cinematographer Robby Müller doesn’t much like unnecessary ‘art design’ cinema either. And listening to the Down By Law 20 minute interview extra on Optimum’s The Jim Jarmusch Collection (Volume 1) probably ‘teaches’ you more about shooting a film than spending years at film school. Down by Law (1986) is one of indie cinema’s masterpieces with the hitherto unequalled trio of Italian comic star Roberto Benigni and musicians Tom Waits and John Lurie (Lounge Lizards) who break out of their New Orleans jail cell escaping into the swamp wilderness of the Bayou. Müller’s black and white photography looks breathtaking in this new DVD print, that “strange enchanted quality” according to Lurie. There are other wonderfully wacky extras including Jarmusch’s home video ‘pop’ of Tom Waits version to end all versions of Cole Porter’s It’s Alright by Me, and taped phone conversations between Jarmusch and his acting trio. Benigni phoned “deep in the night” is outrageous as always describing his “brain in fire period” and “why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7-8-9.” Think about it.

Made for just $15,000, Permanent Vacation (Jarmusch’s first film from 1980) was rejected by the Tisch school as Jarmusch’s final thesis for being “a waste of their time”. It’s the existential journey around New York of Aloysius “Allie” Parker (Chris Parker) photographed in 16mm colour by Tim DiCillo who went onto direct Living in Oblivion. John Lurie again appears and his version to end all versions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow plays out the film, “Let’s just say I’m a certain kind of tourist, a tourist on permanent vacation.” The deservedly award laden 1984 Stranger Than Paradise again with Lurie rounds out the set.
Jim Jarmusch Speaks on Evolution of Broken Flowers
Criterion Down by Law DVD
Criterion’s Stranger than Paradise DVD

Tom Waits surfaces again in the comic/tragic Wristcutters – A Love Story that I’ve recommended several times on this site. And Müller’s unique photography can be seen in Wim Wenders’ existential Alice in the Cities (out on DVD). Also just out is Axiom’s DVD Libero - a captivating Italian film about childhood by actor turned director Kim Rossi Stuart.

BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme has writer/director Chris Petit discussing his Brit cult classic Radio On, just released on BFI DVD. And Michael Medwin, 70s film producer of Memorial Enterprises, is interviewed. He gave debuts to Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Tony Scott amongst others.

I approached Arrow’s The Andrzej Wajda War Trilogy (DVD) with some trepidation not having seen them for 20 years and hoping I wouldn’t have to be simply ‘polite’ to Polish cinema’s hero Andrzej Wajda. Not in the least. Canal (1957) is probably the one to start with (note the almost pictogram ‘letter-play’ irony in the Polish title (Kanal) with the final ‘broken’ crossed ‘L’) and the existential almost hallucinatory escape (very dark cinematography so typical of the Polish spirit) into the sewers of Warsaw during the Nazi onslaught (the Warsaw Uprising). For those, like me, unkeen on war films unfocussed on people’s inner lives, this is far from uplifting but unforgettable. On A Generation DVD (also shot on 16mm B/W and first of the trilogy), there’s a 40 minute interview with Wajda who notes the American reaction to his films and “Polish cinematography [not] only and strictly condemned to itself because it speaks a language unknown to anybody [and has] something to say to the world.” In turn Wajda acknowledges the influence on his work from Hollywood’s Greg Toland (Citizen Kane). Director Roman Polanski was also a Lodz film school (the style so characteristic of his early work) graduate and has a small acting role in A Generation. And note the lonesome reedy sound of Jan Krenz’s Kanal score heavily influencing Preisner’s scores for later Polish director Kieslowski. It’s a shame very few Wajda films are still yet to surface on DVD e.g. his 1979 The Young Ladies of Wilko is a simple haunting tale of a man revisiting his old village and lost loves.
Wajda's hit war film still resonates
Criterion’s DVD set in the States

[ADDITION......................]

California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit) (Romanian site) (literally unfinished film) was the debut of 27-year-old Romanian director Cristian Nemescu (written with Catherine Linstrum and Tudor Voican) proving also to be his last opus as he prematurely died in a car crash. We’ll never know quite how he wanted his final cut of the film. Distributor Artificial Eye has been a staunch champion of Romanian film lately with A fost sau n-a fost? (12:08 East of Bucharest) and the abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) both available now on DVD. California Dreamin' is set late on in the Kosovo War (1999). Stringent and strident NATO US army Captain Doug Jones (Armand Assante) is commanding a train of soldiers but their progress is halted by a tiny village’s petty and corrupt station master Doiaru (Razvan Vasilescu) demanding transit papers. Dying through lack of excitement there, the local mayor (Ion Sapdaru) throws a welcome party for the Americans. Doiaru’s gorgeous daughter Monica (Maria Dinulescu) speaks no English but like most of the other village girls can’t wait to transfer her affections onto one of the handsome Americans. Her catch is Sergeant David McLaren (Jamie Elman) enlivening the ensuing 5-day delay. At 2.5 hours the film is perhaps a little long for its material but we’ll never know under the circumstances. What is obvious in scene after scene, though, is Nemescu’s very low-key command of his actors and script. There’s nothing new here but the humanity Nemescu brings to this material far outweighs that cavil with some particularly beautiful scenes for Armand Assante’s captain who will never see the world at war in quite the same way after his village experiences. And The Beach Boys California Dreamin’ song is so very powerful and potent yet Nemescu never lets it swamp his material; rather he allows it to emerge like a butterfly from its cocoon.

Jollied along a few nights ago at the launch of Ben Lewis’ (now an art critic for The Evening Standard) book Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes.
Times article. Included was some joke raconteuring from Brit artist Doug Fishbone. And a met a very cute girl dressed to the nines like The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy who does something with her husband on YouTube. Haven’t checked it out yet but I’m sure there must be a deeper meaning :)

Does anyone dream of Southeast Arkansas? Shotgun Stories (Trailer) charts a meditative feud between two sets of half-brothers following the death of their father. It’s American Jeff Nichols debut supported by the team from 2000 indie hit George Washington including awesome wide-screen anamorphic cinematography from Adam Stone.
More blood and dust with the No Country for Old Men DVD and
An American Blu-ray of There Will Be Blood.

And this book sounds interesting:
Alexandra Fuller Remembers a Wyoming 'Legend'
Fuller was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week (June2).

Even Wyoming sounds like a ‘paradise’ dream compared to London these days. American readers of this site who’ve almost become blasé about shootings and crime in their cities might wonder what all the fuss is about. So let me make clear that the rise of London crime in the past 5 years has indeed been astonishing. It never existed to this extent before. As I’ve always stressed in this blog, people’s problems are relative - so mine seem small compared to the more serious crimes lately:
Adverts to stop knife crime
15 year-old girl stabbed to death in a lift
But solutions start with the detail not the press spin. And if the authority’s reactions to my complaints are anything to go by, these people would seem to have trouble rustling up a lettuce leaf for a tortoise let alone deal with the wounded animals of the inner city jungle.

Even Liza Minnelli got a taste of English salad:
Liza Minnelli starts British tour after visa wrangle

Transport continues to provide hours of fascinating ‘earth reality satellite TV’ for the aliens:
TfL collects £32m in Oyster card penalty fares. Happened to me the other day too. Like most other city dwellers, I still haven’t had the time to sort it out.
MOD releases UFO files (BBC TV's Newsnight)
Examination of the damage done by the boozy party on the tube (“anthropologically misunderstood”) according to Mayor Boris. I quite like listening to him...

Chief officer explains how TFL are going to enforce alcohol ban

Commuters face chaos after bridge scaffolding collapse
Commuters seconds from bridge disaster
Commuting chaos for travellers going into Liverpool Street (TV footage)
Plus ça change.

And don’t you love the nightly TV pundits who only a year ago were saying Britain’s housing market’s problems weren’t that serious? I’m not suggesting it’s Titanic time but we sure ain’t sailing anywhere near the equator.
Housing market slump could be worst since 1970s, lenders warn

And a couple more weeks to vote for your favourite short film on:
ITV London TV

London time is definitely ripe for Tate Modern’s Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography which is a contrived show but not really contrived enough. And the Tate doesn’t yet have a permanent photography curator. The show follows a rather historical approach to both its known and more obscure 106 photographers – French fin de siècle, through 30’s French and American, to one of Jeff Wall’s large-canvas studio creations and performance artist Laurie Anderson’s 70s Polaroid experiments. For a general ‘street’ public it’s by no means a bore but it never really gets to the heart of the photographic eye. Sarah Jones’ 1995 Actor is prompting us to think more about the triangular relationship between subject, photographer and viewer. But as I mentioned in my recent One Face blog, Russian experimentalist of the 1920s Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing exercises got there first. I would have preferred more a curatorial mish-mash more along the lines of Paris’ Fondation Cartier - shows that though thematic e.g Le Bleu or Le Visage (The Face) nonetheless had ideas bouncing around. Many of the Tate photographs are extraordinary and some, like Arnold Genthe’s very dark 1899 San Francisco gamblers and peasants, are alone worth the effort. But it’s a wasted opportunity for the Tate (who rarely have photography shows) at a time when the proliferation of the digital camera allows everyone to think they are a photographer (how very New Labour), everyone is so used to being snapped, and it all seems so easy. The Tate Modern’s greatest achievement has been to engender a sense of the importance of sight. Of observing not just looking. (One of the most lasting things I take away from classes at New York’s famed Actor’s Studio was actress Ellen Burstyn demanding of us not what we felt but what we actually saw in our colleagues’ exercises). But that takes some energy, and the problem with the London streets is that not enough people have found a way to channel that energy. The ‘graffiti’ art currently on the Tate’s exterior walls is also trying to promote debate but it’s also romanticising what is street ‘reality’ too.

Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography (Guardian article)
Street & Studio: Sharp photographs and blurred boundaries
Haunch of Venison’s Home Lands Land Marks has some wonderful South African photography including Santu Mofokeng, Guy Tillim and the genius ‘charcoal animator’ William Kentridge’s ‘tondo’ anamorphic drawings.

Uta Barth’s latest series of photographs Sundial paint with the light that enters her own home beginning with Untitled (07.01) and proceeding through points in the day. Both impressionist and expressionist, Barth’s photos are both fact and reverie and will definitely enliven your visit through a dialectic on what and how your eye perceives the eye of each Uta Barth.
Uta Barth interview

Haven’t yet managed to see the photos of Mitra Tabrizian at Tate Britain

“Your documentary, on some level, is going to be a lie...it’s how you wish to represent the truth and how you decided to tell that particular story. It’s not true, there’s no such thing as truth, but we come to like and trust a certain story not necessarily because it’s the most absolutely truthful but it’s the thing we tell ourselves that makes sense of the world at least at this moment,” explains New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. He’s one of the many fascinating things on the My Kid Could Paint That DVD. Once upon a time there was Marla Olmstead, a 4-year-old American girl from East Coast Binghampton. She liked to paint. A local gallery saw her ‘abstract’ work and decided to mount a show. A local paper did a story then picked up by the New York Times Metro section. Her work started selling for loads of money. Controversial TV show 60 Minutes picked it up too. They invited the little girl and her parents into the big gingerbread house of network TV. But the wolf of commercialism called her a fraud - a concept little Marla of course did not comprehend. But the nice doco film maker huntsman Amir Bar-Lev came to rescue the little girl and her family. And so far they’ve been no more candy totin’ TV networks. “It’s a story about what happens with stories,” says Elizabeth Cohen, the local columnist who first broke the story. This is the sort of DVD that shoppers at the supermarket check-out really should be tempted to buy. On the one hand, Marla’s parents wished their daughter to have a normal childhood while on the other they naturally wanted to encourage her talents in the American way. There’s a revealing out-take extra showing her mother submitting Marla’s work to a local gallery’s feminist Rude and Bold Women show with a yukky cutesy DaDa artist’s statement written by her Mum. In fact, unusually for a DVD, all the 30 minutes of out-takes are fascinating. The commentary by the film’s editor and Anthony the local gallery owner who mounted Marla’s show tends towards the descriptive, though. It’s a shame a social commentator such as Germaine Greer or Susan Faludi couldn’t have been enlisted. That would have made it amazing. But the presence of Kimmelman’s art criticism more than suffices: “the art resides in the declaration [by the critic or galllery] and the ones that get to choose...[the latter] make people feel bitter and resentful...[but] we want to be told what to think and spoon-fed, and most of our culture is about that- making things convenient for us.”

Market exuberance surprises even the professionals

Jake & Dinos Chapman ruffle art feathers again with If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be. The title refers to watercolours painted by Adolf Hitler, purchased by the artists in a job lot auction, and ‘coloured’ by them with ‘flowerpower’ zest and zeal. Upstairs, they’ve illuminated Victorian portraits with weeping plasma noses, sewn lips and a red nose cone, nails affixing the face, and bulging eyes like a villian exiled to the harsh Martian atmosphere in Total Recall. On BBC’s Front Row they explained they wanted to “draw attention to the fact that anti-Semitism and Fascism are more connected with social and historical processes than with the pathological sympathies of one individual.” Downstairs in the below ground gallery nine glass display cases are angled to form a swastika within which are minutely detailed ‘war memorial’ panoramas of Fucking Hell. These are a painstaking re-creation of the exhibit burnt in the Momart storage fire of 2004. Here is Dante’s Hell in all its glorious gruesome detail: rivers of blood and corpses, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny figures, scabrous faces, decomposing noses, a blackened church for the baptism into eternal hell, a blackened volcanic mushroom cloud of evil. It’s totally disgusting but probably comes closer to evoking the revulsion of war than any war memorial museum could. If art should make one stand even taller, towering and cowering in childlike inquisitiveness, then the Chapmans succeed.

There’s a few more days to catch John Currin’s show of sexual poses in Mayfair. I’m still not quite sure what to make of Currin. This show was apparently Currin’s reaction to the Danish cartoon religious outrage wanting to see how far he could push the boundaries, and his explicit nudes most certainly celebrate the sacrament of the body. Currin’s past work seems to be involved in a dialectic with the French and Spanish painting of the past. And this show seems to celebrate the luscious Renoir-ness oil of the body – the goings-on in the loges and post-play that Renoir couldn’t possibly unveil. In that Currin succeeds, and he most certainly can paint.
John Currin finds beauty in pert, pink places...
Tracey Emin has curated a room of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. See for yourself: shadows and love. BBC Radio 4 Front Row interview with Emin.

“For Alan Green abstract painting is the ultimate reality,” is Guggenheim Museum’s Diane Waldman’s quote prefacing the press release of this show at Annely Juda Fine Art. “The more personal the experience, the greater and more universal is the ultimate understanding,” concludes her catalogue essay. Green’s paintings are decpetively simple: rectangular ‘floorboard’ fields of colour or graduated and variegated cross-hatchings and in each, the oil playing in the light of the linen beneath. It makes you think of childrens’ spatial acquisitional skills and those who play musical masterpieces by rote – astonishing but relatively devoid of something stranger, more playful and vulnerable evoked by Green’s paint. Downstairs are bronze sculptures and drawings by Joan Miro equally worth one’s attention.
Alan Green in the Tate collection

Alison Watt’s, the new National Gallery Associate Artist Phantom continues her work in using paint inspired by fabric. “It’s strange, but sometimes you have to make a painting to understand why you wanted to make it,” she’s quoted as saying. I wonder whether subliminally that’s what 4-year old Marla was doing. Watt was most inspired by the National Gallery’s C17th Spanish Zurbarán painting Saint Francis in Meditation of the dark shrouded monk. Her room of enormous canvases flood it with light almost keeping the dark at bay but reluctant in the knowledge that it’s a symbiotic relationship. Playing for two more weeks with an excellent DVD available to watch there or buy.
The Standard’s article on Watt

With the cool Chinese name, Zhang Qikai (Qi=peculiar, Kai=open) opens an exhibition of his Salvador Dali-esque panda paintings at Marlborough Fine Art. Panda reclining on a revolver, panda on knife edge, panda nonchalantly picking his teeth on a rifle, and panda apprehensively climbing a candle-flame. A guilty pleasure maybe but they’re hard not to like even though blatantly unsubtle.

If my kid could paint that, any older kids who are lucky enough to see
Garbage Warrior will be saying ‘my dad could build that’: (YouTube) DVD trailer and loads more videos of Reynolds' work. “If you create your own electricity, heating and water systems you create your own politics. Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of,” says architect Michael Reynolds and “if you want permission to do something different, you first have to prove that it works. To do that you have to break the law. It’s a Catch-22 situation.” Shot over 3 years, Brit and ex-blockbuster movie model maker Oliver Hodge met Reynolds when he visited the English seaside town of Brighton in 2003 to build his prototype ‘Earthship’ house. What’s lacking in an otherwise completely inspiring doco is what the occupants feel about Reynolds homes. He’s spent the last 25 years on his Earthship: an off-grid solar-powered home built from used tyres filled with earth, beer can bricks and recycled rainwater. The occupants of his New Mexico homes spend less than $40 per annum on utility bills. But 7 years ago the State legislature tried forcing him to comply with building regulations so he donned a suit and tie to fight his case. The film is clearly biased against the legislature but the laws were initially made to protect citizens against rogue opportunists as much as one despises the interests of corporate greed. Reynolds finds friendly ears in a stunning, flaming black-haired, black robed female legislator Zee: “If you don’t want to look at the problem why would you want to look at the solution,” she advises encouragingly and pragmatically. Moreover, Reynolds had both his state and national architectural credentials revoked and it wasn’t until the Asian tsunami and his re-housing mission to the Andaman Islands that the powers that be saw his light. On for another week at the ICA. Go be inspired in the London housing gloom. The ICA also have Nought to Sixty (free Monday nights with day membership) to celebrate their 60th anniversary. I was a bit ‘pissed off’ I had to miss the first one this week. Looked great. And ICA DVD have Blame It On Fidel(YouTube) I so warmly recommended (use my search engine!:)


Housing proud, Britain's greenest new homes have just been completed
Opportunity knocks for landlords to help homeless

[addition: the London Spanish Film Festival opens this weekend with many UK premiers and films you're unlikely to see again in the UK for quite some time (if at all!).

Of course you could also be escapist and see the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with Janusz Kaminski’s ever gorgeous photography (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly DVD out this week). Paramount also have a new DVD box set too.
Keeping up with Indiana Jones. Or Ernst Lubitsch’s last romantic comedy set in London Cluny Brown(1946) just out on BFI DVD. Or dance on the bridges of London with Tango Commute.

Or Hopscotch (DVD) will cheer up reality for you. The hang-dog Walter Matthau plays Kendig an ageing CIA field-man demoted to filing. Matthau’s love of Mozart was specially incorporated into the score for him, and the whole film is rather like an operatic espionage caper with all Mozart’s wit and moral weight. Great cast with Sam Waterston and Ned Beatty as the CIA cohorts angry that disgruntled Kendig is sending them chapters of his ‘warts and all’ book on ‘the firm’. Herbert Lom is KGB. CIA Myerson’s expletives, always cut for TV, are now re-instated for the DVD. Lines like “reasons for National Security - that’s a phrase that’s lost a lot of meaning lately,” forever ring true. Remember too that this was released in 1980 long before Brit intelligence Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. Kendig’s ex-lover and former agent Glenda Jackson is sexy as was ever, and lines like my dog “detests the smell of stupidity” still ring true for her in her current role as a Brit Member of Parliament who was staunchly against her own party (Labour) over the Iraq War. Interesting trivia in the interview extra with director Ronald Neame and Brian Garfield (adapter of his own novel with Bryan Forbes).

Or move to a hut in the blue remembered hills or maybe New Mexico with a new life (Matthau’s Kendig couldn’t bear leaving the frying pan), with your own vegetable garden, generator and DVD player and hope Harrison Ford doesn’t come crashing through your window in search of aliens (some might relish such a thought)as you watch the oodles of back catalogue Universal Classics have released on mid-price DVD all with on-screen production notes and some even with extras:
Thrillers – Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear, John Ford’s The Informer, and Hitchcock classics.
Drama - To Kill A Mockingbird, Citizen Kane, Douglas Sirk’s Written On The Wind
Film Noir - Orson Welles’ rarely seen masterpiece A Touch Of Evil, Jacques Tourneur’s Out Of The Past (aka Build My Gallows High) , Don Siegel’s The Big Steal.
Action and Adventure – the 1932 Howard Hawks Scarface, and remember the star studded 1974 Earthquake?
Comedy – James Stewart in Harvey, Marx Brothers classics, and most interesting the underrated underappreciated Preston Sturges with Hail The Conquering Hero, The Great McGinty and Sullivan's Travels, and the 'Road to' films of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road to Utopia set in Alaska, Road to Singapore, the first in which they try to forget their previous romances in Singapore, that is until they meet Dorothy Lamour. And the all time classic:

Road To Morocco(1942) in which stowaways Jeff and Turkey wash up in the desert and Bob Hope is sold as a slave to the beautiful Princess Shalmar of Karameesh,
“take them outside and bring me back their ears. No Wait! There must be no shedding of blood on our wedding night,” says an ‘oh jealous’ one. The gags and one-liners really stand the test of time though whether you could get away in a family feature with the “Allah has seen the light to dull his wisdom” sketch about our less fortunate mentally sound mortals nowadays is debatable. Road To Morocco was the WWII troops most popular film.
(largest WWII bomb ever in London being defused). And it was right under the carrots' noses in the neighbours' vegetable gardens.

Road to Morocco also has some wonderfully clever lyrics from Johnny Burke and composer Jimmy van Heusen who later hooked up with Sammy Cahn to win 4 Best Song Oscars. Moonlight Becomes You
is there (the desert mirage reprise is still funny) and so is Crosby’s “There’s nothing quite as grotesque as a man at a desk lookin’ out at the sun/Shirts made of silk and a diet of milk maybe he thinks he has fun/I’ve got the vagabond itch I guess I’ll never get rich/Oh hum/Ho,ho,ho,ho,hum.”