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something's coming, something good, who knooows...
On BBC Radio 4's Front Row (Wed 30 July) an interview with Elaine Stritch. You can hear the full interview in a Front Row Special on Tuesday 12th August
At Liberty at the Shaw Theatre in London from Thursday until 10th August.
If you love music, theatre, acting or survival see this show. I worked on a charity benefit in New York, and heard Ms Stritch rehearsing Sondheim's Ladies Who Lunch. She must have sung that song a zillion times, yet still she fussed over getting the intro notes absolutely perfect for her. That woman is an inspiration.
The Independent's review of the show at the Old Vic in 2002 and the New York Times review.
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TUESDAY 5 August, 2008
Classical music's agent provocateur Norman Lebrecht in conversation with French soprano Natalie Dessay who is very candid about surviving her career. And Lebrecht's (available on BBC iPlayer and as a podcast but only for a week!) with Steve Reich in which he speaks fascinatingly and extensively about his Jewish faith. The latest is a very frank interview with German singer mezzo Brigitte Fassbaender. Wish the other interviews were available to listen for longer..(:
The Man Who Invented Stereo on BBC Radio 4's Archive Hour is a fascinating profile of Alan Blumlein who pioneered outside broadcasting for the King George VI 1937 coronation.
The harrowing prison pianist film Four Minutes is now out on DVD - the 'Hell's Angels' version of Shine!
Can Amy Winehouse be saved?
And a discussion on Australian radio about Oliver Sacks's latest book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - a collection of 29 essays on subjects ranging from musical seizures, the fear of music, musical savants, music and blindness, dementia and music therapy, and musical dreams. This "little Oz radio programme" as Late Night Live's presenter Philip Adams likes to call it, has just re-vamped its audio so the segments can be downloaded individually rather than scanning through the entire show as before:
Their Brit correspondent (also a playwright) Bea Campbell discusses the recent spate of knife attacks, many of them fatal, in British towns and cities, disagreeing with Guardian quoted statistics claiming these crimes are up 72% since labour came to power.
War Ghosts of Vietnam
Classic LNL: Life and the Universe
And Australia's Labour government holds a first-ever cabinet meeting in Arnheim Land
I didn't mean to impose such a 'downer' on my readers last week by mentioning my Royal Opera House catastrophe many moons ago (the nonchalence of others even more bizarre considering the BBC were filming one of the earliest 'fly on the wall' docos (supposedly warts and all) The House (a huge TV hit) at the time. Not a mention of my incident, of course, though you'd think they'd relish that sort of thing). And, of course, it's the stuff opera's made from...hmmmm...
Royal Opera House's troubled past
And if you always felt opera wasn't 'your thing' then do try attending a projected cinema performance. Unlike sitting in the opera house, you'll even be able to eat ice-cream and have a quick 'snog' just as they used to in last century Paris and Milan.
Sitting through Errol Morris' doco on the 2003 Abu Ghraib Iraqi torture photos Standard Operating Procedure was somewhat akin to experiencing a chamber opera. Seeing the film in a small preview theatre, I wondered whether the effect would be the same in a larger venue. None of Morris' documentaries have ever pretended to be just docos: at one and the same time there's something both very intimate but also something much larger, inexorable, intangible and infinite - the same effect opera at its most potent can arouse. In contrast, Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (about the Bagram Air Force Base 2002 tortures in Afghanistan) gives the viewer more insight into the subject's complex arguments in a more traditional documentary fashion. You could almost say that the latter is more Brecht and the former more Kurt Weill in its bitter, ironic almost surreal tone. Gibney uses clever artistic chapter graphics throughout the film; Morris enlists 'A-list' title sequence guru Kyle Cooper. Gibney was quite particular about the original music he commissioned from Ivor Guest and Robert Logan and the use of gamelan; Morris uses the dark, slithering rumblings of Hollywood maestro Danny Elfman (most famous for his Tim Burton scores). But interestingly neither director opts for total silence. Silence when the photos burn and scream by themselves like the giant apocalyptic hammer blow drum strikes demanded by Danish composer Carl Neilsen in his fifth symphony. Both directors are at great pains to obtain the right lighting on their interviewee subjects rather than just simply film them au natural. Perhaps the events of both films went so far into another dimension of human behaviour that an almost operatic setting was the only way of presenting this to a wide audience. Utterly involving, emotionally devastating yet distanced.
Tim Golden's New York Times articles: Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse
"When you get into a photo you want to smile, just something I do," relates one of the female US soldiers in S.O.P. attempting to explain why the Abu Ghraib photos looked like soldiers' holiday snaps. Another, Sabrina Harman who was sentenced to 6 months prison for her part in the tortures said you "fake a smile...everytime". The DVD of Gibney's Academy Award winning film has an audio commentary by him that, though of interest, is a little superfluous as he later says so himself: "a simple image without commentary says what it means." The end of his film showing the Guantanamo Bay giftshop selling T-shirts and baseball caps is almost something out of a modern-dress Mozart/Da Ponte opera where characters have their hearts ripped open by husbands, predators or are raped and murdered, only to segue to a comic figure lurking and leering to take photos of these bleeding emotions seen on the nightly news and the daily newspaper. As Gibney notes: "Once you assume the people we [Americans] pick up are horrible and promulgate that idea, you have to develop a system that proves that they're the worst of the worst...because nobody wants to be wrong...the political utility of torture." "Have we transgressed the very ideals we [Americans] are promoting?" Gibney also shows 1968 footage of Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, himself a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, and who quite bravely as a Republican pushed through the Detainee Treatment Act (Iraq War) in what was then a desert for dissenting views (and of course was later criticised for not being bold enough). "A soldier is a soldier and we can't demonise the other," says Gibney. Loads of other incisive DVD extras too, as well as the commentary.
Stories: The Last Great American Reporter
While Democratic Presidential hopeful Barack Obama - like a cross between Paul Robeson and an operatic tenor star - swept across the podiums of Europe and people off their feet and problems, John McCain 'kept it real' by visiting the nitty-gritty of local issues in towns bearing names worthy of the Coen Brothers dark insidious cinema - Hackensack, Wrong Moose Falls, Hanging Ckhadishville...maybe I'm letting my imagination run away a bit now...
How Barack Obama can win over poor whites
A rhapsody in blue (Financial Times article about the rise of Conservatism among Britain's youth)
And several weeks ago McCain issued the following statement on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: John McCain On The Legacy Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Washington Post:
"Perhaps with more clarity and charity than was always deserved, it was Dr. King who often reminded us there was no moral badness, and there was moral blindness. And moral badness and moral blindness were not the same. It was this spirit that turned hatred into forgiveness, anger into conviction, and a bitter life into a great one." At least with McCain what you see is what you get, and at his age what does he have to loose by reforming those Republicans? But with Obama he has the universe yet to conquer. Not that I blame him for such trailblazing. But watch out for those Martians senator, they may be dead, but there's still a helluva lot of interest in them. And there might be life yet...
NASA Spacecraft Confirms Martian Water, Mission Extended
more info
CERN to launch scientific experiment that could create black hole
And NASA hacker Gary McKinnon''s first interview since extradition to US ruling
US judge OKs first Guantanamo Bay detainee trial
BBC Radio 4's American Dreams explored the soldiers of Fort Riley in Kansas, a rapidly expanding base playing a key role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Former CIA agent Bob Baer and role model for George Clooney's character in the film Syriana, had his doco Car Bomb aired on Channel 4 (consecutive Sundays 27 July and 3 August)
See No Evil by Robert Baer
My blog review of Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
Nightwaves
(16 July 2008) had acclaimed documentary photographer Roger Hutchings and former Guardian picture editor Eamonn McCabe discuss where responsibility lies for the safety of individuals whose images are captured by press photographers. But the download expires after a week. Sorry.
Sarah Morris: Lesser Panda shows her latest film 1972, a documentary interview with Georg Sieber, head psychologist for the Munich police at their Olympics. Fascinating doco but is simply screening it art? Her 'trademark' abstract paintings of city grids are downstairs though less intriguing than I remember the earlier ones.
Andrew Marr takes to the skies exploring Britain From Above recently released satellite mapping patterns of Britain's daily life from mobile phone use to taxi grid-lock.
Free higher education for troops in MoD welfare overhaul
Army chief welcomes troop support
Ex-paratrooper Stuart Griffiths was homeless and living in a hostel when he began to take this series of remarkable portraits of former comrades down on their luck.
See Kubrick's psychological war film Full Metal Jacket if you missed it.
recent Special edition DVDs
And Jon Ronson's Channel Four doco on Kubrick's boxes
Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive
Sergio Leone's 1966 The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo) is truly grand opera in the Italian style (3 hours and all!) - best known for it's Ennio Morricone score - and looks absolutely stunning in this new print for the Clint Eastwood BFI season
If you've only seen this on tele you've only seen half the film. Unmissable is a well-deserved epithet in this case.
my blog mention of Universal's super bargain
Clint Eastwood box set DVD collection
Channel Four's doco Dispatches: Sandwiches Unwrapped will have you thinking twice before buying those sandwiches for your movie marathons.
Very organic, though, is the Uruguay film El Baño del Papa (The Pope's Toilet)(trailer), the tale of petty smuggler (batteries!) Beto who has the bright idea of setting up a toilet in his backyard in the hope that it'll be patronised by pilgrims flocking to his small town of Melo for Pope Jean Paul II's visit. Judging from the couple of Uruguay films I've seen, that country's stand-up comedy must be quite interesting. There's a unique tone to these films: the comedy comes out of a realism that so easily seems surreal to outsiders, there's a slow-burning pace, as well as the deep sadness of the human condition that is inherent in good comedy. Whisky is a good example to see as well:
Italian site (wacky poster), (UK DVD)
And the amazing, utterly original Argentinian La Antenna is still around in the cinemas.
But should we as humans forgive heinous behaviour? In Errol Morris' The Fog of War, Robert McNamara breaks down into tears over the part he played in the Vietnam War. Perhaps his guilt was genuine but should he be forgiven? When do you stop being part of the system and become the system itself?
Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (French trailer) is directed by youngest of the Iranian Makhmalbaf film family 19-year old Hana (she made her first short at 8, and at 14 had a film screened at the Venice Film Fest.) Her latest has a 6-year-old girl wanting to go to the school for girls across the river from her home in the Afghan town of Bamian, where the huge Buddha statues were destroyed the Taliban in 2001. The boys she meets along the way pretend to be soldiers, brandishing sticks and even burying her in mud. It's all only pretend but an eerie, prescient pretend. It's the kind of film that could so easily fall flat, cute and generically worthy. But it never does. And the kids with their sticks could be straight out of that August Sander photo of similar pre-Nazi teenagers. Some commentators have argued that Hana's film is exploitative of these young children. But I bet everyone had tremendous fun making it. And taking young kids to see it would probably do far more long-lasting knife-crime awareness in London than any government initiative could ever hope for.
Remains of large Buddha in Bamyan Afghanistan
Hana Makhmalbaf interview in Farsi with English subtitles (7min).
Aural obituary of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine
on BBc Radio 4's The Last Word (Friday 1st August).
And what happened to a lovely low sprawling tree in the north end of Ravenscourt Park in West London? I was having a respite from my belligerent neighbours on an adjacent bench a month ago and kids (maybe a year or two younger than those in Hana's film) were playing and battling on the tree under very watchful parental eyes. (One tiny lad even had a stick and the little girl said "Please don't hit me, I'm only 4." True story.) It must have been as exciting as climbing an oak tree for them. I walked past the other day and the tree is no more. Just a pile of dirt. Don't tell me that Hammersmith and Fulham Council deemed it a health and safety hazard and whisked it into the trash?! Unbelievable. It was such a great tree for tiny kids. They'd have more chance dying of shock watching the nightly news than falling off a branch. Did the tree lean too much to the left or the right, was it too straight, too gay or not gay enough? When I think of my trials and tribulations over the last 6 years with authorities that barely bat an eye at my complaints yet they're quite happy to uproot an innocent little tree.
Nice place you've got here (The Observer on new kid arrivals to Britain)
Lambeth Anglican Communion conference amid gay bishop row
Wandsworth council face huge compensation bill in planning row
Puts me in mind of Jerry Herman's musical version Dear World (1958) of Jean Giraudoux's 1943 play about the little people vs authority The Madwoman of Chaillot:
If music is no longer lovely
If laughter is no longer lilting
If lovers are no longer loving
Then I don't want to know.
If summer is no longer carefree
If children are no longer singing
If people are no longer happy
Then I don't want to know
For my memories all are exciting
My memories all are enchanted
My memories burn in my head with a steady glow
So if, my friends, if love is dead
I don't want to know
(audio of this - alas not by Angela Lansbury - but a great rendition by Sam Harris)
Spanish and British hit The Orphanage is now out on DVD.
The National Portrait Gallery's Wyndham Lewis Portraits really starts one thinking about representation and the human face, especially after viewing the Abu Ghraib films. Lewis had very right-wing sympathies in the 30's and his 'muse' Naomi Mitchinson joked that "she slept with him so she wouldn't have to listen to his opinions". But by 1937 after a visit to Berlin, Lewis began to change his views and one of his books Self-Condemned (1954) about American as "one big village" influenced Marshall McLuhan's ideas about media/message world dominance. Lewis was a truly great painter and his portraits at their best (and many in the exhibition are) show humans with the intensity of machines. One drawing of poet Ezra Pound has his eyes as rectangular visors, his body and mind ready to thrust forward out of his chair at any moment. The much-talked about oil of TS Eliot (rejected by the Royal Academy) shows a stolid, energised, peaceful yet vulnerable man. There's something deeply unnerving about this show (without even knowing Lewis' views) - something about the difference and similarities between man and machine.
Wyndham Lewis society with newsletter subscribe
Lewis in the Tate collection
Courtaild 2005 show
TS Eliot festival at the Donmar Warehouse in the autumn.
And Michael Ayrton did some stunning jacket designs for Lewis' books (Tate archives)
Around a corner or two from the National Portrait Gallery at the ICA two films by Aaron Katz: Quiet City + Dance Party are showing. This is independent low-low budget American 'mumblecore' cinema. What's interesting is the predicament arena of human isolation and social interraction inhabited by these films. Would taking single frames from these films be more affective than the moving images themselves? And that thought then provokes a questioning of the whole 'mumblecore's milieu. Is this the dangerous edge of things or is the edge never to be reached, continuously trapped within the urban spiral?
A Scene from Quiet City
indieWIRE Interview(2006)
2007 another interview
Jesus is Magic the Movie is the very, very, very, mucho very funny (did I say artful) film of American Jewish comic Sarah Silverman's stage show (who also hosted LA's Independent Spirit Awards) but is little known to Brit audiences. Almost every line is quotable and almost every line offends something or someone. But she does it, not just to let off steam but also to make you think. Does putting the world into nice little boxes only serve to forget the big things in the world, forgetting them by the kerbside as we rev off in the big completely sorted truck only to break down half-way on the highway because we also forgot to fill the tank? Some of those little boxes are essential and some aren't. And Silverman is a great archivist of humanity as well as being gorgeous, sexy, and her face a rainbow of subtle inflexion that seems effortlessly spontaneous. She's like a female Lenny Bruce (the New York comic memorably played in a film (1974) by Dustin Hoffmann [choreographer Bob Fosse directing] who kept getting arrested for foul language the 60s/70s) only Silverman could charm the bloomers off a room of Jewish grannies without modifying her act a jot (and does in the film!) and they'd still all ask her to meet their grandson and sort him out. The DVD has a somewhat thin self-congratulatory commentary by Silverman and her director Liam Lynch but a funny Making of and her genius segment in The Aristocrats - a film about the one joke that's like a 'Bible' for comics.
Sarah Silverman explains kabbalah
Early Standup
Sarah Silverman and her racist jokes
Sarah Silverman's UK charm offensive
Gay photographer Bruce Weber's A Letter to True (UK Trailer) follows hot on the heels of the UK cinema re-release of his Chop Suey. These are such self-indulgent films - do we really need to see so many clips from the Lassie movies? True is the name of his dog, by the way - but irresistibly watchable. Marianne Faithful reads a Stephen Spender poem (superlatively), Julie Christie narrates and reads Rilke, Weber basks in the limelight of Dirk Bogarde and Elizabeth Taylor and Jimmy Durante plays out the final credits. What Weber's films do have above all, though, is something true and from the heart.
Weber's Chop Suey title song originated from the Rodgers and Hammerstein (Sound of Music, Oklahoma) musical of Flower Drum Song - the first Broadway show (1958-directed by Gene Kelly) to feature a mostly Asian cast and now out on Arrow DVD in Henry Koster's glorious film version. From the first frames after the opening credits you're totally wowed by the technicolour cinematography (Russell Metty) of 1950s San Francisco. There's nothing too controversial in the romantic comedy plot (C.Y. Lee's original novel is much darker)but the songs are so cleverly constructed including standards like Love, Look Away and its dance number, like all the show's sequences, simply and stunningly choreographed (Hermes Pan after Carol Haney's original)as are the performances. I can just imagine teenage girls of all nationalities latching onto the song I Enjoy Being a Girl and video texting it around.
Look forward too later in the year to more from the Lost Musicals - rehearsed no-set 'presentations' of forgotten Broadway shows.
Wink the Other Eye, Wilton's Music Hall, London
TV spot on how the credit crunch is affecting West End shows: Changing face of the West End
Marina Warner on The Wizard of Oz and the South Bank Centre summer production.
Jacques Demy's musical starring Catherine Deneuve and her sister (soon after killed in a car crash) Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) is out on BFI DVD.
A box DVD present for your Weber affectionado could be Optimum's Tommy Steele Quadruple, four newly restored films (budget price, no extras) from one of England's most popular song and dance entertainers with his boyish, camp, toothy smile and gentle rock 'n' roll crooning. I heard a story that the young, struggling John Cleese was hard up for a penny so they stuck him in the back row of Steele's West End musical Half a Sixpence even though he couldn't hold a note. I once worked backstage on one of his later 'world tour' comeback shows and wow, was that man a professional and a perfectionist. No resting on laurels with him - every night sparkling and spot on.
Brushing away the optimism of Flower Drum Song's "one hundred million miracles are happening everyday" and back to the existential journey with Wim Wenders. Axiom Films recently aquired the director's library for the UK and have just issued most of his important films with audio commentary and extras at mid-price (Arthaus continue to release for the non-English market):
Paris,Texas
Kings Of The Road (2 disc set)
Wings Of Desire
The American Friend
The latter, based on one of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series of books is one of my Wenders favourites. Wenders' luck was in when after much disappointment in learning that all Highsmith rights had been taken up, was told by the author that she had a new Ripley book in manuscript. At the film's premiere she didn't think much of Wenders' retake on her character played by Dennis Hopper (Wenders originally wanted actor/director John Cassavetes) but at a later screening completely changed her mind. Like all Wenders' work the characters are caught in an inescapable spiral like observing a far-off galaxy we barely understand yet still struggle with its contradictions. Long time collaborator Robbie Müller is cinematographer who Wenders credits as inventor of the Kinoflo fluorescent lights that give off "a poisonous green" hue in some of the scenes. He also cast 7 famous directors as "all the crooks" including Jean Eustache, Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller "the most amazing storyteller of my entire life". And bizarrely, Ray and Fuller had never actually met until working on this film despite all their years in Hollywood.
Wrong Move is based on Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (adapted by playwright Peter Handke) and opens in a 1970s Glückstadt (literally happy city, a real North German town) following a writer's unsuccessful spiritual journey across Germany. In his travels he meets the13-year-old Nastassja Kinski (Mignon) her first ever film role. More great Robbie Müller photography and Jürgen Knieper provides another eerie, blue-grey score for Wenders.
Anchor Bay's special edition, 10 disc box-set
The Wim Wenders Collection
Dennis Hopper interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show
American artist turned director Julian Schnabel was amazed by the train sequence of The American Friend and kept asking Hopper about what tricks Wenders used. Schnabel's film version of Lou Reed's Berlin has just been UK released coinciding with Reed's European tour. Berlin was Lou Reed's 1973 commercial failure but over 5 Brooklyn nights in 2006 Reed's contemporary 'Schubertian' song cycle about a girl Caroline and her doomed lovers was restaged. Schnabel designed the sets, his daughter Lola the film imagery and it's all lit by one of the world's great stage luminaries Jennifer Tipton. This experience too felt like chamber opera at its most potent, in that you exited into the world not quite seeing things the same way ever again.
Man on Wire, I mentioned a few weeks ago, is now out on general UK release. Does Twin Towers tightrope walker Philippe Petit literally bravely defy the estranged relationship between man and the natural world or does he enter that rarely seen realm where he becomes part of it- defying the 'matrix' and touching the hand of God.
Man on Wire: the poet of the sky
Blindsight (trailer), directed by partially sighted Brit Lucy Walker, raises more questions than it possibly ever set out to, when her documentary follows six blind Tibetan teenagers attempting the 23,000-foot climb of Lhakpa Ri on the north side of Everest. Children who are blind are outcasted in Tibetan society but in May 2001, Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind man in history to reach Everest's summit and the following year completed his 7-year quest of the highest mountains on each of the seven continents by standing atop Australia's Mt Kosciusko. The difference between Weihenmayer and the Tibetan children, though, is that he was trained to the peak of physical fitness and the kids came no where near that endurance level. Though they don't attain their goal there's a mesmeric scene before their half-way descent of the kids playing in an ice garden, feeling the beauty of the mountain that for them is a pinnacle of achievement. I hope people will take away both aspects of this film - both 'it's the trying that counts not the success' while at the same time not demeaning those who win, who have summitted. It's a very Brit quality to say 'it's not the winning that counts' and of course we all know its American opposite. But as interviews at the end of the film attempt to show, the mountain one has to climb is always within oneself, is only always relative to that, and need never seem but a dream.
indieWire interview with Lucy Walker
Filmmaker Magazine interview
Legless mountaineer makes it up Everest - thanks to the spare part in his pack
At least I won't get frostbitten toes, says legless climber tackling Everest
Ingliss interview video
The Culture Show Goes To China. Excellent BBC TV overview of China's current cultural state (available to view on iPlayer).
China's cyberspace explored on BBC's Newsnight also "As Beijing prepares to host the Olympics, how do ordinary Chinese people feel about the Games?"
China's Will To Win (Financial Times)
Free runners hit the streets as urban craze sweeps Britain
Accredited parkour course gives youngsters something to do
Second Sight offer up a French perspective on the bitter sweet comedy of life and survival with The Patrice Leconte Collection, another very good value set (5 discs). Leconte is a fascinating director who doesn't quite fit either into commercial cinema or arthouse - this in spite of the fact that he directed and adapted one of the most commercial post-war French film franchises Les Bronzés (and Oscar (Foreign film) nominated for Ridicule (1996) [poignant recollections of his Oscar ceremony experience on the very informative DVD extras that also include an early short film]. The film (based on a Simenon novel) that was luke-warm received but played Cannes and first brought him to wider interest was Monsieur Hire (1989) - like many of his films observing erotic obsession. "Desire never comes out of the blue, people in real life work out a choreography of their desire...film is the medium that gives room to our fantasies, most of the time harmless. The upcoming of desire is infinitely more disturbing than the acting out of desire". Tango (1993) in which men are jettisoning their women through murder wasn't well-received by French audiences either: "Women would walk out half way through the film"yet Leconte's intentions were the opposite wanting to show "how pathetically men behave...I'm sorry if some people can find misogyny [in my films] but my intentions are peaceful". Le Parfum d'Yvonne (1994) about a writer enmeshed into the carefree, tranquil opulence of 50's Lake Geneva is also an erotic tale (while the Algerian War terrorism begins rocking Paris). "You're a prisoner now," says Yvonne with innate irony - not simply locked into her orbit but inevitably a prisoner of one's remembrances: les temps perdu. Like the freshness of a perfume scent "Yvonne could only live for a moment," her husband warns the writer. Both films have rich and wonderful Cinemascope cinematography by Eduardo Serra. An earlier erotic film is The Hairdresser's Husband (1990) with the hairdresser's unnerving utterance "Life is disgusting." Leconte endorses that sentiment: "As a rule, life is really disgusting for 90% of mankind - being born was not a gift. We are lucky in the West but for the rest of the world..." Leconte seems a contradiction (hence his career) but really isn't once you've watched all this marvellous DVD set has to offer: "You just have to dream hard to see your dreams come true. Your dreams [don't fail] to become reality because you didn't believe enough."
Ridicule lampoons the blindness of pre-Revolutionary Versailles (the time Mozart visited Paris) and the aristocracy's "fear of not being witty. Wit is a Prozac which frees us [from reality]...this esprit is rather a way to behave, a lifestyle that does not necessarily aim at making people laugh. Humour [on the other hand] is meant to get a laugh, to hit the bull's eye." Though the scintillating script is by Rémi Waterhouse it is very much a Leconte film. The provincial water engineer Ponceludon de Malavoy, wanting to rid the swamps of mosquitoes, discovers how wit is used in the court as a weapon of social advancement. And of course how woman must hide their true feelings in order to survive. He discovers how easy ridicule is when his feet fall foul of the court and he's dubbed the Marquis des Antipodes- the upside down dancer. He does succeed, though, in his engineering dream just as many of the aristocrats escape the guillotine by fleeing to England: "now the bloated rhetoric of Danton rules in place of wit."
Les Bronzés all-time hit at the Paris box-office. Optimum's DVD.
Monsieur Hire (DVD Trailer)
Leconte discusses his music film Dogora - Ouvrons les yeux
My Best Friend, interview at New York's Tribeca Fest
The Girl on the Bridge
And a quote from LA CityBeat: Former Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale, who acquired and distributed The Girl on the Bridge, The Man on the Train, and Intimate Strangers (for the US), isn't surprised that Hollywood has finally taken notice, albeit belatedly. "Patrice has an elegance to his storytelling that surpasses most directors," she observes. "Combined with this elegance is a simplicity of story that is relatable across cultures. Thematically, Patrice deals with fate and mankind. Do we determine our own fate, or is it predestined? His films explore this in a manner that draws audiences worldwide. I only pray that the remakes do his work justice."
If Bruno Dumont's first feature La Vie de Jesus (1996) seems familiar territory - non-professionally cast twentysomethings in a socially arid northern French town - Dumont was in the forefront of the 'post-Bressonian' wave to show "youngsters [as] spectators in a world on which they cannot act...Psychologically this impotency creates incredible damage. The youngsters are totally disorientated," Dumont says in one of the Eureka DVD's interviews in its ever-informative accompanying booklets. "That's all that's left in the rural areas - what people say about what they heard here and there." No extras on this DVD, though.
Senses of CinemaBruno Dumont's Bodies
The Cinema of Sensation
Six Decades of French Noir Come to Film Forum in New York
Makes the Helsinki complaints choir seem mere urban angst. Nonetheless, remains one of my fave videos on the internet. At least they complained!
Agnieska Holland's Europa Europa (1991) [DVD] was ahead of its time, too, telling the true story of Soloman Perel who survived the 20th century by morphing from Jewish, to 'young pioneer' in a Russian Communist orphange, to Nazi, and back to Jewish in this "Zelig-like" story. Holland's audio commentary is always useful, informative and never merely descriptive. "His penis is the most important part of the story," she jests early on over a shot. "The paradoxes of the mask saved me from the stereotypes...[the film is about] what it means to be true to ourselves". On its initial German release it was slaughtered by the country's press, who actively prevented it from being nominated in the Oscars Foreign Film category. Well worth checking this DVD out in our politically correct world.
Bright Shiny Morning (BBC Radio 4's Front Row Thur 31 July) is the new book about LA from maligned American writer James Frey who Oprah Winfey exposed as a fraud. How far does the fact and the fiction need to be delineated in writing memoirs?
The US antihero: James Frey
Nightwaves (17th June) had a fascinating unlisted segment on some recent London insect news:
London underground source of new insect forms
Natural History Museum: natural wonder
Natural History Museum baffled by mystery bug in their own back yard
Mystery insect found in Museum garden
Will WALL-E end up like Solomon Perel? The amount of detail in Andrew Stanton's movie would easily engage an adult's repeated summer kinder chaperone jaunts. And it's the kind of detail easily missed by adults yet genetic to kids (until they have it decoded and decommissioned by the education system). In spite of its happy Hollywood ending, though, I found this film deeply sad and dare I say profound given its cinematic milieu. I imagined a sequel where WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) would be relegated to the unemployment queue after his part in saving the world. This new world would take away his tool kit and spare parts assiduously collected over years, his boxes full of detritus of what it meant to be human, and he'd stand there, one eye popping out, one tractor tread missing not deemed worthy of a national health service makeover. They'd take away his Hello Dolly video (Michael Crawford in Jerry Herman's It only Takes a Moment and Put on Your Sunday Clothes), they'd take away his enthusiasm, but above all they'd take away his love - what little his mechanical parts would muster. EVE (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) would probably end up a venereal disease evaluator after working the streets, her laser-weapon defence arm dismembered.
I listened to a fine, finely textured performance of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) from the BBC Proms Sunday night (you can watch this online) by conductor Donald Runnicles (himself somewhat of a UK exile) and imagined lovely little WALL-E trying to intone the final words of Mahler's text Ewig (eternal) harbouring the glimmer of hope that somewhere on the planet his estranged EVE would hear him. And he'd spend the rest of his days getting that dynamic marking of ppp (mucho quiet pianissiomo) just as Mahler intended it. Just as a world-class 'load-lifter' should.
Dame Janet Baker's immortal version of Mahler
YouTube vid with Chinese text of poems.
'It's in my bones' (Financial Times interview with Runnicles)
Vibrato wars whip up a musical storm over last night of the Proms
Female staff win equal pay fight
Andrew Stanton on BBC Radio 4's THe Film Prog (18 July)
behind-the-scenes clip and meet the characters.
Ben Burtt talks about creating the sounds for the lightsabers
Ben Burtt interview about R2 and Jim Shima's light saber
AND....Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918 - 2008 some good links from Greencine
[Am I wrong in thinking he directed a film in around 1980? Can't see any references to it so maybe he didn't ??]
THURSDAY 7 August
I've remembered: it was't Solzhenitsyn but poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko and the film was Detskiy sad (released as Kindergarten in the US -1983) about a boy growing up in a time of war. Amazing scene of soldiers marching with live fish bowls in their arms. Don't think I've ever seen it programmed anywhere since.
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