The quiet, gentle, wryly comic Sweetland from director Ali Selim (an advertising Gold Lion award winner at Cannes) has taken sometime to get a UK release but thankfully it did thanks to Revelation Films. As you'd expect from skimming Selim's resume it looks fantastic (1920's Minnesota). But what is even more fetching is his grasp of directing and casting actors - (some familiar faces such as Alex Kingston, Alan Cumming [also exec producer] are here in roles they wouldn't get elsewhere) - and sense of dramatic pace. Inge (the dove eyed Elizabeth Reaser) arrives in America from Germany knowing no English but firm in the knowledge of her unseen husband-to-be the Norwegian Olaf (Tim Guinee). This is not to the taste of the village's post-WW1 Lutheran community even if "Luther was a German". Though a period film, it gives the viewer a good sense of a timeless small town America's by turns generosity, bigotry, insularity and anchored gaze into the future. "Banking and farming don't mix," says one. Farmers around the world will certainly relate to that now more than ever. A lovely film.
Junket interview with Elizabeth Reaser, Trailer
Partition set in the last days of the British Raj and Pakistan's partition from India in 1947, plays more like Bollywood tackling serious issues than an indie film. Gian (jimmy Mistry) and Naseem (controversially the 'white American' Kristin Kreuk) are a latter-day Romeo and Juliet so plugs the press release. The tragic story of a friend of writer/director (former doco filmmaker) Vic Sarin's father - a Sikh gentleman who loved a Muslim woman - became the film's inspiration. Unlike, say, Bandit Queen, everything in this film is just that bit too beautiful (Sarin is alo cinematographer). It's a beauty that one easily falls in love, though, including white colonial Margaret Stilwell (Neve Campbell with an entrancing Buddhist like tranquillity). Production Designer Tony Devenyi played a crucial role in recreating India in Canada's British Columbia for six weeks location shooting. And ultimately the film pales because of its charms. And that's a shame because the characters one really ones to believe in. Nor is the film really helped by Brian Tyler's lush John Barry-esque 'Out of Africa' score, the composer conducting the Hollywood Studio Symphony.
Vic Sarin speaks at the Partition Advanced Screening
A Sikh teenager who was excluded from school for wearing a bangle wins her court battle.
Building prejudice? Switzerland's minaret row (Channel Four news)
Another kind of partition without any romanticism can be found in the film of Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas Linha de Passe - four fatherless São Paulo Brazilian brothers and their mother who is pregnant with a fifth child. Vinicius de Oliveira (star of Salles' Central Station) is the only one of the five main actors to have previously worked in film (though they'd all done various forms of theatre). Miramax's City of God hit spurned quite a few films about the Brazil's class divide. But Linha de Passe really engages you afresh. The camera work by relative newcomer Mauro Pinheiro is stunning -not overtly, but quietly, insidiously when a slight little camera move makes all the difference in edging an audience into the drama. And Gustavo Santaolalla's electric guitar licks (he scored 21 Grams and Amores Perros) are never over-kill. (Can't wait to see his Cafe de los Maestros(2005) uniting tango's greatest living legends.) This is a film that should be screened for all London's schoolkids so relevant and unpatronising is it's impact.
Downloadable interview with Salles.
Morton Rhuhe's novel The Wave has been classic compulsory reading material in many German schools for over 20 years. Based on a real experiment conducted by an American history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 Palo Alto over a week, Dennis Gansel's film (based on Ron Jones' short story) updates events to a contemporary German setting with teacher Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) illustrating over a week how easily totalitarian governments are accepted by requiring all his students to wear white shirts if they want to be members of their group The Wave - complete with sinewy hand gesture. The results are devastating. Like Linha de Passe, this is a really important film for teenagers with the questions it poses having far wider resonances. Being any sort of teacher, carer anyone with responsibility over other people often inevitably involves some form of ego on the part of the 'leader'. What the film chillingly demonstrates, though, is the willingness people have to be part of the group - to be disciplined, "The Wave has made us equal...we can help each other". But of course while the group itself may purport to be equal those outside aren't.
The experiment begins with a discussion on autocracy, "we have to stand up and speak it's good for our circulation," says a student. Ron Jones began his in response to a student's question, "How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people?". Many years ago Julian Jaynes wrote a book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976): "At one time, human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was Consciously aware." The Wave also brings to mind Chomsky's moral posit of whether the person who orders the gun to be fired is as guilty of the murderous act as the one who actually pulls the trigger. Wenger imposes discipline (so do most leaders/teachers) but he never commands any of his students to commit evil or harm. Nor does he ban the non-conformists from his class, it's the students themselves that do that. And his questions are really rhetorical ones.
Brit comedienne Katy Brand parodies indie bands that look all the same in Ting Tings - We're All The Same
The Guardian tracks down Ron Jones and his students
The British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict raises many questions too. Hadrian took the strife-torn Roman Empire by the horns restoring much needed order. He withdrew troops from the overreached Iraq, lower taxes, abolished corruption and extortion throughout the provinces and built magnificent things - when he started designing himself his architect told him to stick to drawing vegetables. He sort of promoted gay rights - though it was actually against the laws of marriage- through taking his Greek lover Antinious in addition to his wife. This really is a must see show and surprisingly you take it all in within the hour at a leisurely pace. Positioned in what was formerly the famous Reading Room where Karl Marx scribbled Das Kapital it's a fitting stage for Hadrian with its cavernous imperial dome above. And the lighting and positioning of the exhibits has really been thought through thoroughly so you never end up with ancient artefact fatigue. Even if you've seen the buildings 'live' on visits to Rome - his Villa, the Pantheon - the show remains thought-provoking and awe-inspiring. All those achievements and seeming sensibility yet he massacred and burnt to the ground hundreds of Jewish villages renaming Judea, Palaestina. A translucent glass plate radiates its fragility and defiance through history in its case, completely intact from its journey up to the hilltop Jewish hideout caves. Yet equally there's an incredible aura about the tiny papyrus fragment further on in the show from one of Hadrian's speeches.
Laughter Roman style
Hi-tech future for ancient Roman town
Why Britain's broadband is among the slowest in Europe.
I could just imagine Hadrian and Antinous reclining to watch Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon directed by the 87-year-old French arthouse 'auteur' Eric Rohmer who's adapted the pastoral C17th romance of Honoré d'Urfé set in C5th Gaul.Dosen't sound promising I know! And if I told you that there was a Druid cross-dressing Celadon (Andy Gillet) to win back his girlfriend Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour)? It is quite long-winded stuff but immaculately detailed. It took me back to the days when I'd immerse myself in the entirely un-British theatre of Racine, Claudel and Marivaux in Paris - hours and hours of French text that transported one to a different universe through its nuances of gesture and inflection. "Love desires only itself," - things hotting up in the dialectic debate of the last 45 minutes. "The several virtues of one God...junior gods..one God for many" and so on.
Rohmer interview
Koch Lorber Films released at New York's Anthology Film Archives in August.
Brit TV soap/primetime director Joanna Hogg's first feature Unrelated (LFF and winner of the 10th FIPRESCI International Critics Award) has quite a Rohmer sensibility and couldn't feel less British (though it's shot in Italy). Her acknowledged influences are more the likes of Ozu and Japanese cinema. "I'm not interested in plot," she said over breakfast, "in each moment there's a little story. The complete antithesis to the Robert McKee school of screenwriting that I feel patronises audiences." There are only two small camera moves in the entire film; the rest are static set-ups with no music score. Fortysomething Anna (Kathryn Worth) goes on holiday to an Italian village finding a motley bunch of Brits. There is a plot, of sorts, but what I found more fascinating was watching these characters exist within the film frame. Even if you know no English, there is a universality in their reactions that would speak in those tiny 'moments' Hogg referred to. This is the first release from new distributor Next Wave films formed by ex-Artificial Eye founders Robert Beeson and Pam Engel.
Chris Marker, only really known for short still photo fiction La Jetée and Sans Soleil, is given his due with Icarus Films in the States releasing The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (26 min-1967), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Remembrance of Things to Come (42 min-2001) and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, Three Cheers for the Whale, The Embassy.
San Francisco Film Society
The ICA Auction (in collaboration with Sotheby's) celebrates its 60th anniversary and has some really fantastic pieces by luminaries of the art world - Peter Blake, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Struth to name but a few.
More much awaited DVD releases arrive from Eureka's Master of Cinema series and Georges Franju's Judex (B/W 1963) and Nuits Rouges (colour 1973).Franju is better known for Eyes Without A Face while Judex, a re-make hommage to Louis Feuillade's 1916 film, is his much talked about but rarely seen film retaining the spirit of the old film serials such as Feuillade's Fantômas. Fellow director Jacques Rivette quoted from Eureka's 40 page booklet: "Franju is at once the one who, through science, rediscovers the secret [at the origin of the cinema], and the modern who knows it is lost - astonished at its power, spying on it and affirming it, finally, in that doubt." Franju was also co-founder with Henri Langlois of France's equivalent to the British Film Institute, the Cinémathèque Française. Franju: "You have to have faith in appearances. It's what I wanted to do in Judex. I found myself in Florence recently, at the house of our friends from the Institut Français who had organised a retrospective of my films. I presented Judex and we were trying to put our fingers on it. Here's what we found to be most true: Judex is an illusion that happens to overturn a prowling realism." Starring a real magician of the time Channing Pollock the plot revolves around a wicked banker, his helpless daughter, and a mysterious avenger. "The incarnation of evil is more seductive than the incarnation of good" says the director. Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux gives an interview extra on both DVDs giving the viewer a good insight into Franju's world. Note the Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) score from early in his career.
Nuits rouges (Red Nights) is the companion film to an eight-part 1975 television series pilot called L'Homme sans visage (The Man Without a Face) about the Knights Templar with Franju collaborating with screenwriter Jacques Champreux. "In Nuits rouges there is no emotional conflict since there is no fluttering victim and therefore no melodrama, and its style derives not from the fantastique but the insolite [a Franju term explained in the booklet]. Nuits rouges exercises the latter, and should therefore be approached rather like those carnival sideshows which require you to rediscover your innocence. This quest for fascination is a fascinating business. Fascination implies a certain resistance, but also an awareness, in the person being fascinated." If this all sounds very Cahiers du cinéma French intellectual, the films themselves play easily as pure entertainment. Especially for Nuits rouge, Franju wanted the film to have the feel of American pulp TV serials like Zorro and it certainly has an uncanny resemblance to the Get Smart series. But Franju was the ultimate perfectionist with no detail left to chance.
Get Smart: The Complete Series just out on Sony DVD
The deadpan casting of Steve Carrell opposite Anne Hathaway in the recent movie version really works by the way.
More of that 'deadpan' acting style in Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) out on DVD and written by Thunderbirds Gerry Anderson. Interesting to compare this with the futuristic Logan's Run (1976) and Michael Crichton directing his own Westworld (1973) a few years later, now out on Warner DVD. The tone and style of Journey has the perfection of Franju and needs a very deft hand to bring it all together. Behind the sun is discovered a doppleganger (double) of planet earth - except everything is reversed as in a mirror image. As with experienced mask and puppet performers, abstract stylisation can often produce surprisingly 'real' emotional results - what Franju was really all about. And it works for Gerry Anderson in this film too. Beautiful digital transfer (compare to the disc trailer) from Universal as well at bargain price.
In 2004, Spanish writer/director Guillermo del Toro brought Mike Mignola's comic-book hero Hellboy to the screen showing what the 'indie' director could do with a Hollywood budget. He amazes again with Hellboy II: The Golden Army leaving perfectly adequate entertainment fair like The Mummy sequels crumbling for mercy in the cosmic dust. While never quite stepping into the darkness of say Batman's The Dark Knight it treads a thrilling thin line between entertainment and the perils of greed. You'll want to own the DVD but don't wait deprive yourself of the big screen WOW. And there really was a clandestine NAZI paranormal bureau way ahead of anything President Roosevelt concocted in 1943).
The Boy in Striped Pajamas, based on John Boyne's book, is a sort of Life is Beautiful about two 8 year-old kids on opposite sides of the electric fence of the Nazi Jewish death camps (the striped pajamas) not fully comprehending the adult world. Director Mark Herman (Brassed Off) continues to show his work's acute knowledge of when to nudge actors in the right direction and knowing exactly when to hold a scene and when to cut. And the film (as in Heavy Metal in Baghdad) shows that daily life really does exist in the most horrific circumstances. This may seem a touch naive or off-putting for some but it ultimately proves a heart-breaking cinematic experience and a rare one that young kids can actually relate to rather than being fed the bullshit of London 2008's pious, social, consumer and political bling. And though there's more than a touch of 'we've seen it all before', there's never a false note in this film right down to the last notes of the score.
The Girl Who Leapt through Time (TokiKake or Toki o kakeru shôjo ), also based on a novel, and another film for both adults and kids and one of the best Japanese animés around. Makoto is a school girl who finds a time travel device and with it she learns about grappling with the concept of moral responsibility in trying to be a change for good in the future. At the end of the day she learns that it must reluctantly and inevitably always be 'our secret'. 私の秘密
Three of Australia's most distinguished professionals in the film and writing industry got together at the Adelaide Town Hall in June 2002 for a discussion in front of a live audience to discuss which tells the story best, the book or the film? Does the film necessarily destroy the book? Should it stick religiously to the plot or should it aim simply to capture the essence, the feel of the story?
CERN's earth-swallowing black hole experiment begins in Switzerland
If the world indeed seems to be about to end for you then one might as well savour those last moments with some indie produce form London's recent Speciality and Fine Food Fair 2008. The Ooh La La Chocolate girl started her business (and creating her logo) having been commissioned by a friend (March of the Penguins film fan) to design a large chocolate penguin. Thus emerged her little silver and black boxes of seasonal fruit chocs, some of the fruit she actually grows at the bottom of her garden. Try Jasmine Tea, Elderflower and even Earl Grey. The idea being that one should buy chocolate fresh just as you purchase bread and milk? Raw Intent (a hit for me from last year's fair) continues growing strongly. (When most other businesses are struggling, commercial 97 year-old giant Thorntons had nearly a 20% surge in profits for the year to 28 June.) The husband (he designs the packaging) and wife (she didn't like raisins) of Muddy Cook have some great organic muesli for the kids coated in Mexican agave cactus nectar. Something to discuss over breakfast aside crashing stock prices.
Claire Lettice' business card bills her as the company's Director of Yumminess. And Stephanie Bond's company Knobbly Carrot organic (£200,000 annual turnover) won an EDC (Welsh Assembly Government initiative) one-off ecodesign and support package along with three other much larger companies. The company also won the highly coveted Great Taste Gold Award this year for its Luscious lentil and Country Vegetable Soup. All products are 100% organic and certified by the Soil Association.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter's doco Our Daily Bread
A herd of goats has been hired by City officials in Los Angeles to clear wasteland earmarked for development.
Channel Four's Dispatches: What's in your wine? isn't palatable viewing.
Time Magazine calls Sunita Narain 'India's most influential environmentalist
Australian botanical artist Ellis Rowan amassed over 3,000 paintings But very few people have heard of Ellis Rowan or seen her paintings which are largely hidden from view in drawers.
Australian geographer Griffith Taylor(1880-1963): Visionary, Environmentalist and Explorer who was virtually hounded out of Australia for his denunciation of the White Australia Policy and his controversial stance on the limits to Australia's growth potential at a time of unprecedented nationalism.
Over the same period the Brits were needing help understanding how to use a telephone and post a letter. But it gave artists a great outlet for their talent (not to mention rent payment). Some great shorts in this bunch.
Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit(1936 - 1939)
Legendary Brit theatre dirctor Peter Brook on the so-called Cultural Olympiad, leading up to 2012 Games in London.
The Telegraph's 50 reasons to love Britain (not that fashion guru/icon Vivienne Westwood is at all British!..the very reason she became what she was)
Abadadabada, abadadabada, abadadabada, abadadabada - that's all folks :) ;).........................
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