parlez.)

At least X-Men Origins:Wolverine - longly awaited by much of the world – had sharper claws than the British Chancellor’s budget promulgation last week. But did the film’s director Gavin Hood also miss a chance to really ‘get real’ with the brothers’ dark relationship – the very reason he got the job? Set in the 1970s (backstory to the franchise’s other futuristic films) it could have worked well within the difficult construct of the comic book movie. But the film never ascends anywhere near Guillermo del Toro’s cinematic depths. Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber have great screen rapport and while the thrills never allow for seat wriggling (thanks to Donald McAlpine’s cinematography, the casting, and all the other production departments), and with memorable final scenes: being an ardent X-Men fan no doubt helps your enjoyment. In fact Wolverine’s budget could probably have saved thousands of crippled and struggling arts organisations both in the UK and US. But as all hard bitten cynics know too well, life’s not really like that (except by the third leaf of the amphibian pond to your far left as you exit the Ken Livingston memorial wildlife sanctuary).

Mind the gap: departing Tube chief Tim O’Toole warns of £2bn black hole
£2m to airbrush Metronet out of London commuter history
Tube fares may rise to fill £600m hole in TfL efficiency savings

The new chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain Dame Liz Forgan seemed almost ready to break into a rendition of the Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life as she credit crunch encouraged us ‘to roll up our sleeves and make the best of a bad lot’ in an interview on Radio 4’s Front Row. The more London life trundles on the more surreal it all seems. ‘Look: that business is doing well’ a dim desperate little voice is heard to echo in the Synecdoche New York (opens May 15) warehouse of London. They’re even trying to crack down on burlesque shows in the capital. What will those politicians now do without the New Labour counselling programme of electric guitar and wife’s high heels on a Friday night? Find some wandering minstrels of Devon (WMDs) I expect. Please leave Wales alone, though; the sheep enjoy the New Labour war veterans’ Bob Dylan wafting through their valleys.
Release dates for Eureka’s Soul Power now confirmed: Glastonbury Festival 26/27/28 June, general release July 10.

Gideon Koppel’s pensive doco film (shot atmospherically on 16mm) Sleep Furiously (out May 29 from New Wave) explores the lives of mid-Wales hill-farmers (50 miles further north of poet Dylan Thomas’ fictionional village in Under Milkwood ) and is cut by Michel Gondry’s editor Mario Battistel. Perhaps a tad repetitive in its imagery, the film’s daily life vignette stagings are so redolent of Dylan Thomas mulch. The superb Brit pic Helen (last blog) is also out this week from New Wave Films. Pastoral comedic is The Grocer’s Son (Le fils de l’Epicier) (ICA) (trailer)- the fictional feature debut of French doco maker Eric Guirado. We’re in sunny southern rural France with a Parisian son coping with his recuperating father’s mobile grocery van. The film’s not as deep nor as strange nor as acute as might be wished but it’s a fun 96 minutes with gently directed and nuanced performances with an almost quirky English touch.

Will Hannah Montana survive translation for French farmers? Because in spite of all its hokeyness, the film’s greatest strength is its homespun goodness and good nature. For those uninitiated through the original TV series the opening scenes can be cringey e.g. Hannah’s pink suitcases in yokel countryside. But then the Disney spell starts taking effect. Or rather the talents of the amazing almost 17 year-old Ms. Miley Cyrus. She carries this film with the ease of someone 10 years older, transfixing the audience with her big eyes, pouty lips, and her ‘this is my show folks enjoy the ride’ aplomb as the LA superstar Hannah learns to be the Montana Miley. Moreover, Cyrus can really act and hopefully will bite into some straight acting parts post adolescence. Cynics will probably cringe at Miss Hannah’s “Life’s a climb but the view is great” philosophy or its companion song in the score and the one about caterpillars and butterflies. But though the film may be wrapped in Disney tinsel the gift inside is pulsing with Nashville “I cried a river over you” strength and fragility (Miley’s real dad country and western star Billy Ray Cyrus plays her film dad). There’s also a fun movie musical hip hop country fusion sequence Hoedown Throwdown. Directed by Peter Chelsom, fellow Brit Peter Gunn is among the film’s great supporting cast – Oswald the ‘baddie’ “wretched soulless succubus” media hound. The script doesn’t exactly abound with those one-liners as did Enchanted, though. And this film is chasin' the blues away more than singin' 'em.
Right here, right now - after twenty per cent of conservatives voted for Obama, the Republican party was left in tatters

BBC 4 documentary series looking at the history of 20th century farming in Britain
Mud, Sweat and Tractors
Molly Dineen and her film The Lie of the Land (Channel 4)
Modern Life (La Vie moderne) is out from Soda Pictures

Would Peter Harness’ Brit seaside retirement home script Is Anybody There? work without Michael Caine in the lead? Yes, probably. But what Caine movingly brings to the retired magician Clarence is a lot of Caine himself considering old age, and there are some heart-stopping moments in this script that haven’t come his way since his wonderful role in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. Clarence’s big monologue about life is delivered to Edward the 10 year-old son of the home’s owners who’s befriended the old man. Edward (Bill Milner from Son of Rambow) has also found himself alone in the world and a resident’s last gasp leads him to believe in ghosts. Directed by John Crowley there’s nothing particularly new here and its wonderfully acted array of slightly oddball characters. But the central relationship is so strong and so devoid of cloying bathos that it haunts us like a never forgotten sunset on the sea.
John Burningham author of children's books : 'In 2009 being young is terrible. You can't run wild'

Shifty is being touted as the year’s indie Brit hit – shot over 18 days on 35mm film for a £100,000 budget – a first feature for writer/director Eran Creevy. It’s a good film but one that still lacks a distinctive edge on second viewing. Nodding in the direction of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach it doesn’t quite achieve their black humour of predicament and actually the film feels more like very good TV drama (absolutely no backhanded complement intended I must add). Yet there are some funny lines, the casting is great, the photography, and it seems churlish to say anything negative or perhaps want more from what is a tremendous result from very finite resources. And it’s a film focussing on its characters rather than its issues and identities (Shifty is a London drug dealer and a Muslim so he’s “fucked either way”) which is often not the case with Brit films of this sort. Creevy will make a really good second feature too but will it be an Eran Creevy film with its own distinctive flair just as Shane Meadows carved out his territory?
Sunday Times article

One wished there’d been a bit more ‘reality’ to the satirical In the Loop - the TV series lampooning Westminster politics and translated to the big screen by centring its plot on a political jaunt to Washington. Broadly and barbarously funny as it is, the idiocy of the Brit delegation often sat uncomfortably with realpolitik. The TV series worked so brilliantly because it created its own quarking mad parallel Westminster universe but meeting the Americans is like entering an alien dimension (exactly the point of course, with their razor sharp pragmatism - superficially at least). Perhaps if the Brit side had donned more the mantle of maturity when with the Americans they would have seemed even more ridiculous and therefore even funnier sitting trouserless in their hotel room eating take away while watching shark documentaries on cable TV. If you died laughing with The Office, the In the Thick Of It series will nail down your coffin’ lid. FAQ About Time Travel is a ropy first feature by Brit TV comedy director Gareth Carrivick – a bunch of lads gather in a pub in a sort of ‘garden shed’ Doctor Who spoof. Exec Produced by America’s HBO, there’s a lot of self-deprecating English humour here and in a way its ‘shaggy dogness’ works well in its favour. But wait for the DVD.

Another ‘reality’ Brit director Kevin Macdonald has assailed Hollywood with State of Play a thriller based.on Paul Abbott’s BBC series. Whilst Hannah is attempting to save her Tennessee home town from developer greed, the tectonic politics of Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill and the city’s Globe newspaper rumble as the greenback widens the cracks it attempts to close. “Public office, the nature of the beast” scrowls Russell Crowe’s hardened investigative journo to his old friend but now U.S. Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck). This film is what Hollywood is capable of when it lets the creatives take charge (which isn’t very often). It’s not Polanski’s Chinatown, most thrillers rarely are. But State of Play heads in the right direction. It goes for character milieu rather than plot. A good thriller is like looking under a rock at the lifeforms beneath. We don’t need really to know where the rock is, who lifts it up, why the rock was lifted in the first place. But there’s a fascination about why those organisms do what they do there. Jack Nicholson’s private eye is full of contradictions lacking in Crowe’s dishevelled reporter Cal. And though somewhat of a cliche such a focussed unpostered performance still interests us. He could be on the take too. Cards are played close to the chest. So we keep watching. Nothing too unusual either about Affleck’s politician but the relationship with Cal is drawn and we watch and wait. All the while Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography immerses us in their world. And what’s that little creature imping in under the rock – oh it’s the newspaper’s online blogger (Rachel McAdams) who will change things forever.

Werner Herzog’s always searching for other peoples’ worlds and so to Antarctica - Encounters at the End of the World. Vowing never to film any fluffy penguins, Herzog even finds one lone penguin who’s either a visionary or an idiot as it waddles towards the mountain range while everyone else heads the other way. Some of the world’s great minds work at McMurdo research station -“professional dreamers” who found their home.

North Face is out on Metrodome DVD
Choreographer William Forsythe's City of Abstracts at Tate Modern
William Blake show at Tate Britain
Thomas Joshua Cooper's new works The World's Edge (interview)
Radio 4's The New Galileos
Radio 4's In our Time on the vacuum of space (April 30)

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”Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the ‘dreams of his youth’,” - German philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Does art ever really force us to look at ourselves? Or does it simply cajole? Tempt? Tease? Tame? Taunt? Torment both artist and viewer?
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in
The Dehumanization of Art (published in 1925):
“Perception of ‘lived’ reality and perception of artistic form, as I have said before, are essentially incompatible because they call for a different adjustment of our perceptive apparatus.”
When visiting an exhibition of children's drawings, Picasso remarked: "When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them." (quoted in Penrose’s Picasso: His Life and Work)
And of course probably the most famous Picasso quotes: “Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.”

The National Gallery’s Picasso: Challenging the Past follows not the usual curatorial chronology but has six rooms each exploring Picasso’s ‘debt’ to art history “as a source for energy and innovation” states the catalogue. The show most certainly achieves its aim (there’s also additional influences in the main gallery’s Room 1), moreover though, this approach frees Picasso from all those boring Blue/Rose etc art historian dubbed periods and shows just how great, prolific, fun and spontaneous an artist was he. It’s so bleedinly obvious this approach yet not one that’s been much taken up by galleries. Seen in the same room, 18 years separates Girl in a Chemise (1905) and Portrait of Olga (1923) showing Picasso really could ‘paint’ more traditionally and not just as a ‘student’. Yet the childlike Van Gogh influenced 1938 Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice-Cream Cone hits one straight off in the exhibition’s first room. There’s no message in this art simply childish joy and childish frustration of life and many of his female nudes. In fact, the show’s curator was at some pains to distance Picasso from his politics when I broached with her that issue. And though I don’t agree with her, quite honestly, the National Gallery show proves all the more arresting, involving and intriguing for that decision.
Paris police unveil Picasso files

“When Pablo Picasso applied for a visa to the United States in 1950, it threw State Department and FBI officials into full alert. The purpose of the artist's visit—his first ever to the United States—was to lead 12 delegates from the Congrès Mondial des Partisans de la Paix (World Congress of Peace Partisans) to Washington in an effort to persuade President Truman to ban the atomic bomb. The peace congress, which had been founded a year earlier in Paris and Prague, had already been identified as a powerful Communist front.”

Gertje R. Utley’s Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years is published by Yale University Press.

Unbelievable nowadays (of course) but so popular was Picasso’s dove image in the 1950s that the CIA–backed Paix et Liberté movement targeted it for caricature in anti–Communist propaganda campaigns.
Dave Borling’s first novel Guernica tells the story.
BBC Culture Show special


Costa Gavras is interviewed on the 40th anniversary of his landmark feature Z (1969), “about an incorruptible judge investigating the killing at a peace demo of a reformist politician, played by Yves Montand. Z was an indictment of the US-backed coup in Greece, and banned under the 1967-74 military junta.” His latest film Eden Is West opened London's Human Rights Watch film festival last month.
Picasso tapestry on show in London
BBC’s series The Lost World of Communism (out on 2 Entertain DVD)

Across the Thames at the Hayward Gallery is French artist Annette Messager’s The Messengers. Her use of everyday objects has made her very collectable by the world’s major galleries. Justifiably so - if you saw any one of her works individually the response would be wow, so collectively imagine. Many seem effortless but you peep through slots to see her early 70s work in The Secret Room and this play of hide and seek (at times a horrific Grimms fairy tale) continues throughout the show: 1973 -“We are multiple, contradictory and ungraspable, up to the moment we cease living. I am undoubtedly always wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, and to avoid being restricted to an ultimate form, lacking contradiction, before that time has come.”
The following Messager extracts are from an interview with Natasha Leoff in Journal of Contemporary Art:
“In order to be touched by a work of art, it must first refer to the person who made it, a strong personality, and it must touch the collective, everyone must find something in this order.
Artaud is a good model for this. He made his drawings for himself only and we can all find ourselves in these portraits, his auto-portraits or his manifestos. It is precisely this back and forth between the individual, between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, which makes a work of art stand out, because it touches both worlds at the same time.”

The Messengers is probably a great show for kids more because of its honesty than its ‘kiddyness’. The Boarders (1971-72) is 3 cases of taxidermied sparrows (some real some fake) displaying their ‘life cycle’. Once again the prison and freedom of childhood.
“When children are asked to draw their house, even if they live in an apartment, they will always draw a traditional house with an attic and a basement. When we ask a child to draw clothing, he will always draw a traditional piece of clothing. This is what I like, for example in what we call Art Brut, which is always outside of trend, of fashion. Obviously I come from a specific generation of artists, but let's say by using the kinds of timeless materials-cloth, paper, crayons-that are not directly linked to today's technologies, I am interested in transcending a certain temporality. I would love to work with video, but somehow I feel incapable of using that kind of material today. I would like to use video as easily as I use a pencil... Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley engage in child-games, what we call in French "pipi-caca." In my work on the other hand, the colored crayon becomes a weapon, it is pointed. I stab with it; it keeps the formal aspect of the pretty colored pencil but is lethal, deadly.”- Journal of Contemporary Art

Coloured woollen yarn, soft toys, gloves, dresses (“part fairy tale princesses, part coffin”), pastel painted parachute ‘sea-anemone’ bouncy castles (Inflated-Deflated,2006), finally lead the exhibition’s visitor to her large 2005 Venice Biennale room Casino – undulating fabric: is it resting, waiting and if so for whom and to what purpose? Things get bigger, more restless - mirrors Them and Us, Us and Them (2000) “an entertainment for bored long-dead Popes”, until finally fabric automatons Articulated-Disarticulated her response to ‘mad-cow disease’ and the heart of her forest - Dependence-Independence (1996). I guess the kids have to learn sometime. What’s frightening is that nowadays they probably know it all already. A range of design and giftware for the gallery shop has also been specially commissioned from leading designers. Your fear after seeing the show though is that they may literally fly off the shelves or worse still stealthily stalk you home.

Upstairs at the Hayward is - Mark Wallinger Curates: The Russian Linesman - Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds – not quite as exciting as hoped for (and no where near as fun as Messager) but many of his selections of mostly other artists work are always worth a gander.
How Mark Wallinger finally won the hearts of the British public
Tate Modern extension go ahead

Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is just out from Atlantic Books. Pieces and edges. Hmmm...
The Paris Review interview
There's now a Front Row archive with a link to each episode (without expiring after a week)!!! Better late than never I guess.

Radical new plans by the Government to regulate psychoanalysis . Where would that put pioneers in the RD Laing vein one wonders?
RD Laing: The abominable family man
(More 4 news)
Start the Week
has Michael Portillo examining what drives people to violence and whether any one of us has the potential to become violent.
How Violent Are You? will be shown later this month as part of BBC 2’s Violence Season.
Dr. Jonathan Miller reviews the new exhibition Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 at the Wellcome Collection in London, which examines the relationship between mental illness, the visual arts and architecture in Vienna during the period 1890-1914.
[Addition: Madness and the artistic imagination]
Did I Leave The Gas On? on sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorder

Some would say the eponymous journo hero of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (narrated by erstwhile fan, Johnny Depp) would have benefited from more therapy. Yea: consider the final paragraphs of his obit in The Economist (Feb 24th 2005)-
“In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world:
It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”

Optimum’s Gonzo DVD is great, but by the man’s very nature could probably never have been revelatory even with all the interview outtakes as extras and an audio commentary from director Alex Gibney: “[His] contradictions embodied the central contradictions of the United States – being a country of great idealism and possibility but also possessed with this dark side...the fear and loathing as Hunter called it, and a really mean violent streak.” “[He was] a novelist in a journalist’s body and it allowed him to get to a kind of deep ironic truth that was beyond a recitation of the facts.” He ran for office - initially as a joke - for Sheriff of Aspen, but one that became serious.
On the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots: “Two fractious sides that were beating to death the American dreams, and that’s what was really horrifying [Hunter]; there was no middle way, no sense of dialogue anymore and that the extremes had won.”
He supported McGovern’s ’72 campaign (no surprise) as the Senator described Washington as “I’m sick and tired of old men sitting around in an air-conditioned rooms here dreaming up wars for young people to die in.”

Hunter was lauded for being against ‘the system’: by the Republicans (though he loathed Nixon) for his gun-toting gun lovin’ life-style and by the Democrats for his sincere belief in social change giving it ‘hip’ appeal. Thus becoming a victim of his own success and a ‘darling’ of the Vanity Fair magazine crowd. He was the guy everyone knew was inside himself. The guy they would never admit to being. The guy women loved to hate and hated to love. Somewhere in the middle of that water elevated, across the lake his favourite Great Gatsby something the crazy ‘Wild Turkey’ man on the other side had become part of whilst trying to destroy it. The fly on the gateaux hovering ‘Christ-like’ over the water.
The Gonzo Tapes
State of Play

Hunter was sent to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali (travelling with Ralph Steadman, his Rolling Stone illustrator)but he remained by his hotel pool awash with marijuana never filing his report. Gibney’s doco doesn’t tell us whether he made it to any of the 12-hour, three night long concert (The Rumble in the Jungle) held concurrently in Kinshasa with James Brown, BB King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners and on and on? Jeffrey Levy-Hinte edited the Academy Award® winning When We Were Kings about the Ali-Foreman fight and has collated the hitherto unseen concert and behind the scenes footage into Soul Power (nabbed by Sony Pictures Classics for North American and Latin American) and very cannily by Eureka in the UK (they hope to prem it at Glastonbury this year, later theatrically and then on their Masters of Cinema DVD series). It is an absolutely extraordinary 93 minutes. Documentarians today are spoilt by light, portable DV cameras, so marvel, just marvel at how effortless the great Albert Maysles and Paul Goldsmith (Rust Never Sleeps), Kevin Keating (Harlan County USA) and Roderick Young make it all seem with a old celluloid cameras (16mm). The footage has been restored in HD (High Definition). The ‘Gonzo’ irony was that the concert was made possible by a Liberian investment group with dictator Mobutu Sese Seko still in power. Or as James Brown puts it: “No black man ever got liberated by being broke”. And there’s a great line from Ali himself as he swaps a fly: “The flies here stay hungry and fast, in America they’re overfed so they move slower.”
blogspot mention
Q&A: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
YouTube
Toronto Film Fest prem last year
A conversation with Bill Withers (just ‘cause he’s great - not from the film)
Making of
Tyson is released by Revolver. (Front Row)

“If you can’t satirise yourself you have no identity,” says one of the top funny people in More 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-ups (as voted for by the public). What happens when great comedians start doing the ‘talking dog’ movies of Hollywood, though? Thankfully, some still remember the kennel.
The Omid Djalili Show - Series 1 is out on DVD.
His No Agenda - Live at the London Palladium
Russell Brand on sex, Sachs and self-improvement
Richard Curtis about his new comedy The Boat That Rocked on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (April 3).
Richard Curtis admits he took some liberties with his pirate-radio homage.
Armando Iannucci's debut feature film In the Loop discussed with Alastair Campbell.
And the series that spawned the film: The Thick of It: The Specials (out on 2 Entertain DVD)
The dark art of spin (More 4 News) – couldn’t have and died and gone to heaven for better Westminster publicity for the film.

Michael J. Fox’s sense of humour is always inspiring - The Daily Show
Elizabeth Warren depresses even Jon Stewart with details how much taxpayer money has been sent to Wall Street and what they've done with it. (The Daily Show)
Clown therapy puts the smile back on faces of children whose lives were shattered

Cindy Sherman’s new show opened last night in London.
I'm every woman (Sunday Times) interview

The DVD of Not Quite Hollywood is out and like Gonzo is another Optimum ‘must-have’, moreover, an important document in cinema history given its exhaustive commentary by director Mark Hartley and contributors. This is the side of Australian cinema ‘Ozploitation’ that wasn’t promoted by the tourist board – ‘Tarantino’s Oz’ (an early affectionado of the genre). And this doco really is quite revelatory – an untold story and balanced in telling at that - these are not films “as engines for social change” but ones harking the audience back to the “Nickelodeon days of laughs and gasps”.
Senses of Cinema article on Alvin Purple
Front Row
spot on whether film classification is too lenient: film director Stephen Parsons explains why he asked the British Board of Film Classification to give his film Wishbaby a more restrictive certificate - changing it from a 15 to an 18.

There’s commentary on Optimum’s The Signal DVD too
(US site) that’s probably more inspiring for aspirant indie filmmakers (all shot on Canon XLH1 HDV video) than Joe Public. Fans of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, they are funny guys though (as is reflected in the film’s black comedy). “You don’t really need verisimilitude when you have crack jay-walking zombies,” says one of the three directors who in turn direct a third of the movie ‘on the fly’ in Atlanta - hence the jaywalking joke. (A prominent UK historian on his way to a conference was even arrested doing it, so beware). “Justin is my Atlanta Klaus Kinski,” they quip again. Yet the directors do exhibit a moral questioning of the horror genre whilst espousing the entertainment value. Once again, the monster may well be within us.
This wonderfully titled cult blog muses on ‘shock tactics’ in cinema (March 02, 2009 posting)

Tony Manero (ICA)(Youtube) is
director Pablo Larrain’s second feature and looks amazing shot on 16mm blown up to 35mm. Set in 1979 Santiago Chile during Pinochet's brutal dictatorship, aging Raul Peralta (Alfredo Castro) is obsessed with the John Travolta charcter in Saturday Night Fever, hence the title. At times it’s almost Robert Bressonian in its brutal, unflinching (Raul casually murders several innocents) observation of everyday detail as he sets about constructing a minute flickering dance floor and mirror ball in order to practice for a TV Manero lookalike competition. Macabrely funny and deeply disturbing, it’s a totally engrossing film exhibiting all the expertise of Abel Ferrara at his best.
eye for eye film
French site
Vertigo article: The Dance Macabre of Tony Manero

Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma) (trailer) was the discovery of the 2008 New York Tribeca festival and is what the ‘reality’ Dardennes brothers would make if they went ‘Vampire’. This quality more than the shades of Stephen King and Anne Rice allow Swedish director Tomas Alfredson and writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) to explore the pre-teen world of the outsider that though horrifying is exquisitely redemptive. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) lives with his single mum in 1982 Stockholm social housing, and new girl next door Eli (Lina Leandersson) is a bit odd - "I'm twelve, though I've been twelve for a long time." Giving Oskar confidence to fend off his violent classmate bullies, Eli is inextricably drawn to Oskar into revealing her secret. It’s a magnificent, haunting film that photographed by Dutch-Swede Hoyte van Hoytema in anamorphic widescreen like a Renaissance painting forever frozen in ice always seems to whisper. A crucial character trait was changed from the novel, probably for the better, as it distills the essences of the character’s human needs and the essence of the vampire as something within oneself yet purged and manifested in an external genre construct.
the book
Tomas Alfredson reveals the secrets of his gory sound effects and poet, publisher, painter, photographer and actor Viggo Mortensen (star of Lord of the Rings) speaks about his new film Good.
Magnolia thinks bloggers should chill out about Let The Right One In’s subtitles on the US DVD and Blu-Ray.
Andrei Molodkin wants your body
Andrei Molodkin: black gold, blood red
BBC Radio 4 Remembrance of Smells Past

Eureka DVD have Carl Dreyer’s Der Vampyr
Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature on BBC Radio 4: A German refugee from the Nazis who pioneered nature broadcasting in Britain. He became the first person to harness new technologies to record the sounds of birds, mammals and insects.

Boys held for ‘torture’ of children were in care

“I was no longer afraid of things I could not see,” says Frankie (Lukas Haas) who got bullied too, being locked in a cloakroom on Halloween. Frank LaLoggia’s 1988 Lady in White (Director's Cut)
(trailer) out on DVD, is somewhat more subdued and ‘Hollywood’ than Let the Right One In. But as LaLoggia explains on the audio commentary (originating from the Sony DVD issue) his was a forerunner (in John Carpenter spirit) of indie filmmaking. With his cousin’s help, the production budget was raised from 4,000 investors many of whom lived around where the film (set in the 60s) was shooting.
This murder/ghost mystery “is a film about loss and coming to terms with loss,” says LaLoggia. With camera work from Russell Carpenter (who went onto bigger and ginormous things, Titanic), it’s an uneven film but one that’s held in enormous affection by people. And the DVD proves why -36 minutes of deleted scenes on the disc too.
(Part 1 on Youtube)
Beating the System -an Interview with Frank LaLoggia

The Winslow Boy (out on Optimum DVD) is a 1948 melodrama directed by Anthony Asquith from a script by the oft underrated Terence Rattigan (based on his original successful stage play). A young upper middle-class lad accused and convicted of petty theft is helped by his father Arthur Winslow (Cedric Hardwicke)beating his head against legal bureaucracy in order to clear his son’s name. Sir Robert Morton (Robert Donat) takes on the case and wins. But what is the price paid by those involved?

Five Minutes of Heaven won the prestigious World Cinema Directing Award and World Cinema Screenwriting Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival and was screened on BBC 2 TV a few weeks ago. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel(Downfall)'s film is fact based(writer Guy Hibbert). In 1975 Joe Griffin’s (James Nesbitt) 19-year-old brother James was murdered by the 17-year-old Ulster Volunteer Force member Alistair Little (Liam Neeson). Aged 11, Joe Griffin was an eyewitness. The men are brought back together decades later by an interview ‘reality’ TV show. One can easily pick holes in this film but its simplicity and directness is breathtaking. Questions of morality are framed as ‘what ifs’. What if young Joe had stopped kicking his ball against the wall as asked and gone inside 5 minutes before the shooting? What if the cameraman hadn’t faltered forcing a retake of tracking Joe down the stairs to meet first-time face to face? What if the production runner hadn’t been such good listener to Joe? What if...?
Martin McGartland police agent in IRA , disowns Fifty Dead Men Walking
Jim Sturgess takes on role as IRA informer

“That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City (BFI DVD and Blu-ray) is a melancholy meditation on his homeland of Liverpool. "I thought at one time, when I started making my films, particularly the early autobiographical ones, that I would reach some catharsis. But I haven't. All it has done is highlight that which has been lost," he said in an interview with Greencine’s Aaron Hillis. (Strand Releasing distributed in the States)
BBC's The Culture Show

“If you opened people up, you would find landscapes, if you opened me up, you would find beaches.”
“Si on ouvrait les gens, on trouverait des paysages. Moi, si on m’ouvrait, on trouverait des plages.”
Distributed by Cinema Guild in the States, Agnès Varda’s docu-fantasy “self-portrait at 80” Les plages d'Agnes (The Beaches of Agnes) (trailer) screened at last year’s Times BFI London Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival but hasn’t been seen much outside the festival circuit - yet to be released in London. And that’s a great shame.
If you like Terence Davies then you’ll probably like Varda’s film. They share honestly, wistfulness, a love of becoming. Varda is French cinema royalty - associated in one way or t’other with every great French artist in the last however many decades. When she looks at you she really notices. But a glint in her eye masks what she’s actually seen. Hence the use of mirrors on the beach: “Varda, in casual deconstructionist mode, also films people in the act of setting up the mirrors, stressing the image as collective creation. The entire film consistently unfolds within this binary focus,” noted the Variety review from Venice last year. While Terence Davies elevates reality to the sublime, Varda elevates the sublime to the real. If you really wanted to dance in the streets you could but we always danced in the streets. Remember, she seems to ask? Transfixed we agree. Davies goes the other way, he waves his magic wand and life is what it meant to be only sort of never was, “the land of lost content”. Varda sees Los Angeles (where she spent time with her then husband Jacques Demy) as “a very sad fiction. When I go back the beach is where I meet my friends again.” But she convinces us there was a Michel Legrand song there in our step. Davies’ Liverpool ‘reality’ is sad too. The sobbing is the hushed ppp of a Mahler symphony but he chooses the heavenly climax of the composer’s Resurrection Symphony for the film’s penultimate moments.
We look in the mirror and wish we were something other, glimpsing a firefly that is probably all too real indeed.
Agnès Varda’s European Graduate School Lecture 2004. 1

The centrepiece of Ron Arad’s show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery is an enormous shelving unit (Arad is a sculptural designer) in the shape of the United States of America Oh, the farmer & the cowman should be friends. Individual states constructed of stainless and Corten steel – one state seeming to mirror another, mirroring the observer, but each obscured by itself and whatever books find there way into that particular shelf. The idea’s simplicity is just stunning. How many books could it hold? Would it ever collapse? Why didn’t I see that idea myself, you ask?
good photos on Designboom
Artinfo interview
[Addition: Crossing the divide between art and design]
and my photo of Ron Arad at the show’s opening. Is he communing with the cows, the farmers or some unknown force?

My Dinner with Andre (youtube) out on DVD last month, is a 1981 film classic written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, directed by Louis Malle. What do audiences make of it now? In its day it was quite radical simply to film two people talking in a restaurant (mostly Gregory). Now with the internet and mobile phones perhaps not. But the power of storytelling probably still holds sway here as Shawn gazes awe-struck at Gregory’s tales of working with his director friend Jerzy Grotowski and his actors in a Polish forest, his visit to ahead of its time ‘climate aware’ Findhorn in Scotland where beach stones were placed on the roofs that never seemed to dislodge in a storm, and his trip to the Sahara to create a play based on The Little Prince. In the age of reality TV do people still become enthralled? Gregory suggests to Shawn that what passes for normal life in New York is more akin to living in a dream than it is to real life. “I could always live in my art but not in my life,” says Gregory. It’s strange to hear them moaning about finance and living in New York from a quarter century ago when those days now seemed oh so good as theatre companies that’ve struggled for years become victims of the credit-crunch. For anyone obsessed with a particular art form there’s an exquisite beauty to this film; something almost sacrosanct in the treasuring and questing for culture, knowledge and the search for an internal enlightenment that can cast its glow upon at least some people in the world.

In 1994, Gregory's voluntary 3 year work with an acting troupe on Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (the English translation by David Mamet with Shawn in the lead) was filmed again by Malle, Vanya on 42nd Street -it would be his last film.
André Gregory’s 2007 book
Bone Songs
Wallace Shawn interview
Her Drawings With André
podcast
Shawn is in London for the season of his plays at the Royal Court that run until June: Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever and Grasses of a Thousand Colours (directed by Gregory).

As some of the contributors to these programmes note, there’s something very Chekhovian about Alan Ayckbourn's plays: the petit-bourgeois may be the milieu but the still waters of humans run very deep.
The Broadway run of The Old Vic's production of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests has begun at Circle in the Square marking the playwright’s 70th birthday .
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row
And BBC Radio 3 has A Small Family Business and
Man of the Moment about reality TV culture.
Sir Michael Parkinson has hit out at the media's treatment of the late reality TV star Jade Goody.
Britain’s Got Talent Youtube sensation Susan Boyle: “47 and that's just one side of me” Demi Moore apparently Twitter’d about her according to the BBC.
Peaches: sex and the seminal woman

The UK's only dedicated Sci Fi and Fantasy film festival Sci-Fi London opens next week with Eyeborgs ( links) produced by
Crimson Wolf
Of Aliens and Astronomers Royal
International Year of Astronomy
BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4 on
Carl Sagan - A Personal Voyage , a man way head of his time.
Anousheh Ansari made headlines in 2006 when she paid $20m (£14m) to become the world's first female space tourist.

Electric Dreams (DVD) is an entertaining oddity from 1984. Geeky architect buys all-encompassing, all-controlling computer Edgar that unwittingly woos for him the beautiful female cellist neighbour. 1982’s Tron this even isn’t and many may find it just too cheesy for words let alone music. Cue Phil Oakley’s Together In Electric Dreams that became somewhat of a hit single for Richard Branson’s pubescent Virgin Records along with Giorgio Moroder’s synth soundtrack. But remember this film is pre-ring tones, though well over a decade past Kubrick’s 2001 Hal. I loved every minute but I can’t say it ‘guided my soul’.
Radio 4's In Our Time has a discussion of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. No money in people liking nature, inciting people to say YES, state intervention into daily life. How very, um, dated!
A deeper peeper
Internet privacy: Britain in the dock
Slow Down London gives city time to relax

a little bit more to come...will someone water my diodes...

Sisyphus still trying to move that rock for the big one

Did the handling of the G20 protests reveal the future of policing?
Tomlinson death: missing moment?
Shareholders vote against RBS pay
Planet group protest against RBS
Time Shift: The North-South Divide
For visitors to London be warned that Royal Mint is warned that one in 20 £1 coins is fake. Or is that another government ploy for something dark and deep with promises to keep.
The Hospital on Britain’s NHS (National Health Service) (4oD Catch-Up at Channel 4). Depressing comment from one nurse that what used to be a staff ‘event’ – a stabbing or a shooting – is now fairly commonplace among their clientele. Tonight's show highlights teenage pregnancy.

If you thought things were bad your end watch from Kiev on how Ukraine - in receipt of $16bn from the IMF - is on the economic brink.
BBC’s Our World - Russia's New Model Army - has access to the Russian military and plans for the biggest reform in the former Cold War army for more than fifty years.

This year's Proms are taking a walk on the wild side of music
Handel Week on Radio 3
Private Passions
The Handel House Museum was home to the baroque composer George Frideric Handel from 1723 until his death in 1759
Catherine Bott and Laurence Cummings explore Handel's Eight Great Keyboard Suites on The Early Music Show
Why we are shutting children out of classical music?
Charles Hazlewood on Discovering Music explores Handel's Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne.
BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature:
Liquid Assets - Handel's Finances
I can vouch for all of those programmes.
Nightwaves (Wed 15 Apr) about Handel's originalityPianist Nikolai Demidenko on BBC Radio 3's In Tune gives a sneak preview of his Chopin CD played on the composer's original piano. Well worth 20 min of your time.
BBC Radio 3's Hear And Nowexplores the spoken word in new music and sound art.

Amateur orchestra greeted by thousands as Gustavo Dudamel begins a one-week residency at London's South Bank Centre
Mystery girl Madeleine Peyroux, in Britain to support the homeless charity St Mungo's and to promote her latest album

BBC Four screens West End Jungle - banned when made in 1961, this documentary delves into the history and seedy reality of the sex industry in London's Soho.
BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves explores the contemporary state of Arabic-speaking Christians.

Cult chanteuse who accompanied herself on the piano and wrote songs Blossom Dearie died in February aged 84 A good place to start for the uninitiated might be her rendition of Sheldon Harnick’s (altogether different but very much the same as his Fiddler on the Roof) The Ballad of the Shape of Things To Come.
God forbid you can even get a ringtone:
Then try the other singles in the NYT obit. Ever wondrous on stage, gracious in person, and if you only knew her recordings and not her age you’d would swear she was an innocent young girl.
I like London in the rain
Youtube,1985


The fascinating Tis Autumn about forgotten jazz legend Jackie Paris is out on DVD.
Betsy Blair
aural obit on The Last Word (27th March)

The Menier Chocolate Factory’s sell out production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s A Little Night Music is to transfer to the West End.
Front Row spot on the Menier’s rise to prominence.
Radio 4's The Reunion (Fri 10 April) brings together some of the original members of the National Theatre to remember its birth in 1963 under artistic director Laurence Olivier.
programme’s archive for previous years

The East End Film Festival arrives in week or so and
The Escapist Brit director Rupert Wyatt interviewed as his film opens in New York.

Peter Ackroyd and the Retelling of Chaucer

And in The New Yorker How Palladian was Palladio?. The Royal Academy show just closed.

The Clore Ballroom Screenplay
And 2009 Italian Film Festival UK

Roberto Benigni upstages even himself let alone Patsy Kensit on Graham Norton's show.
Benigni's Tutto Dante on Youtube that almost half of all Italy's citizens have seen. So it can't just be his extraordinary delivery of the English language. He played Drury Lane london last night.

The Spill festival of international experimental performance at the Barbican

BBC Radio 4's The Last Word had composer George Fenton on the legacy of film composer Maurice Jarre
The Independent obit
Alexandre Desplat interviews on CNN
Milan Records have a David Lean tribute recorded live at the Barbican Center (London, 1992) with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, this edition includes a full audio commentary of the concert by conductor/composer Maurice Jarre himself.

BBC Radio 3's Music Matters interviews Simon Rattle

.^

Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983 – with Jean-Claude Carrière’s great screenplay) is re-released on Criterion in the States (2-disc set – Metrodome in the UK issued theirs in 2006) starring Gérard Depardieu and Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak (Robespierre) as the key figures of the French Revolution. Though nobody feared a lynching at or around the G20 summit, everyone from police to politicians hung on tenterhooks. Police raided two East London squats this morning after yesterday’s protests and one protester collapsed and died last night though the facts surrounding this are still unclear. (Around 90 people ended up being arrested yesterday)
[Addition: final figures from The Guardian (Fri 3)]
But the protest (a quarter mile a way) from the Excel Centre meeting today in the Docklands was relatively minuscule (400-500) (maybe 100 today outside the Bank of England) and two security coach rides away from the meeting. An action some would say was ‘undemocratic’. It’s an interesting time for policing in London with a possible Conservative coalition government voted in at next year’s General Election and a new Commissioner of Police Sir Paul Stephenson. One new initiative of his is to have some coppers walk solo on their beats rather than groups or pairs – a move fairly unthinkable in America. And in many ways, though dangerous, it makes a lot much sense. Policeman would become more aware of their surroundings rather than be engaged in comrade conversation. They would appear less threatening to the community and more approachable. And of course, there’d be more of them to go round. But like any force of power too often such an organisation attracts those less interested in people and more obsessed with their own testosterone. We shall see.
BBC 2's Yes We Can! ... The Lost Art of Oratory

And the politicians today? Well again, one could be cynical, but for a ‘Conservative’ Prime Minister such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy to be vehemently advocating tax haven transparency is quite startling (the biggest transgressors all transit – and more - with their ill-gotten gains through Paris at some point!). And there will always be tax loop holes. And always ‘pantomime’. But the almost ‘tacit’ complicity and acceptance of this practice by countries’ politicians looks set to stop after today’s meeting (the 7-page addendum). And that’s quite something after a century or more of greed. But the paradigm shift in economic practice? Human nature answers that question I think. Why do retailers still use ‘1 penny less’ psychology in selling products? Does anyone really believe they’re paying £4 instead of £4.99? For many people a religion does them the power of good. But not for others. At the end of the day education not indoctrination will always be the key to unlocking the problem if not cleaning up a mess.

Susan Greenfield, the eminent neuroscientist and head of the Royal Institution, has warned that young people's brains may be fundamentally altered by internet activity
The genius behind Google’s web browser

And part of the education should surely always be music with its inherent freedom of possibilities. Sarkozy’s musician wife Carla Bruni no doubt likes Marianne Faithfull who talks of her Private Passions on BBC Radio 3
A competition to invent the next musical instrument - more than 60 people applied, and 25 were chosen to show off a stunning variety of musical instruments of their own devising.
The Pet Shop Boys are back and cool again

One can certainly appreciate the difficulty of being human when the grand photo call this morning for the G20 Heads of State forgot about the Canadian Prime Minister who’d apparently gone to the lavatory. Maybe they could have done a Gerhardt Richter blur instead for him as Angela Merkel seemed to be searching for a ‘photomate’ on her left side. Can I work in a Canadian film into all this? Well, yes, actually. And one of Canada’s greatest cinematic exports Guy Maddin whose most recent bio/kunst/reverie My Winnipeg played the U.K. to mostly great acclaim. Careful (1993) has just been re-issued by New York’s Zeitgeist Films in a remastered DVD version. The townsfolk (very appositely) tread and speak carefully in this silent melodrama in order to avoid an avalanche. A very, very unique talent Mr. Maddin.

I wish I could say the same for Brit director Michael Winterbottom who’s Genova opened last week. Mr.Winterbottom is a bit of a ‘darling’ with the left-wing cineaste crowd but (at the fear of being lynched) I have to say I’ve never really warmed to his work (nor to him on a recent meeting). The Angelina Jolie vehicle A Mighty Heart (just issued by Paramount on Blu-ray) was warmly received but I felt the director was copying from a textbook (albeit a very fine one) and that Jolie would always be good whoever was directing. A Cock and Bull Story was very interesting but again, how much difference did Mr. Winterbottom’s input make. Not point scoring here or even ‘axe grinding’ but sitting through Genova (and I admit to only lasting an hour) I did begin to wonder about his reputation.

He’s been credited in his many recent films as co-editor, but again, there’s not much evidence of that skill in Genova. Some very esteemed Brit critics have stood up for Winterbottom’s film while others seemed to be somewhat scraping the bottom of the praise barrel with references to Roeg’s 1973 Don’t Look Now etc. But if there was yet another shot of a sandy Ligurian beach with sunbathers I really thought I’d scream. It’s a part of Italy I happen to know very well but the only shot I found somewhat intriguing was the makeshift wooden wigwam Colin Firth’s character stumbles upon in the demi-darkness while searching for his daughter. Try Silvio Soldini’s 2004 Agatha and the Storm (Agata e la Tempesta) for a much more subtle take on Genoa:
The Reality Around Me Has Changed, an interview about his most recent film Days and Clouds, an American DVD review.
Or Quiet Chaos is out on DVD

A real treat was the DVD of Firefly Dreams (Ichiban utsukushî natsu) directed by an estranged Welshman who’s ended up spending the last decade or so in Japan, John Williams. Initially I dreaded the ‘Genova’ experience with this, but the film was, to use that cliche, simply beautiful. Sulky school-hating teenage Naomi(Maho Ukai) has parental problems and is packed off to relatives and fellow teen Yumi(Etsuko Kimata) for the summer. There’s absolutely nothing new to this film in story or technique - just an all-pervasive humility. Perhaps that’s why one of Japan’s most recognised and respected actresses Yoshie Minami agreed to play the octogenarian Mrs. Koide who finally bonds with Naomi. The DVD release is so self-deprecating that the 30 min DVD interview extra with John Williams is shot unedited and in what resembles a police interview room in echo sound and dour decor! (There's a DVD director's commentary too)But when someone speaks ‘from the heart’ nothing else seems to matter. Easy to see why discerning New York distributor Wellspring nabbed the film for American release.

Cherry Blossoms, (US site) has had some luke-warm American reviews and opens in London tomorrow (Friday). Its German director Doris Dörrie sparked attention with her 1985 Männer(Men) and has since continued a reputation for wry human comedies (even directing a production of the Mozart opera Cosi fan Tutti about the fickleness and fidelity of love). In Cherry Blossoms, the ageing couple of Rudi (Elmar Wepper) and Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) trudge on the treadmill of life in a drab German town while their son has escaped to whizzy Tokyo. When Trudi dies, Rudi journeys to Japan and ends up befriending (in a purely platonic way) a young butoh dancer (Aya Irizuki) who dresses like a candy bar wrapper and camps in a park (Rudi’s wife bizarrely loved Butoh). Together they travel to see Mount Fuji. On the one hand there’s an irritable narrative contrivance to all this, but conversely, an overwhelming honestly as well, that for me, proved irresistible.

Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town - ICA, French trailer - was inspired by the tiny Thai town of Takua Pa where 8,000 people perished in the 2004 tsunami. Even in the quietest village in Thailand, the young girl Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn) has trouble ‘living quietly’ when she begins a relationship with visiting architect Ta (Supphasit Kansen). A young local kid kicking at some rubble in this film or in John Williams’ Firefly Dreams, the ‘real life’ old street-marketer who everyday spends hours unpacking his ‘Aladdins’ Cave’ linger far longer in our minds than Genova.
If you like Wonderful Town then try Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (literally Light of the Century in Thai) – originally commissioned by Peter Sellars’ Mozart tribute New Crowned Hope. But more of him later.
Alan Gibson’s 1982 A Woman Called Golda with another amazing performance from Australian actress Judy Davis is out on Paramount DVD in the States.

a Thai film blog
Wonderful Town US site
US DVD
Same US indie distributor have out special DVD editions of Wong Kar-Wai’s:
Fallen Angels (Duo luo tian shi)
Happy Together (Cheun gwong tsa sit)
Or there’s a BFI DVD of Nighthawks/Strip Jack Naked

A lifelong friend of master director Ozu Yasujiro, Hiroshi Shimizu (1903-1966) directed many children's films such as Children in the Wind (1937) but made well over 100 films during his career and is another relatively unknown figure in the West. Criterion’s Eclipse Series 15 - Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu is out on DVD.
Hiroshi article
The recent San Francisco Asian American Film Festival (March 12-22) held a retrospective Kiyoshi Kurosawa whose latest film Tokyo Sonata recently played New York and was distributed in the UK by Eureka.

Japanese director Kon Ichikawa made almost as many films as Hiroshi and isn’t even a cineaste household name apart from a couple of films but Eureka DVD have done the world proud again by releasing two fantastic films of his,
Kokoro (B/W-1955) trailer and Alone Across the Pacific (1963) (Trailer).

The Independent obit
The Guardian obit
NYT obit
MOMA retrospective in New York

Alone Across the Pacific is based on 23 year-old Kenichi Horie's (Yujiro Ishihara)best-selling book detailing how he left his family and their traditional values for his 94 day yachting quest (1962) across the Pacific to San Francisco. Again: another film you’d think wouldn’t be riveting but is most certainly with Cinemascope cinematography and a score by contemporary classical composer Toru Takemitsu. Brent Kliewer quotes Goethe, “So I work at the whirring loom of time and make up the living garment of divinity,” in his booklet essay and notes in Zen fashion “getting away from something is not the same as seeking something”. Ichikawa began as a cartoonist and both these films embed a very quiet, wry wit.
Kokoro isn’t an easy word to translate (first screened as The Heart) and as noted in Eureka’s ever excellent booklet, the novel’s original translator thought it closer to “the heart of things”.
Bit like Wabi Sabi (hope they re-broadcast Marcel Theroux’s BBC Four doco) [gosh he’s similar to his younger doco-maker brother Louis]
Trust me, Kokoro really is amazing film, that in its directness of human emotion could have been made but yesterday.
Silent cinema specialist Flicker Alley have Under Full Sail: Silent Cinema of the High Seas

Just opened in London is the Royal Academy of Arts’ Kuniyoshi show featuring over 150 of the artist’s wood block prints (1797-1861) thanks to the Arthur R. Miller Collection. Dull this show most certainly isn’t. What’s more, Kuniyoshi was a ‘wood block’ protestor constantly running into censorship problems with his work and finding often comedic ways to circumvent. If ever there was a ‘socialist’ artist this guy was it. The government had basically a ‘shoot to kill’ policy on foreign ships while Kuniyoshi lampooned the desire for luxury goods and championed the Kabuki theatre artists who were moved to the outskirts of the city (1842) as part of the government’s suppression of popular urban culture (including body tatoos and geishas). Things haven’t changed much in the West either over the centuries as the Japanese government of Kuniyoshi’s time wanted prints that promoted fidelity and virtuousness and certainly not female contemporary fashion. Ok, at least we’ve moved on from the last point First Lady Michelle :) It’s a fantastic show for kids as well with its Manga-like imagery and enormous detail in the prints that will at least attract if not keep the attention of children. In the artist’s time a single print cost no more than a double helping of noodles. If you’re brave enough teach the kids about ‘pleasure quarters’ with Kuniyoshi’s sparrows – one of his comic ‘crazy pictures’(kyoga) using animals. The artist invites a broad church. I spent two hours at this show (excellent audio guide hanging off one ear) without flagging a second. Go, go, go – you’ve got till June 7. This time next year (2010) the show will be in New York at the Japan Society. But if you miss the London show, Arthur Miller has donated 2,000 of the prints to the British Musem for their permanent collection.

Japan in Colour: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn
BBC 4's current series Hidden Japan
Japan: A Story of Love and Hate
Mishima’s play Madame de Sade continues in London with the great Dame Judi Dench who’s back on stage after tripping, falling and spraining her ankle at the stage door.
A Trip to Asia shot on HD (High Definition) by Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle follows Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic on their Asian tour.
Slumdog Millionaire is out on Fox DVD with alas no extras (they obviously weren’t anticipating a hit)

The Whitechapel Gallery re-opens April 5:
BBC The Culture Show (is it on the site’s achive yet)
The Independent
The Guardian video with Jonathan Glancy [have to watch a car ad first on the site]
Also, BP British Art Displays: Turner/RothkoArt critic Waldemar Januszczak’s
Baroque! and a repeat of
historian Simon Schama
provocative art series.

and a bit more to come...

.i.

Did the G20 meeting beginning tomorrow really need to be held in London (the Docklands not the West End or the City) rather than another European city? Did ‘blighty’s city grind to a halt with protests etc? The British taxpayer footing the bill for this meeting as well as all the other banking woes of the country. For a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, the financial crises and this meeting must seem rather like a poisoned chalice for Prime Minister Gordon Brown. But a chalice, nonetheless, and one that he seems to be brandishing with enormous relish (hence G20 in London?). His stage has been rather overshadowed, though, by President Barack Obama’s visit and actions in the Big Apple tent (such as the clawing back of AIG bonuses and the recent Chrysler ultimatum) that given the President’s short time in office must be taming even the most sceptical of coconut pelters from their trees.
Twitter used by protest groups to galvanise forces
Brown defends Government's role in Dunfermline Building Society crisis
Arts projects to tie in with Olympics are launched

Today’s relative non-battle between police and protestors (only 24 arrests by the end of the day) in the City:
Running battles in heart of London
Jon Snow interviews the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, about whether he believes we need more fiscal stimulus?
Live BBC News protest map

The fact that rarely can be uttered, though, is that if it weren’t for 9/11, the global financial game of ‘smoke and mirrors’ would have ‘kept on keeping on’ in the words of an old Oz advertising paint slogan. That is until inevitable market forces prevailed. And in that sense the terrorists’ (or in many of their supporters’ eyes ‘freedom fighters’) aim to destroy or at least avenge Western capitalism succeeded. The British (and Australians) like to blame the U.S. for the economic woes. The French and Germans are angry at being lumped in the same boat as other nations when both those countries followed fairly prudent financial practices over the years. Renting housing in the U.K. was always seen as a poor-man’s solution (and reflected in personal credit ratings) whereas on the continent it was deemed normal prudent practice. So when New Labour enabled almost anyone to get a mortgage most people leapt at the chance of gaining a foothold on the capitalist rung. Ordinary people don’t like to admit their complicity in the financial meltdown. But complicit they most certainly were. Their greed was no different (but certainly grossly less) than that of the bankers being openly despised this week by protestors. Were these Brazil President Lula’s “white-men with blue eyes” culprits?
Panorama: Credit Where It's Due
My bank account went into recent free-fall when a bank interest payment pushed my account over its overdraft limit by £1.42 for only one day. Computers are one thing but it was only after many, many struggles with ‘people’ that I got any one at the bank to listen to reason. Initially their response was one of relative triumph. So it isn’t just press hype about the woes of the ‘little man’.
Susan J. Smith on Radio 4’s Start the Week(Mrch 30)
One great capital city, 20 world leaders – and 40,000 holes in the road
Simon Jenkins' article in The Standard
Can Nintendo save the ninnies?
By Tyler Brûlé
Mission for a mandate
Richard Holbrooke on Radio 4’s Profile

Will G20 prove only to be a damage limitation exercise, however? If ever there was a time to make a financial paradigm shift then it is nigh. And President Obama has shown, in what amounts in earth time to a blink, what is achievable through strong leadership. But a paradigm shift would take a very brave man indeed. My thoughts on this coalesced watching a DVD (that’s Region 2 not Region 1 if Heads of State are giving presents) of last year’s French Cannes Film Fest prize winning film The Class(Entre les Murs) , (trailer) – though it’s not actually out yet on DVD but is still on Brit cinema screens.

I approached this film with some trepidation. Don’t know why - the director’s (Laurent Cantet) last film Time Out (L’emploi du Temps) about unemployment was great. Maybe it was the school ‘thing’ and all that. But WOW is this a really fantastic film. François Bégaudeau (a teacher who adapted his book) himself plays a teacher of a comprehensive school on the outskirts of Paris. Using non-professional teenagers and real teachers the film is a docu-drama that sounds ever so boring in description but proves totally riveting in practice. And it’s relevant to the G20 meeting because the film transcends the classroom into so many areas of debate concerning authority, co-operation, diversity and discussion – all principles that Britain’s New Labour government aspired to but has so dismally failed to deliver. Though in fairness, they did at least try. There are no Hollywood angels and demons in this film only evidence of the proposition that writer Neil LaBute puts succinctly on his DVD commentary to the film Lakeview Terrace(discussed later): “can’t we all get along and the movie says, barely.”

It’s a shame to give away the ending of The Class (so spoiler alert) but when, on last day of term after everyone else has left, one girl quietly approaches the teacher and says that she has learnt nothing (after the rest have all admitted to learning at least something) we too are left staring perplexed at the world around us. What is worth knowing? What is ‘worth’ anyway? Does diversity ever really work when people naturally gravitate to those of like-minded backgrounds? What about diversity of wealth? I imagine many people will walk quietly away from the G20 week pondering exactly the same questions. Do I really have what I thought I had in common with some of my fellow protestors? But by the same token, I have learnt something about myself if not the world. And is that not the same thing? Equally for the Heads of State: was this a wasted opportunity? Maybe Obama’s right after all. I wish I had his ‘balls’ some may say. Who can we trust? Goddamit, why can’t we throw caution to the wind and be braver? (After all, who’d have thought a Brit govt could successfully start going after tax havens) But birds will naturally always find something to pilfer and with which to build their nests. The Class proffers all these questions with naturally no answers. If the teacher hadn’t let slip one particular comment would the entire life of his rambunctious student Souleyman (Franck Keita) have been any different? And if just one person (either protestor or policeman) at the London protests today got out of hand would things have had a very different outcome?
School reporters ready to go live
Interview with the actress playing Esmeralda
US website
UK distributor
Rouge has an issue on teenage-ness in the cinema.
Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling
(trailer) now out on DVD.

Jacques Maillot’s recent French film Rivals (Les Liens du sang) (out on DVD with alas no interview extras) set in 70s Lyon explores the living threads of two brothers - police inspector François (Guillaume Canet) and his older brother released from prison Gabriel (François Cluzet). A bit taxing if you need to read the subtitles but worth it.
(French site)
The Dardenne brothers The Silence of Lorna (Le Silence De Lorna) (now out on Drakes Avenue DVD) (trailer)offers another fascinating view on survival.
Lust for life: Cystic fibrosis sufferer Alex Stobbs on conducting a three-hour Easter epic by Bach.
And François Truffaut's classic 1959 The 400 Blows(Les Quatre cents coups) gets a BFI re-release.
Criterion DVD Blu-ray
Also Truffaut’s The Last Metro(1980) Criterion DVD and Blu-ray
Ari Folman’s animated Waltz with Bashir out on DVD and Blu-ray from Artificial Eye
Exploitation producer Herman Cohen captured the 1950s teen market with such titles as I was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. Wheeler Winston Dixon looks at his career and the thematic subtexts that underpinned his work.
Fancy designing an alien for the Doctor Who TV series?

Waterloo Road (youtube) is a series commissioned for BBC Scotland in 2006 (6 million plus viewers and still going strong), and like The Class, set in a teenage comprehensive school of mixed ability students only in Britain. You wouldn’t call the scripts ‘cutting edge’ nor the camera work but for a prime time series they still pack quite a punch. This DVD box set of the 10 eps in Series 3 opens with a new student suffering from Asperger's syndrome while Ep. 4 tackles the issue of HIV. Great casting too.
Bovvered?

Duane Hopkins' debut feature film Better Things (set in the Cotswolds) screened at last year’s BFI 52nd London Film Festival is almost too art-house cutting edge to hold one’s attention. But Hopkins’ is obviously passionate about exploring lives both young and old in the cinema so we keenly await his next film.
“Why did she think falling in love would make it any easier?”
BBC interview with Duane Hopkins
another
Mike Leigh: The BBC Collection (DVD)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in the BFI Top 100 and out on DVD and Blu-ray

Helen, released May 1, is a far more captivating blend of cinema technique and narrative.
My blog review from January:
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s film Helen may well prove to be one of 2009’s highlights in the way that Joanna Hogg’s very still, very European film Unrelated was for 2008. (Both are distributed by the same company, New Wave Films formed by former Artificial Eye boffins Robert Beeson and Pam Engel).Helen (produced by the wonderfully named company desperate optimists and a UK/Ireland co-production) began as nine short films known as the Civic Life Series made over the past 5 years. All were shot on 35mm cinemascope, on relatively low budgets using mostly locals with little or no acting experience. “[We wanted the audience] to feel this tension between the slickness of 35mm production values and the rawness in the performances allowing for something admittedly flawed but ultimately human and honest to come through,” said the directors. “Normally the editing process allows the filmmaker to eliminate or disguise mistakes but with Civic Life the imperfections and flaws have become one of the defining features of the works.”

Given that, Helen from start to finish looks stunning, more of an art work –perfectly framed, sculpted, painterly (Ole Birkeland, camera) – bringing to mind Antonioni films, Pirandello playwrighting, the recent London Film Festival ‘scope film Afterschool or Anton Corbijn’s black and white Control. 18 year-old Joy is missing and another girl (Annie Townsend) Helen, currently in a care home, is asked to ‘play’ Joy in a police reconstruction of her last hours after being selected from her schoolmates. The next 80 minutes doesn’t as much narrate a story as leave space for its audience to blend these emotional colours for themselves. Very European and yet quintessentially the whispering death and emotional renewal of English landscape.
Interview
This [fictitious] interview
Dispatches: Britain's Challenging Children

Nick Park’s latest animation is out on DVD: A Matter of Loaf and Death
And Wallace & Gromit present a World of Cracking Ideas at the Science Museum at the Science Museum.
Nick Park: 'I'm like Wallace - a tinkerer'

Some interesting Brit related content in the latest issue of Senses of Cinema:
Speck of Dust in Her Eye:Living London Returns
Sally Jackson’s Living London

We have Will Smith and James Lassiter’s company Overbrook to thank for Lakeview Terrace, (trailer) just released on DVD and Blu-ray. I wrote very highly of this Samuel L. Jackson film on its release and though the audio commentary from lead actress Kerry Washington and writer Neil LaBute is often more descriptive and production anecdotal rather than revelatory, it’s still a great value package with 14 minutes of deleted scenes and a thorough 20 min Behind the Scenes. The film “almost becomes a Western” notes LaBute with the family protecting the homestead. Kerry Washington: “We haven’t really seen a modern, hip, inter-racial couple, ever” on screen. For lead actor Patrick Wilson, it’s “not so much about race as opposed to personal space.” What would have been useful from LaBute’s commentary is to have had his perspective on the film and his own very unique take on male relationships – something that has made his name in the theatre and thence the film adaptations of his work. Still, there’s more to ponder here than a dirty dozen or more Hollywood thrillers. It’s not that the American dream is inherently evil or self-destructive just that the people striving inside it can often be rather lacking, wounded, and suspect. “Can’t we all get along and the movie says: barely,” says LaBute.

You’d think that with a director’s reputation such as John Huston’s behind it (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen), Wise Blood (1979), (youtube), would have been a cinch to get greenlit. Even with a budget of less than $1 million! But it was the Germans who in the end saved the day - the film gathering a cult following throughout the world ever since. This Second Sight DVD is for once a step ahead of Criterion in New York who issue their DVD version on May 11 - presumably it’ll be the same beautiful print from Janus. Again it’s a rather topical film in a way for the protesters of the G20 summit. Hazel Motes is a character “imbued with grace...and his rebellion is against that,” notes Benedict Fitzgerald who co-authored the adaptation with his brother Michael (the sons of poet Robert Lowell). It was the first novel of maverick American authoress Flannery O'Connor (banned in South America) who explained that Motes “integrity lies in his trying with such vigour to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind," but for her "Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to." Free will, she says, "does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man." Michael Fitzgerald, notes in the generous and fascinating DVD interview extras (2009), that writing the screenplay was “secretarial work” so good was O’Connor’s dialogue.

Returning from a war Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif) has come to the conclusion that the only way to escape sin is to have no soul and attempts to drum up followers for his new "Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ" in the deep South. “We’re all liars...none of us are really true to our ideas,” says Dourif. “Critics couldn’t quite understand what [O’Connor] was up to...her moral imperatives, her Catholicism in her storytelling...as horrid on self-examination and human activities...in order to make their salvation...in the story plausible, a surprise, or a...hoped for inevitability...I doubt that there are any other writers now focussing on anything like this,” says screenwriter Fitzgerald. What fascinated Huston as he progressed was the misunderstood comedy of the story (hence the misspelled Jhon Huston in the opening credits),”the religious heart...was a straw heart”. The idea of becoming a saint. What would that be like shown in all its fervour, passion and ridiculousness. A film once seen, never forgotten.
The very funny and provocative Religulous opens in cinemas this week
Bill Maher: The God Botherer

A guilty comedic pleasure is the DVD of My Best Friend's Girl. I still have problems with the film itself (though it’s far more cleverly constructed than many give it credit for) in that in many ways it says we should forgive a***holes and learn to lovvvvvvve. But you have to give the guys involved (and Lionsgate the distributor) credit for one of the most entertaining (if not actually funny) DVD commentaries around. “Nobody’s listened this far into the commentary – the undiscovered country,” somebody quips. They even phone up other cast members from the recording suite ‘out of the blue’ asking for their input. Jason Biggs wife (Jenny Mollen who plays Colleen) even manages to hot foot it into the studio before an audition and share in some of the lubricating Irish whiskey being supped by all. The DVD extras are genuinely funny – all the outtakes, The Cast’s Guide to Dating, and their recollections of prom night. There’s a more subdued separate commentary from director Howie Deutch that’s not too boring either. And it’s all a love fest for Boston (the city not a new Gwyneth Paltrow child)- nothing wrong with that. Really good value DVD this one, only, don’t tell your ‘arthouse’ movie friend or they might suggest you go back to taking your medication.
Wonder if Richard Holbrooke would enjoy this one after the football? Go on, put one in their ‘goody bags’.....

The 7th Polish Film Festival continues to placate your ‘arthouse’ friend including:
Polish New Wave-The History of a Phenomenon that Never Existed (3-5 April at Tate Modern)

more tomorrow...