Komm, Hoffnung, lass den letzten Stern

With my last posting having said, "there is hope but not for us", along comes the teenage band I Can't Go On, I'll Go On competing in Bandslam. Certainly a film many cuts above the rest of post-post-modern teenage existential Beckettian angst (and with David Bowie's approval)...And in the month when 'keep the kids employed over the summer break' films abound, the question once again is begging: what effect does the cinema have on us? Dance Flick falls way short of Mel Brooks or Jerry (Airplane!) Zucker parodies while bravely travelling the hazardous route of political incorrectness in an attempt (some might say oftentimes feeble, unfunny and joyless) to make teenagers think about what political correctness really means in their lives. (one rather jarring scene proclaims street cred to be more important than inner respect). Funny gag? "You're wearing a pink shirt to a drive-by?"-"It brings out the colour in my eyes." Or the all-singing/all-dancing Joffrey Ballet's new opus: "Your Momma Died in a Car Crash" along with the Nick Nolte/Mel Gibson/Amy Winehouse drink-driving jokes (I think I left someone out..) Real life is always more excruciating, horrible, funny and downright depressing than any film could possibly hope for.

Would we assume that after seeing Todd Graff's well-crafted slasher thriller A Perfect Getaway that everyone we meet on holiday may be out to cut us up into mincemeat? Unlikely, given the expert 'tongue in cheek' tone of the film causing us both to giggle and toe-curl for a brisk 98 minutes.

So why are else are films there? To un-depress us? Quite obviously in many cases. Does it matter that Jacques Demy's 1967 French musical Les Demoiselles de Rochefortseems lacking the socio-seduction undercurrent of the director's 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Can films make us go and rob a bank, mutilate another human, encourage sexual activity with a four-legged creature etc etc? Some censors would have us believe that this is absolutely so. That an Annie Liebowitz photo of teen pin-up Miley Cyrus bearing a tipple of nipple is somehow different to a Renaissance nude. As Hungarian director Béla Tarr Collection believes: "What is film for? It's not about telling a story...but about getting closer to people and understanding everyday life...human nature and commenting on our sins and how we betray one another." Tarr creates parallel worlds in black and white where time moves very slowly indeed and where estranged people meet in the rain and have discussions that both embody meaning and yet seem inconsequential as in Damnation (Kárhozat) where "things have an order in the world and you can't upset them." As the director himself acknowledges of The Man from London (A Londoni Férfi): "almost a silent movie". Reality stares people in the face yet often they still fail to see it. Is that where cathartic celluloid comes in to play?
Gross-out Taxidermia directed by György Pálfi finally arrives in New York (Tartan in the UK last year) at Cinema Village.

25 year-old director Antonio Campos (Afterschool screened at last year's London Film Fest) acknowledges a huge debt to legendary American long-form doco filmmaker Frederick Wiseman especially Near Death: "the colloquialisms and cliched phrases that appear over and over when people grapple with mortality and loss." In Afterschool "I wanted to examine a community that has become accustomed over time to an almost abnormally sheltered and safe existence that has to confront the sudden impact of a violent death on its own grounds." Set in an elite American high school, for much of the film camcorder window images, including the corridor death of two beautiful girls shot by the main male character, fill the otherwise black widescreen canvas. With a Certificate 18, it's a film most teenagers won't be allowed to see. Yet they are precisely the ones who should. Many of the images are disturbingly graphic but the overall effect (for most) will not be one of titillation or voyeurism but of profound debate of their peer world.
Campos' Borderline Films
Rolf de Heer's 1993 Oz film Bad Boy Bubby gets uncensored, uncut director's version UK Blu-ray (and SD) release by Eureka with director and actor audio commentary.

Teenage bullying - just one of many these days.

Helen (another film that must be seen on the big screen) gets more screenings at the BFI Southbank.
Louis Theroux - The City Addicted to Crystal Meth in his customary non-judgmental and un-moralistic style documents the substance abuse prevalent in Fresno, California.

Japanese director Nagisa Oshima is given a BFI retrospective The Art of Transgression with all his feature films (many rarely seen). In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida) 1976, is based on Japan's most notorious sex crime (1936) where a woman was found wandering the streets with her decapitated lover's penis. Strangely, the many graphic sex scenes you'd think would be erotic or arousing just aren't. Whether because three decades on many of us are so used to such scenes is hard to tell. The images of Catherine Breillat, someone more contemporary, most certainly are erotic.

And it's a film many may appreciate more in the context of the director's work than as standing alone. Usually censored by about one third when shown in Japan obviously the film also had problems in the West. (In 1977 Oshima was charged with obscenity just for publishing the screenplay and stills). A few extracts from Nelson Kim's passionate Senses of Cinema essay give one a better idea establishing the director in the context of: "the condemnation of the "premodern" Japanese mentality: feudalistic, xenophobic, undemocratic, hostile to personal liberty, mired in dead traditions. Second, the importance granted to cinema: the belief that Japanese cinema can profoundly influence the direction of the Japanese nation. (For the better, and for the worse: Oshima has always disdained the great humanist tradition of Japanese film, seeing it as the artistic embodiment of those "premodern elements of Japanese society" he opposes)"

He quotes the young Oshima's writings:
"Reality, however, is always changing. Thus, the filmmaker who is unable to grasp it immediately ceases being a filmmaker and degenerates into a mere crafter of images. Constant self-negation and transformation are necessary if one is to avoid that debilitation and continue to confront circumstances as a filmmaker... "Reality" ...stands for the thing to be resisted, struggled against, overcome. Reality is the way things are, the received wisdom of the social order. The artist pursues a personal vision that will lead to a new consciousness of reality, but once that vision has expressed itself in a particular work, an act of self-negation must occur, to clear the way for new visions...However: the radical filmmaker seeks these goals, but knows that ultimately, they can never be achieved. It is not a question of reforming a certain law, or bringing a particular issue to light. There is no victory over the horizon, only the persistent struggle, the movement of all things."

While Oshima was entering his 'porn period', New York artist Lynda Benglis was the talk of the town with her infamous Artforum ad (1974) fully nude with oversize dildo extending from her genitalia: an era leading up to the founding in 1976 of October magazine by two ex-Artforum gals Rosalind Kraus and Annette Michelson. Benglis'ad was a response to Robert Morris' bondage poster featuring Kraus.
The recent show at NYC's Susan Inglett Gallery travels to Eindhoven and Dublin.
Still in NYC Dorothy Iannone: Lioness, tucked into the back ground floor gallery space of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, is the first ever US show showcasing her erotic 60's and 70's groundbreaking, controversial art. In 1961 Iannone sued the US government to declassify as obscene Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer that she'd brought into the country.

The Nouveaux Pictures/Cine-Excess label is the UK's first ever cross commercial-academic film venture. Brunel University's School of Arts Cult Film Archive has been given the rights to some 300 movies owned by the legendary B-movie producer and film director, Roger Corman. The university's intention to "take trash seriously" in an academic respect and to release the films from the Corman archive on DVD led the university's lecturer in Film and TV Studies and director of Cine-Excess, Xavier Mendik, to seek out Nouveaux Pictures as a joint distributor of its forthcoming titles. The aim of the is to bring the very best examples of cult cinema to both the commercial consumer and to the cult film studies educational sector. Extra features on the label's releases will include university academics discussing the films, many of which have been, or are being remade in Hollywood, but may also have a "retro" appeal to new audiences and are of interest to film studies students. First up is Viva (2007) commenting on sex in the 70s (not simply a symbolic act of liberation for a suburban housewife) - the debut full-length feature by LA-based artist and filmmaker Anna Biller. Future releases will include the Corman-directed Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters and Ron Howard's directorial debut feature, Grand Theft Auto a well as a Special Edition of Dario Argento's classic Suspiria.
The BFI runs a Sexploitation season in September.
Discover the BFI Flipside

Also on BFI DVD are the 70s films of director Jack Bond and actress Jane Arden that have been impossible to see for 26 years (1983 NFT retro). All DVDs have excellent accompanying booklets, as you'd expect, with audio commentary from Bond on Separation (1967). Arden committed suicide in Dec 1982. "We weren't people who wish we'd made more films," he says interestingly. And all three films do have that singularity of vision. Arden's own directorial The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) "isn't a work to love. It is a work to puzzle through and to wrestle with," warns Amy Simmons in her essay. And the film's study of schizophrenia derived from an all female stage production is hard slog indeed for the viewer. Far more so than Peter Brook's 1966 film adaptation of his Peter Weiss staging The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. As Simmons point out Arden's film "suggests that the real issues are buried in society's taboos and repressions and that only through a form of madness can proper sanity be restored.

At the time Scotsman R.D. Laing was proffering his revolutionary hotly debated Anti-Psychiatry movement with the book Primal Scream (1970). Earlier, Ken Loach had directed Kes (1969) and Family Life (1971) heavily critical of current social norms. Polanski's brilliant study of psychiatric decline Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve was 1965, Bergman's Persona (1966). But Jack Bond does comment about critics likening the final scene of Separation to Antonioni's Blow-Up: "I've never seen the bloody film, so to say I've been influenced is absolute nonsense." Bond's Anti-Clock (1979) with its "techno-alienation tropes" using video and surveillance seem dated now, but not when seen in the context of say artist Dan Graham's early video experiments. The voice of Anti-Clock's character Sapha: "This I is simply space. And where the strands of energy cross is a dot. And this dot is the delusion called MY IDENTITY." Chris Darke's essay cites Godard's Numero Deux (1975) and David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983). There's an extra disc with Bond's 2005 re-edit that's 5 min shorter than the original. One US critic at the time wrote that the film "makes [Alain Resnais'] Last Year at Marienbad(1961) look like a TV sitcom in comparison." Andy Warhol having said that the film "is great" snapped away at Bond's head with his Minox camera. There's even an appearance from Nobel physicist Richard Feynman.

"Death is beautiful because we don't believe in it," says Abbas Kiarostami in an interview on the DVD of The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). "If you look carefully, you see everything in opposition to death...the crew eating strawberries, the relation to the town...the trees in the graveyard. Everything has a sign of life. But at the same time, life without opposition, life without the discord of death has no meaning...we have all witnessed the death of others but never our own."
Ta'm e guilass (Taste of Cherry)at the National Gallery (29 Aug)

At many junctures in the adequate though uninspired teen rom/com I Love You, Beth Cooper many homicides nearly occurred. Do we therefore believe, though, that Twentieth Century Fox is promoting reckless endangerment in our youth through this film? Yet the film probably gives kids a better idea of what emotional attachment means than The Time Traveller's Wife whose A-list US indie/major production team somehow manage to make emotional time travel very lugubrious and very unexciting indeed.

Shirin travels around the UK through August: an entire film of faces watching a movie screening. But the faces are those of actors not ordinary people. Would the reverse be more iluminating?
Roni Horn's photo sequence of Isabelle Huppert close-ups and much, much more in The Female Gaze at Cheim & Reid in New York.
"For the first time in world history," wrote Walter Benjamin, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual."

Much of humanity looks up to actors on screen and even expects them to embody their TV soap opera characters to the extent of answering to their on-screen names whilst doing their menial supermarket chores. Is that part and parcel of the Faustian pact of success? Has one 'aura' replaced another? Can most people ever do without one? Advertising quite clearly still is effective in seducing people to buy goods and services, particularly in teenage/child markets. But it wasn't until last year (hmmm, didn't I question this earlier than that on my blog?) that British supermarkets phased down the .99 pence/cents wooing of less than the full quid purchasing. Penny less seduction was no more. The new Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That is a cine-slave to capitalism with its Rouge Bull product placement and rather dubious 'noir' politics to boot. The imaginary world of 7 year-old daughter Olivia (the cute, sparky Yara Shahidi) is supposed to bring her dad (Murphy) down to earth from corporate high. Most kids, though, are unlikely to find much point in slavering to fetch this magical measuring stick.

Aliens in the Attic most certainly has an imagination recognisable to kids - the younger ones will goo at the shy, not so nasty E.T.esque alien Sparks. Are there other messages landing here? Cynics might say it'd always be hard to tell between most normal people's routine and the ones zombified by the aliens' high-tech (well 'lo' by inter-stellar standards) mind control gadget. "Let's go save the planet and your dumb old boyfriend," gung-ho's one of the kids to his big sister (Robert Hoffman is her great comic dumbo boyf).

More kids' quality downtime and Shorts has writer/director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids and of course the technically adventurous Sin City with Frank Miller) in fine form encouraging the cyber kid generation to think non-linear through narrative backflips and leaps. More than a touch moralistic the film maybe but so was Wagner's Ring Cycle opera tetralogy (watch some of the festive online) where the gold stolen from the Rhein river maidens and the Ring fashioned from it with all its devastating power is finally returned to them. Don't tamper with the power within our earth! In Shorts the Ring is a magic Rainbow Rock that grants its owner - whether kid, alligator, or the green Booger monster bred from nose snot - whatever wish is desired. The film preaches the downfalls of being careless with such power, picking your nose, lacking self-respect as well as decency towards others. But equally it's enormous fun. And adults (not to mention kids) might just phone text each other a little less and see the world a little more after exiting the cinema. Wishful thinking, I know.

Also in search of, not so much the promised land but their imagined American idyll, are the Mexican/Honduran gang members railroading across the great divide from its southern most border in Sin Nombre (literally 'nameless')- an arresting debut (2009 Sundance Fest awards) from writer/director Cary Fukunaga. Cine grammar isn't what's original here rather it's this young director's ability to have one leaving the cinema remembering every character's name and face. A gift not so common when Hollywood tackles similar themes. (US DVD out Aug 31 through Universal)

Brian de Palma's almost 3 hour 1983 Scarface (re-issued and screened digitally in 60 UK cinemas) is an exception. The electronic score synths up and you think that sounds like Giorgio Moroder, and of course it is. One's forgotten because it's been so badly aped a thousand times through the decades. And there's Pacino. But wasn't he always amazing? Even before this? Yet again, you're kinda astonished to be reminded. OK, The Godfather Part II was 1974. So why do we remember this film like some long lost cinema amigo? Those Pacino eyes leaping through the screen haunt us but we know that very well. The plotline's not that original, De Palma expertly choreographs the camera but it ain't Godard or any number of other European directors tripping off the tongue. I remember loving this old amigo. There must have been something about him! Then the peso drops like a hushed, tense Mexican stand-off: I was at the opera. It was De Palma's hybrid of Sergio Leone's Once Upon in the West (1968) (his Once Upon a Time in America released in the same year as Scarface) and the reality of Coppola. De Palma was directing a Verdi opera. Pacino was Simon Boccanegra, the uncouth savvy ambitious pirate who rose to rule Genoa realising too late that his power lay not in the gold ring on his finger but with the freedom of the open sea that he'd forsaken."The world is yours" trumpets the statue in Scarface's Miami mansion courtyard. Principles were the downfall of this gangster - "all I've got in this world is my balls and my word and I'm not gonna break them for anyone". Never would he kill ever kill woman or child. But his sister is lost forever. Boccanegra's daughter lived. "This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so,It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows/That ever I have felt...Never, never, never, never, never!" rasps King Lear over his dead Cordelia.

Four years later in 1987 (many years gestating prior actually), Brit producer Don Boyd had the inspired notion of asking his wish list of 10 directors to contribute (each given a £50,000 budget) to Aria. Remember this was before classical or any other CDs flooded the market, before Classic FM, before the World Cup Three Tenors. Classical music let alone opera was still considered elitist. This special DVD edition from Second Sight has a fascinating audio commentary from Boyd and 45 minutes of interviews, "you'd never believe it was shot 20 years ago" he says. And it's true. "It had a modern vibrancy about it that isn't anything to do with star attraction or the use of lenses. It's to do with cinema combining with music at its most poetic and its most tragic." Fellini was the first to say yes to the project but had to withdraw due to ill health. Orson Welles accepted but died (having spookily asked for the contract to be sent to his eventual funeral home). But the work of those who survived is breathtaking. Robert Altman gathers an audience of mad inmates asking where does the reality really lie, Julien Temple's is the apotheosis of Los Angeles dream kitsch, Franc Roddam watches the doomed lovers of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde under the Las Vegas glare, and Godard stages a Baroque Jean-Baptiste Lully aria in a gym. All woven together by the last days of great tenor Caruso (John Hurt). The DVD oughta be on sale at every opera performance interval.

Also directing a segment was Nicholas Roeg whose early work as cinematographer pops up in the little seen Richard Lester (Beatles films, The Bed Sitting Room ) pic of 1968 Petulia with its narrative jumpcuts through time that later became Roeg's trademark (Don't Look Now, 1973). "an uncommon movie. Lester is one of a new group of directors who use film to jolt us out of our customary frame of life...She [Petulia] must puzzle out yesterday before getting through tomorrow," allures the film's trailer. A favourite film of Jean-LucGodard's was Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die. As Tag Gallagher notes in his booklet essay (extracted from Senses of Cinema) "Sirk's point is that all we have in life, ultimately, is Will or the lack of it. We can impose our own blindness or faith on objects in ways that make this a worse world or a better one."

a little more to come...

Strange sensation bears you aloft/As the silent candle casts its glow.

Artwork copyright Ron Arad, photo copyright Andrew Lucre

Uberfällt dich fremde Fühlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.

As New Yorkers summer quench for less shimmering asphalt pastures, those left behind in the city face a more sobering batch of art-house film releases this week: You, the Living (Artificial Eye DVD), Lorna's Silence (Drakes Avenue UK DVD), Flame and Citron (Metrodome UK DVD). Londoners, meanwhile, plod forth virtually zombified by the last few months of Westminster political goings on and promises of economic recovery or perhaps just visibly relieved that temperatures are so mild for the un-airconditioned buses and underground that have past proved excruciating. Some buses continue ending routes just short of their destination (with no prior warning) while others in Oxford Street resemble a toddle of migrating red tortoises. Will they reach their destination before next season catches up with them?

Where are we in this street of Matrix existence, this web of wriggling happiness? Where exceeding your meagre bank overdraft by £1 can ruin your life and in which people who've been habitually modest, frugal and generous begin regretting. All the while the signs preaching: 'we are here to help'. Both sides of the Atlantic, the team of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra are here to save the world for us. But who really is our enemy? Was it truly those Nanomite guys? We don't actually care because everything about the film (from costume and production design to coherent script) beats a dozen cups of kick-ass coffee. Never mind lack of sleep, the jitters and nagging doubt of who am I in bed with. (Nice too that all those English actors in the cast earnt some non-Monopoly money for once. Apple juice anyone?) YouTube trailer sensation Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus trailer achieves UK theatrical distribution thanks to Metrodome. Yes, the film's bad, but bad enough to be 'B' movie enjoyable? Possibly for a well-oiled Friday night. Script doctors were all medicated on this one: "There's poetry here," rhapses 80s pop sensation Debbie Gibson - cut to a shoal of gambling Hammerhead sharks. Later she cheesily kisses overlookin' the sea. Alas, the monsters don't kiss and make up. But the world is saved.
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The Ugly Truth arrives to cheer us up: you don't need to adhere to the road-norm or listen to the life-guard anymore to gain TV market share. But Luketic's comedy never seems sure whether it's an emotional Bentley or one of those zippy little cars turning advertising somersaults. Do some great one-liners save lack of chemistry casting? And why is such talent as Bree Turner (the work colleague Joy) not been given a driving licence let alone a car? Thankfully, Katherine Heigl just survives the road test.

The Yes Men Fix the World (trailer), or rather the documented corporate hoaxes here pulled by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnaro, will give some humans 85 minutes of hope that there might indeed be change we can believe in: each stunt as intricately and consummately conceived as a piece of performance art. A special screening and live debate nationwide cinema satellite link-up August 11.
Terry Gilliam BFI Southbank retrospective.

Tom Tykwer's big-budget conspiracy thriller The International (now out on Sony DVD) had tepid reviews when it premiered at this year's Berlin Film Fest - the water temp remaining constant on its UK release. But Tykwer gives 300% to his craft and the DVD with audio commentary from him and writer Eric Singer is well worth one's time for that. What some maybe find missing from this film is a character depth from its protagonists Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. Owen is dishevelled, grumpy, with history on his face (the role he plays often and consummately) and Watts is his side-kick but little else. Yet neither actor is asked or expected to be more than that. It's left (and very effectively) for Armin Mueller-Stahl to grasp the heart of the matter in a monologue late on. He works for a fictional version of the BCCI- the world's 3rd largest private bank in the mid-80s to early 90s. Says writer Eric Warren: "the largest corporate criminal organisation in the history of the world...the 'Chase Manhattan' but to drug dealers, criminals...". In a way, lack of character works well in a film described by the director as "an architectural voyage backwards" where architecture is a leading man and architectural transparency proves anything but for its inhabitants: faces are visible but deeds are not. Plenty of DVD extras on the now-famous shoot-out scene in the Guggenheim Museum and a cut scene, the only one showing Salinger (Owen) and his daughter (Amy Kwolek - such is an actor's life in the edit suite).
50 Years Of The Cuban Revolution DVD boxset out now. Well worth a visit.

Another assured director is Thomas Clay whose Soi Cowboy opened in London last month and will soon be out on Network DVD. He cites Antonioni as "an enduring inspiration" and quotes Michel Piccoli in Godard's Le Mepris(Criterion DVD): "everything has been commodified, our bodies, our minds, our happiness". Clay's film has the space/pace of Asian neo-Antonioni cinema (Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Ploy, the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul). Exquisitely shot in wide-screen, Clay' film is less about plot and character and more about life's minutai - even slices of morning toast popping up seem interesting. Even toast has potential for destruction.
Clever soundtrack too that includes a snippet of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.
Bayreuth Festival online this weekend
Apichatpong Weerasethakul study from Wallflower Press

How does Max Mayer's Adam fare in broadening people's perceptions of Asperger's Syndrome? Predicable? Yes: but predictability we can believe in. And you probably have to be a New Yorker to appreciate just how accurate this film is as a portrayal of human emotions (Asperger's is trouble with 'normal' daily interaction). Two of the emotive music tracks are even performed by a group called The Weepies. As effective as these are, the direction and performances of Hugh Dancy (Adam) and Rose Byrne (Beth) are compelling enough to need no underpinning. Adam sees the lie but doesn't realise the truth (in Picasso's words). His violent outburst is not against his new girlfriend but against a set of norms he doesn't fully comprehend. The irony being that he's far more adjusted than many who would claim to be 'normal' through living by norms. And aren't the so-called norms simply a presentation of self in everyday Erving Goffman's books) that in themselves have dubious claims to a priori normality? Judging the film's ending as sentimental we adhere to yet another norm. How much of ourselves can we give another person and what do we need to take in return to maintain what we perceive as our own chemical balance?
Max Mayer Sundance Interview and Clip
Waterloo Road (commissioned for BBC Scotland in 2006 - 6 million plus viewers and still going strong) opened its Series 3 with a new student suffering from Asperger's syndrome. Brave stuff for Brit prime time. (my blog review)

Orphan does no favours for the world of society's outcasts and oddballs. Like Optimum's far superior horror release Eden Lake it warns us that not all our children are 'normal'. And if it were made by a first-time director one probably wouldn't feel any more kindly towards it. But the film tin does what it says. It's a yucky watch and one that's very well crafted and paced yet an hour after, nothing is remembered as that inventive or surprising. But the little girl's image on the poster as you enter Dante's London Underground does haunt you. Is that Freudian transference? I've always pondered about a North London tube named Sigmund Freud ( his house in Belsize Park is open to visitors).
Sigmund Freud hated America

Wanna fright? Let Right One In is now out on Momentum DVD provoking the question of who should be allowed to watch this brilliant Swedish vampire film. It's subject matter and protagonists are pre-teen but it's a very violent film (though less depraved than its source novel) and very much an adult film.
James Kendrick's Film Violence is published by Wallflower Press in October.

A Jean Charles de Menezes play has been written and performed. Honourable, honorable humans.
Ian Tomlinson's family accuse police of cover-up over his death
IPCC demands change in police tactics after G20 protests inquiry
G20 protests: woman may have had a miscarriage after being kicked and struck
The Independent

The very un-PC history (and hitherto untold story) of sex and violence in Australian cinema Not Quite Hollywood (Optimum UK DVD) slips quietly onto New York screens this week. Optimum's UK DVD (my blog review
along with Not Quite Hollywood, Let the Right One In, Tony Manero, Let the Right One In and others)
Richard Lorber (formally of Koch Lorber) recently NYC released Tony Manero (soon on Network Releasing DVD in the UK) and Nollywood Babylon (that had a short run at MOMA's cinema, no UK dates yet) is a frightening doco about how religion in Nigeria's capital Lagos has co-opted the country's film industry (world's 3rd largest albeit straight to DVD).

Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Momentum) (trailer) is essentially a bio-pic of the French gangster anti-hero. There's even a Part 2 (Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1 released August 28). Not sure that this film gives us the French cine-psychological crime insight of Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville or many other directors but Mesrine cranks up the pace and volume after an hour or so (very convincing Gerard Depardieu cameo) and Vincent Cassel is, as always (remember him from Sheitan (Russian site)), a captivating screen presence. Many fine performances from known names here including Elena Anaya as Mesrine's Spanish girl. Not sure that he really was a Robin Hood though (he was co-opted by the Free Quebec movement), maybe Part 2 will elucidate. Or one could read the plays of Bernard Marie-Koltès and see the film made of Roberto Succo.

And so to the world of Takeshi Kitano or rather his deadpan gangster/cop on-screen presence as well as writer/director/editor (othertimes a famous Japanese TV host/comedian and formally a boxer and dancer and 70s TV sitcom star). A unique cinema world for "the way he illustrates fear...and death" notes Chris D. (author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Cinema) on the audio commentary for Violent Cop (as well as Sonatine). "The blurring of the underworld and the police force didn't occur in Japanese films until the mid-70s...he heightens realism by decreasing characters' reactions to the violence...gives new meaning to the word slapstick...humour between what we expect and what transpires...[needing] no artificial plot devices" The commentary is quiet, restrained, never sycophantic and while not quite revelatory nonetheless interesting to hear from someone who's both an expert and huge enthusiast. Kitano has "a stoic persona whether happy or sad" partly resulting from a severe accident to one side of his face (he even drew a false eye on his patch for TV interviews). Kitano's world maybe violent but it's also deeply sad. How did violence become the norm for these "young rebellious energies recruited into the yakuza"? The films are available single or as a box DVD set.

Bizarrely the first ever retrospective (and that includes Europe) of Basil Wolverton's comic book genius continues for one more week in New York at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. But then people aren't well-known for their objectivity about other people's creativity.
Neighbourhood Watched (BBC One) slips in late night in the dead summer August BBC schedules (kept alive by the Proms) exploring social housing (one in five Brits) housing officers at work. It's not Molly Dineen but what is? Fancy hearing my story? Nobody's given a toss in the past. Soon will, though:) My fire escape hallway for starters.

The Meerkats trailer rather pales when you've seen even a few eps of David Attenborough. I can't imagine Sir David uttering the immortal lines "what nature gives with one hand is taken away by another." And if they were, one certainly wouldn't cringe. In this doco they're voiced by Paul Newman (one of his last jobs) - but what a voice. (We still cringe a bit, though, at that line) Newman sounds like he's actually done battle with la cobra that the meerkats pick a meal with. Back lit by the sun these cute furry creatures resemble aliens from another planet. They've also come to be the emblem of Neighbourhood Watch signs in London (standing alert on their tippie toes). Decades ago before the meerkats became household names, I remember one of the first docos showing a diligent kat unceremoniously falling off a branch as it swooned under the sweltering sun. In this BBC outing, they all gently fall asleep on top one another. Ahhhhh.... Much like Neighbourhood Watch I expect. That's when they're not picking fights with highly venomous creatures. The G.I. Joe team were saving the world. Only joking of course. Moving swiftly on....

Norman Lebrecht talks to president of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Michael Kaiser. Known as 'the turnaround king' of performing arts. Kaiser has saved numerous artistic organisations from closure Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Kansas City Ballet). There is hope for some but not for us, so said Samuel Beckett.
Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia (1993) continues in London. Read it if nothing else and the experience of living in Britain becomes clearer.
A very candid Will Alsop quits architecture for painting

And last chance (until Thurs 13 Aug) to catch "Sergio Leone's elegiac, ironic and supremely cinematic milestone movie" Once Upon a Time in the West on the large NFT1 BFI Southbank screen. (Mon is the smaller NFT3)
(my blog review form last year's LFF)

there's a bit more cerebellum to come so please be patient...and if not that then be consciousness, clear and somewhat careful ;)