Computer gremlins conspiring to overthrow my blog the last week. But we will triumph over little creatures who hide under rocks! Or on asteroids. So here's a very rough guide to few things that may turn your life in a slightly different orbit.
The problem with The Men Who Stare at Goats is that the truth is so much stranger than fiction in Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book (and TV doco)about the US military’s 1979 psychic experiments to kill animals. At the press conference Ronson admitted that he didn't "believe in it at all...it's all nuts" and that the reality hamster staring footage was "an inconclusive snuff video at best". Kevin Spacey when quizzed about his own psychic experiences turned to George Clooney smiling "working with you is about as paranoid as I've got". In spite of the fact that there's no real trajectory to the story it's a fun film and feels right in having taken the route of comedic rather than dramatic adaption.
A very deft dramatic comedy at The Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF hereafter) this weekend is David Kaplan's Today's Special with a central performance by Aasif Mandvi (also co-writer) - better known from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show for his spoofing political interviews. Samir is a top Manhattan sous chef who winds up 'slumming' at an Indian restaurant in Queens but finds a palace. Like Peter Sellers, Mandvi shows just how strong drama can be when acted by a comedian who's not playing for laughs. Some may find this film a little insubstantial while others will relish the taste of its low key tone, performances and direction.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot) (the director of French classics The Wages of Fear and Les diaboliques) is a gem of the this year's festival. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea have constructed a doco about Clouzot's ill fated 1963 film L'enfer combining original material (the sensual Romy Schneider) with studio actor reconstructions (the strong, arresting Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin in Schneider and Reggiani's roles). Clouzot had 3 camera crews on call during the shoot but in the end his obsessive, controlling temperament meant he barely used just one of them. The doco also uses make-up and colour tests that were way ahead of their cinematic time, all in all creating a film that's probably more fascinating in its ruins than any original. Park Circus releases Nov 6.
For those who want to torture themselves with the apocalypse The Road screens on Monday. Javier Aguirresarobe offers breathtaking widescreen cinematography while we meditate on the survival of the fittest.
The comparatively subdued mood of this year's Frieze Art Fair relative to previous times, did for once, instead of being wowed, make one really contemplate what on earth the f**k we're doing even looking at all this stuff. For the uninitiated there's still enough to make a visit worthwhile. But go to the Tate Modern's John Baldessari retrospective Pure Beauty, and here's a guy back in the late 60s and 70s asking us to look at that colour more closely, listen to the language of that line, that soundtrack. What could be more relevant as we zombie through the new millennium decade when the proliferation of digital images is numbing and onanistic. Returning to Baldessari is life-enhancing. 'Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (in Stage Setting)' at Sprüth Magers gallery. (Wish they'd get their site working properly)
Rosalind Nashashibi is at the ICA with many associated events.
Zombieland has Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin as a 12 year old shooting up zombie mumffers in a very fun movie. While that seems OK in a studio pic (and I have no problems with that) Annie Leibovitz photographing Miley Cyrus and revealing a tipple of tit just wasn't OK. Nor was a photo of Brooke Shields in the Tate Modern's Pop Life: Art in a Material World (photo on this site) and shown in the Guggenheim show Richard Prince: Spiritual America
The Guardian's Adrian Searle on the controversy and last year's Serpentine gallery show.
Co-curator of the show Jack Bankowsky feels that in a modest venue some of the images may be more appropriate than in "a major public forum. [We wanted to] to capture the provocative experience that made it challenging." Bankowsky didn't feel he was compromising by placing warnings to the public about three rooms (now 2) and Cosi fan Tutti's corridor. Though all visitors are warned they have the right to decide themselves whether their children under 18 should be admitted. "[We want to] keep it an exciting challenge and re-telling history in a shifting context." The show's final room is very appropriately given over to Takashi Murakami - he of the limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. The show won't be revelatory to modern art lovers but given the Tate's broad attendance base it does put works in a proper context that, to some, may in isolation always seem just plain crude and pornographic.
Getting his break with the stills for Trainspotting,Lorenzo Agius: In the Mood ushers out the quirkiness of his celebrity subjects being true both to the celebrity artifice and the public's need for revelation and gossip.
Beyond Text seems a very worthwhile use of taxpayer's money (£5.5 million) on the strength of today's Sight and Sound in the Street forum at the Courtauld Institute. Fascinating, thought provoking day but this blog is not one for gossip.
Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts, stressed at the opening that it wasn't a retrospective of his work, rather a continuum. Those familiar with his shiny reflective meditative sculptures that entice one into another world, that for some may be that of the Narcissistic present, will be surprised at how all the works in the show somehow seem brand new. Svayambh (from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘self-generated’) is an extraordinary work in red wax spanning the entire breadth of the back galleries. Is one travelling towards something on those tracks or is it coming to get you. Is it keeping something in or something out? Shooting into the Corner has a man firing a cannonballs of wax into the wall of another gallery.
Vampire pic Thirst is another extraordinary escape from the mind of South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK to name but one). Perhaps too long but then again perhaps not, this film never at any point ceases letting go of you. The final scene is really quite grotesquely moving making one feel a tinge guilty (possibly complicit). What vampire films are about really. And Brit director Christopher Smith's Triangle treads the mindfield of Tarkovsky's Solaris giving the 'stranded in a boat at sea' scenario an interesting twist by having co-exisiting multiple time dimensions. Could be a lot better but more interesting than most of the genre pics. And Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is very uneven but there are wonders to behold with model Lily Cole stealing into your eyes for the entire film.
Fashion designer Tom Ford's first foray into film A Single Man (LFF) based on a Christopher Isherwood novel, is far from the vanity project many expected. And not simply someone with clout assembling a A-list team around him. Ford transcends the story into the realm of asking questions about what is it to be the presentation of a man? The female relationship to clothes and facial image has often been explored on film but rarely has the male image except in obviously gay genres. Ford's eye chooses a cool, detached approach that oftentimes is quite moving.
Watch out too for this quality in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and The Portuguese Nun.
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet is world-reknownd Frederick Wiseman's latest doco. What's interesting here is that Wiseman style is allowing the footage to speak for itself with no narration. Yet his subjects are usually normal working people. Of course the case is true for this ballet troupe as well (the camera exploring the building from roof to sewer) But much of the film inevitably deals with the human body speaking abstractly. For viewers familiar with a dance vocabularly this is fascinating but does it work for non dance affectionados? You can decide as Soda Pictures will release in the UK.
And spare a thought for the honey bees (they're thriving on the Paris Opera roof but dying off most other places) in Vanishing Of The Bees.
[My original blog posting]
And for the past year, the eagle-eyed will have seen growing mentions of the honeybees dying off - CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Who Killed the Honey Bee? on BBC Four TV came to the conclusion that there was no one cause (exploring the possibility of a parasite) whereas The Vanishing of the Bees to be released in the UK on October 9 by Dogwoof and The co-operative felt chemical pesticides to be the real culprits. The BBC doco used Wagner underscoring as swathes of the empty hives resembled coffins. And both docos pointed out that one in three mouthful of our food is dependent upon the survival of the bee. You also learn that it was an English (or was he Scottish) clergyman who stopped the 1,000 year-old practice of murdering the bees for their honey and substituted the idea of harvesting honeycomb frames.
There's a whole few paragraphs on last week's 17th Raindance Film Festival that I'll either finally extract from the gremlins' grasp or have to rewrite. It's a festival worth doing that for. And there were all these great links to galleries in New York. Grrrr....
Trimpin: The Sound of Invention (LFF) a doco about the West Coast sonic experimenter, a combination of inventor, engineer and composer should inspire anyone into listening to the world differently.
And Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo (last year's LFF) is a film everyone can relate to in finding their place in the world. Even a gremlin.
And last but not least, there's always Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying. Even a '''
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