...about an April wind

David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a 50-something Lothario and professor of romantic poetry in post-apartheid South Africa. After seducing student Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel) he exiles himself to the remote market-garden farm of his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines): “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts,” he muses to her. “Is that the moral?” asks Lucy, “that males be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked?” David: “No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It punished itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.” As the camera pulls back from Lucy's teeny bit of our planet into a wide wide shot at the end of the film, we are left with multiplicities of feelings. Disgrace (DVD 8 February and at the ICA cinema thru January) surprisingly engrosses as an adaptation of South African J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel by the Australian husband-and-wife team Steve Jacobs (director) and Anna-Maria Monticelli (screenplay). Nor is it simply a white liberal guilt trip. Lucy convinces herself that she has no other choices but the ones she's made: choices that David (and many audiences) will find hard to agree with. David could have 'got away' with his actions (with mild disciplinary action) but chooses instead disgrace and atonement. Precisely because of its specificity, the film resonates with much wider contexts into continents afar.
Coetzee's new novel Summertime

Experienced in documenting African issues, Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson's Mugabe And The White African surreptiously shot (HD video) one man's last stand and court case (74-year-old Mike Campbell) to keep his farm (built with a State mortgage over 20 years) while Zimbabwe's President Mugabe nationalises everything in sight through bloodletting. Essential harrowing and ultimately uplifting viewing.
Article in The Telegraph
BBC News 24 Our World slot airs the never screened 1979 film A Vanishing Breed about Kenya's white hunters.
Are the walls in Rio de Janeiro being built around the city's favelas serving as eco-barriers, or hiding the city's social problems?
District 9 is out on DVD(SD) and Blu-ray
Based on the novel by Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country (1952) starring Sidney Poitier and filmed in South Africa at the height of apartheid is out on Optimum DVD.

Cormac McCarthy 's Pulitzer prize winning, Oprah Winfrey approved novel The Road is according to the film's adaptor Australian director John Hillcoat (Greencine podcast) "a love story between a father and son...a test for their humanity and a struggle for humanity". Or as the novel puts it "each the other world's entire". That phrase could easily be set as the final challenge for a film grad from such as Lodz in Poland (Roman Polanski's old school). Cinematically greats such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Wim Wenders have assailed this spiritual territory before and far more profoundly. And one wishes Hillcoat's film to transfix us more than it does. Bleak can be beautiful if one remembers the grey dirt road poster for Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. And Hillcoat's film is certainly that with the young boy so special (Kodi Smit-McPhee) that the DP Javier Aguirresarobe (another reason to see Erice's The Quince Tree Sun) described him as "not of this world". Robert Duvall has a great cameo as The Old Man tramping the road. Perhaps the trouble with Brit playwright Joe Penhall's screenplay is that it's too much of this world. Cormac McCarthy (also source for the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men) anchors in the bedrock of human language but what Hillcoat's film needs is a cinematic poetry of time allowing depth (not of field but breadth of consciousness) to the haunting cinematography. Nick Cave's score errs on the nostalgic, the melancholic. But how to create that trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost of "carrying the fire" within our soul? Kodi Smit-McPhee's 'presence' is the reason for seeing this film and the crux of McCormac's novel (he's approved the film). Hillcoat's 1988 debut Ghosts...of the Civil Dead will again see the light of distribution in the States in the next year or so (according to Greencine).

Michael Caine at a Brit awards ceremony recently extolled the wealth of Brit film talent. So why don't we see more of it? Scottish director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Asylum, Hallam Foe) needed America to shoot Spread (Optimum UK and Anchor Bay DVD in the States) refusing to play 'to the gallery' audience. Artist Sam Taylor-Wood by contrast delivers a consummate product with Nowhere Boy - great cast, visuals etc etc- but not a patch on her best experimental art work. It took a Dane, Lone Scherfig, to make a Brit film An Education that in subject matter harked back to a Brit film industry of yesteryear (no mean social mores' feat) tackling sexual issues. Ridley Scott's daughter Jordan chose for her debut Cracks a 1934 Brit girls' boarding school simmering with suppressed erotic desires all beautifully shot by John Mathieson but ultimately a little too much style over substance. In fact when the Brit flics do sex they usually do it very well indeed. Crying With Laughter's (Raindance 09 and shot on HD) premise is a stand-up comedian (Billy Connelly mode) whose joking medicates him (though not his alcohol) from his adolescent sexual trauma. That's until an old sparring partner from childhood arrives on the scene with unhealed neuroses. Great use of HD video though the plot veers melodramatically towards the end. Actor David Morrisey's film (also shot on HD) Don't Worry About Me (LFF and due out sometime this year) is incredibly tender and would be appreciated by many a multi-plex crowd bored with current fodder if only they'd get the chance to see it. Also in last year's London Film Festival and out soon - Jullien Temple's as ever inventive music doco Oil City Confidential (Feb 5) and The Disappearance Of Alice Creed (March 12), In June last year, the ICA inaugurated their annual New British Cinema season with an impressive line up including: Smita Bhide's The Blue Tower (HDV/HDCam -Raindance 08), Thomas Clay's Soi Cowboy, and Mark Losey's eerie The Hide (HD)- an inventively twisted bird-watching psychological drama (just out on DVD). Next week sees commercials director Malcolm Venville's debut 44 Inch Chest hopefully utilising its great cast. BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme interviews Basil Dearden's (Victim, Sapphire) son James about his father's film The Halfway House (1943). Just one of many listener requested films still unavailable on DVD.
Optimum DVD does its best with another 3 titles out in its Ealing Collection Classics as well as The World Ten Times Over and The Proud Valley with Paul Robeson stranded in Cardiff.
Writer Jon Dighton's (Kind Hearts & Coronets, Went the Day Well?) Undercover is out Jan 25.

The Brits are also very adept at what one could dub with the artworld term 'ready made' comedy of the everyday - and by it's very condition intrinsically somewhat surreal, whether it be Monty Python, The Goons, Fawlty Towers, The Office or recent cinema release Bunny And The Bull. Helmed by Paul King (director of the wacky cult TV series The Mighty Boosh) its naive charm is reminiscent of last year's FAQ About Time Travel (Lionsgate UK). The picaresque travels through Europe are in Stephen Turnbull's(Edward Hogg) mind in an attempt to make sense of of why his flat has become a Warhol-like life repository even down to a box labelled "drinking straws 94-96". With a budget of 1 million pounds the mix of live action and animation has the nerdy energy (but also longeurs) of a couple of teenagers in their bedroom computer animation suite. That same end-November week last year also offered up the very unfunny gay London rom-com Mr.Right and Debbie Isitt's Nativity! - a film tapping into Britain's celebrity obsession with a Coventry school kids' teacher (Martin Freeman) letting slip that his ex-girlfriend (Ashley Jensen) now Hollywood exec (though not really) might come to see the kids' Christmas nativity play. Some deft moments and casting but for many it's likely to send them running a mile for a pint and seeking the nearest black hole time portal.
Far funnier was Shane Meadows' manifesto example of guerilla filmmaking Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (out on DVD-1st December posting)
The BFI treated us to Terence Davies poetry in a DVD set of his work and also offered The Jacques Tati Collection

Unlike almost every after Second Sight DVD re-release Gambit (a capering heist) is by no means a great film either as it's 98 year-old director Ronald Neame freely admits on the audio commentary: "The first thing I'd do is cut 20 minutes." But watching Michael Caine and Shirley Maclaine act together could never be called hard work and most of the film's production team have been multi Oscar winners or nominees including composer Maurice Jarre. What you're really buying this DVD for is Neame's commentary or rather his anecdotes recounting stories so evocative you don't even need the picture track. Thanks to film studio head Arthur Rank Neame worked with David Lean (as cameraman) on several pictures and then produced for him. Great Expectations (1946) was the first but "I hated being behind a desk, watching budgets, hated telling David to get off the set because we'd go over budget". At just 21 he became the youngest DP in England due to the cameraman's medical misfortune on Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929) - Britain's first sound film and went on to work with all the greats: Judy Garland's last film (even though she tried to have him fired) and Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968-even though she hated filming and preferred the theatre). Retired for 20 years Neame is now 98 with some colleagues labelling him a deserter to tinseltown after shooting The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Odessa File (1974). If you ever dreamed of being in the motion pictures Neame's story will keep your flame alight. Second Sight also released Hopscotch (1980) again with a fascinating commentary.

It's sobering to re-watch The Poseidon Adventure - what cinema one can achieve with a firehose, an upside down stairwell, star character turns one remembers etc etc- in the light 2012's impressive, thrilling but often sterile digital pyrotechnics. The success of Paranormal Activity (Israeli-born director Oren Peli's $15,000 budget reaping over $100 million) can only be accounted for as the result of people's fascination with the scary in the everyday. The irony being that the everyday social interaction of walking down the street, buying groceries or family relationships is far scarier than this accomplished Big Brother ghost house. Building on the film's success (Icon distributed in UK Paramount is dishing out $1 million a year for 10 micro-budget (under $100,000) projects. Paramount is also starting an online service to sell their movie clips.

A recent survey revealed that New York was one of the world's unhappiest places to live if no longer the scariest (BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour on the city's hellish blackout). In writer-director Marc Lawrence's comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? estranged Manhattan couple lawyer Paul Morgan (Hugh Grant) and real estate agent Meryl (Sarah Jessica Parker) are forced to discover what country living is all about when relocated to to a dot on the map in Wyoming by witness protection. The murderer spotted them also and quietly connives in the background by bugging Meryl's workmates. The acting is what you watch here in this amiable and jovial script and once the local marshal Clay Wheeler (Sam Elliott) and his wife Emma (Mary Steenburgen) join, the film bubbles along. This cast make comedy look easy (which films can so often clearly show it just isn't). And one always has an unwilling expectation that this is the time Hugh Grant might just deflate the souffle. But as always he never does. In fact his one-note characterisation works in favour of wooing back Meryl - very dependable and not quite as boring as she'd thought. More of Mr Hugh Grant a bit later.

More country matters in Taking Woodstock (out on DVD in the States and UK mid-Feb ). Based on Elliot Tiber's (Demetri Martin) 2007 memoir of that dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y summer of 1969, as always director Ang Lee coaxes great performances: the Russian-Jewish parents Jake (Henry Goodman) and Sonia (Imelda Staunton) with Liev Schreiber popping up as a cross-dressing pistol totin' bodyguard. Was avant garde performance art ever as wanky as parodied by The Earthlight Players? And anyone old enough to remember The Red Telephone by the Los Angeles band Love?
Also showing at the BFI studio
Burk Uzzle had no idea his Woodstock photos would become iconic (Laurence Miller Gallery, New York)

It Might Get Loud is directed by The Inconvenient Truth's Davis Guggenheim and while his new doco never really digs beneath the guitar fretboard it does reveal that although many of these great musos - seeming to rely merely on a few notes, chords and time signatures - the Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) of this world know their instruments inside out and can actually build a guitar from scratch.
(US site)
BBC Four's series on Guitar Heroes

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll by all accounts reincarnates Ian Drury through Andy Serkis' performance. Out now on UK release.
A history of The Mods on BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4
And the UK still hasn't seen The Posters Came from the Walls (Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, London Film Fest 2008) a fascinating sociological doco on ’80s Brit band Depeche Mode's fans across the world.

There's not a lot left to remember several weeks after viewing Post-Grad except for lead actress Alexis Bledel. For the uninitiated, Bledel played the daughter in American TV sit com Gilmore Girls. Now if one could 'marry' a sitcom this would probably be the one - every episode peppered effortlessly with witty, cheeky, wise one-liners attributed to characters who seem really to have slipped on real-life. If that marriage were possible then maybe the world's not about to end after all [no historical spoiler needed]. Post-Grad is the debut of screenwriter Kelly Fremon and though it's not half-bad she hasn't quite found a voice of her own for Vicky Jenson's directorial skills to steer. However, the pitfalls of post-grad jobsearching haven't really been seen in film comedy and Bledel's acting ability makes one believe (as in Gilmore Girls) that she's an American girl-next-door that you'd actually be interested in getting to know let alone employing her. Carol Burnett pops up as the grandmother (she's more than just a sit com actress as anyone who heard her sing Sondheim's breathless Not Getting Married Today on Broadway will testify). More of Bledel's Post-Grad father Mr. Michael Keaton later this posting.

With Meryl Streep in the lead, Nancy Meyers' (writer/dircector/co-producer) It's Complicated is given the veneer of comic sophistication. But Streep is not a natural comedienne when playing basically 'herself'. A mere slurp of wine from her Julia Child chef in Julie and Julia could raise a knowing smile as do almost all her comic characterisations. But such knowing-ness should be for our part not the actress. Her 60 something Santa Barbara cafe/restauranteur Jane Adler is a fun gal (as is Streep) but every character nuance seems somehow just too 'signaled' to the viewer. Out jogging, her not so non ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) calls out from his car and there's a cut-away shot of her doing a quirky stop in her tracks. It's fun but she knows that so we the audience don't really register or enjoy it so much. Her love-forlorne architect Adam (Steve Martin) is as we know a die hard comedian and is endearingly funny precisely because he does nothing. When he gets 'high' with Jane at her daughter's party, Martin erupts with his signature crazy dance while under the influence and it still raises our smile. Because of Martin's pathos and therefore as a comic foil, Streep's scenes with Martin fare best. Baldwin playing straight is fun to watch, too, just as the whole film is 'fun' utilising a great production team. But when Jane's three grown kids cry in response to their dad's (Baldwin) tears, we just aren't moved. And we should be. And we feel Nancy Meyers feels we should be. What's missing is that simple uncontrollable 'crying into the cupcake' moment of our existence - a Brechtian dialectic between the reality and our desire of it.

Tales From The Golden Age (Amintiri Din Epoca De Aur) (London Film Festival 09) written by Cannes Palme d'Or winner (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) Cristian Mungiu who also directed the second of 5 parts (though each is uncredited) is a familiar lampooning of Ceausescu's 1980's Romania and the 'golden age' of communism - "legend has it". Worth catching a look at the DVD from Trinity Filmed Entertainment (their web site has been under construction for quite some time) as are most of their titles e.g. Beaufort, Import/Export. And when will OsadnÈ (LFF and Best Doco at last year's Karlovy Vary Fest) air on TV- the funny tale of a town on the farthest reaches of the European Union, "there are no people here, not even a cow or a horse" jokes a local. Getting their Brussels MP to open a nature trail is an enormous coup as is their reciprocal visit to Belgium.
WC Fields BFI retrospective with 8 new prints
And one has to admit, Mr.President, that The Daily Show sketch on White House endeavours to unite the child labour of America is very funny.

Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon was originally UK distributed in 1992 by Sony and 1994 in the States - one of the initial releases from the now-defunct Fine Line (New Line Cinema's subsidiary). The MPAA gave it an R rating for " the strong depiction of a perverse sexual relationship" but reviews were quite liberal considering: The Miami Herald "bumpy, mesmerising ride", the New York Times: "smutty, far-fetched...darkly subversive in his view of the world he defines isn't dull, Bitter Moon is kind of world-class", London Time Out: "deeply ironic black comedy grotesque portrait of love's variety". Though the first cinematographer chosen passed on the project due to its sexual nature as did the original editor, Polanski nabbed Tonino Delli Colli whose career was "a who's who of European cinema" including Pasolini's Gospel, Canterbury Tales and Salo, as well as Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and his last film Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful. In a DVD extra, lead actor Peter Coyote recalls his first phone conversation with Polanski who defined eroticism for him: "Eroticism is when you use a feather. Pornography is when you use the whole chicken." "Polanski couldn't write the Microsoft manual" Coyote says affectionately. Arrow DVD's audio commentary doesn't begin promisingly and scriptwriter John Brwonjohn doesn't offer much that's enlightening but producer Timothy Burrill adequately fills in the gaps with enough information to make it all worthwhile. If only they could have got Polanski himself.

He based the film on an OTT French paperback novel by Pascal Bruckner founder of a right-wing faction The New Philosophers (critical of post-structuralism and multi-culturalism) that broke from the 1968 Paris left. One of the let's champions Vangelis (the band Aphrodite's Child) writes the film's score. As with all Polanski the film works best on the cinema screen. Having seen it on initial release, one is reminded of just how good a subtle comic presence was the then unknown Hugh Grant (the late, great casting director Mary Selway). The art of being not pretending on camera. And of course he still is: one of those few actors that can both raise a smile and belief in an audience when he says "I think I've fallen in love with you." The untrained actress Emmanuelle Seigner of course went on to prove her casting wasn't just a fluke. And of course Kristen Scott Thomas.
Polanski's 1972 film What? will bore, infuriate, or fascinate you (Severin DVD,Region 2)

More palatable philosophical musings can be found in Ozzies David Barison and Daniel Ross’s 2004 documentary The Ister (3 hours now available on Facets DVD) (Istros the ancient Greek term for the Danube) musing on the river's Hölderlin’s poem. Together with German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, three leading French philosophers—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler, take turns at grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy. "Rivers have no poetic power anymore" they are losing their mythic resonance and becoming part of the “machine” of “daily life.” Some may prefer Syberberg's own historical musings to this doco (most are available on Facets DVD and are highly recommended).

Ken McMullen took a plunge in the similar waters with An Organisation of Dreams premiering at last year's London Film Festival. He also enlisted Bernard Stiegler on camera whose philosophy emerged while in jail for armed robbery. Also at the London Film Festival and December at Anthology Film Archives New York, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch's Film Ist: a Girl & a Gun takes its lead from a Jean-Luc Godard quote via DW Griffith: “To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.”. The is an ongoing series that Deutsch edits together from often disparate archive footage -porn, science reels, obscure movies, sourcing from among others the Imperial War Museum (in Britain) and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction (Indiana University). One's fears in the first 15 minutes or so that all this is just an arty wank are allayed into somewhat of a hypnotic meditation on the power of cinema imagery. Or rather a meditation on Eros, Stiegler's historicity of human desire and aesthetics "genealogy of the sensible" and the principles of Herbert Marcuse dubbed "father of the New Left in the United States" who in One Dimensional Man (1964) writes: “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile."

If all that proves too much you can watch Bitter Moon's sex god Heavon Grant's teammate from the group Hot Gossip Arlene Phillips judging on BBC's So You Think You Can Dance? "I live for you, I think you are the truth," one of the judges said of 19 year-old Charlie. Mmmm moving quickly on good as she was. Hugo from Brazil looked as if he'd stepped out of a Schwarznegger fitness video doing leg splits as if limbs of rubber. His visa's only good for his work on the West End so was disqualified from competing for the 100,000 pound prize. Will they find the Susan Boyle of dance? When do we get So You Think You Can Be Prime Minister? Perhaps a hosting opportunity for Gordon Brown if he gets more time on his hands. In a few weeks Tony Blair may reminisce in quieter moments of The Chilcot Inquiry (aka The Iraq Inquiry) on why he didn't pursue his 80's dream of So You Wanted to be a Beatle! As ice and snow mounted without, the inquiry (began last Nov)slipped into the more gutsy sessions with relative silence last week. According to one Major General: "I don't think the complexity of the situation [in Iraq] was remotely transferred to the public psyche."
BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music on how the foxtrot was re-invented by C20 composers
The Hurt Locker is out on DVD
BBC Radio 4 Profile of Sir Roderic Lyne

Writer/director Lynn Shelton's comedy Humpday (Raindance Film Fest 2009 opener) is one of that new bread of American 'male bonding' movies that resembles a Sideways but without the wine, locations and arch wit. While there is enough booze for old (straight) frat-mates Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) to dare each other to shoot (just) themselves in a gay porn vid for Humpfest, there's not even the whiff of a puke with the knockabout Judd Apatow way out of sight. Herbert Marcuse is looming though. UK offering, Dogging: A Love Story shrinks in the corner, rather, in comparison. On the strength of his BAFTA 2008 nominated short Soft, great things were expected from director Simon Ellis who's immersed himself in drawing and cinema over the years. But in spite of a few funny scenes involving Dan (Luke Treadaway) and his Job Centre geek functionary, there's not too much to get excited over.

John Hurt's Quentin Crisp sequel An Englishman in New York aired on ITV over New Year and is available on DVD.
Belated mention of a show tucked away in a side street off the Piccadilly drag: William E Jones: ‘Tearoom’ @ Swallow Street consisting of police surveillance footage taken through a two-way mirror in a public toilet in Ohio in 1962. The show was closed a week early. Haven't found out why.