pretender of flesh

A year ago in a Lakeview Terrace DVD review I wrote that:
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,” [director Neil] LaBute. And who else but Michael Moore is better than rounding up the usual suspects. His latest Capitalism: A Love Story has more of his trademark arresting stunts e.g. wrapping police crime scene tape around Wall Street abodes of financial baddies or thrusting swag bags at bank security staff demanding cash back for the American people. As ever, regardless of what one may think of his methods, Moore always gets to the heart of the matter with examples of outrageous and grievous assaults on the freedom of the people. A reform school for teenagers is privatised and the judiciary sentencing young offenders is given kick backs to swell the numbers and hence profits. Companies take life assurance policies out on "dead peasants" (employees) and in the event families of the deceased receive nothing. And airline pilots and flight crew are forced by financial hardship to work a second job. Moore is asked in the film's press release, "What do you hope audiences will take away from this film?" and he replies "Popcorn and pitchforks."
A doco Oscar nominee this weekend, Burma VJ is out on Dogwoof DVD.
And believe it or not, Neil LaBute goes PlayStation with Heavy Rain (The Times, The Independent)

Criticise Moore as much as you want but what those films do have is an old-fashioned heart. As for London's latest releases? Well, first time director Tom Ford's A Single Man towers above them all. (In his BAFTA acceptance speech last week the rarely awarded actor Colin Firth joked that if a man hadn't come to fix his fridge and interrupt his email reply to this unknown 'Tom Ford' quantity things would have been very different). And as with people, one can forgive a film's other shortfalls for that one basic element of heart (notably absent in thankfully only one or two London film critics). [Brit] Tom Vaughan's direction or use of his cinematographer (irritating soft lensing) isn't that exciting in Extraordinary Measures nor is the script of Robert Nelson Jacobs but this true story of a doctor (Harrison Ford) whose obsession leads to a cure for the rare genetic Pompe disease is nonetheless affecting. Not solely the story but Ford's film presence gives the character weight and believability. The minute he sets face on screen you're curious. Not of Harrison Ford the actor and his traits but of a rather dull but incredibly determined and sincere man of medicine Dr. Stonehill (the real life Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen thence Geeta Anand's book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million-and Bucked the Medical Establishment-in a Quest to Save His Children). "You know how shitty my funding is?" asks Dr. Stonehill. We can all relate to that even if the film doesn't convince us that enzymes have 'bling'.

Everybody's Fine is another case in point. Everything's never fine in life but some of us do the best we can and alas many the worst. Based on Italian director Giuseppe (Cinema Paradiso) Tornatore's Stanno Tutti Bene (1990), Brit director (and scriptwriter) Kirk Jones gets on with allowing Robert de Niro to do his job of inhabiting a father's hopes for his grown-up family of four. A tale so simple, familiar and so universal but De Niro's skill is in making us believe it's our own family there on screen. Formulaic in many places, the heart wrenching moments in this film are so convincing that they almost make redundant Dario Marianelli's (as always) fine score and Sir Paul McCartney's original song. Henry Braham gives understated but acutely aware cinematography as does editor Andrew Mondshein.
Rahmin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo out on Axiom' s new World Cinema Limited DVD label - an output deal to exclusively sell and distribute all of Axiom's DVD titles in the UK and Ireland.

1234 is first of the New British Cinema Quarterly initiative that will pick a new film from the UK's major festivals. My blog mention from the 2008 London Film Festival:
Nothing new in this aspiring 'band makes good pic' but it feels fresh because Borg has allowed a natural mountain stream of talent to gently flow: “a film for people who still dream it might happen, even if they don’t really know what ‘it’ might be.” Director Giles Borg writes in the press notes for this week's release that he was "bored of seeing films in which everyone in the band was some kind of drug taking monster, we wanted to show the music world we were more used to, where the guitarist is more likely to stay in and read a book than go out on the town, a more literary self aware rock world, where everyone in the band has seen Spinal Tap and knows the pitfalls but isn't really interested in them. I'm sure there are plenty of drug-addicted drummers out there, but I don't know them and so wanted to steer clear of that cliched view...This is a British film and British people are notoriously bad at expressing their feelings. Coupled with the slightly geeky slacker world and it's a situation for silences and the unspoken. I wanted characters who could express themselves in their music but found it much harder to express how they really feel face to face."
The very best that can be said of Freestyle is that it has youthful energy and was released multi-platform in cinemas, Video on Demand and electronic sell-through (Sky Box Office, iTunes, FilmFlex and LOVEFiLM) and concurrently on DVD.

She, A Chinese is the odyssey of a young provincial Chinese girl whose poster of Big Ben becomes a reality when her 'hit man' boyfriend's loot is suddenly hers. Not a revelatory film but one whose honesty is still affecting on a second viewing.
Actress Samantha Morton's impressively shot directorial debut The Unloved has its final screening at the ICA and won't disappoint on DVD. Would they really be watching a B/W subtitled foreign film in a youth care home though? Morton almost convinces us that they well might.
Birds Eye View Film Festival

Art Digest magazine ran an article, Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate? and Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern does a good job deliberating on that question. Whatever other criticisms may be levelled at him he certainly knew how to paint and more so than just a copyist of other painters' styles and re-inventor of his own work. Artist Cy Twombly: "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting," something particularly obvious in the re-workings of his pastel into oil (the Betrothals of Room 11). The round, voluminous shapes of his early work and inner swirls of Khorkom (1934-6) grew into canvases of quietly heaving colour - an ever ghostly abstract of his family's struggles in the 1915 Russian Armenian pogroms and of course his mother's death through starvation 4 years later.

New to many will be the rarely seen exquisite painterly films of Georgian/Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov who receives a BFI retrospective and many other events. Is Mat Collishaw's gallery installation a fitting tribute?
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

The Real Van Gogh the Artist and his Letters (Royal Academy of Arts) is being sold on the fascinating 40 or so letters (recently collated and published by Thames and Hudson). But it's the paintings (many from private collections) and the vibrant little drawings illustrating them that still knock one sideways. Moreover, the myth of self-taught Van Gogh as mad creative genius is somewhat debunked as the exhibition points out he worked mostly in his long periods of lucidity rather than the last 2 years of his mental illness. Often loosing their vitality through reproduction, reel in movement strokes of background colour Vase of Cornflowers (1886) or the one from 1890. "The dark patch in sun drenched landscape" is how he described his 1889
Saint-Rémy Cypresses in Letter 783 - those swirls surging in an entire Mahlerian world of hope and despair.
Former Labour Party leader Michael Foot died yesterday

Up for an Oscar this weekend in Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges' hard drinkin' country music gravellin' Bad Blake oughtn't to be attractive to anyone. Yet his lyrical sincerity continues uniting a crowded bar and earning everlasting respect from his more X-Factorish protege Tommy Sweet (Ryan Bingham) - who even tells an autograph hunter that it's Bad's moniker he should be after rather than his. Cue a bewildered, dismissive look from the fan. On paper, the story of single mum journo Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) falling for this pot bellied fiery-breathed man twice her age is more than a little cringey. But the acting chemistry between Bridges and Gyllenhaal creates a completely different dynamic. Jean beds and befriends Bad not 'cause second-best is better than nothing in her life but because [in Harlan Howard's lyrics] "country music is three chords and the truth" and whatever Bad's shortcomings he still has more of a soul than other male hicks. She wants her son to grow up at least with that. One of the many unlaboured truths in this fine film is when Bad parks her young son Buddy (Jack Nation) on a bar stool after a great day out and the next minute he disappears. No apparent reason makes the child's entire history a subtext for us.

For those who've never experienced 'neighbourhood Manhattan' the comedy Motherhood may feel just too cute and quirky. Others in the know will just keep chuckling to themselves as they recognise the tiny trials and tribulations of Uma Thurman's writer-turned-mom blogger Eliza as she prepares her daughter's 6th birthday party in their rent-controlled 'walk up' in otherwise gentrified West Village. Minnie Driver is Eliza's funny self effacing, loud mouth best friend and The Daily Show's Samantha Bee pipes up in a shop queue.

The great cast of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D (hopefully more impressive in Imax) hits the screens after exhibition differences. But Jonathan Miller's B/W 1966 BBC version also weaved many wonders.
Or there's the animated future of 9 on DVDAt the Barbican French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's installation for The Curve is a walk-though aviary with zebra finches, electric guitars and more. (Youtube)
For water babies there's Colin Farrell looking mean and moody with lady of the sea Alicja Bachleda in Ondine (Magnolia Pictures June 4 in the States)- but far be it from me to pour cold fish over such hot blooded mythic Irish amphibian passion.

Roots of eroticism are a forte for director Atom Egoyan and Amanda Seyfried's lady of the night Chloe -or in the case of Liam Neeson's husband, daylight nymph - allows for much male projection. Unusually, the script isn't by Egoyan himself but Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) - itself based on a French movie Nathalie. Julianne Moore 's wife is just as sexy as Seyfried's Chloe who she hires to seduce her husband and in turn gets seduced herself. While the nuances seem more Egoyan than the script there's little of this director's trademark narrative complexity here. Nonetheless, a classy way to spend 99 minutes.
Egoyan talks about Arshile Gorky's influence on his work (April 21)

Formerly an actress, director Mia Hansen-Løve's Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants), based on French art house film producer Humbert Balsan's 2005 suicide after insurmountable debts, teems with an actor's eye for character detail. In the production notes the director recounts a text by Eric Rohmer "in which he quotes Stendhal as referring to the "slightly abrupt clarity" that might define French art...a quest for the invisible." One pellucid moment is when the bereaved eldest daughter Clémence is seated in a cafe after spending the night (we assume) with a boy she met at her late father's office. Did she sleep with him? Was she a virgin? Or is that not it at all? Her thoughts form with difficulty even deciding what coffee to order. "More than bereavement," says Hansen-Løve "I'd say the film talks about starting over." Father of My Children is a film of thoughts. Present thoughts not past regrets. And about a filmmaker who follows in the quiet persistent footsteps of a Maurice Pialat.

If all those pensées make 'Jacques' too dull a boy then this remake of George Romero's 1973 The Crazies will rock you. Stunning production values from cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (who learnt his trade with some of the great cameramen) and Andrew Menzies' production design. For once one is proud to flaunt the promotional T-Shirt. Scriptwriter Ray Wright also offers us Case 39 this week - the English-language debut from German director Christian Alvart (he of the 2005 skin scalpeling serial killer film Antibodies). Reminiscent of the recent demon child horror Orphan it's a film that eventually starts to grow on you sprouting a lease of life half way just as things seem to be dipping. In spite of some silly stuff, one can't help thinking that like Zombie movies, the deep undercurrent of humanity's love and latent lust for pychological manipulation and control is what Ray Wright's script is really all about. Think down that road and the heebie-jeeebies truly start the joint jumpin'.
70s counterculture icon Kenneth Anger has been revived over the last few years P.S. 1 retrospective and now his 1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother (pulsating Mick Jagger soundtrack) at Sprüth Magers gallery. His aim is to get through to 'the great Collective Unconsious'.
Barry Miles' London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 BBC's Front Row (Wed March 3)

Frieda Hughes, daughter of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, is this week's guest on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions

Anyone who has painted the heart knows
that first he had to
discard his spectacles,
his mirror,
throw away his fine-point pencil
and carbon paper

and for a long while
walk
outside. Miroslav Holub