A Considerable Speck

Hard to know what really to say about London these days. The city hurtles towards the 2010[sic] Olympics with many still wondering how on earth the West End, let alone its tentacles, will cope with the overcrowding. Yet no one dares be seen as a nay-sayer. The post-war 'austerity' games of 1948 came through all right though didn't it? After all, ain't a few months of national pride and economic bling worth any collateral damage? Another signal failure on the underground the other day that almost resulted in a head-on collision. Those words signal failure are heard so often over the Tannoy we get the heebie-jeebies. Another devil in the detail - my Oyster travel card almost went berserk because a 'bendy bus' had recorded the afternoon time as being that of the wee hours of that same morning thereby increasing the fare total for the day: impossible as the bus doesn't even get up that early! Most people are just too busy to complain, though, amounting to a nice little revenue spinner for Transport for London. These 'glitches' have happened so often but for the first time one was actually provable beyond all reasonable doubt.
Happier thoughts with the Underground artist who puts smiles on commuters' faces

After two mornings this month of no water whatsoever from the privatised Thames Water (burst water main the first time) they have the audacity to send an offer of a payment protection plan. One has to suffer 48 hours of no water before even being compensated £20!
And speaking of holy water, the Pope was in town. Still available to watch on TV:
BBC 4-Vatican: The Hidden World
BBC4- The Lost Gospels (no doubt it'll be available on iPlayer again after they repeat it this week)

One imagines there are some(where) poor cogs in the wheel that just want to throw up their hands in disgust, if not quite going so far as to sacrifice themselves as the man in Kafka's In the Penal Colony - presented by Music Theatre Wales- opera version by Philip Glass.

BBC Radio 3's In Tune profile
Daily Telegraph interview
Così fan tutte
Don Pasquale
Janacek's opera The Makropulos Case which opens at English National Opera.
In Tune spot
And director Des McAnuff talks about Gounod's Faustt, opening soon in a new production at English National Opera.
Radio 3's In Tune discussion

Meanwhile, David Shrigley (his video here) and other Brit artistic luminaries demonstrated outside Tate Britain against arts funding cuts.

But how much really do the arts matter anymore? (that's a topic for discussion not a statement!) In Czech novelist Milan ­Kundera’s new book of essays Encounter he relates “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.” Will Self promoting his latest book Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall recalled as a judge of last year's Edinburgh Film Fest British feature-film category that "of the 10 films shortlisted not a single one- a single one!- gained a cinema release." Hmmm...not sure that is entirely true but we know what you're getting at Mr. Self. The New York Times lead film critic also recently considered the state of things in Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better? concluding that "some of the best movies of the future may be movies for the few, or even for no one, expressions of idiosyncratic personal visions or ideas that linger happily at the margins."
Daily Telegraph with Will Self
The Independent
The Brit Indie Collection

The niche arts and ideas Nightwaves (BBC Radio 3) had presenter Philip Dodd conduct perhaps one of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's most revealing interviews (his latest memoir just published)
. On several occasions Blair pretty much implied that Radio 3's audience wasn't his usual demographic more than hinting, however, that he relished such a challenge, "I knew this would be an interesting interview" (or 99.9% words to that effect) as he bought thinking time to answer Dodd's question. The interview is there on the web for you to decide but germane to this post was his apparent refusal to accept his rise to power as being somewhat of a Faustian pact of duality. He has often said that people either love or loathe him. But is such dichotomy a bad thing? Moreover, does there ever need to be a dichotomy? Alongside the thorny question of can one ever really change anything when compromise comes into play? The NYT film critic concludes quoting Oscar Wilde who "observed that there are as many publics as there are people, a notion that flips the utopian idea of movies for everyone on its head. At the movies, you’re on your own."
BBC2- The Special Relationship

The beguiling quality of Will Ferrell's new film The Other Guys is that it questions our notion of a utopian reality: that films have to be 'issue' based, or comedy/dramas, or entertainment or any other number of definable genres. Early on at a police press conference one reporter identifies himself as " New York Observer...(Pinter pause) Online". Online these days has anointed eqality but (as this blogger well knows) it is still forbade the same kudos as print journalism. Allen (Ferrell) shares precinct pen pushing with Terry (Mark Wahlberg) - the latter known only for mistakenly shooting a sports star in the leg. What's fascinating about the film is that nothing is ever quite funny or quite serious or quite anything. It seems to ask how does one deal with the dualities of a world reality that is both beautifully blessed and downright disgustingly damned.

It's plot line is that of a 'Bernie Madoff' villain (Steve Coogan); of how does 'pen pushing' personality Allen always get the beautiful girl; of why does the shit always hit the exemplary Terry and not the real twats around him. There are action/chase/shootout/explosion sequences that are neither exhilarating nor sent up. In fact after one explosion, there's an aerial shot of the near missed pair jettisoned to the ground, deafened by the blast and screaming of just how bullshit those action escapes are where one walks away unscathed. If you laugh in this film its always somewhat uneasily (reinforced in the closing credits - stay till the very end) knowing full well that outside the movie theatre is a world just itching to either embrace or destroy you. Can't get more life-affirming than that.

It's hard to feel as tepid as other reviewers about Why Did I Get Married Too?. You don't need to have seen Tyler Perry's buppie prequel to enjoy the follow-on. And your life's been a sheltered one if most of these characters aren't cringingly recognisable - particlularly the screeching Angela. Formulaic it may be cruising down its plot roads while not quite immersing you in individual psyches. But there are a helluva lot of indie indie films that never achieve such finesse as the multi-talented Mr.Perry and it leaves Adam Sandler's Grown Ups groveling in the dust for mercy. What's not to like about a Steve Carrell comedy vehicle Dinner For Schmucks who's claim to fame are taxidermy mouse sculptures? Well...could do with some Will Ferrell.

"Dreaming at the movies. I don't dream about a movie. The movie dreams about me. Where is my self? " asks Lulu in Heimat-Fragments:The Women
(2006). She searches for something which she calls “the old future of childhood” through 40 fragments of the lives and dreams of the women of a century. This is the coda to director Edgar Reitz's mammoth historical exploration of his German homeland (heimat) - Part One, Part Two. Initially it all seems a bit too soul-searchy Germanic and something we've all seen before. Wrong. The film sees us and is in pursuit inveigling till the very end.

Second Sight DVD also have Fassbinder's 3hour plus made for TV sci-fi World on a Wire (1973) in the restored 35mm print- proclaiming the early skill of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (later DP for Scorsese andd Coppola). It received its first ever theatrical run this April at MoMA in New York after the Berlin Film Fest premiere. Scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) suspects that a government's Simulacron AI (artificial intelligence) project is far from benign. This is a film way ahead of its time; it too, gently laughing at itself and the absurdity of it all. The 2-disc DVD also includes a fascinating 50min doco.

Comparing World on a Wire to Avatar isn't quite equitable. And if there's a major criticism of the latter perhaps it's that a little dose of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove would have gone a long way. But I tell you: seeing Avatar again in the extended version, sitting goggled with those 3D specs dead centre front row (the far edges of screen in peripheral vision)..........one was totally immersed and gobsmacked of director James Cameron's artificial world. That's not to say 3D IS the future. But a filmic experience has to viscerally take hold of the viewer: psychosomatically - mind and body, no matter what film format is used. Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge do it their way, Frederick Wiseman his, Godard another, Visconti in The Leopard, Douglas Sirk, Naruse and so on and on. As the New York Times man says: you are inevitably "on your own" in 'relating' to a film. Collectiveness is only ever really achieved in the theatre.

Nino Rota season at the BFI, BBC Radio 3's Music Matters on a new Rota book
The Leopard (1963)
The only downside of Abrams glossy hardcover The Art of Avatar with the film's production designs is that there's no technical info on the 3D cameras. Nice Christmas present, though.
BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music shows just blase we've become about Gustav Holst's The Planets and how ahead of its time it was. Last week's world premiere of Graham Fitkin's Tidal was a captivating soundscape too but it's no longer available.

"From 18 - 26 September 2010, the Anti-design festival will explore sound, film, art, design, image, performance, writing, product, 3D, interiors, transmedia and interactive across ten venues around London's Redchurch district," says the website as an anti-dote to the London Design Festival.
Design guru Neville Brody (The Face, now Royal College of Art) explains on Nightwaves

French director Claude Chabrol died last weekend having offered cineastes a film practically every year. Yet another cinema world to explore for those unfamiliar - a world that regrettably never grows out of fashion. Senses of Cinema article
Roger Ebert interviews Chabrol many moons ago.
Guardian 2001 article, 2010 obit

Many of his films are available on Arrow DVD
Improve your je ne sais quoi with French Radio London

Jacques Demy's first film (re-released 10 years ago) Lola (1961) can superficially seem French trite. But closely observed it's arguably the best of Demy's oeuvre and certainly the equal of Godard in its incisive use of cinematic grammar. It's almost better that Demy couldn't raise the money to make it a musical like his later films - Michel Legrand nonetheless scores. All the film's protagonists dream of a different reality to that surrounding them. "It's always beautiful in the movies," says Roland (Marc Michel) after seeing a Gary Cooper pic. "So is life," says his friend.
The BFI revives Oscar-winning 1953 film From Here to Eternity

Many of those even reasonably knowledgeable about film only vaguely know the work of Russian director and actor Ники́та Михалко́в. Long. long overdue is a Kino DVD box set of Films of Nikita Mikhalkov: Vol 1- A Slave of Love (1976), Without Witness (1983), Five Evenings (1979) and Oblomov (1980). The Academy Award winning Burnt by the Sun (1994) is available on Second Sight. His father wrote two sets of lyrics used for the Soviet national anthem and the current lyrics of the Russian national anthem while his older brother Andrei Konchalovsky (Asya’s Happiness) moved to Hollywood (Runaway Train). Though it's never stated, Mikhalkov would probably be promulgated more in the West if it weren't for his pro-nationalist, pro-monarchist views. His autocratic rule of the Russian Cinematographers' Union has equally been heavily criticised. The talent for filmmaking, though, able to grab the viewer and hold them captive is undeniable.

Eccentric and ever fascinating Mr. Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? didn't even manage a mainstream 'art house' UK distributor with David Lynch as Exec Producer. Scanbox (better known for their 'horror' genre) are the lucky ones (it screens at the Curzon among others). It may not be vintage Werner Herzog but not even the willful dark colour tones can sully one's intrigue. Worth checking out for the performances alone. Ahhh, Udo Kier again. All that actor has to do is look at you and one surmises something's afoot.
Times article on Herzog

If pressed, do any of the recent 'horror' movies warrant our time granting us a new perspective on the world? The Last Exorcism that reaped rewards at the US box office a few weekends ago gushes with talent, you just wished it was lavished on material less familiar. Former big budget steadicam operator turned director Imran Naqvi's The Last Seven is nicely packaged and uses experienced cameraman David Mackie without showing much that's exceptional about London except it's deserted. Daisy Head (of the famous screen acting family) shows promise as Chloe but we don't really care much about any of these characters even with an end twist. Another Brit offering Splintered fares better than The Final from a few weeks ago.

Better off sticking with the old hands, and Arrow DVD has a slew of upcoming Dario Argento titles: Inferno (1980), Bird With A Crystal Plumage (1970), Tenebrae (1982) and Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976) with Argento's Cat O Nine Tails (1971) on Oct 4.

And kids films? Well, Diary of a Wimpy Kid (based on the books by Jeff Kinney) and directed by Thor Freudenthal is probably the best of the bunch - rarely mawkish, sensitive, funny, and spot on performances by Greg (Zachary Gordon), Rowley (Robert Capron), and Angie (Chloe Moretz). But any Hollywood movie that has it's young female lead hiding under the bleachers reading Ginsberg's Howl has to be worth a teenage look. In all his roles, Michael Cera seems to portray fading youth on the brink of either becoming a cynical cog in the political wheel of life or a spaced out seer. And while Edgar Wright's direction oozes invention and brio in Scott Pilgrim vs the World I can imagine teenagers being a bit miffed they'd weaned themselves away from their gizmos to see it.

The anarchic, inventive, anger of Kim Chapiron's Sheitan seems rather mollified in his latest Dog Pound despite its consummate elements. And scary Brit offering F fares better than the heartfelt story of The Kid

But as most normal people barely make it to even a couple of films a month, the remaining choices boil down to a very potent broth of Cyrus (the first bigger budget from two indie brothers); Winter's Bone and director-cinematographer Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar (released by Film Movement in NYC, DVD Oct 4, New Wave Films UK).
The London Spanish Film Festival opens this week

Writer Will Self is right: who has the time to see all these movies- the ones that even manage a release? Who has the time to read all this blog when the writer himself barely finds time to read all the other blogs he admires? This year's 54th BFI London Film Festival will soon be upon us. Some of us may indeed be on our own. But there's safety in numbers. Better that than believing we don't really exist.

Physicist Richard Feynman is profiled on BBC Radio 4's Archive.