That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture! - Robert Browning
With metropolis London (ney our world) awash with fear, loathing, apathy, greed and provocation (the mercenary 'stirrers' amid the genuine, committed London student rioters et al together with Uncle Tom Cobbly in the background), The Tourist comes as a blessed relief. Most interestingly, the film's central conceit of Roman god Janus' two-headed personality is probably how most people feel (toujours but especially pre-XMas). They/we want the glamour but equally the normality. And the simultaneous presence of both just doesn't square that circle.
Disturbing doco for our times Catfish opens this week. Are people ever what they seem let alone on the internet?
In America, things assume the veneer of clarity: you either aspire and succeed or you don't and live vicariously through the dreams of others. In Britain, you are forced to pretend that aspiration is all just for show and you'd much rather be having a pint drowning your sorrows down the local pub with the 'boys' or 'gals'. Bull S**!!!! The Tourist is a 'Thomas Crown Affair' flic: how do glamourous 'porcupines' mate? - Very carefully. Angelina Jolie (as Brit Interpol agent Elise Clifton Ward) is the female James Bond 'bucking' the system and yet enjoying every minute of 'acting' in an 'Audrey Hepburn' movie: innocent, swan-like grace under fire, her eyes never rippled through paddling too hard- only melting across the screen as if a mermaid's ice-cube amid Mediterranean swelter. In sasses seemingly mid-America Mr. Normal Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp) who proves anything but.
So why would Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (of The Lives of Others- 2006) choose to be directing (and adapting [alongside other illustrious scribing talents as Christopher McQuarrie - The Usual Suspects , and Julian Fellowes - Gosford Park]) this supposed cineaste candy-floss? The Lives of Others explored 'surviving' under the former Communist East German surveillance regime. "I wanted this to be a thriller that was simply a fun time at the movies," said producer Graham King. (Great acting 'cameos' too from Timothy Dalton (as the deus ex machina Chief Inspector Jones) and Steven Berkoff (as the ruthless villain Reginald Shaw) - all seductively lensed by John Seale.) Well, the producers got a bit more than he bargained for as The Tourist seems to suggest in a world that post 9/11 and post the collapse of world banking has 'no still point' in poet T.S. Eliot's 'turning world'. What does one pretend when everything proved the pretense one knew it always was? When almost everyone looks over the shoulder of the next poor sod wondering if they have an answer to the problem thence one can steal. Perhaps it's allowing The Tourist more 'benefit of the doubt' acuity that it deserves. Yet, I think not. Costume designer Colleen Attwood combined old and new world costumes - Alberta Ferretti for the extras at the Gala Venetian ball (each gown hand-tailored as were Jolie's clothes), Inspector John Acheson (Paul Bettany) wears an Oswald Boating-designed tuxedo.
Wandering around the GSK Contemporary – Aware: Art Fashion Identity (photos HERE, video soon...) located in the 'back-end' of London's Royal Academy of Arts, the show asks us to consider fashion's relationship with normal human desire and the means of production-the affordability of haute couture albeit 'high street'. Whether the ideal ever meets the reality is perhaps the mute point. Up the corner in Cork Street is a commercial gallery showcasing Dali - an artist who never ceases to amaze as both a creative genius and precursor of advertising's cult of personality connivance. Anyone who finds themselves in Atlanta this Christmas might do well popping into a Dali show highly recommended by The New York Times.
So pissed off was one made feel this month I even considered mounting my own WikiLeaks arts site to even up the odds. But: I mean, should we let kids know that Santa Claus exists only as an advertising gimmick? Let alone....Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a surprise Finnish hit that while masquerading as slyly subversive is really just another take on mean old Uncle Scooge. The Richard 'Donnie Darko' Kelly Claus on barbiturates albeit with happy ending.
Oz journalist John Pilger's The War You Don't See is released the week we consider whether the Julian 'WikiLeaks' Assange's of this world are for good or ill. Remember Daniel Ellsberg who in late 1969 - with the assistance of his former RAND Corporation colleague Anthony Russo photocopied classified Pentagon documents relating to the Vietnam War and released them to The New York Times? Does seeing 'truth' promulgated - something we always somewhat suspected - ever change the reality of events? If we stared the 'truth' in the face would we only ever believe it if we actually saw it in the newspaper or on TV? In Enemies of the People journalist Thet Sambath allows Cambodia's Khmer Rouge Brother No 2 (Nuon Chea) - someone he's known for many years and become fond of- to tell his story of the Killing Fields: "They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if [a] country is to move forward," says Sambeth. Not all viewers will agree with that somewhat 'passive' notion but even initiating a dialectic with 'the other' can be a huge step forward.
This year's Cannes Film Fest Grand Jury Prize winner (and France's 2011 Oscar contender) Of Gods and Men (director Xavier Beauvois) shows eight North African monks holding out against Islamic Fundamentalist bloodshed in the 1990s. The trajectory of them from shaking the hand of such enemies through to the eve of their possible slaughter whilst drinking communion wine to an LP of Tchaikovsky ballet music traverses another cinematic plane entirely. The returned Brit soldiers of In Our Name (though with much talent here to recommend) lack the French film's subtlety and grace often only proffering us with questionably cloudy moral codes.
Possession is cult 70s Polish cinema (in English) from "the cinema of moral concern...the ethical problems of people living in Communist Poland" explains writer/director Daniel Bird's doco (filmed for the German DVD release co-inciding with the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). Often mistaken simply as a horror film, the film's director Andrzej Zulawski notes in an extremely candid rather disturbing interview: "evil in Communist reality, evil for us...had a very material face, you could pinpoint it...the layers of fiction, lying, [in the system] this ideology which is the contrary of its realisation...But then how come that it visits this young woman who is not evil as it visits us all. Do we nurture it in us or is it from outside and plunging into us and changing us? That would be a question."
American screenwriter Frederic Tuton spent a day visiting East Berlin "I came in as a Leftist and I came out as a moderate...a line, a line, a line and then you'd see a hole in the wall of a building, and they were waiting for an ice cream cone. One scoop: it took your heart away...It's a profoundly beautiful film and has stayed ever so...for a new audience they will be kind of amazed...I have a suspicion that certain emotions are so archetypal and so profound in our natures that they stay with us...my god, all these years and [the film] hasn't staled?...[the monster] is something that loves her in the strangest, abhorrent way in the way that she wants to be loved. I think that as a metaphor is so interesting: our loneliness can create something that nurtures our love...that somehow in our most despairing, abject pain, loneliness - somewhere, somehow is a creation of something that comforts us...She cultivated in a small flat...something unimaginable, beyond all systems, beyond the grey street and red flags." A leading Polish film critic advised Zuwalski NOT to show the monster as such. But Zuwalski and his producer (Marie-Laure Reyre) saw the first Alien movie in New York and immediately knew that they wanted Giger for their project. Unavailable, he suggested contacting Carlo Rambaldi. The DVD extras on this disc are really worth one's time.
Fresh from My Brilliant Career, Australian actress Judy Davis wasn't available but Sam Neill was. Bruno Nuytton was the director's first choice as cinematographer as [he claims] was Isabelle Adjani as actress (Zuwalski didn't know Bruno was married to her) - and though Adjani had initially declined, in 3 days was persuaded by Nuytton to agree the role. She "had a terrible reputation at the time...a strong temperament and can easily be impossible...I was blacklisted in Poland and she in France" said Zuwalski. The 1981 Cannes Film Fest was a very Polish festival with Wadja's Man of Iron (about the explosion of 'Solidarity') ultimately winning the coveted award: "it was important that this film won...but I know that 40 years later I would rather see Possession than Man of Iron," reflects Zuwalski but Isabelle Adjani won best actress for his film, "at that time the [French] Left and Possession didn't click for them, which is a pity. I don't think they really understood what the hell it was about."
For those searching for an alternative DVD Christmas this is the release for you:
Zuwalski's Facebook site, and the visionary uncompleted sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe (Polish website)
The altogether more tamed Monsters I missed because of the tube strike and though not having had the chance to see it on general release is by all accounts well worth a 'gander'. Writer-director Colm McCarthy's debut social realist occult feature Outcast is set in the dreary council estates of Edinburgh's Lothian and though often rough and ready is far more full of promise and invention than most Brit releases, let alone of simply its genre.
A Serbian Film has been much hyped as controversial due to its cuts from the BBFC censorship board. As an academic consideration of film censorship it proves quite interesting but it pales not even in comparison to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom as transgressive cinema. A Serbian Film's slasher/porn premise is that subjugation to power makes one do horrendous acts. That's as may be. But the film isn't very incisive psychologically, nor brazenly, blackly 'Communist' comedic, nor even penetrates the depths of ethnic cleansing. A frustrating missed opportunity here when most independent/foreign films disappear without even a whisper these days. And why the distributors couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't/didn't exploit the film's product placement of a leading American bourbon is also bemusing.
The final film of this year's 54th BFI London Film Festival was Andrei Ujica's 3 hour The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu - given an extra screening due to the initial print being bereft of subtitles. (A spokes-person for the Romanian Cultural Institute said that the titles ended up on a film at the Spanish Embassy - humour in Communist vein indeed.) In description - 3hours of archival footage with never any voice/over to explain Ceauşescu's whereabouts - it all sounds as dreary as watching Soviet paint peel. Yet much of the footage had never been shown in Romania (let alone abroad) and what becomes fascinating is just how much resonance such an 'ideologue' leader has for his Western counterparts both then and now.
One scene films Ceauşescu addressing his 'cabinet' in a state room - true national socialist manner: how 'we' must maximise our agricultural assets etc etc - heads suddenly bowing in disgrace and embarrassment. The scary bit being that instead of appearing as a figure of fun and derision he so often emerges as an exemplar for the future. No need to cite contemporary or present political parallels there.
From East to West: A Portrait of Romanian Diaspora by photographer Raul Stef shows (extra)ordinary lives of some exemplary people at the London embassy.
Hungarian Hollywood exile Ernst Lubitsch's classic The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is re-released this week and proves fascinating in comparison to his early silent Lubitsch in Berlin: Fairy-Tales, Melodramas and Sex Comedies - Eureka's (region-free) Masters of Cinema Series (smartly packaged box set with essays on each sleeve cover rather than Eureka's usual booklet). All restored by the F.W. Murnau Foundation back in 2000 (first available on Kino DVD in the States and sold separately):
Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to Be a Man) - 1918 - featuring Ossi (played by his first muse Ossi Oswalda)
Die Bergkatze (known in English as The Mountain-Lion or The Wildcat) - (1921) - with its experimental framing masques for the picture. And
Die Puppe (1919)
Die Austernprinzessin (1919)
Anna Boleyn (1920)
Sumurun (1920)
You'd think there'd be more docos on Lubitsch around but Robert Fischer's 110min Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin proves a rarity:
Director Tom Tykwer extolls the virtues of Lubitsch's optimism: "[they] smile about the insanity that rains down on us. That's why those films have a medicinal effect. It's why they leave you with a certain addiction, because they don't blur your sight. They focus on conditions, and they force you to take a mild-mannered air and a sense of gentleness, and a positive attitude to stand up and say, 'I won't despair no matter what'."
The Criterion Collection issued Lubitsch Musicals and Trouble in Paradise
Critic/historian David Thompson on The Shop Around the Corner: "Though it all works out finally, a mystery is left, and a fear of how easily good people can miss their chances".
Was Lubitsch as ground-breaking as Billy Wilder was in his pushing of film boundaries e.g. the Hayes Code? Or indeed Preston Sturges? Or was he (as Chaplin) asking us simply asking us to smile as our hearts are breaking?
Boudu Saved from Drowning (Boudu sauvé des eaux) is Jean Renoir's 1932 B/W French film (remade by maverick Paul Mazursky in 1986 as Down and Out in Beverly Hills). In his essay for the Criterion DVD, Christopher Faulkner cites Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and "spatial stories as those that make “sentences and -itineraries” out of the places that they “traverse and organize,” that they “select and link” together...Both Lestingois [who rescues the tramp] Boudu know their world, their city, very differently. One observes it, one acts in it. One is an eye at rest, the other a body in motion. One is static, sedentary; the other mobile, a pedestrian. One is rational, reflective, bound to time; the other impulsive, corporeal, a creature of space. One is forever stable, at home; the other forever displaced, in public. This is the phenomenology of their separate ways of being in the world. There is a sense that Boudu exteriorizes something that is in Lestingois himself, that the bookseller has summoned him up from the dark reaches of the personal and social unconscious. Boudu is everything at the center of the self and within society that has been discarded, ignored, or repressed...he does allow those who engage with him to imagine how they might politicize the individual as well as the social body through a willingness to recognize and negotiate their limits. The political geography of the self in social space has to be a somatic geography."
For Colored Girls is Tyler Perry's film of Ntozake Shange's acclaimed 1974 Obie-winning stage play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
- originally 20 prose-poems performed by a cast of seven women and punctuated by dance and music. A classic of its time - a bare stage with every women assigned her own color of the rainbow. But Perry, rather than trusting his source material or creating a contemporary echoing cave, tries to make what is impalpable conspicuously just so. Wonderful talent here throughout including an oft under-used Thandie Newton brightly shying and shining as Tangie. It is wonderful to see Ntozake Shange revived yet so disappointing that she's not nurtured and allowed to shine brighter than a 1000 stars into the C21st.
On Tour may garner a fan club due to the presence of burlesque star Dirty Martini but the fiction rather pales agin the doco facts and female empowerment of Too Much Pussy (screened at this year's Raindance Fest.)
Burlesque opens next Friday. Will it gather a camp cult following?
The infrequently UK distributed Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek's Loose Cannons (Mine Vaganti) is receiving a justly deserved Christmas push from uber indie Peccadillo Pictures. There's so much heart and soul in this pic that nitpicking would seem rather churlish.
Artist turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel's Miral (Pathe UK) certainly has 'heart' if rather lacking in cinematic umph. It's based on Rula Jebreal's 2004 novel about an East Jerusalem orphanage/school, the Arab Children's Home (1948 to 1994): "There's no space for imagination in he Middle East. You can only tell what you've seen through your own eyes. Every day this place makes you decide who you are and what you have to do. It's something that's imposed on you," wrote Jebreal.
Ben Uhri Gallery has just acquired George Grosz's magnetic watercolour Interrogation (1936) - painted whilst exiled in New York. Equally well worth the visit are self-portraits from Maria Fidelis Girls Convent School in Camden, Wanstead High School and Acland Burghley Secondary School in Tufnell Park painted in response to their visit by holocaust survivor, Eva Kugler and artist Heather Libson. Without their labels, you'd swear some of these were executed by far more celebrated artists.
Dreamworks' Megamind has a striking resemblance to Despicable Me in that both are entertaining tricksters while neither really appeal to the intellect nor the foetus instinct. If one had a choose Megamind might probably win given that it's more slapstick than slap-happy: a film that adults will kick themselves for enjoying whilst praying that their kids won't hold them to ransom afterwards.
Meanwhile, a different kettle of fishies altogether: in 1950 when the first C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia was published in England, reviewers were luke warm echoing beliefs at the time that "stories should help children to understand and relate to real life, that they should not encourage them to indulge in fantasies, and that fairy stories, if for any children at all, should only be for the very young," noted Lewis' friend and biographer George Sayer. Though Lewis admired Tolkein (The Lord of the Rings) the latter "thought that it was a terrible mistake to put them [real people] together in Narnia, a single imaginative country". The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader isn't helped much by its (3D) but there's much to admire rather than marvel in Fox's attempt to save the initial Disney 'franchise' from dissolving.
Digory Kirke in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tells the young heroes that their sister's claims of a magical world must logically be taken as either lies, madness, or truth. C.S Lewis' notion of 'Universal Morality' or the 'deep magic' is thus elucidated by the writer:
"These then are the two points that I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in."
The resonances of C.S. Lewis' Christianity hover far beyond a particular religious affiliation. "There is a magic deeper still the Witch does not know", "defeat the darkness in yourself", "don't run from who you are". In an age when social networking sites and reality TV continually commercially exploit everyone's need for the mirroring of desire and self, the world of Narnia offers a rare realm of self-knowledge and empowerment. Hopefully, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair will yet be released late 2011-2012.
Sofia Coppola's 2010 Venice Fest prize winning Somewhere proves it was not mere nepotism on the part of Jury head (and ex-lover of Sofia) Quentin Tarantino. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is movie star single-parent of the utterly beguiling 11 year-old Cleo (Elle Fanning). There's little hint of a Jim Jarmusch/Wim Wenders slightly world askew here. The somewhat eerie magic is simply the reality: Cleo's castigating stare at Johnny across the breakfast table as his one-night stand amiably shares their 5-star hotel table. The terrifying fact that there is no wizard anymore simply the poor limping fiend of market capitalism. Simply the wondrous optimism of the child Cleo. "You'll be fine," mundanely assures Johnny's ex-wife over the phone as he sits drunkenly morose after Cleo's departed for summer camp. One day maybe he won't be just fine. But what can/could anyone do? Santa Claus always comes but he never was there. Pixar's Toy Story struck at the heart of what it was to be human: the toys are REAL, the DREAMS were real for ever and a day. Make believe is something that will never vanish - the priceless commodity. Growing up was the importance of 9 and a HALF, of 5 and almost 6, of all of 3 quarters: fractions that make us whole whilst also offering an escape route into the future.
dog and nothing but a dog, black, white or other,
empty-handed messenger, because there is no
mystery
except the thread which from our hands
leads round the far side of things, round the collar of the landscape
and up the sleeve of a star.
The root of the matter is not
in the matter itself
dog and nothing but a dog,
with your eyes gazing into
the sweet shell of terror,
stay, you are so fair.
Verweile doch, du bist
so schön
And Faust feels he loves the dog with a love
whose essence is hopelessness just as
hopelessness has its essence in love,
knows what he should do but cannot,
not having a bandage
nor
a veterinary's licence
nor
the right to redress the acts of omnibues
The root of the matter is not
in the matter itself and often
not
in our hands
Miroslav Holub
