Recently there appeared a well-respected American critic's musings on why we go to the cinema at all. It coincided with a somewhat existential crises of why write this bloody blog at all. For many people nowadays a blog is no more than one of many marketing tools in their web presence armory. For others it's the most cherished internet trait of direct political action. For some it's a rather practical, though oft hypocritical, path to being 'properly published'. For a die-hard, intrepid few it's a place to make sense of things; a cri de coeur to others that they are not alone in such thoughts and though we may seem a little or wholly weird to the 'norm' world we just know we ain't crazy; that safety resides in such knowledge - "better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy".
So should arts coverage and 'real life' be counterpointed in the modality of this blog? You would think that newspapers and their web equivalents these days do a perfectly good job in offering the reader a choice of life's coverage: from politics to breast implants, the best houseplants to the worst nannies - business and pleasure (pure and soiled). In London, most commuters will read the free sheet Metro on their way to work, the now free sheet Evening Standard on their return with perhaps snippets from their chosen 'quality broadsheet' during what free time remains of the commute and rest of the day-never enough newsprint on hand to cover the weekly delays due to signal failure. At weekends - given the economic slump- it's probably down to one of the bulging Saturday or Sunday editions. Others will choose the 'tabloids'. Is such routine really that different anywhere else in the world? The internet now offers specialty subjects for everyone's tastes at their fingertips.
Isn't arts/film reviewing exactly the same? Most inclined people barely get to one art show a month or even one movie? Would three DVDs per month be a good guesstimate? As one shrewd multi-national news organisation knows, TV was, still is and will always be the future.
Sky Atlantic on Brit TV launches its cable chocolate box of HBO goodies this week with the Scorsese directed first ep of Broadwalk Empire. Reviewed on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves along with That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect
Politics left well aside:(). Go to all the review sites and there 'they' all are in their neat little boxes ready for you to choose a 'reliable' source of cultural/entertainment recommendation. All publicity pushing towards that all-important release week thence it's onto the next best thing without looking back - until far from the 'Medusa' with the 'best of' end of year round-ups. Did anyone really care what jibes Mr Gervais (as host of last month's Golden Globes Awards) lobbed at the Hollywood elite?
As reported here last summer, when the host announced at an outdoor (London's Somerset House) screening of Swedish vampire flic Let the Right One In that a Hollywood remake was afoot, 1000's of attendees hissed and booed. Recently on BBC 4, one guest commentator on Sunday morning's papers accused (in the context of Ricky Gervais' remarks) Americans of being "earnest" allowing themselves to float in their "bubbles of happiness and sycophancy".
Independent on Sunday - what makes Brit humour (written I believe by Tim Lott - can't find the bloody link so find it yourself if you're THAT interested-I don't get paid for it ;)
More interesting about the Gervais 'debacle' was the question of whether in fact he was funny at all? Stephen Fry at one BAFTAs ceremony took the tact and role of headmaster chastising, cajouling and encouraging his celebrity pupils. The jokes of Jonathan Ross as host in other years sunk without trace hopefully along with his scriptwriter. Gervais rose to fame from his TV series The Office (remade for American TV) about the painful mundanities of British office life with Gervais as the office 'Mr.Jolly' (but in reality with all the pain of failed comedian Archie Rice in John Osborne's play The Entertainer). And comedy only ever succeeds if it's based in a truth that others can relate to.
American sociologist Erving Goffman wrote of how we try to re-establish face after the loss of it, "remedial interchanges" (e.g. bumping into a lamppost i.e. that wasn't really me that was an 'abnormal' me, very rare that that happens, if at all to me). That in fact we are normal people. But the the painfully funny fact that made The Office so resonant was that most people don't want to be normal: rather they want to be A+ normal, or even super-normal without ever severing the arteries of normality's apron-strings. In that regard, peoples of the world don't seem to differ much in that sense of being and belonging. Of loss and triumph.
The King's Speech hasn't much to do with the reality of royalty but is a such a darn good compellingly told story we don't question whether or not the stuttering King (Colin Firth) was really cured through the expletives usage suggested by his voice therapist (Geoffrey Rush). Just as most people really don't care that the modest lodgings in which this was filmed has been regularly used by its well-connected owner for £100 a head sex parties.
Hyperion have just issued Hindemith's Trauermusik (Lawrence Power, viola) written for the death of the previous King, George V.
The success of British tabloids in particular is based around that fact that people want to read about celebrity sinners not saints- hence the ongoing 'phone hacking scandal' while anyone with any 'nouse' knew that such practice was far more commonplace than initially admitted. Even better if they were a saint that erred into sin, bounced back into sainthood and then fell off the altar again. The British have a very skeptical (to put it politely) view of success - that it somehow will always diminish quality and rigour - that the roots of one's tree will be forever forsaken. And it's precisely what the British hate about the Americans - that they only celebrate success never failure. Which of course is total bullshit as many a savvy American ex-goalbird will know forsaking confinement and entering the bank laughing with TV interview contracts under their arm, a ghostwrite book deal and possible sale of film rights.
It's often certainly true of Brit humour that it's successfully more self-deprecating than that of the Americans. If one's to succeed in the States you can't suddenly arrive out of nowhere with no ink in your pen and no stationary as back up. Gervais' celebrity jibes were personal in an industry that's rather impersonal- in an industry where being the most talented has no guarantee of success attached. Like it or not, celebrities mirror the real world. They don't create it. People want to dress like them, smell like them, eat like them. And what most people crave (often clandestinely) is an affordable equivalent. What was disappointing about Gervais' Golden Globes 'act' was not so much the jokes themselves but that this umbilical bridge was never broached.
For example, if Robert Downey Jr.'s career was based on nothing more than being a rather talentless, errant glamour boy then Gervais' joke about him being better known from goal and rehab might have cracked a smile. But the truth is that he was and still is better known as one of the most talented actors (in the true sense of the word) in Hollywood. There could have been comedy there if Gervais had somehow linked that to the horrific statistics of how many people get locked away for quite minor crimes (a privatised system whose vested interests lie in finding people guilty not innocent) and the fortune (dubious and deserved) of those entering minor celebrification after release.
Conviction is an amazing true story of a sister so determined and convinced of her brother's innocence that she studied law to become his attorney and track down evidence that with the latter day use of DNA testing would prove his innocence. There's little to fault this film except that the truth is more amazing than the film fact-ion. Does an audience identify more or less than they would with a documentary on the subject because they are able to project onto these actors a multitude of other personal crises?
Olivier Assayas, director of Carlos (best miniseries or motion picture made for television at this year's Golden Globes)relates in a DVD interview extra how a friend of his likened the film portrayal of this terrorist to that of a rock star. As with all Assayas' films Carlos makes an argument in defense of people rather than politics - all the more intriguing given that only the bare facts are known about this terrorist's life and connections.
The highly accomplished remake of rape revenge pic I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi's 1978 original is out on Anchor Bay Blu-ray) elicits disgust but is too far a cry from Assayas territory to be considered as anything more than a nasty genre flic and pales in comparison to the nauseating all too easily true horror of Eden Lake.
If you didn't know that Deadly Crossing was an American TV episode (Southern Justice) re-fashioned as a feature you'd soon suspect as one commercial break 'flash' frame zoom close-up came hot on the heels of another. And though it's not a DVD to die for, Steven Seagal's idiosyncratic Elijah Kane (chief of a Seattle undercover police unit) is remarkably believable with an excellent supporting cast. It too easily sinks without a trace simply because TV has been awash with quality product such as this for years. For a real New Year change, try Optimum's boxed sets of Brit TV series The Avengers and you'll be amazed at the ingenious story lines not to mention its women's lib protagonist getting a march on Southern Justice by about 50 years!
Do the cops get a fair deal in actor Ben Affleck's rivetting The Town, now out on DVD? Also out is Brit sleeper Crying with Laughter (Britfilms) first seen at last year's Raindance Fest and twice nominated 2011 Oscar Winter's Bone and also from Artificial Eye, Peepli Live one of the few films in recent years that could even dare be mentioned in the same breath as Satyajit Ray.
Brit undercover police were in the news last month when environmental campaign op 'Flash' hit the headlines. Nice to know the taxpayer was footing the bill for his undercover lifestyle - hence the name activists gave him. And police will be wearing baseball caps in future (no kidding!) to indicate they are in non-confrontational mode as more demonstrations are organised by the Education Activist Network and the national Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.
Oh, and Pension pots and the taxpayer Nice to know that auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's are making record profits and that London's West End is doing similarly well.
Those who believe that American grass will never be greener can cite the doco Gasland in their defense as American water could never be more undrinkable - so polluted with natural gas from adjacent wells that tap water and streams catch fire when touched with a flame. So used are Brits to hearing of tepid enquiries into government/commercial/police misdemeanors that seeing the live footage of 'no comment' gas chief execs charcoal grilled by the US Senate will blow them away.
America is also a country that relentlessly forces one to believe that pharmaceutical drugs will remedy life's ailments. Love and Other Drugs UK released before Christmas and Barney's Version are similar in that both seem to offer more than they actually deliver in how we cope with life - the radical distinction being that the latter is an adaption of a Canadian writer Mordecai Richler and the former quintessentially 'Stars and Stripes'.
Love and Other Drugs is set back in the days when Prozac first hit the market. One of many poignantly funny scenes has a hobo returning to the dumpster from which he foraged boxes of Prozac asking the salesman for more - he suddenly got himself a job. The ever watchable Ann Hathaway plays the drug rep's (Jake Gyllenhaal)(artist/Parkinson's Disease suffering girlfriend. Barney's Version is highly satiric of the well-to-do classes in their Montreal mansions 'on the hill' that could just as easily be breeding upon the Manhattan isle. Paul Giamatti deservedly won a Best Actor Golden Globe for his shambolic, alcoholic, aging haplessly in love through the decades (Oscar nominated for Best Make Up) chancer, Barney Panofsky. For those not having read the 1997 source novel, Barney's Version seems redolent with Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's novella themes (1958) (1961 - re-released in the beautifully restored print,Paramount 2005 with producer audio commentary) as part of a BFI Audrey Hepburn retrospective.
Barney's director Richard Lewis, having nursed a passion over many years for adapting the novel, finally convinced producer Robert Lantos that he was the one to direct. Crucially he dispensed with the book's narrator as did George Axelrod in his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly Golightly (Hepburn) on her ex-husband Doc to Joe the bartender:
He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you end let yourself love a wild thing. You'll just end up looking at the sky.
Barney is very similar to Doc only that he's never made up his mind whether he's the tamer or the tamed in his relationships to women. Invariably he falls for the latter. "You wear your heart on your sleeve and it looks disgusting," one says to him. And there are many things in the film that just don't ring true. But it's precisely the heart on the sleeve that does resound; in the same way that what most of us secretly want is to meet a Holly Golightly, prank about the streets of New York, and have a cheap 'Crackerjack' ring engraved for her at Tiffany's. Barney is a thoughtful, resourceful and probably talented chap who ends up running Totally Useless Productions - a TV company living up to its nomenclature. In the same way, the aspiring writer Paul (George Peppard), originally Breakfast at Tiffany's narrator, is an Upper East Side kept man (by a married female socialite) living downstairs from Holly. Having written nothing since his acclaimed book of short stories, Holly's gift to him after their first meeting is typewriter ribbon for the ribbonless, heartless machine on his desk.
Barney always believed that his errant, vivant friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) would/could write something of note whereas he habitually convinced himself deep down that he never was somehow worthy of that honour. At his wedding to the 'Second Mrs. P'- (Minnie Driver) a Jewish heiress, he falls head-over-heels in love at first sight with Miriam (Rosamund Pike) sending her roses every week but never allowed by her to meet again until finally the ink dries on his divorce papers and she acquiesces to a lunch date. There's a halcyon reverie of Grand Central Station's 'ballroom' scene from Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King to the courtship. Only Barney is drunk as a skunk, vomits everywhere, leaving Miriam awaiting by his side until he awakes. Producer Robert Lantos believes that Richler's novel "hides its heart under a mask of irreverence and political incorrectness...at a time when the western world, and especially where I live, has sheepishly flocked towards a dictatorship of the politically correct, making [this] movie seems a necessity."
Giamatti interviewed on Radio 4's The Film Programme
Canadian pianist Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould also 'bucked the system' - a troubled hypochondriac genius who in later years fell prey to cocktails of anti-depressants. Much footage in this documentary has never been seen even by affectionados. Skewed rather more towards the man than the musician (as the title states, though of course they were inseparable) the doco nonetheless is engaging and insightful. Abandoning the concert platform he became a recluse in the recording studio and was one of the first musicians to try and create a true aural surround sound experience. There was a fascinating BBC Radio 4 doco some years back exploring his 'sound plays' for radio. And of course the acclaimed fiction film 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould.
Abel is an impressive art house film - parenting a kid whose way ahead of his age proves almost devastating for this Mexican mother. An edgier simplicity than It's Kind of a Funny Story? Neds is actor turned director Peter Mullan's take on his Scottish childhood.
And how and what do we remember of relationships asks the justly acclaimed Blue Valentine - a film crafted over 12 years by director Derek Cianfrance. There's been little 'bad press' about Darren Aronofsky's melodramatic ballet world Black Swan and its director undoubtably knows exactly what he's doing. But if you know your Dario Argento horror, it's hard not to suppress thoughts of Suspiria whilst watching this. Amer (now out on DVD) is in Italian horror gallo style with a cinemagraphic palette even more ravishing than a bunch of vampires devouring Turkish Delight chocolate in a commercial. Temptation is a digitally shot more than slightly cheasy Brit indi vampire flic - with Lesbian, or is it just female-bonding undertones. The DVD also includes the 'to watch' talented director Catherine Taylor's first short The Drowners shot by the same cinematographer Carolina Costa. Definitely one for the teenagers or twentysomethings trying to regain their youth.
Disney is also trying not to loose its apron strings to Walt's original 2D drawn animation wonderment. Tangled, from the Pixar team, is certainly no WALL-E nor does it pretend to be. It's a good old-fashioned Disney yarn with modern day 'attitude'. And though most viewers won't share nor understand the animators ecstatic orgasmic delight over animating Rapunzel's hair they can't but be moved when the lantern wafts out of the screen and over our heads in the lovers' nocturnal boating escape/romance duet. The animators quite craftily leaving the 3D aspect relatively alone until that moment. And Rapunzel's friend Pascal - a silent chameleon who sings with his face couldn't be better PR for the species. If that's all a bit passe for hip new century parents perhaps they can treat themselves to the funny irreverence of the Meet the Parenmts: Little Fockers latest installment.
Back in the 'art house', The Portuguese Nun, an acquired taste from precision Portuguese director Eugene Green (2009 London Film Festival) finally gets its London release. Axiom will release Ballast from that festival this March, and in June the quirky, wistfully bonkers Mammuth with Gérard Depardieu from last year's LFF.
The Antonioni Project from Amsterdam's reknown theatre troupe Toneelgroep plays Feb 1-5 at the Barbican.
Radio 4's Brief Encounters-a World View of Cinema
And John Pilger's The War You Don't See is still required viewing as the Chilcot Enquiry trundles on. Since the invasion of Iraq more than 300 jouranlaists have been killed more than in any other war - Pilger's film is a tribute to them.
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