New reviews of:

Potiche

Incendies

Sparrow

Cutter's Way

The Halfway House DVD

The Messenger

Countdown to Zero

...sad, slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is the recovering alcoholic, depressive, toy company CEO of the Jodie Foster directed The Beaver . The title refers to the Cockney accented animal 'ventriloquist' hand puppet through which Black relates to both his estranged wife (Foster) and kids and the outside world. Kyle Killen's script had been dancing the Hollywood rounds garnering 1st place on the 2008 Black List survey of best un-produced screenplays. Thankfully producer Steve Golin (Anonymous Content) decided to shoulder the risk. There are resonances of the Robin Williams' vehicle World's Greatest Dad whose anti-hero stops living the lie (for which he's been amply rewarded) and tells the penultimate truth about his dead son. And in many ways that film's script is far more astute than Killen's The Beaver.

Both celluloid dads appear on a network TV show - ostensibly inspiring the world to better love and understanding. Robin Williams' dad is practically pissing himself with constipated laughter though it's perceived by the audience and host as tears. Gibson's 'Beaver' dad is totally sincere in his breakfast TV spot as he self-performs open-heart surgery on his condition: "it's crazy pretending to be happy". Mel Gibson is one of those rare breed; both a fine actor and a movie star. (I was lucky enough to see him, as Biff, every night on stage pre-stardom, break his father's heart Willy Loman (Warren Mitchell) in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman). Gibson 'acts' too much in The Beaver. He doesn't inhabit that alternative world of quiet, noble, witless desperation that only a comedian like Robin Williams has visited. Once one has become a construct of the befuddled world and seen it (as if through the eyes of the Ridley Scott's Blade Runner android) there is no turning back. Some go on flailing revenge for something that they could never have been. Others only watch, refraining comment. Which lily pads of dreams will survive the surface tension of the pond? The Beaver is a wistful film about life wrestling on the river bank. But the Kyle Killen/Jodie Foster/Mel Gison Walter Black could have been a contender. He could have been Willy Loman.

When it was announced last year that Ridley and Tony Scott (together with Youtube) were seeking worldwide clip submissions for the feature length Life in a Day one thought this is either gonna be really naff or quite wonderful. 80,000 videos of July 24, 2010 daily life on the planet were submitted and director Kevin Macdonald alongside editor Joe Walker whittled it all down and added a music score by Harry Gregson-Williams. It's all a thoroughly engaging 90 minutes with a great end credit sequence. And not getting the penultimate clip that someone hastily taped a few minutes to the midnight deadline would have completely changed the impact of the entire film. Without 'spoiler alert' a girl mused whether all our daily lives are actually that interesting? And there are many moments in the film where, in retrospect, you feel more like a 'save the planet' campaign video had been thrust upon one rather than a reality check. There's little anger, violence, obscenity etc etc in the finished film to upset our sensibilities - surely not so in 80,000 videos! Life in a Day is an unashamedly life-affirming movie waving rather than wearing a sting in its tell-tale heart.

Many will find greater sustenance in Jean-Luc Godard's latest opus Film Socialisme (not released till July 8) shot on low-res video. The subtitles for the multi-lingual exchanges are simply a trinity of words and Godard terms the film "A symphony in three movements": THINGS SUCH AS, OUR EUROPE, OUR HUMANITIES. "Ideas separate us, dreams bring us together."

Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill (at the ICA) is a psuedo-doco about family bereavement using non-professional actors (apart from singer Sky Ferreira) - the director stating “an interest in the world first and storytelling second”. Too often, though, one feels Porterfield's interest, rather than the world's existence. And in this regard, it's a far cry from the work of say Kevin Jerome Everson.
Whether the sexual boredom of marriage in Jonathan Newman's rather lame London set Swinging with the Finkels bears any resemblance to the bedroom antics of our fair city I wouldn't know - I think most of such-like prefer going out for a 'dog' don't they? American movie talent (in both senses of the word) Jerry Stiller (Seinfeld)/Mandy Moore share the screen with Brit TV talent (both senses) Martin Freeman/Angus Deayton. This blend results in rather obviously odorous joss sticks that get up your nose rather than more refined, sinuously fragranced incense getting the mood up. In that sense I guess it is quite representative of a London demographic;)

More stimulating is a new book launched yesterday at the Courtauld Institute Girls! Girls! Girls! in contemporary art (edited by Catherine Grant and Lori Waxman, Intellect Books) on the representation of girlhood in contemporary art photography. In short, why for so many years has the more explicit work (e.g 'panty photos') of girls/women by women been deemed exploitative? I'm reminded that Scotland Yard police a few years ago shut off the Tate Modern room of Richard Prince's 'teen Brooke Shields' photo whereas it had been publicly exhibited at major American galleries without any drama. Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge in the Courtauld gallery should ruffle fewer feathers;) Even fewer than Hugh Heffner's new Playboy Club in Mayfair? Straights fighting over the fig-leafs of gays? No wonder the dodo became extinct? I guess those birds just fluffed their lines too many times in the evolutionary cycle.

Not that you'd get to pick up much on the broadwalk of the South Bank except some driftwood and maybe used condoms along the beach at low tide. But, hey, they've really pulled out all the stops in pre-Olympic year to make this part of town sociable if not exactly exciting. The Eden Project has real grass and plants on what was a desolate concrete terrace now replete with bar; hidden away under the Royal Festival Hall is an exhibition of its conception and history; round the back of the 'bike sheds' you can snog your way through organic produce (and buy some decent incense). Or sit on the fake grass of the Royal National Theatre (they grew live stuff a few years ago courtesy of those grass sculptors whose names I always forget) and watch performances every day. A nice walk it is too past Oxo Wharf (where the inaugural Moving Image London fest takes temporary root during Frieze Art Fair Week later this year) and onto the Tate Modern.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (on till Sept) is the artist's first major show in London since 1964. The Tate is plugging a political dimension to a life's work that has almost become its own ubiquitous wallpaper. But like all good retrospectives it's the trajectory from his earliest to late work that most fascinates in Miró. There's some early crap (sorry, adequate) Fauvist paintings but all those little childish spidery spirals are present even in the earliest 'landscape' paintings. Evolution is at work. An early sky at the top of a canvas bellows cylindrically. As the years progress, the spirals become tentacles, become tiny contemplative shoals in seas of massive colour.

There's certainly a repetitiveness to Miró's inspiration but always a movement towards something (so apt is the show's title). If you 'do' the last room first you think, here's a guy who's just run out of ideas and he's hurling buckets of paint at the canvas decades after Jackson Pollock. But go backwards, forwards, and back again and it's not like that at all. 'What happens to my little creatures if I throw paint at them?' the artist seems top ask. His Spanish contemporary Antoni Tàpies' accolade is so apposite (quoted in the Financial Times review): in his "infinite flux of nature...he showed us that we are all equal because we are all made from the stars themselves. He made the wretched see that they carried all the riches within themselves." But as we all know, especially in the wake of Spain's recent Socialist election slamming, equality doesn't necessarily lead to prosperity. Nor happiness.

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Does law and order ever really make us happy either? French cop corruption pic Point Blank is far from the advocate for that ideal and makes recent Brit effort Blitz seem like tea at the Ritz in comparison. And a couple of French gendarmes emerge with soul if not humanity nor dignity in The Round-Up - a rather worthy though engaging (I wish I could say expose) of French complicity in the WW2 Holocaust. Do we really need that soundtrack music of Grieg and Debussy's Clair de Lune at the end to help us feel! Why anyone except filmmakers would want to sit through the loathsome bloodbath of Mother's Day is quite beyond me. But you can't fault the film's technical aspects nor the acting. One for die-hard Saw franchise fans. Zombie cult fest hit Stakeland is fun but tame in comparison and a rather dubious promo for the country of Maple Leaf freedom.

Those who survived the zombies fell for the safety of notional northern territorial syrup. And let's face it, governments will always try to convince us that we are safe and secure in their hands. Duck and cover and all will be well. The origins of the comic books upon which is based The Green Lantern movie are almost the same as the origins of this blog. Martin Nodell was waiting on the subway platform after a train delay and noticed the red and green lanterns of the signalmen. The rest was history: ALL-AMERICAN COMICS #16, July 1940.. There's a great film to be made of The Green Lantern but this Warners effort is far from that goal. One could smell fear of failure as they turned away journalists from the preview (Warners being a studio that has a reputation for being as welcoming as possible). I wasn't allowed a second cup of coffee but I did get into the screening.

Which is strange because Warner Brothers could only win both ways. No matter what the critics might think, people would pay their money if only out of curiosity. And given that the film follows the high production standards that Studio sets for itself punters could only wish that a sequel would be better. It could have been Warners' Avatar though James Cameron needn't be worried about gesumping his 3D. Unlike most other comics, The Green Lantern is full of ordinary mortal humans who are chosen to be tested for a seat with 'the gods'. Moreover, the comic's green elemental nature is choking with cinematic possibility - the female 'Erda' earth quality (femininity without tokenism being rare in comics) and the whole Gaia thing going on (the planet is you and you are the planet etc). There was even a gay character in Green Lantern #137 (June 2001).

None of these elements are present in Martin Campbell's film. After so much disappointed expectation on his own film adaption of the BBC TV series Edge of Darkness (again with Gaia themes) I guess he was given another shot. Though from the evidence of this film probably not again. The same goes for the muddled and muddy plot coherence and exposition. As for the possible exploration of the Wagner 'national socialist' (the lower case political) Ring Cycle (gods stealing the gold from the Rheinmaidens, forging a ring of power only for it to be their undoing and for it to be returned to the watery depths) I won't even go there. Nor did the film. The dying alien Abin Sur gave his ring to a crashed test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds): the new comic of 1960, a human who was "utterly honest and born without fear". More parallels with the Siegfried and theRing Cycle.

What the film has got going for it are the special effects which are hard to wear off. Even Hal's green muscular suit (designer Ngila Dickson) should make the comic's originators proud. (Based on the C16 anatomy drawings of Vesalius) - "a human body without the skin on". While Fox Studios latest X-Men got us closer to why kids (young and old) read comics in the first place, Warners' The Green Lantern carries us further away. Comics aren't so much an escape from life rather an affirmation that life does have meaning. That we have the power to change our destiny. The Green Lantern comics posit that the battle is never won by simply defeating another colour (e.g. yellow) but by recognising just how much of that colour is latent within us.

Artist Matthew Day Jackson continues at Hauser and Wirth. Essential to understanding the show is his lounge room at the back where he's created a TV show about the spectres of our body - ghosts and the nuclear test sites in the desert.
The Barbican has a retrospective of Czech animator Jan Švankmajer that's not to be missed.
Katsuhiro Otomo's classic 1988 Akira is re-released in an HD print next week and on Blu-ray.

And as an afterthought, wouldn't it be great if there were comic films incorporating the 'gods' itching to shoplift and covert mortal spoils or union troubles amongst The Green Lantern Corps where they can't agree on exactly what colour green represents the will. Possible tube strike in London on Monday - hold onto your tempers...

more tomorrow....

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Also showing at the Barbican is Francois Ozon's romantic socialist 'musical' Potiche- set in 1977 (adapted from the 70s play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy). Ozon deserves an entire article to describe his idiosyncratic cinematic style that always has seemed to divide critics. But it'd be hard for anyone not to succumb to the charms of Potiche ('trophy wife' colloquial in French). Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) was the catch for Robert (Fabrice Luchini) who ruthlessly took charge of the umbrella factory his new wife had inherited from her father. Union troubles are now afoot reducing Robert to a sick bed yet allowing Suzanne (formerly only the "Queen of kitchen appliances" in Robert's eyes) to flower as a trouble-shooting honey-bee. She buzzes over to an old-flame who just happens to be the town's Communist mayor Babin (Gérard Depardieu) and all becomes well again (no pollination required just the batting of wings). With the current problems of European socialism (let alone the old Communists hanging in there for dear life) it's an incredibly apposite film. "These days the personal is political" says one character, and Ozon's great skill is never allowing his subject matter to be trivialised by his flamboyant cine-style. Rather it is elevated from the mundane weary path to a plateau of human happiness.

Incendies directed by one of Canada's most respected directors Denis Villeneuve was also based on a play (Wajdi Mouawad). This long winding tale of two twins who must retrace their family past returning to the Lebanon after reading their mother's will could so easily have run itself down into a bog over 131 minutes - and the "17 different factions with alliances and betrayals of a baffling complexity for neophytes," said Villeneuve who makes no attempt to elucidate those details. What the film does is hit you in the chest slamming one against the wall in helpless rage and anger leaving us to quietly contemplate the importance of our actions in the world. Ostensibly the twins' mother is presented as a martyr. But is she really any more noble than anyone else fighting their cause asks the film? If anything, it is the nurse who delivered and saved the babies who deserves nobility. At times one almost fears that the music score of Grégoire Hetzel even singing 'Mensch' might swamp the film but Villeneuve and his team have created such a 'Guernica' canvas no element seems out of place nor out of time.

Hong Kong director Johnnie To with Sparrow "wanted to make a light-hearted musical" in the vein of Jacques Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg. "[I even chose] a French composer [so it wasn't] a typical Johnnie To macho film." Mr.To's company Milkyway is a shining example showing that indyfilmmaking can indeed make money and give one independence. To isn't simply an 'action movie' director: "a man who knows how to use a gun does not shoot in a haphazard way. Each shot must make sense. Each bullet is important. Thanks to this attitude my gunmen are similiar to the swoerdsmen of the past," he explains on the 1hour feature included in this special 3-DVD box set that includes a soundtrack disc and interviews with all his actors.

Ivan Passer's 1981 Cutter's Way is re-released in a new digital print as part of the BFI's Jeff Bridges season. You can read all about the film's distribution trials and tribulations on the web and for many cineastes it's on their Top 10 list. Based on a novel, the film's laconic tone is similar to Chinatown. "The routine grind drives me to drink. Tragedy I take straight," says Alex Cutter, a Vietnam War amputee vet who finds renewed vigour in mounting a 'Don Quixote' quest to reveal Santa Barbara's richest man as the murderer of a teenage girl. What film buffs treasure in this film is probably it's lack of any genre self-conciousness -it seems to meander like a river but its tide can be leathal as is the beauty of its many placid coves. Jack Nitzsche (of the Rolling Stones Performance soundtrack) provides a glass harmonica, zither, strings score that is a collectors' item. These days you'd have to go independent to make a film that anywhere near approaches the subtlety in every aspect of Cutter's Way.

Optimum continue the battle to keep DVD alive (many of the titles you'd happily see in the cinema again if only they ever were shown). This month sees 3 Blu-ray only war titles: Ice Cold in Alex (1958), The Cruel Sea (1953), and Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron (1977) chock full of new extras (nearly 100 minutes).

On DVD are 2 Anna Wong Ealing Classics and long awaited The Halfway House (1944). The latter is from director Basil Dearden who had before this only solo-helmed The Bells Go Down (1943). The highly respected film critic David Thomson has never been an aficionado and is accurately quoted in Wiki: "[Dearden's] films are decent, empty, and plodding and his association with Michael Relph is a fair representative of the British preference for bureaucratic cinema. It stands for the underlining of obvious meaning". Oh dear. Dearden's high point was Victim (1961) with Dirk Bogard - one of the first Brit films that openly discussed homosexuality. On the surface there's nothing particularly revelatory about The Halfway House and one could hardly deem it 'a classic'. It's hard not to write about this film without spoiling the plot (though it's soon fairly obvious what's afoot). In a nut-shell, this time-warped tiny pub (everything is a year behind) in the Welsh valleys functions as an aide-memoir for its guests: could we have lead our lives differently or were we always fated? And in retrospect it's a far cry from the jingoistic Brit cinema of its time. Interesting comparison with the directorial effort of The Halfway House's producer Calvalcanti Went the Day Well? (out July 25 on both formats), based on a Graham Greene short story. Excellent extra is the audio featurette BBC Radio 3's The Essay - British Cinema of the 1940s.

A year can be an eternity in wartime. In The Messenger gruff U.S. military's Captain Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) and his underling Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) have the job of notifying next of kin after an Iraq combat death. Director/co-writer Oren Moverman had amazing tutelage on this script - Sydney Pollack, Roger Michel; and even Ben Affleck was set to direct. Thankfully, there's very little that's 'Hollywood' about this film and certainly nothing sentimental. It has laughs, too, but they are hard won. Why a studio didn't release the film even without an 'Affleck' name is also cause for concern about the health of our cinema. It was nabbed by UK distributor The Works (as was World's Greatest Dad).
The BBC's 3-hour film The Fallen is a must see also.

Countdown to Zero is so obvious a documentary you kick yourself for not making it on your own. And so obvious you think surely someone else must have made an equivalent over the years. This potted history of the nuclear bomb directed by Lucy Walker- its ownership, manufacture, deployment and proliferation- owes its existence to producer Lawrence Bender (The Inconvenient Truth and Tarantino's Inglourious Bastards) -he accessed most of the key interviewees. The footage from these is quite staggering; the archive footage all too painfully familiar e.g. newsreel of the first UK nuclear test in 1952 bringing 'peace to a troubled world'. See this doco and your eyes will just roll out of their sockets in disbelief.

more tomorrow....

Kaboom

Prom

Raise Ravens (Cría Cuervos)

Honey 2

Bridesmaids

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It's getting harder and harder to know what to say about London. And perhaps many would deem this blog to say very little about the current state of the nation's capital. But probably the only thing worth living for in this city is the culture - and London certainly has that. As does this blog;) We look forward to certain cultural/architectural assets of the 2012 Olympics - the floating barge sounds great in that rather dead space (though not for those in the know of London space) across from the Tate. But the city's daily grind growls on with no let up from transport woes and other dilemmas. The city appears clinically obsessed with tweeting, twotting, twatting and all manner of trivia and irrelevancies. No-one can do anything, say anything, think anything without some idiot reaching for an electronic device. The same morons who continue their pretense of 'socialism' whilst itching to have the celebrity (albeit synthetic) of another and of course who are just as avaricious as those they mock.

I feel akin to the Brazilians who extolled racing car champion Ayrton Senna in Asif Kapadia's documentary as "the only good thing about Brazil". David Beckham fulfilled that role for England. But it's not a happy state of affairs for arts organisations who received funding cuts. Yet that problem is a far more complicated one than just 'agitprop'. Britain has a welfare state that no longer has the funds to support that ideal. Yet to scrap the ideal would mean betraying some of the only true voices left of Brit humanity.

Senna would probably just be an interesting motor racing doco if it weren't for Senna's extraordinary tales. The film's crux is Senna losing out on a Formula 1 championship because of ludicrous regulations that essentially meant that he had to drive backwards against the prevailing cars out of a 'siding'. The extraordinary tale is sealed by his death in 1994 and the subsequent rules that resulted in mechanical checks and not a fatality since. For Brazil the wonderful ruthless reality truly was 'there but for the grace of God go I'.

I intended to write at length about Danish director Lars von Trier's comments at last week's Cannes Film Fest so perplexed was I about how his comments could possibly be deemed anti-Semitic at all (he was made persona non grata by the festival chiefs). I was even more dismayed when many of my critical film fraternity colleagues (normally rapacious in devouring such things) hadn't even bothered to watch the 35min press conference in its entirety. But in fairness, I doubt anyone in London's streets would have the foggiest idea of what the debacle was all about. Von Trier's film Melancholia doesn't open here until late-Summer so perhaps I'll wait to air my arguments until then. I'm not 'hedging' my bets, I know who my winners are [sic]. Maybe Lars even will grant me an interview.

Suffice to say that the only comment 'thread' on the net that bore any resemblance to what I saw and heard of the press conference was: Zachary says on May 20, 2011 at 2:17pm. I'll quote in its entirety:
No one who’s seen Bruno Ganz play Hitler in Downfall can deny feeling sympathy for the man. But what I think is key: This situation with Lars cannot be adequately judged in black and white. Refn’s remark and Cannes’ decision to declare him persona non grata—they’re calculated and precise in a way that Lars is not (in either his work or in his public performances). His work notoriously navigates gray areas. He prods, he explores, he feels out a subject. In this way, he expels the concept of black and white. The world we live in, which moves at high speeds and allows us limited time to give thought or care to any one event or idea, detests what cannot be explained in a sentence. Sound bytes have become three words in quotes: “I’m A Nazi.” The press and much of the public will not tolerate the time or care it takes to consider the complexities of any given situation. So Cannes responds in a way that there can be no doubt of their stance; as does Refn, as do some others. They understand how they will be perceived. They know not to include a single false word. They know not to meander in their response to Lars’ comments. Get to the point, is the point. And look good.
Lars doesn’t operate this way. Those who are seeking to understand why he would say these things, are finding the human inside him. Those who are reading the headlines and watching the three-minute clip, and posting Facebook statuses about him being an “asshat,” well… They believe the person is the sound byte, the sound byte is the person. And that, to me, is tragic. Bravo Zachery!

So: back to, ah-hum, liberal London (lots of latent ancien German aestheticism over here Lars). Last week I raced over and up the Royal Academy stairs to try and catch the tail-end of the Richard Long opening at Haunch of Venison- making a joke about being sure I was too late. One of the bevy of young male-blooded invigilators (the females tend to be more chilled out in my experience) stood in his ad hoc line and commanded that I had to leave - "it's either us or the police". Whoa...I hate to imagine the result of pleading artistic license before them. I can just imagine our young friend in an August Sander photo brandishing a stick and dreaming of a more ordered way of life for the C20th. I guess he'll stick me with a 'twot' instead.
Giuseppe Penone is downstairs.

Wim Wenders' photos preceded Richard Long in the same space and Wenders' Pina doco preceded Dancing Dreams in the cinemas. A hard act to follow. But this doco charting the rehearsal process of Pina Bausch's dance piece Kontakhof with a bunch of local teenagers is almost more moving than the Wenders. Not really fair as Wenders' 3D film is in a different realm altogether. And although Bausch used fully trained classical dancers in her company these untrained teenagers exhibited the very soul of this choreographer's work - why should we ever dance?

Vogue editor Carol Woolton and students of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art have the right idea of making friends, rather than smashing the windows of the Bond Street jewelers - cajoling them into using their designs to complement their window displays. (Part of UK Vogue’s ‘Street Lights’ initiative). Holition’s interactive window display at Garrard (who supplied the Royal Wedding ring - one very similar is in the window).
The motorbike smash and grab window raids of designer stores continue.

Is Blitz a 'fair cop' on London's policing methods? It opened the week of an Irish bomb scare in the Mall. And reading the newspaper headlines one couldn't help but feel skeptical about whether the story we were being told was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or rather, the fear that nowadays one is rather alone in such skepticism. Blitz (adapted Ken Gruen's novel) isn't a bad film at all which isn't to say it isn't quite a good one oftentimes. Brant (Jason Statham, mean and gritty as ever) is a cop that gets the job done by not always playing by the rules. A cop killer (Aidan Gillen, forever smirking as if straight out of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange) is rampaging. Brant despises most of his superiors but not the new bloke (Paddy Considine's gay designer-pad sincerity). The film's denouement may be politically incorrect but it makes a refreshing change from the boringly obvious police swarming street maneuvers the day after government increased policing newspaper headlines. Give a few days and alas it's all back to old business.

10 Vyner Street hosts a very brave exhibition by Greek artist Xenofon Kavvadias displaying manuals of various terrorist organisations. All the books have cleared exhibition permissions from the Metropolitan Police etc. to the extent that many reside in a an enclosed room where photography is strictly forbidden. It's the boldness, simplicity and clinical nature of this gallery show that most impresses and awes. Perhaps far more so than any photograph of an actual victim or perpetrator ever could.
Audio of Geoffrey Robinson QC's opening speech on the website (downloadable podcast)

Down the road at Wilkinson Gallery is something far less perturbing. Upstairs a 45 year-old tortoise from London Zoo has his own penthouse suite replete with room service and sunbed (it's a different local tortoise for each new city). Shimabuku's art is deceptively simple and pays off with close attention.

"Liberty is about our rights to question everything." - Ai Weiwei's (the imprisoned Chinese artist and he of the Tate Modern's ill-fated painted porcelain sunflower seeds) So Sorry (2010) referenced "the thousands of apologies expressed recently by governments, industries, and financial corporations worldwide in an effort to make up for tragedies and wrongdoings – though often withhout shouldering the consequences or the desire to acknowledge let alone repair." By comparison the Lisson Gallery's show is a rather sedate affair. Exquisitely crafted objects and a video installation. Even Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in the Somerset House courtyard seems to yearn for a full circle of centrifugal force rather then just half a one. These are copies of the C18 heads ransacked by British and French troops from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860.
"Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one."- Ai Weiwei

Whitechapel Gallery has a retrospective of Paul Graham's photos - many of 80s/90s deprived Britain. Over at his Soho gallery Anthony Reynolds has Graham's incredibly simple and captivating photos of enlarged film stock emulsions that appear to be world in themselves.

Apocalypse Now has been re-issued in cinemas preceding Optimum's 3-disc Blu-ray release. In the Whitechapel's cinema "Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. LÍís split-screen film simultaneously shows clips of Charlie Sheen in Platoon and his father, Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now. Sheen junior watches his father deal with the posttraumatic syndrome of the Vietnam War and illustrates the complexities of family relationships, the repetition of war and history, and the emphasis on masculinity in Hollywood."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia at Spruth Magers Lee simply aligns little Polaroids on a continuous ledge around the gallery. At the opening he likened them to the old dye-transfer processing that gave them a simultaneity of both distance and immediacy. Another American artist Matthew Day Jackson's Everything Leads to Another at Hauser & Wirth is a fun show replete with his own designer lounge and televisual entertainment. "In my work there is no past. History is a part of everything. Everything leads to another. As the sum of history moves out in 360 degrees from its center ñ which does not exist ñ it envelops the present. Perhaps you could say I am interested in moments of sublime beauty which carry their counterpart, otherwise known as terror, so closely that it is difficult to delineate one from the other."

But Day Jackson does have a sense of humour. Standing beside him at the opening with his Axis Mundi - a huge life-size sculpture re-purposing the cockpit of a B29 - I asked if it was in working order and could "get us out of here". "Absolutely!" "Do we need to take the coloured skeleton that resides in the rear cockpit," I asked. "No, we can get rid of him." Such is the ruthless pragmatism of the art world;)

Superficially, Kutlag Ataman's new video work of Istanbul street beggars at Thomas Dane may seem condescending. But the longer one gazes the more disturbing and mesmeric these scenes become. Everything is not what it seems. Literally because many beggars are 'rehearsed' in their manipulative, theatrical gestures by their 'pimps'. Ataman's feature length film Journey to the Moon is also worth seeking out on DVD.

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Mammuth starring Gérard Depardieu as a depressed motor-biker abattoir worker is according to its directors "a film that is funny and moving. Funny because we’re confronting a “socially disabled” man with a modern society that is beyond his reach. Moving for the same reason. A bit like a mammoth in a world of foxes. Who flails away in the face of a multitude much sharper and livelier than he." As I wrote after last year's London film Festival it is quite simply melancholically and movingly bonkers. Their dark comedy Louise-Michel was also recently released by Axiom. If the Dardennes brothers films just that bit too 'real' for you then Mammuth may suffice knocking one sideways and inside-out.

For some horror, Spanish Julia's Eyes won't disappoint though it takes a while to get gripping. And Angels of Evil on the life of real life 70s/80s Sicilian habitual crim Renato Vallanzasca (Kim Rossi Stuart), though predictable, is all round very impressive filmmaking.

Quieter and subtler as you'd expect is Tom McCarthy's 3rd feature Win Win with Paul Giamatti as a New Jersey lawyer who opportunistically takes on the $1,500 a month legal guardianship of an Alzheimer's client. As in life, the script (Joe Tiboni and McCarthy) isn't at all as clear cut as that, though few are the lucky ones in suburban life for whom things work out as reasonably as they do for these characters. Acutely cast actors such as these do, however, restore one's faith in a life full of promise if not devoid of pain.

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This bio-pic of Vidal Sassoon doesn't begin promisingly with its gushing B/W accolades comparing the London hair stylist to the Messiah and Einstein. But gradually one does become fascinated by the story of this man's single-minded tenacity to succeed. A Jewish East End kid, at 14 he got on his bike during the WW2 Blitz and worked his way up through the ranks. "1954-1963 were the most exciting years but with many lonely downtimes". Sassoon is credited with a revolution in hair styling "a whole different look in shape". His new glass windowed salon "looked like a modern art gallery...people [being seen] having their hair done was a revolution". As you'd expect there's little comparison to other hairstylists or comments that are any less than gushing in this doco. But it is an inspirational story nonetheless and not without compromises. He even had to take elocution lessons in order to lose his broad East End accent to seem acceptable to posh clients. "If you go out on a limb...[what] can't be done...the root of who you are, the gut...in whatever field, my sense is that you will surprise yourself."

Sassoon was fascinated with the geometry of cutting hair. Popping into Alan Cristea's gallery and seeing Michael Craig Martin's work will also inspire in this regard. His geometry is quite staggering in its freshness even though much of the work dates back many decades. He's also curated some of the rooms at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition including a room of academicians' work that in his own words "is a singularity" that never seems to stop moving such is the resonant interraction of the chosen works. Even a large Per Kirkeby painting in Room 3 that you'd think would never work alongside such disparate other painters' work only serves to enhance both itself and the rest of the room. The Summer Exhibition hasn't had great press in recent years (and I haven't seen the shows to compare) but the breadth and detail of each room each curated by an established artist this year is a fascinating insight into what it is to be an artist rather than just a cramped free for all for lesser known artists to sell their work.

At Eleven Fine Art Daisy de Villeneuve shows her well-known designs as part of a Pop Art show alongside Peter Blake and Natasha Law (Jude's sister). Daisy's father Justin (like Sassoon from a poor family background) is credited as having launched Twiggy, convincing her to cut her shoulder length hair into the icon we recognise today. "Everybody kept telling me I couldn't do this or that, but I just went ahead and it worked out O.K.," Justin is quoted as saying. He, however, vetoed changing Twiggy's working-class accent.

Keira Knightley in Last Night seems to be trying to shrug off her image as a big budget Hollywood actress and show she can be edgy and improvisaional. You will either empathise with this film's guilt ridden relationship scenario or be bored to tears by its solipsism. I hasten to add I'm of the former camp because the script rings true as a bell. Thankfully nobody in the film 'acts' they are just being. And while these characters are quite possibly among the most boring individuals on the planet that doesn't mean the actors are thus. First time director Massy Tadjedin encourages Sam Worthington (Avatar) to just be rather than act. And he turns out to be the most boring but dependable bloke in Manhattan. And so on and so on. On board are also some of the cinema's greatest technical talents, Susan Morse (editor) and Ann Roth (costumes).

Third Star is the sort of film that gets attention at the Raindance Film Fest and if lucky enough resurfaces possibly grabbing a distribution deal in the big bad real world. It's a film loaded with talent but equally with longeurs. Oliver Schmitz's Life Above All is based on Allan Stratton's best-selling Chanda's Secrets. It's subject matter is an AIDS rumour ruining the family of a small African village. While it may sound worthy it transcends politicisation and becomes an engrossing tale of humans trying to survive prejudice. Everything in this film is exemplary -and what a performance from first-time actress Khomotso Manyaka as Chanda.
For director Xavier Dolan, "The only truth is love beyond reason," quoting playwright Alfred de Musset. Heartbeats will irritate the life out of some viewers with Dolan's 'trademark' choreographed camera style and willful colour palette right down to a tangerine sweater. "You never look at me from where I see you," another de Musset quotation. Dolan's direction sees everything; arguably too much so. But like his character who observes that "Koltès [a renowned contemporary French dramatist] keeps you in shape", Dolan dances his characters into the corners of their desires as Koltès sculpted words to be batted across the theatrical space.

Re-released is the painstakingly restored print of Herbert Ponting's 1924 doco The Great White Silence accompanying Scott on his voyage to Antarctica. Last year Getty Images showed Ponting's stills that have remained mesmeric to this day.

Le Quattro Volte is also elemental. Director Michelangelo Frammartino: "It urges the viewer to seek out the invisible connection which breathes life into everything that surrounds us." The film is both as 'arty' as it sounds and as cleansingly beautiful to refresh our belief in existence.