You kind of know things are getting bad when London prime time news show anchors appear to have hit rock bottom with what’s on their auto-cue and the only news item glimmering with any hope is a Florida woman rescued from the errant alligator in her kitchen. London mayoral elections are this Thursday, and you have to admit that Rory Bremner’s joke on the subject (or one of his ever clever writers) about the three ugly sisters in search of their prince was pretty funny. We could do with more of that Enchanted in London to stop those shoes slipping down ‘the underground gap’.
Mindless babble of the robots on the Tube
£115,000 down Tube as noise case is lost
Film stars dodged angry Tube drivers at the premiere of a film about suicides on the Underground.
Three and Out, an unfortunate title given last week’s critical response.
The first openly gay senior policeman Brian Paddick, aka the 'Cannabis Cop', here reveals that after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, he suffered severe depression. Now the Lib Dem is in the final straight of the race to be Mayor of London.
And just in case you missed The Terminal 5 Song (the BA ad with Delibes’ Lakméseems such a distant memory). Or is lost irony?
BAA (not to be confused with BA) set to lose stranglehold on airports
Profits before service – what did you expect?
BAA forced to sell off Gatwick after competition watchdog accuses it of ripping off millions of passengers
You're fired: T5 fiasco proves terminal
Fasten your seatbelts for T5 summer of hell
Robert Wardle will go down in history for caving in to political pressure to drop the investigation of arms giant BAE (what’s an acronym’s capital between friends) over alleged bribes to Saudi Arabia.
And someone who’s had his fare share of acronymic stress Mohamed Al Fayed (Harrod’s owner and the Diana-Dodi inquest) gets a hearing in The Guardian with his lawyer Michael Mansfield.
London commuters left gagging as manure cloud drifts over Channel from France
Gives a new meaning to plus ça change, n’est pas?
BBC’s Newsnight debate over Prime Minister’s tax U-turn, or as Conservative leader David Cameron said on Sunday morning’s BBC: “singled out some of the poorest working people in Britain and thumped them”. It’s hard to be funny anymore when the jokes in the headlines write themselves.
The UK's biggest banks have lost a test case about overdraft charges and the 10p tax row.
Big four stores face third price-fix probe
UK construction firms of accused of price rigging
Banks pull the plug on buy-to-let landlords
Victory for consumers in bank charges
Soldier's mother criticises Government for £2 million compensation claim. How those British soldiers must feel on hearing this.
In his latest book, American Journeys, Don Watson travels around America by train and hire car, eavesdropping on conversations, relating various histories and writing about his impressions of a country both loved and loathed by many.
Sound Proof is a sound art exhibition focusing on the site of the 2012 London Olympic Games. Six artists have been invited to respond to the site in the Lower Lea Valley and to the wider issues and debates surrounding the Olympic project. No glass slippers there, but howsabout some Central Park trivia for New York readers. The Brits Birkenhead Park was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. In 1850 F.L. Olmsted, later famous as the designer of Central Park, visited the park as part of a tour of Europe and nicked (sorry, was inspired by) the idea. So now you know.
The pioneer plant hunters
The Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens reveals the beauty of botany
Lasers used to make female flies act like males
Casanova: The Myth and The Man
But there’s always The Sunday Times annual Rich List to turn you back into the loving socialist you always were or the tax exile you always dreamed of becoming. Or what about
The 100 most powerful people in British culture, or The Independent on Sunday’s Happy List, happy in the knowledge that their devoted flock manage to keep their wool in the winter of our discontent. I forgot to mention that striking trade union pension anger shut down the North Sea pipeline (one third of Britain’s gas supplies), and the teachers went on strike their first in 21 years, and another tube strike today and tomorrow. Brings on a petit pace? Surely not. I have Amy Adams’ princess ringing in mine ears and polishing my doorknob. Ah sweet mystery of life...blugger, wrong key - I still live in social housing, a world where the artist struggles to dream let alone sleep soundly or write his blog.
Is anxiety about sleep keeping us all awake?
The nature of reality is most certainly mein leitmotif this week (you know you’ve only been in my prologue and Act.1, Scene 1 for the past 18 months and that Wagner was on the watchlist for being a Lefty radical after the 1848 revolutions, don’t you?) Photographer Gregory Crewdson is currently at the White Cube
What dark secrets does this picture hold?
BBC's Front Row (23 April)
Those who’ve never seen Crewdson may well be awed. But for me, the beautiful precision of his ‘film stills’ of everyday American life or rather gesamptkunstwerk stills (a whole movie within one still), always leave me rather cold and remote like his subjects almost an ice chamber in the surroundings of the White Cube. But that may well be the whole point.
At Annely Juda Fine Art is Japanese sculpture by Yoshishige Saito and Time Space Wood (his last show there was back in 1992). Like all great sculpture they appear suspended in time as if these black planks and blocks had been thrown in the air like childrens’ coloured ‘pick-up sticks’ and rescued before they had time to settle. They harbour both strength and the fragility of the moment.
Former editor of The Economist Bill Emmott’s new book
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade.
Nightwaves interview
Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies
Back to urban reality and Blek le Rat: This is not a Banksy
Robert Fisk: Painters love martyrs and prophets
And the cry of Katie Paterson’s melting glaciers at Modern Art Oxford
Nightwaves on recent BAFTA winning documentary film maker Paul Watson about one of his new plays for radio, a satire of television called How Now TV. (Sorry, Nightwaves is only up for a week)
BAFTA judges snub TV inquiry to honour filmmaker
The press told me I was finished
Nightwaves
Lord of the fly-on-the-walls
Alzheimer's film-maker to face ITV lawyers
Watson hits out at Cowell
the rest’ll be ready tomorrow :(
Monday, 28 April 2008
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Castles in the sand, ghosts in the shell
BBC Radio 3’s weekly Saturday Review has the ‘best’ discussion I’ve heard on Brenton’s new Royal National Theatre play, Michael Cockerell (political documentary maker who met Harold MacMillan). There’s also a review of Wolf Totem Jiang Rong’s massive best seller in China (over 2 million copies and an estimated 6 million more pirated versions).
China in London: Spotlight Beijing at the ICA.
New Zealand comedy horror Black Sheep is out on DVD with director’s commentary.
Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles
Consumer confidence falls to 15-year low
Get your skates on if you want to see Tate Modern's latest installation
Last weeks of the Royal Academy of Arts’ From Russia show.
Simon Calder: Terminal 5 is a breathtaking display of institutional hubris
And London's 22nd Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is now on.
In Daniele Luchetti’s Italian ‘68 student protest era film My Brother is an Only Child(Mio fratello è figlio unico ), the Communist sibling Manrico amends the perceived “Fascist” Ode to Joy ending of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at a student concert to a ‘Communist manifesto’ of placards akin to the video of Bob Dylan’s song: art without ‘the people’ “is a huge two-fisted jerk-off” claims Manrico. In march his brother’s Fascist supporters to disrupt proceedings. It’s quite a wonderful love story and more than worthy of being dubbed a descendant of Visconti’s class struggle cinema given its fine acting, script, cinematography and direction.
All in all, it’s quite a disturbing, thought provoking week of film and DVD releases. In addition to which, I had my almost never utilised Facebook account suspended. Having sent roughly two messages in about a year, I thought I’d see if I had any potential friends by choosing what I thought to be a suitable and specific ‘network of friends’ and sending them a note and link to this website. This was deemed to be ‘spam’ and my account closed forever (so far). Yet isn’t this the raison d'être for Facebook’s existence? If you don’t say hello to the bunch of beautiful, weird and wacky strange girls and boys at the bar how do you know whether or not they’re interested? Do you sit in a corner by yourself with a sign on the table saying please talk to me I’m interesting? And one obviously haven’t gone to the ‘bikers from hell’ club in Deathville dressed in a three-piece suit and bowler hat or the bar at the local bingo hall brandishing a machete. One has chosen ‘a bar’ at which you think like-minded people might be congregating and you try to network. How could what I did be equated to coldly knocking at people’s doors and leafleting?
There was an interesting Facebook harassment case verdict last week in Birmingham; a story you needed to piece together from about six different newspapers. The chap had sent the girl a message, someone he’d previously had an 18-month relationship with, even though he was under a restraining order. But the judge ruled that the Facebook message hadn’t constituted ‘harassment’. Actress Samantha Morton complained of text messages in a separate case which she won. When does love become a dangerous obsession? Become stalking? And when do obsessions become destructive? More of that anon.
Funny Games is director Michael Haneke’s almost shot for shot American remake of his original 1997 Austrian film. It is totally repulsive and totally compelling. All the more so because there are no subtitles to distance the viewer from the image. All the more so because we know these faces up there on screen. There’s Naomi Watts and there’s Tim Roth. And into their leafy vacation suburbia stroll the two clean white faced, white clothed intruders who innocently ask to borrow eggs and end up terrorising the couple and child. It’s as if they’d read the ‘Talented Mr. Ripley Handbook’ (Patricia Highsmith’s charismatic charlatan) and become Bret Easton Ellis clones from his American Psycho novel. All the more repulsive because these idol belle rich boys have been desensitised not only to violence but even to sex. For them what they do seems no more than kids’ pulling off the legs of grasshoppers.
Michael Haneke Interview on Funny Games, Part 1, Part 2, 2008 trailer.
The Film Programme (BBC's Radio 4, 28/3) has a Naomi Watts interview along with other goodies.
Sunday Times article and Why Naomi Watts is a glutton for punishment
Oz film The Book of Revelation first aired here at last year's Raindance Festival. Directed by Ana Kokkinos and co-scripted by Kokkinos with Andrew Bovell (Lantana) from Rupert Thomson's novel, a dancer Daniel (Tom Long) is kidnapped by three hooded femmes and kept as a sex slave for almost a fortnight. When released he abandons his high profile career with choreographer Isabel (Greta Scacchi) - Oz Olympics Meryl Tankard’s choreography. It’s a shame this film doesn’t quite fulfil its strangeness because it’s one of Australian film’s most interesting and rarely invoked characteristics. Not Aboriginal dreamtime, exactly, but a sort of ancient shared consciousness of unresolved strangeness (cf Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) or the more recent Look Both Ways on Tartan DVD).
The Book of Revelation interview (The Movie Show, Oz TV), Oz site, Oz distributor Palace Films trailer.
Narcissism
The Loss of Sadness, one psychiatrist claims that are we increasingly medicating for what was once viewed as normal sadness.
Son Of Rambow ,
Official Trailer, with its poster adorning many London buses, has been a festival fave throughout the world. And it’s easy to see why. A nifty idea: set in 1982 England, 10 year-old Lee (Will Poulter) wants to win the BBC Screentest Young Filmmaker’s Award by making his very own Rambo on video starring his tearaway schoolmates. Brought up by his mum (Jessica Hynes) and surrogate stepfather (Neil Dudgeon) in a strict ‘Plymouth Brethren’ family, the more demure Will (Bill Milner) is blackmailed by Lee into his project but quickly enjoys being the stuntman. It’s a film throwing up a lot of questions yet leaves them dangling on a tree. On the one hand, it’s an inspirational film for kids (12A certificate) showing that one needn’t be trapped by society and that self empowerment is closer than many want them to believe. On the other, it never really addresses the questions of violence it raises. The two kids forge their bond by literally cutting their palms and becoming blood brothers rather than letting the script thread this through emotional. The brethren “protect their way of life” by retreating from the world just as Stallone’s Rambo tries to forge a better one by utilising its inherent violence. Will’s mum finally throws off her head shawl in exasperation of Joshua’s strictures on her son and though Lee misses out on the BBC gig he does get a final delight. The fact that Streisand’s Yentl is playing at the cinema can’t be simply a cheap screenwriter’s twist (writer/director Garth Jennings). And the fact that it feels like half a script is all the more frustrating because of how fantastic the ‘existing half’ feels. The uncanny Stallone casting resemblance of Lee’s ‘old-man Rambo’ is one of the myriad script delights.
Britain's Mean Streets (Time Magazine, March 26)
Teenage knife crime 'is one of biggest threats to London
After offending many with his radical views in papers and periodicals Dutch writer Theo van Gogh gained independence by launching his own website De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker). He supported the Iraq invasion but offended both the Jews and the Muslims referring to the latter as “geitenneukers (‘goat-fuckers’)”. His friend and ally was conservative Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002, and the subject of Van Gogh’s film Sixth of May now out on that enterprising indie Bluebell DVD (no website). Van Gogh’s 10-minute film Submission, on the violence against women in Islamic societies broadcast on Dutch public TV, finally got him killed on November 2, 2004. Theo van Gogh was great-grandson of art dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent van Gogh, and Theo’s father a member of the Dutch secret service (AIVD, then called BVD). So he knew what he was talking about when making a conspiracy thriller. Pete Travis (who forged the harrowing docu-drama about the Irish Omagh bombing) recently received relatively dismissive reviews for his American studio US Presidential assassination conspiracy film Vantage Point. And I hate to say it but the film’s details rang a lot of truths for me while obviously remaining a fiction film. I think I wrote this many months back, but when novels talk of governments and companies bugging each other, nobody bats an eyelid. But when Brit MP Clare Short declared some years ago that Koffi Annan’s United Nations office was being bugged there by the Brits was uproar. And I felt the same about Van Gogh’ Sixth of May. It is well made, well acted, well editing, really nice father/daughter relationship but not particularly ground breaking in any other way. However, if you read up on Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, the script’s fictional conspiracy theory starts to niggle in your mind. One thinks of the Brit film Defence of the Realm (1985) and the BBC series Edge of Darkness (1985)(ah those were the days..) And there’s a lightness to Van Gogh’s script that is a little eerie - the almost comic ease with which conspiracy evolves. Great use too of Gabriel Rios - Broad Daylight.
London’s Mayorial elections
London transport crawl the worst in 40 years
The amazing and in many ways prophetically contemporary The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is now out DVD (my blog review).
Beaufort is directed by Joseph Cedar, US born but Israeli since a child, and adapted from a novel by Ron Leshem, who co-wrote the screenplay. A 12th century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon, Beaufort (Beautiful Fort) has survived the bloody scars of centuries of war. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 the Israeli army captured the fort from the PLO and Cedar himself spent time in Lebanon as an infantry soldier, paratrooper and medic. The film shows the lead up to the soldiers’ withdrawal from the fort under the Hezbollah shelling and their orders to destroy it. In reality this was done in May 2000 but the ancient castle remained unharmed. I was truly mesmerised by this film. Like Van Gogh’s film it does nothing particularly new or inventive cinematically. It is, however, shot in Cinemascope (Ofer Inov) and that’s what really compels the viewer into the soldiers’ world. The wide periphery of the screen is there to draw you into its centre, almost hypnotically like a crystal ball, in which the soldiers become Everyman – soldiers of every war, every country, and every epoch. I urge you to see this film whatever your creed. The slate of its distributor the new Trinity Filmed Entertainment is shaping up impressively. In the near future they’re also releasingHeartbeat Detector (New Yorker Films) that’s just opened in the States.
ICA Israeli season
Neglected poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg Ben Uri Gallery, Front Row Thurs 27 March, Nightwaves
Robert Fisk: Where is our man for all seasons?
His new book, The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings from Fourth Estate. (Southbank talk Monday 7 April 2008)
Lebanon boycott underlines divisions ahead of Arab League summit
Rageh Omaar on Iraq: A nation in pieces
The haunting El Violin about Mexican civil war is now out on DVD (My blog review).
Under the Bombs (Sous les Bombs) filmed partly during the 2006 summer conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is directed by French-Lebanese Philippe Aractingi who combines actual footage with his story of a well heeled Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) arriving in Beirut from Dubai and wanting to head south to see her son. Her only hope is the Lebanese Christian taxi driver Tony (Geroges Khabbaz). And off they go into the war-torn danger zone. Most of the cast are non-pro and some may well prefer this film’s tone to Beaufort. Though engaging and heartfelt, I wished for more of a Kiarostami quirkiness as we journeyed on.
Nick Broomfield’s Iraqi docu-drama Battle for Haditha (recently screened on Channel Four is now on Contender DVD)
Abbas Kiarostami’s meditative Five is out on BFI DVD with an extensive Making of extra.
British Silent Cinema Festival this week (the one and only!)
Ben-Hur (with Carl Davis’ score) screens Saturday 19 April.
On the Black Hill (1987) (DVD Region 0) hails from the Brit era when Channel Four television was at its new and most adventurous height as well as the BFI (Terence Davies’ 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives ). Writer/director Andrew Grieve was told by the BFI, we have some money, make it now or you’ll never get another chance anywhere else. And it’s a really funny, beautiful and enduring surprise. The difficult adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel spanning 80 years of ‘Vision’ farm’s family in the Welsh hills never feels pushed or abutted. With Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s (later turning director himself) widescreen anamorphic cinematography we glide though history and the twin brothers struggle to retain the farm. “In a world of constant and extraordinary change, how do you make a film about things that don’t change: the rhythm of the seasons and the circularity of time...no matter how far we travel we never really leave home,” writes Grieve in the DVD’s accompanying leaflet. “How do you imagine hell...and hellfire?” asks the German girl Lotte. “Something like London I expect, replies the twin Ben. There’s also a 10min short by Pinny Grylls Peter and Ben about Peter and his sheep Ben. A DVD that makes a great perennial parental gift.
Last Word has an interesting aural obituary for Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths as well as Mikey Dread (honorary 5th The Clash member and well at the roots of Brit Dub and Reggae), Shusha Guppy and Nigel Acheson.
And last week’s In Our Time (BBC Radio 4):
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
Only one fleeting afternoon of Brit springtime so far this week but one of the glories of the spring DVD season blossoms from France and director Bertrand Tavernier who hails from the beautiful but drizzly Lyon. Optimum have five single releases each with the same 15 min intro interview with Tavernier speaking in English about his career and then a specific interview for each disc. Tavernier is a wonderful raconteur even in his second language and it’s well worth listening to the two audio commentaries. The first is on his debut 1974 feature L'Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul), the well connected ex film publicist Tavernier convincing Philippe Noiret to star. The star’s agent didn’t want him to do it and he and Tavernier kept getting ‘patronisingly’ rejected by every finance company even though it was based on a Georges Simenon novel. It’s a film that Tavernier would remake again and again in terms of its esprit de coeur. A quiet, working man and unerring cog in society’s wheel one day stops turning in the same direction as the others: only a tiny cog but enough to unbalance the motion. In this film Michel is literally a watchmaker whose son one day commits a murder. When Tavernier, wanting to dedicate the film to the great French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, explained him the story Prévert said, “well it’s not the worst thing he will do in his life.” Tavernier denies being a ‘political filmmaker’ and its true that Tavernier’s most lingering films are those where an extraordinary man stops turning in an ordinary world. Or at least will never keep time in quite the same way ever again. In the Simeon novel, Michel is simply a lonely outsider but Tavernier wanted him to be lonely when to all intents and purposes he’s one of the friendly crowd. Tavernier also tells the lovely story of his little daughter (used in the ‘studio’ interior opening scene) seeing the cut to the moving train on screen and thinking for years that her Dad was a magician.
Le Juge et l'Assassin (The Judge and the Assassin) 1976, begins with a crime passionale set in 1893 with the killer Joseph (Michel Galabru), two bullets lodged in his brain and released as ‘cured’ from a mental asylum, going on a serial rapist rampage through rural France. The judge assigned to the case is Noiret again. Joseph is captured and argues his case against the society that originally released him, “I served justice. France is the offender.” Society’s response is “a madman who knows he’s mad is a cured madman.” The historical backdrop is the anti-Semitism of the time, and anti Émile Zola and the novelist’s support for Dreyfus.
This idea is furthered in Coup de Torchon (Clean Up) inspired by Jim Thompson’s novel Pop.1280 that Tavernier transplants to a French African colony in 1938, again with Noiret, this time as the corrupt, faded local police chief Cordier who eases into violence, “all crimes are collective”. If this wasn’t clear enough then L.627 bears out Tavernier’s view, again with engrossing audio commentary. The script was co-written with a working cop and shows Paris cop “Lulu” Marguet (Didier Bezace) beating his head between the corruption on the street and the corruption in the force, “Nothing has changed in the French police since the film was made,” says Tavernier wryly. For half the actors it’s their first film and Tavernier insists on doing the casting himself on all his films. Great score too from his regular collaborator Philippe Sarde.
Ca Commence Aujourd'hui (It All Starts Today) 1999, is set in deprived modern day Valenciennes in northern France, the same bleak area of Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal (Germen or seed, the name of the seventh spring month of the French Revolutionary Republican Calendar) in which a young migrant worker tries to scratch out a living as a coalminer. Daniel (Philippe Torreton) is schoolmaster of a kindergarten who struggles to keep the building and his kids afloat. “A year and a half after the film’s release, the left lost most of the cities in the election because they weren’t in synch with the [film’s] problems. I don’t want to be branded a ‘political filmmaker’ [though]. In all my films there is one desire [and that is] to learn,” says Tavernier quoting his English film mentor Michael Powell. If ever a Making of extra needed to be made it was certainly true for this film, and the 50 minutes footage of the incredible life changing effect of the film in unforgettable. “You gave me two years of courage,” said one mother to Tavernier.
new Mike Leigh DVD set
Sally Hawkins: life as Mike Leigh's muse
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh
Koch Lorber has the Taviani Brothers films of ‘existence’ out on DVD in the States: Fiorile, Kaos, and The Night of the Shooting Stars
For a touch of comedy try ITV’s Teenage Kicks
Ade Edmondson plays a not so Young One in Teenage Kicks
And last night’s (Wednesday 2 April) Newsnight on BBC2 had a chat about comedy and religion.
Podcast of the Week: The story of a lost episode of Fawlty Towers
And for horror try the lost children’s voices of The Orphanage trailer , produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and a stunning thoughtful directorial debut for Juan Antonio Bayona. “What sparked the idea for The Orphanage was [an illustration] on the copy of Peter Pan that I read as a kid. It was [an illustration] of Wendy's mother sitting by the window, waiting for her children to come back. I thought it would be interesting to re-tell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother,” says screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez in this interview. It’s released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by New Line in the States April 21. The ‘normal’ cinema audience watching with me shuddered every time.
Concluded tomorrow...
"If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow...after all... tomorrow is another day."
China in London: Spotlight Beijing at the ICA.
New Zealand comedy horror Black Sheep is out on DVD with director’s commentary.
Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles
Consumer confidence falls to 15-year low
Get your skates on if you want to see Tate Modern's latest installation
Last weeks of the Royal Academy of Arts’ From Russia show.
Simon Calder: Terminal 5 is a breathtaking display of institutional hubris
And London's 22nd Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is now on.
In Daniele Luchetti’s Italian ‘68 student protest era film My Brother is an Only Child(Mio fratello è figlio unico ), the Communist sibling Manrico amends the perceived “Fascist” Ode to Joy ending of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at a student concert to a ‘Communist manifesto’ of placards akin to the video of Bob Dylan’s song: art without ‘the people’ “is a huge two-fisted jerk-off” claims Manrico. In march his brother’s Fascist supporters to disrupt proceedings. It’s quite a wonderful love story and more than worthy of being dubbed a descendant of Visconti’s class struggle cinema given its fine acting, script, cinematography and direction.
All in all, it’s quite a disturbing, thought provoking week of film and DVD releases. In addition to which, I had my almost never utilised Facebook account suspended. Having sent roughly two messages in about a year, I thought I’d see if I had any potential friends by choosing what I thought to be a suitable and specific ‘network of friends’ and sending them a note and link to this website. This was deemed to be ‘spam’ and my account closed forever (so far). Yet isn’t this the raison d'être for Facebook’s existence? If you don’t say hello to the bunch of beautiful, weird and wacky strange girls and boys at the bar how do you know whether or not they’re interested? Do you sit in a corner by yourself with a sign on the table saying please talk to me I’m interesting? And one obviously haven’t gone to the ‘bikers from hell’ club in Deathville dressed in a three-piece suit and bowler hat or the bar at the local bingo hall brandishing a machete. One has chosen ‘a bar’ at which you think like-minded people might be congregating and you try to network. How could what I did be equated to coldly knocking at people’s doors and leafleting?
There was an interesting Facebook harassment case verdict last week in Birmingham; a story you needed to piece together from about six different newspapers. The chap had sent the girl a message, someone he’d previously had an 18-month relationship with, even though he was under a restraining order. But the judge ruled that the Facebook message hadn’t constituted ‘harassment’. Actress Samantha Morton complained of text messages in a separate case which she won. When does love become a dangerous obsession? Become stalking? And when do obsessions become destructive? More of that anon.
Funny Games is director Michael Haneke’s almost shot for shot American remake of his original 1997 Austrian film. It is totally repulsive and totally compelling. All the more so because there are no subtitles to distance the viewer from the image. All the more so because we know these faces up there on screen. There’s Naomi Watts and there’s Tim Roth. And into their leafy vacation suburbia stroll the two clean white faced, white clothed intruders who innocently ask to borrow eggs and end up terrorising the couple and child. It’s as if they’d read the ‘Talented Mr. Ripley Handbook’ (Patricia Highsmith’s charismatic charlatan) and become Bret Easton Ellis clones from his American Psycho novel. All the more repulsive because these idol belle rich boys have been desensitised not only to violence but even to sex. For them what they do seems no more than kids’ pulling off the legs of grasshoppers.
Michael Haneke Interview on Funny Games, Part 1, Part 2, 2008 trailer.
The Film Programme (BBC's Radio 4, 28/3) has a Naomi Watts interview along with other goodies.
Sunday Times article and Why Naomi Watts is a glutton for punishment
Oz film The Book of Revelation first aired here at last year's Raindance Festival. Directed by Ana Kokkinos and co-scripted by Kokkinos with Andrew Bovell (Lantana) from Rupert Thomson's novel, a dancer Daniel (Tom Long) is kidnapped by three hooded femmes and kept as a sex slave for almost a fortnight. When released he abandons his high profile career with choreographer Isabel (Greta Scacchi) - Oz Olympics Meryl Tankard’s choreography. It’s a shame this film doesn’t quite fulfil its strangeness because it’s one of Australian film’s most interesting and rarely invoked characteristics. Not Aboriginal dreamtime, exactly, but a sort of ancient shared consciousness of unresolved strangeness (cf Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) or the more recent Look Both Ways on Tartan DVD).
The Book of Revelation interview (The Movie Show, Oz TV), Oz site, Oz distributor Palace Films trailer.
Narcissism
The Loss of Sadness, one psychiatrist claims that are we increasingly medicating for what was once viewed as normal sadness.
Son Of Rambow ,
Official Trailer, with its poster adorning many London buses, has been a festival fave throughout the world. And it’s easy to see why. A nifty idea: set in 1982 England, 10 year-old Lee (Will Poulter) wants to win the BBC Screentest Young Filmmaker’s Award by making his very own Rambo on video starring his tearaway schoolmates. Brought up by his mum (Jessica Hynes) and surrogate stepfather (Neil Dudgeon) in a strict ‘Plymouth Brethren’ family, the more demure Will (Bill Milner) is blackmailed by Lee into his project but quickly enjoys being the stuntman. It’s a film throwing up a lot of questions yet leaves them dangling on a tree. On the one hand, it’s an inspirational film for kids (12A certificate) showing that one needn’t be trapped by society and that self empowerment is closer than many want them to believe. On the other, it never really addresses the questions of violence it raises. The two kids forge their bond by literally cutting their palms and becoming blood brothers rather than letting the script thread this through emotional. The brethren “protect their way of life” by retreating from the world just as Stallone’s Rambo tries to forge a better one by utilising its inherent violence. Will’s mum finally throws off her head shawl in exasperation of Joshua’s strictures on her son and though Lee misses out on the BBC gig he does get a final delight. The fact that Streisand’s Yentl is playing at the cinema can’t be simply a cheap screenwriter’s twist (writer/director Garth Jennings). And the fact that it feels like half a script is all the more frustrating because of how fantastic the ‘existing half’ feels. The uncanny Stallone casting resemblance of Lee’s ‘old-man Rambo’ is one of the myriad script delights.
Britain's Mean Streets (Time Magazine, March 26)
Teenage knife crime 'is one of biggest threats to London
After offending many with his radical views in papers and periodicals Dutch writer Theo van Gogh gained independence by launching his own website De Gezonde Roker (The Healthy Smoker). He supported the Iraq invasion but offended both the Jews and the Muslims referring to the latter as “geitenneukers (‘goat-fuckers’)”. His friend and ally was conservative Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002, and the subject of Van Gogh’s film Sixth of May now out on that enterprising indie Bluebell DVD (no website). Van Gogh’s 10-minute film Submission, on the violence against women in Islamic societies broadcast on Dutch public TV, finally got him killed on November 2, 2004. Theo van Gogh was great-grandson of art dealer Theo van Gogh, brother of Vincent van Gogh, and Theo’s father a member of the Dutch secret service (AIVD, then called BVD). So he knew what he was talking about when making a conspiracy thriller. Pete Travis (who forged the harrowing docu-drama about the Irish Omagh bombing) recently received relatively dismissive reviews for his American studio US Presidential assassination conspiracy film Vantage Point. And I hate to say it but the film’s details rang a lot of truths for me while obviously remaining a fiction film. I think I wrote this many months back, but when novels talk of governments and companies bugging each other, nobody bats an eyelid. But when Brit MP Clare Short declared some years ago that Koffi Annan’s United Nations office was being bugged there by the Brits was uproar. And I felt the same about Van Gogh’ Sixth of May. It is well made, well acted, well editing, really nice father/daughter relationship but not particularly ground breaking in any other way. However, if you read up on Van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn, the script’s fictional conspiracy theory starts to niggle in your mind. One thinks of the Brit film Defence of the Realm (1985) and the BBC series Edge of Darkness (1985)(ah those were the days..) And there’s a lightness to Van Gogh’s script that is a little eerie - the almost comic ease with which conspiracy evolves. Great use too of Gabriel Rios - Broad Daylight.
London’s Mayorial elections
London transport crawl the worst in 40 years
The amazing and in many ways prophetically contemporary The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is now out DVD (my blog review).
Beaufort is directed by Joseph Cedar, US born but Israeli since a child, and adapted from a novel by Ron Leshem, who co-wrote the screenplay. A 12th century Crusader fortress in southern Lebanon, Beaufort (Beautiful Fort) has survived the bloody scars of centuries of war. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 the Israeli army captured the fort from the PLO and Cedar himself spent time in Lebanon as an infantry soldier, paratrooper and medic. The film shows the lead up to the soldiers’ withdrawal from the fort under the Hezbollah shelling and their orders to destroy it. In reality this was done in May 2000 but the ancient castle remained unharmed. I was truly mesmerised by this film. Like Van Gogh’s film it does nothing particularly new or inventive cinematically. It is, however, shot in Cinemascope (Ofer Inov) and that’s what really compels the viewer into the soldiers’ world. The wide periphery of the screen is there to draw you into its centre, almost hypnotically like a crystal ball, in which the soldiers become Everyman – soldiers of every war, every country, and every epoch. I urge you to see this film whatever your creed. The slate of its distributor the new Trinity Filmed Entertainment is shaping up impressively. In the near future they’re also releasingHeartbeat Detector (New Yorker Films) that’s just opened in the States.
ICA Israeli season
Neglected poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg Ben Uri Gallery, Front Row Thurs 27 March, Nightwaves
Robert Fisk: Where is our man for all seasons?
His new book, The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings from Fourth Estate. (Southbank talk Monday 7 April 2008)
Lebanon boycott underlines divisions ahead of Arab League summit
Rageh Omaar on Iraq: A nation in pieces
The haunting El Violin about Mexican civil war is now out on DVD (My blog review).
Under the Bombs (Sous les Bombs) filmed partly during the 2006 summer conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is directed by French-Lebanese Philippe Aractingi who combines actual footage with his story of a well heeled Shiite woman Zeina (Nada Abou Farhat) arriving in Beirut from Dubai and wanting to head south to see her son. Her only hope is the Lebanese Christian taxi driver Tony (Geroges Khabbaz). And off they go into the war-torn danger zone. Most of the cast are non-pro and some may well prefer this film’s tone to Beaufort. Though engaging and heartfelt, I wished for more of a Kiarostami quirkiness as we journeyed on.
Nick Broomfield’s Iraqi docu-drama Battle for Haditha (recently screened on Channel Four is now on Contender DVD)
Abbas Kiarostami’s meditative Five is out on BFI DVD with an extensive Making of extra.
British Silent Cinema Festival this week (the one and only!)
Ben-Hur (with Carl Davis’ score) screens Saturday 19 April.
On the Black Hill (1987) (DVD Region 0) hails from the Brit era when Channel Four television was at its new and most adventurous height as well as the BFI (Terence Davies’ 1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives ). Writer/director Andrew Grieve was told by the BFI, we have some money, make it now or you’ll never get another chance anywhere else. And it’s a really funny, beautiful and enduring surprise. The difficult adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel spanning 80 years of ‘Vision’ farm’s family in the Welsh hills never feels pushed or abutted. With Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s (later turning director himself) widescreen anamorphic cinematography we glide though history and the twin brothers struggle to retain the farm. “In a world of constant and extraordinary change, how do you make a film about things that don’t change: the rhythm of the seasons and the circularity of time...no matter how far we travel we never really leave home,” writes Grieve in the DVD’s accompanying leaflet. “How do you imagine hell...and hellfire?” asks the German girl Lotte. “Something like London I expect, replies the twin Ben. There’s also a 10min short by Pinny Grylls Peter and Ben about Peter and his sheep Ben. A DVD that makes a great perennial parental gift.
Last Word has an interesting aural obituary for Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths as well as Mikey Dread (honorary 5th The Clash member and well at the roots of Brit Dub and Reggae), Shusha Guppy and Nigel Acheson.
And last week’s In Our Time (BBC Radio 4):
The Dissolution of the Monasteries
Only one fleeting afternoon of Brit springtime so far this week but one of the glories of the spring DVD season blossoms from France and director Bertrand Tavernier who hails from the beautiful but drizzly Lyon. Optimum have five single releases each with the same 15 min intro interview with Tavernier speaking in English about his career and then a specific interview for each disc. Tavernier is a wonderful raconteur even in his second language and it’s well worth listening to the two audio commentaries. The first is on his debut 1974 feature L'Horloger de Saint Paul (The Watchmaker of St. Paul), the well connected ex film publicist Tavernier convincing Philippe Noiret to star. The star’s agent didn’t want him to do it and he and Tavernier kept getting ‘patronisingly’ rejected by every finance company even though it was based on a Georges Simenon novel. It’s a film that Tavernier would remake again and again in terms of its esprit de coeur. A quiet, working man and unerring cog in society’s wheel one day stops turning in the same direction as the others: only a tiny cog but enough to unbalance the motion. In this film Michel is literally a watchmaker whose son one day commits a murder. When Tavernier, wanting to dedicate the film to the great French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, explained him the story Prévert said, “well it’s not the worst thing he will do in his life.” Tavernier denies being a ‘political filmmaker’ and its true that Tavernier’s most lingering films are those where an extraordinary man stops turning in an ordinary world. Or at least will never keep time in quite the same way ever again. In the Simeon novel, Michel is simply a lonely outsider but Tavernier wanted him to be lonely when to all intents and purposes he’s one of the friendly crowd. Tavernier also tells the lovely story of his little daughter (used in the ‘studio’ interior opening scene) seeing the cut to the moving train on screen and thinking for years that her Dad was a magician.
Le Juge et l'Assassin (The Judge and the Assassin) 1976, begins with a crime passionale set in 1893 with the killer Joseph (Michel Galabru), two bullets lodged in his brain and released as ‘cured’ from a mental asylum, going on a serial rapist rampage through rural France. The judge assigned to the case is Noiret again. Joseph is captured and argues his case against the society that originally released him, “I served justice. France is the offender.” Society’s response is “a madman who knows he’s mad is a cured madman.” The historical backdrop is the anti-Semitism of the time, and anti Émile Zola and the novelist’s support for Dreyfus.
This idea is furthered in Coup de Torchon (Clean Up) inspired by Jim Thompson’s novel Pop.1280 that Tavernier transplants to a French African colony in 1938, again with Noiret, this time as the corrupt, faded local police chief Cordier who eases into violence, “all crimes are collective”. If this wasn’t clear enough then L.627 bears out Tavernier’s view, again with engrossing audio commentary. The script was co-written with a working cop and shows Paris cop “Lulu” Marguet (Didier Bezace) beating his head between the corruption on the street and the corruption in the force, “Nothing has changed in the French police since the film was made,” says Tavernier wryly. For half the actors it’s their first film and Tavernier insists on doing the casting himself on all his films. Great score too from his regular collaborator Philippe Sarde.
Ca Commence Aujourd'hui (It All Starts Today) 1999, is set in deprived modern day Valenciennes in northern France, the same bleak area of Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal (Germen or seed, the name of the seventh spring month of the French Revolutionary Republican Calendar) in which a young migrant worker tries to scratch out a living as a coalminer. Daniel (Philippe Torreton) is schoolmaster of a kindergarten who struggles to keep the building and his kids afloat. “A year and a half after the film’s release, the left lost most of the cities in the election because they weren’t in synch with the [film’s] problems. I don’t want to be branded a ‘political filmmaker’ [though]. In all my films there is one desire [and that is] to learn,” says Tavernier quoting his English film mentor Michael Powell. If ever a Making of extra needed to be made it was certainly true for this film, and the 50 minutes footage of the incredible life changing effect of the film in unforgettable. “You gave me two years of courage,” said one mother to Tavernier.
new Mike Leigh DVD set
Sally Hawkins: life as Mike Leigh's muse
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh
Koch Lorber has the Taviani Brothers films of ‘existence’ out on DVD in the States: Fiorile, Kaos, and The Night of the Shooting Stars
For a touch of comedy try ITV’s Teenage Kicks
Ade Edmondson plays a not so Young One in Teenage Kicks
And last night’s (Wednesday 2 April) Newsnight on BBC2 had a chat about comedy and religion.
Podcast of the Week: The story of a lost episode of Fawlty Towers
And for horror try the lost children’s voices of The Orphanage trailer , produced by Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and a stunning thoughtful directorial debut for Juan Antonio Bayona. “What sparked the idea for The Orphanage was [an illustration] on the copy of Peter Pan that I read as a kid. It was [an illustration] of Wendy's mother sitting by the window, waiting for her children to come back. I thought it would be interesting to re-tell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother,” says screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez in this interview. It’s released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by New Line in the States April 21. The ‘normal’ cinema audience watching with me shuddered every time.
Concluded tomorrow...
"If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow...after all... tomorrow is another day."
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Just as well I originally included the 'unbearable' in my blog title because the 'unbelievable' will be too all too soon believable. The incidents of 'believablity' are becoming so numerous that they'll eventually waft over our ears and eyes like the casualties in Iraq. They did get the new Kings Cross train terminal working on Day 1, though.
Heathrow T5: Grand opening chaos (video)
BA faces huge fine for misleading travellers
Terminal chaos continues (video)
Second day of delays as signals fail on Tube. No changes there then since I started writing this column.
Engineering overrun causes rail delays
I guess the Brits still have culture:
Jeremy Irons: Power player (as Harold Macmillan)
Supermac, a true hero for the old Left
and BBC's Nightwaves has a review of Howard Brenton's play Never Had It So Good, an interview with new head of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny and with Ole Sheeren of Rotterdan based architects OMA them what's behind the Central Chinese Television (CCTV) Tower in Beijing. BBC TV's Newsnight has two great spots on China's workforce.
Simon Russell Beale reveals all about Sacred Music
Juliet Stevenson pays tribute to Anthony Minghella
Mark Lawson talks to musicals star Maria Friedman for the whole of BBC's Front Row (Fri 28/3). Her new show is at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
How an eccentric new film gave Richard Strange a summer he will never forget about his role in wacko Harmony Korine's film Mr.Lonely.
And a full length Arthur C Clarke interview on Australian radio
Heathrow T5: Grand opening chaos (video)
BA faces huge fine for misleading travellers
Terminal chaos continues (video)
Second day of delays as signals fail on Tube. No changes there then since I started writing this column.
Engineering overrun causes rail delays
I guess the Brits still have culture:
Jeremy Irons: Power player (as Harold Macmillan)
Supermac, a true hero for the old Left
and BBC's Nightwaves has a review of Howard Brenton's play Never Had It So Good, an interview with new head of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny and with Ole Sheeren of Rotterdan based architects OMA them what's behind the Central Chinese Television (CCTV) Tower in Beijing. BBC TV's Newsnight has two great spots on China's workforce.
Simon Russell Beale reveals all about Sacred Music
Juliet Stevenson pays tribute to Anthony Minghella
Mark Lawson talks to musicals star Maria Friedman for the whole of BBC's Front Row (Fri 28/3). Her new show is at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
How an eccentric new film gave Richard Strange a summer he will never forget about his role in wacko Harmony Korine's film Mr.Lonely.
And a full length Arthur C Clarke interview on Australian radio
Sunday, 23 March 2008
i forgot where i hid the bunny
More political incorrectness with BBC Radio 4’s latest The Archive Hour about Herbert von Karajan. Well done writer/presenter Mark Lawson of Wunderkind! who listens to all sides of the late maestro debate: a Nazi, misrepresented, or nothing? Usually he just get accolades or tirades. (I prefer Furtwängler's dangerous edge but fascinating nonetheless hearing the Berlin Phil players on Karajan.)
How Germans remember the Nazi past
We need more of these programmes that question the habitually mush mooshed into our eyes and eyes by the media as they pass off their version as the truth. Saturday morning's BBC Radio 3's Building a Library this week is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring showing the musical difference between volcanic thrill and leather seat. They said there was a podcast but I can't find it. And BBC Four has actor Simon Russell Beale (currently in Major Barbara at the Royal National Theatre) presenting the history of Sacred Music, something most people listen to with one ear on the radio (not literally, come on...though on some planets...) but is a surprisingly little explored topic outside the specialist programmes judging from episode 1. Vanesssa Redgrave speaks of her musical passions in BBC Radio 3's Private Passions - advocating that we don’t need more consensus but more people learning to play the same chord together.
And now that Easter thing is over of moving the rock or finding the bunny or whatever happens (I get a bit religo-dyslectic sometimes – for years I thought the catechism was the cataclysm, no wonder ‘they’ wanted me to attend Hebrew school instead), I can mention the The Mighty Boosh (out on DVD) (and Wiki seems accurate) taking over BBC 3 for a night (a sort of BBC 1 and 1/2 -TV execs never quite sure if they should go the extra half pint – American readers need a Brit translator to understand that bit). (Think Flight of the Conchords grounded at Heathrow and forced to eat nouveau Labour beau-berries for 72 hours, alright: Conservative and Lib Dem berries can be pretty hallucinogenic too...) Hurry up please, it’s time. It’s time. (I thought there were 24-hour or at least extended New Labour drinking hours. I’ve never been able to find one of those pubs, though: the New Labour ‘ploughman’s lunch’. What? I told you Yanks you needed a translator. Now where were we, floods or daffodils?
Would the 5-8 year-olds of today be kept occupied by Bewitched - The Complete Sixth Season: 30 episodes (25min) on 4 discs (Region 2) in colour (orig B/W but colourised for syndication)? I didn’t have a guinea pig over Easter, but I doubt that Harry Potter has ‘staled their infinite variety’. The seasons started being released by Sony in 2005 as a tie-in to the Nicole Kidman film (Season 6 hits Region 1, May 6). It’s a brilliant TV format (Sol Saks) and ran for a record 8 US seasons between 1964-1972. Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) is a blonde witch who’s married a “low-grade mortal”, Darrin Stephens a successful advertising executive (Dick Sargent in his first season - 1969/70 - as Darrin) and they live the suburban life portrayed in HBO’s (currently on BBC4) Mad Men. Like all families, Samantha has a meddling mother Endora (Agnes Moorhead) but the boredom is relieved by the fact that she’s also a witch - “show me another mother who sharpens her teeth in the morning,” says Darrin - as is her entire family, and Samantha has a young daughter Tabatha (Erin Murphy) who in this season gets a baby brother. Samantha’s dad Maurice (Maurice Evans, one of the many ‘hammy’ Brit thesps popping up shedding English gloom for LA sun) casts a spell on the new born baby Adam, such that all who lay sight upon him are besotted. A jest at the advertising world? The fact that Darrin and Sam are a mixed couple is another of the many sly moral themes woven into the series. “I don’t know why we don’t just tell people we are witches then everyone will know what nice people we are,” says Bambi-eyed Tabitha to her mum in the Halloween ‘trick and treating’ episode. “Everyone’s entitled to believe in what they want,” says Sam in Tabatha’s ‘Santa Claus’ episode. But Darrin forbids Samantha to use her powers for their advancement, the compromise being the witchy maid Esmerelda (Alice Ghostley) who when sneezing “materialises the thought nearest my cerebellum”, so we get Caesar himself as she attempts Caesar salad (he and Cleopatra explained away as part of Darrin’s ‘Tiger cologne’ ad campaign). The only cavil is that there aren’t any extras (though 5 language options) and one is left wondering (or heading for the internet) to find out what became of all these wonderfully fun, talented people.
And for some early cinema magic, US silent film specialist Flicker Alley has just issued 13 hours (5 DVD’s) of the complete George Méliès 1896 to 1913.
How Germans remember the Nazi past
We need more of these programmes that question the habitually mush mooshed into our eyes and eyes by the media as they pass off their version as the truth. Saturday morning's BBC Radio 3's Building a Library this week is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring showing the musical difference between volcanic thrill and leather seat. They said there was a podcast but I can't find it. And BBC Four has actor Simon Russell Beale (currently in Major Barbara at the Royal National Theatre) presenting the history of Sacred Music, something most people listen to with one ear on the radio (not literally, come on...though on some planets...) but is a surprisingly little explored topic outside the specialist programmes judging from episode 1. Vanesssa Redgrave speaks of her musical passions in BBC Radio 3's Private Passions - advocating that we don’t need more consensus but more people learning to play the same chord together.
And now that Easter thing is over of moving the rock or finding the bunny or whatever happens (I get a bit religo-dyslectic sometimes – for years I thought the catechism was the cataclysm, no wonder ‘they’ wanted me to attend Hebrew school instead), I can mention the The Mighty Boosh (out on DVD) (and Wiki seems accurate) taking over BBC 3 for a night (a sort of BBC 1 and 1/2 -TV execs never quite sure if they should go the extra half pint – American readers need a Brit translator to understand that bit). (Think Flight of the Conchords grounded at Heathrow and forced to eat nouveau Labour beau-berries for 72 hours, alright: Conservative and Lib Dem berries can be pretty hallucinogenic too...) Hurry up please, it’s time. It’s time. (I thought there were 24-hour or at least extended New Labour drinking hours. I’ve never been able to find one of those pubs, though: the New Labour ‘ploughman’s lunch’. What? I told you Yanks you needed a translator. Now where were we, floods or daffodils?
Would the 5-8 year-olds of today be kept occupied by Bewitched - The Complete Sixth Season: 30 episodes (25min) on 4 discs (Region 2) in colour (orig B/W but colourised for syndication)? I didn’t have a guinea pig over Easter, but I doubt that Harry Potter has ‘staled their infinite variety’. The seasons started being released by Sony in 2005 as a tie-in to the Nicole Kidman film (Season 6 hits Region 1, May 6). It’s a brilliant TV format (Sol Saks) and ran for a record 8 US seasons between 1964-1972. Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) is a blonde witch who’s married a “low-grade mortal”, Darrin Stephens a successful advertising executive (Dick Sargent in his first season - 1969/70 - as Darrin) and they live the suburban life portrayed in HBO’s (currently on BBC4) Mad Men. Like all families, Samantha has a meddling mother Endora (Agnes Moorhead) but the boredom is relieved by the fact that she’s also a witch - “show me another mother who sharpens her teeth in the morning,” says Darrin - as is her entire family, and Samantha has a young daughter Tabatha (Erin Murphy) who in this season gets a baby brother. Samantha’s dad Maurice (Maurice Evans, one of the many ‘hammy’ Brit thesps popping up shedding English gloom for LA sun) casts a spell on the new born baby Adam, such that all who lay sight upon him are besotted. A jest at the advertising world? The fact that Darrin and Sam are a mixed couple is another of the many sly moral themes woven into the series. “I don’t know why we don’t just tell people we are witches then everyone will know what nice people we are,” says Bambi-eyed Tabitha to her mum in the Halloween ‘trick and treating’ episode. “Everyone’s entitled to believe in what they want,” says Sam in Tabatha’s ‘Santa Claus’ episode. But Darrin forbids Samantha to use her powers for their advancement, the compromise being the witchy maid Esmerelda (Alice Ghostley) who when sneezing “materialises the thought nearest my cerebellum”, so we get Caesar himself as she attempts Caesar salad (he and Cleopatra explained away as part of Darrin’s ‘Tiger cologne’ ad campaign). The only cavil is that there aren’t any extras (though 5 language options) and one is left wondering (or heading for the internet) to find out what became of all these wonderfully fun, talented people.
And for some early cinema magic, US silent film specialist Flicker Alley has just issued 13 hours (5 DVD’s) of the complete George Méliès 1896 to 1913.
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
British film director Anthony Minghella died yesterday morning. As we all know you don’t have to be a beautiful person to make enduring art but if you are, as in Minghella’s case, it certainly helps those involved in the process soldier on against inevitable adversity and attempt to make better futures. Juliet Stevenson speaking on BBC's Front Row last night said that Minghella understood ‘the rhythms of the heart’. More than just a lover of music he thought as a composer. (He was to have done a Bach St Matthew Passion staging for the ENO (English National Opera) this year following on the success of his Madame Butterfly Puccini staging). This is the quality that made multi-Oscar winning The English Patient more than just an adaptation. Novelist Michael Ondaatje was essentially a poet and though the film wasn’t ‘the book’, no film could ever be that. What Minghella found was a mainstream cinematic equivalent to the novel’s ‘rhythms of the heart’. And if millions of people around the world were touched by that movie and were moved to struggle on, then slightly transgressing a few ‘poetic’ liberties was worth it. Remember the truly beautiful scene with Juliette Binoche and the Piero Della Francesca frescos (Bacci Chapel in Arezzo) scored by Gabriel Yared in ‘late-night Bach awe’? And Minghella introduced the world to Márta Sebestyén. Alan Parker's tribute amongst others on BBC Nightwaves. His The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency airs on BBC TV Sunday night.
NPR radio interview (in the States, thanks to GreenCine for link)
Exclusive Sunday Times interview with Alexander McCall Smith
Precious Ramotswe: a very special investigator (written by Minghella himself)
On set report
Another film that steers well clear of the ‘worthy, well-intentioned’ view of Africa is the small independent pic Bunny Chow directed by John Barker with comics and a would-be comic playing themselves in an improvised script that the director terms “retro-scripting”. Is this South African ‘mumblecore’, Film Comment article? The director made South Africa’s first music mockumentary Blu Cheez before this first feature. Bunny Chow is a local ‘hangover’ dish of bread, meat and vegetables consumed in Johannesburg and the appeal of the film is that its local detail is also quite universal in its mundanity. A ‘fair trade’ movie without the habitual lecture.
(By the way, the Mike Newell directed film of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera is a huge disappointment lacking the magic of ‘magical realism’. Start reading the book and you’ll never be able to stop until the heartbreaking end. Shows how difficult is literary adaptation.)
[Addition- see next blog]
As in the case of Heath Ledger, did he die because he couldn't bear the strain of what he knew, or was he put out of his misery? Or maybe it was 'just one of those crazy old things'. And if you think that's shit, wouldn't it be great if Philip Dodd came out on BBC's Nightwaves and told the story of the shabby politics of the his ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) ousting. Or maybe I missed it all as I was being bashed over the head myself. I even turned up on the doorstep of Conservative Party HQ with photographers outside and nobody even raised an eyebrow. They're used to bleeding heart politicians not bleeding head constituents I guess. That's Britain for you. (Actually the researcher who saw me was very considerate.) Oh, and while we're on the conspiracy theory bandwagon (mine make Mr Al Fayed’s claims seem like an entire solar system) why did the lovely non-conformist 'much more than just a Riverside Studios programmer' (see 1987) Ed Lewis die in his Notting Hill Housing Trust hallway some years ago without even a by your leave? Can't even find his obit on the internet, [just found one], but I know that I read one back in 2002, wasn't it? Our life may be "rounded by a little sleep" but Shakespeare had his enemies, too. (BBC's Front Row, Fri 21/3). Personally I've had it with the selfish Brit socialists and the equally selfish Establishment, not to mention the nouveau Labour petit bourgeois. More on't in future blogs.
And sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke died. Good Front Row discussion on his life including Doris Lessing. All agreed that Childhood's End was his 'best'.New York Times obit.
In the same Front Row prog, interesting piece on nearly completed renewal of the historic St Martin-In-The-Fields church (off Trafalgar Square)and the specially commissioned window created by Turner prize nominated Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. St Martin-In-The-Fields had the first free lending library in the 1680's and the first religious broadcast in the 1920's. Avoid the selfish (or some hidden agenda) socialists (maybe they’re just sheep in fake wolves’ fur) at the Westminster Reference Library around the corner (and Marylebone too). Their internet facilities are full of viruses too, but like everything else, no-one really cares. I should know, I've watched them for over 20 years. There are, as always, exceptions. I don't think Minghella was very fond of those kind of people either. Check Jon Stewart's Daily Show (March 19): Jon goes to the Advent map to give us "today’s gubernatorial sexual perversion". Larry Wilmore and Jon on 'blackness', the 'pinkies' ousting the marines in Berkely, and John Hodgman uses a time helmet to see if we're currently in a recession. I told you about the recession last year. Don't you listen! :) He's funnier this week than I am. I'll make up for it Jon with my forthcoming 'New Labour' video blogs. Monty Python meets Marxism.
One of Britain’s greatest-ever actors Paul Scofield also died this week. I only ever saw two great Brit thesps on stage- Sir John Gielgud and Paul Schofield. I marvelled at Gielgud’s vocal technique to reach me, seemingly effortlessly, up in my seat ‘in the Gods’ when he performed with Rosemary Harris on the West End. But with Schofield in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre in 1996 (recorded on video for the archive), his performance was like a field of energy wrapping itself around the entire theatre. The voice and the body were as one. He was well matched by Vanessa Redgrave’s unpredictable fire (my first acting job in London able to watch her work every night, that was ‘dying and going to heaven’,and whatever one thinks of her politics, Vanessa could never be accused of being a hypocrite or a selfish socialist - one of the most generous humans you are ever likely to meet). BBC’s Nightwaves has a spot on Schofield, and there’s an excellent, inspiring one on BBC’s Front Row (Thurs 20/3), with RSC voice coach legend Cicily Berry on his vocal technique, playwright/director Christopher Hampton, and Richard Eyre’s fun anecdote on directing him in Borkman. His reading of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and The Four Quartets lives on. What with that and musical theatre no wonder I became a late ‘Donnie Darko’ teenager. Rappers could learn a lot from listening to Schofield’s Eliot. Also in the same Front Row is a spot on Howard Brenton’s new play Never So Good at the Royal National Theatre on Conservative PM Harold Macmillan. A socialist (well, humanist really, well whatever he is, at least he doesn’t wear moth-eaten fake howling fuzz) becoming enthralled by a Conservative. Now that’s sounds interesting.
Postmaster wants his losing PO business closed but is tied
Two very different postal stories in the Royal Mail row.
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NPR radio interview (in the States, thanks to GreenCine for link)
Exclusive Sunday Times interview with Alexander McCall Smith
Precious Ramotswe: a very special investigator (written by Minghella himself)
On set report
Another film that steers well clear of the ‘worthy, well-intentioned’ view of Africa is the small independent pic Bunny Chow directed by John Barker with comics and a would-be comic playing themselves in an improvised script that the director terms “retro-scripting”. Is this South African ‘mumblecore’, Film Comment article? The director made South Africa’s first music mockumentary Blu Cheez before this first feature. Bunny Chow is a local ‘hangover’ dish of bread, meat and vegetables consumed in Johannesburg and the appeal of the film is that its local detail is also quite universal in its mundanity. A ‘fair trade’ movie without the habitual lecture.
(By the way, the Mike Newell directed film of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera is a huge disappointment lacking the magic of ‘magical realism’. Start reading the book and you’ll never be able to stop until the heartbreaking end. Shows how difficult is literary adaptation.)
[Addition- see next blog]
As in the case of Heath Ledger, did he die because he couldn't bear the strain of what he knew, or was he put out of his misery? Or maybe it was 'just one of those crazy old things'. And if you think that's shit, wouldn't it be great if Philip Dodd came out on BBC's Nightwaves and told the story of the shabby politics of the his ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) ousting. Or maybe I missed it all as I was being bashed over the head myself. I even turned up on the doorstep of Conservative Party HQ with photographers outside and nobody even raised an eyebrow. They're used to bleeding heart politicians not bleeding head constituents I guess. That's Britain for you. (Actually the researcher who saw me was very considerate.) Oh, and while we're on the conspiracy theory bandwagon (mine make Mr Al Fayed’s claims seem like an entire solar system) why did the lovely non-conformist 'much more than just a Riverside Studios programmer' (see 1987) Ed Lewis die in his Notting Hill Housing Trust hallway some years ago without even a by your leave? Can't even find his obit on the internet, [just found one], but I know that I read one back in 2002, wasn't it? Our life may be "rounded by a little sleep" but Shakespeare had his enemies, too. (BBC's Front Row, Fri 21/3). Personally I've had it with the selfish Brit socialists and the equally selfish Establishment, not to mention the nouveau Labour petit bourgeois. More on't in future blogs.
And sci-fi writer Arthur C Clarke died. Good Front Row discussion on his life including Doris Lessing. All agreed that Childhood's End was his 'best'.New York Times obit.
In the same Front Row prog, interesting piece on nearly completed renewal of the historic St Martin-In-The-Fields church (off Trafalgar Square)and the specially commissioned window created by Turner prize nominated Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary. St Martin-In-The-Fields had the first free lending library in the 1680's and the first religious broadcast in the 1920's. Avoid the selfish (or some hidden agenda) socialists (maybe they’re just sheep in fake wolves’ fur) at the Westminster Reference Library around the corner (and Marylebone too). Their internet facilities are full of viruses too, but like everything else, no-one really cares. I should know, I've watched them for over 20 years. There are, as always, exceptions. I don't think Minghella was very fond of those kind of people either. Check Jon Stewart's Daily Show (March 19): Jon goes to the Advent map to give us "today’s gubernatorial sexual perversion". Larry Wilmore and Jon on 'blackness', the 'pinkies' ousting the marines in Berkely, and John Hodgman uses a time helmet to see if we're currently in a recession. I told you about the recession last year. Don't you listen! :) He's funnier this week than I am. I'll make up for it Jon with my forthcoming 'New Labour' video blogs. Monty Python meets Marxism.
One of Britain’s greatest-ever actors Paul Scofield also died this week. I only ever saw two great Brit thesps on stage- Sir John Gielgud and Paul Schofield. I marvelled at Gielgud’s vocal technique to reach me, seemingly effortlessly, up in my seat ‘in the Gods’ when he performed with Rosemary Harris on the West End. But with Schofield in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre in 1996 (recorded on video for the archive), his performance was like a field of energy wrapping itself around the entire theatre. The voice and the body were as one. He was well matched by Vanessa Redgrave’s unpredictable fire (my first acting job in London able to watch her work every night, that was ‘dying and going to heaven’,and whatever one thinks of her politics, Vanessa could never be accused of being a hypocrite or a selfish socialist - one of the most generous humans you are ever likely to meet). BBC’s Nightwaves has a spot on Schofield, and there’s an excellent, inspiring one on BBC’s Front Row (Thurs 20/3), with RSC voice coach legend Cicily Berry on his vocal technique, playwright/director Christopher Hampton, and Richard Eyre’s fun anecdote on directing him in Borkman. His reading of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and The Four Quartets lives on. What with that and musical theatre no wonder I became a late ‘Donnie Darko’ teenager. Rappers could learn a lot from listening to Schofield’s Eliot. Also in the same Front Row is a spot on Howard Brenton’s new play Never So Good at the Royal National Theatre on Conservative PM Harold Macmillan. A socialist (well, humanist really, well whatever he is, at least he doesn’t wear moth-eaten fake howling fuzz) becoming enthralled by a Conservative. Now that’s sounds interesting.
Postmaster wants his losing PO business closed but is tied
Two very different postal stories in the Royal Mail row.
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Thursday, 13 March 2008
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National Science Week: alien life begins at home. Jodrell Bank webcast Fri night (14th)
Nightwaves 45 min interview with Richard Rogers. Don't think he's had the same horrible experiences as me living in London, though.
Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudí out now out on Criterion DVD
ITV London -The London Nobody Knows: Revisit of James Mason’s documentary from 40 yrs ago.
You may not agree with the Evening Standard’s art critic Brian Sewell, but he certainly poses some good questions: Cranch the Crude
The new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, announced the end of the blockbuster exhibition. A gamble on multiple divisionists.
Mindless babble of the robots on the Tube Not even an apology or an announcement this morning on the 94 bus that went on a diversion to the Westway roundabout on its way to the West End. Unbelievable.
Record £14m fine - plus knighthood - for Network Rail
Assembly (集结号) (Ji jie hao) (YouTube), Official trailer is directed by Feng Xiaogang, China's most commercially successful director. This is winter of 1948, during the civil war between the Nationalist KMT and the Communist PLA, its Ninth Company soldiers led by Capt. Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu). His Lieutenant, Jiao Dapeng claims to have heard the assembly bugle call for retreat which Gu denies and the rest of the film is largely set in a retirement home being built for army veterans in 1955 peacetime China. Based on the 3 page short story Guan Si (Lawsuit) by Yang Jingyuan and adapted by Liu Heng (of the now classic Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and The Story of Qui Ju) it’s surprisingly gripping with the director acknowledging in interviews the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. There are hints too of Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem in its search for truth and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers in its re-writing of history. Even having to read subtitles these characters are engrossing.
Black and White is far less successful as ‘Bollywood’ tackles the serious issue of a young suicide bomber. Worthy, well acted but predicable.
I was initially excited when I read that Robert Sarkies’ Out Of The Blue was using an old soft focus lens that Kubrick has invented for Barry Lyndon to evoke David Gray’s view of the world. One nice November in 1990, Gray (Matthew Sunderland) used a high-velocity rifle to shoot dead 13 people in the sleepy New Zealand seaside town of Aramoana. Though the film is an excellent re-construction of the event and the ensuing police stand-off, what is lacking and disappointing is a sense of Gray’s place in the world. Not an explanation of his deep anger (initially sparked by a charge on his cheque at the bank), nor a forgiveness, but a sense of a man’s pent up release at the world against him. As horrific a suggestion as it may sound, I almost wanted a perverse inverse use of Kubrick music (e.g the Blue Danube Waltz or something) to complement the special lens use. Austrian director Michael Haneke achieves better results in his sparse, abstract 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance Amok (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls-1974),
Kino DVD in the States (part of Tartan’s Haneke Trilogy in the UK).
A shame Haneke’s 2006 Paris Opera modern dress production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni isn’t available on DVD: (FT review )
Don Giovanni ist ein höherer Angestellter
But we do have Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of the Paris Opéra’s Don Giovanni using the original cast lip-syncing on Venetian locations and Palladio’s magnificent Villa Rotunda. Losey insisted that the recitatives (sung dialogue) be recorded live with an on set harpsichord. The cast is a dream list of performers: Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi), Leporello (José van Dam), Donna Elvira (Kiri Te Kanawa), Zerlina (Teresa Berganza), Donna Anna (Edda Moser) and Don Ottavio (Kenneth Riegel). Though it was Paris Opéra director Rolf Liebermann who initially suggested the project to Losey, its class politics was perfect material for him. The opera was written a few years before the French Revolution and the film opens with a quote by Antonio Gramsci (a founder of the Italian Communist Party – Losey left America for England because of his political allegiance) scrawled on a wall: “The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interum a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth.”
When as a teenager I saw this film on its big screen release I was bowled over. It must be remembered that though opera was a ‘people’s popular’ form in Verdi’s Italy, the 20th century didn’t catch up until the World Cup Three Tenors in 1987, TV commercials, and the advent of the CD. Amadeus wasn’t released until 1984, and the only significant opera films came later too, Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982) and Zefferelli’s La Traviata (1982). So Losey’s Don Giovanni must be seen in this context. It remains a little ‘stage bound’ but always gloriously in Gerry Fisher’s cinematography. It’s good value too (3 discs) considering the quality of the product recently restored by Gaumont. As for extras, there’s “a thematic analysis” by Michel Ciment the French film critic, a not so interesting making of with a lot of Losey wandering around set without explanation, but the fascination is The Sound Odyssey 1978 – 2006, an adventure in itself, showing how the film almost never saw the light of day due to the problems with poor Dolby sound. Sony couldn’t find the masters but the sound recordist unearthed illegal reference reels in his cellar, and eventually hey presto, the new DTS 5.1 surround sound mix. Conductor Lorin Maazel recently led the New York Philharmonic to North Korea. (BBC Newsnight vid) Picture restoration site, Gaumont French DVD site. And Losey's Don Giovanni on YouTube (if you must :)
For something a little different, Later with Jools Holland had the sparky Southern kitten Devon Sproule (MySpace), NPR interview (National Public Radio)
Leonard Rosenman obituary: Oscar-winning film composer who introduced modernism into Hollywood movie scores
Gérard Depardieu’s character Alain Moreau in The Singer (Quand J'étais Chanteur), my blog review keeps himself and the world moderately happy and alive through singing French crooners from the likes of Christophe and Michel Delpech (Les paradis perdu). I loved this film when it was first released last year and I love it even more hearing the 50 min interview extra with director Xavier Giannoli. “One fight too many,” says Moreau. “My characters fight for love.” Giannoli champions Stallone’s films like Rocky “as French director Jean Vigo put it, ”These movies eat meat.” He says in English to camera, “I’d like to make a film with you Sylvester Stallone.” There’s also an engaging extra about Alain Chanone: The Real Singer who inspired Depardieu’s character. Giannoli: “The question I asked myself was can beauty and grace still remain in a world obedient to local dance, to popular culture and entertainment. Can we see traces of beauty.”
Luchino Visconti was always in search of beauty and Rocco and His Brothers [Rocco e i suoi fratelli] was released the same year as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Out on Eureka DVD (2 discs), you get not only quality but a real bargain here: the entire un-cut 3 hour film in a gorgeous transfer, 3 hours of extras, (the CD of Nino Rota’s soundtrack had to be withdrawn, still a bargain set though), and a great booklet. I last saw this film in a print as if through a perpetual hailstorm of scratches. So what an unforgettable joy was this DVD. A mother and her 5 sons move from rural southern Italy to the metropolis of Milan. So topical and close to bone was the film that the City of Milan initially refused to distribute it. Visconti began in theatre staging several of Arthur Miller’s tragic observations of family life including After the Fall and A View from the Bridge. Oh to have seen those. When Tennessee Williams saw Visconti’s Rome production of A Streetcar Named Desire he thought it came closest of any staging he’d seen to what he intended. Composer Hans Werner Henze who saw Visconti’s La Traviata at La Scala with Maria Callas credits the director with coaching Callas into the actress we know of legend. And the citations go on and on including Burt Lancaster “the best experience of my life both as a man and as an actor”. Rocco (Alain Delon) succeeds in boxing to success getting his face onto street posters while his dearest brother and enemy is seduced and destroyed by the bourgeois ideals of the Milanese. Lots of Rilke’s terrible angelic beauty here.
Lionsgate DVD in the States has just issued The Alain Delon Collection that doesn’t overlap with Optimum UK’s fine set. (My blog review)
Also in stunning B/W anamorphic is The Round Up (Svegénylegények) (Miklós Jancsó, 1966) now out on DVD (Sight and Sound gave it a place in its Best 365 Films of all Time). London Q&A with Jancsó, John Cunningham’s Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex - he gives an illustrated talk Sat (15 March). Like Josie in the Irish film Garage, Jancsó’s characters also seem caught out in a world they thought they knew: “It seems that life is a continual movement. In a procession, a demonstration, there’s movement all the time, isn’t there? It’s physical and it’s also philosophical: the contradiction is founded on movement, the movement of ideas, the movement of the masses...A man is always surrounded by movement, threatened by oppression: the camera movements I create suggest that too.” The film is set after the 1848 Hungarian defeat against Austrian domination and a number of ‘Robin Hood’ resistance rebels rounded up (the Hungarian title literally means The Hopeless Ones). The stunning anamorphic widescreen transfer is so crisp it resembles high definition at times. In the short but detailed accompanying booklet, Jancsó is quoted from a 2002 Riverside Studios festival: “Now I have realised that the only thing that you can do about the world is to laugh at it. In the old times I tried to take myself very seriously, because I thought it was possible to change the world, but not anymore.”
BBC Four's The Curse of Comedy series airs this week.
Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay as part of its 20th anniversary, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien’s French-language directorial debut. Juliette Binoche is single mum Suzanne who works at a Chinese puppet theatre and lives with her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu) and nanny Song (Fang Song) in a higglety pigglety life and Paris flat with a problem tenant (Hippolyte Girardot) downstairs. Song is a film student video hommaging Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s classic short The Red Balloon and Simon has created for himself an inner world of beauty and magic. You’ll either find it too slow or very zen. Hsiao-hsien’s regular cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing beautifully evokes the mixed metaphor of the red balloon’s loneliness and childhood. New York’s Janus Films’ (through Criterion DVD) re-releases Lamorisse’s Red Balloon and White Mane in April.
Juliette Bincoche Q & A Toronto Fest (YouTube,Part 1)(Part 2)
French trailer
Bad boy of cinema and bars Harmony Korine has his latest film Mr.Lonely on release. A Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a similiar Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) in Paris inviting him to her Scottish retreat full of other lonely impersonators including the Pope, the Queen, Lincoln, Chaplin and Shirley Temple. I only managed to see about half at last year’s London Film Festival. And though Korine is certainly an acquired taste the minute the images start hitting the screen it’s quite different to anything else you’ve seen.
Acclaimed Brit writer/director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) airs his comedy horror The Cottage that he’d previously written, and it’s pretty (well, uglyishly) impressive using fantastic anamorphic camera work (Christopher Ross). Reminded me a bit of Brit break out Hot Fuzz. With no pretensions to ‘genre’ political overtones it’s far funnier than you’d expect. And that’s not meant a backhanded complement. It probably wouldn’t sustain repeated viewings like the classics, though.
But one of the few movies on the planet that you could enjoy a successful date even with kids in tow is, finally, a successful and faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel): Horton Hears a Who! fashioned by the astute and magical team that brought us the clever Ice Age animations (the original just out on Fox Blu Ray disc with commentary). Horton (Jim Carrey) the elephant with a trunk of gold becomes the elephant with a trunk of one pink non-decidious dandeloin flower and destined for the forest psychiatrist’s log by his fellow fauna. On the flower’s tippy tippy top is a speck from which he claims he hears the voice of a Who (Mayor, voiced by Steve Carrell) – a citizen of the world of Whoville. Surely a story that shows that elephants too can overcome the obstacles of mountains should be required screening at all political summit meetings re-iterating the delicate balance of planet earth. After all, aren’t most politicians just kids who never really had that childhood? The ageing vulture (in need of his annual preen) and the kangaroo get a bad press but her joey saves the day. Can’t reform everyone I guess.
BBC's Nightwaves :The cultural history of the Soviet Pioneers and Peter and the Wolf (and it seemed so innocent) is discussed with film historian Ian Christie and Catriona Kelly whose book on the subject was published last year. Easter bunnies will never look the same after listening to this.
Nightwaves 45 min interview with Richard Rogers. Don't think he's had the same horrible experiences as me living in London, though.
Hiroshi Teshigahara's Antonio Gaudí out now out on Criterion DVD
ITV London -The London Nobody Knows: Revisit of James Mason’s documentary from 40 yrs ago.
You may not agree with the Evening Standard’s art critic Brian Sewell, but he certainly poses some good questions: Cranch the Crude
The new director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, announced the end of the blockbuster exhibition. A gamble on multiple divisionists.
Mindless babble of the robots on the Tube Not even an apology or an announcement this morning on the 94 bus that went on a diversion to the Westway roundabout on its way to the West End. Unbelievable.
Record £14m fine - plus knighthood - for Network Rail
Assembly (集结号) (Ji jie hao) (YouTube), Official trailer is directed by Feng Xiaogang, China's most commercially successful director. This is winter of 1948, during the civil war between the Nationalist KMT and the Communist PLA, its Ninth Company soldiers led by Capt. Gu Zidi (Zhang Hanyu). His Lieutenant, Jiao Dapeng claims to have heard the assembly bugle call for retreat which Gu denies and the rest of the film is largely set in a retirement home being built for army veterans in 1955 peacetime China. Based on the 3 page short story Guan Si (Lawsuit) by Yang Jingyuan and adapted by Liu Heng (of the now classic Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and The Story of Qui Ju) it’s surprisingly gripping with the director acknowledging in interviews the influence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. There are hints too of Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem in its search for truth and Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers in its re-writing of history. Even having to read subtitles these characters are engrossing.
Black and White is far less successful as ‘Bollywood’ tackles the serious issue of a young suicide bomber. Worthy, well acted but predicable.
I was initially excited when I read that Robert Sarkies’ Out Of The Blue was using an old soft focus lens that Kubrick has invented for Barry Lyndon to evoke David Gray’s view of the world. One nice November in 1990, Gray (Matthew Sunderland) used a high-velocity rifle to shoot dead 13 people in the sleepy New Zealand seaside town of Aramoana. Though the film is an excellent re-construction of the event and the ensuing police stand-off, what is lacking and disappointing is a sense of Gray’s place in the world. Not an explanation of his deep anger (initially sparked by a charge on his cheque at the bank), nor a forgiveness, but a sense of a man’s pent up release at the world against him. As horrific a suggestion as it may sound, I almost wanted a perverse inverse use of Kubrick music (e.g the Blue Danube Waltz or something) to complement the special lens use. Austrian director Michael Haneke achieves better results in his sparse, abstract 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance Amok (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls-1974),
Kino DVD in the States (part of Tartan’s Haneke Trilogy in the UK).
A shame Haneke’s 2006 Paris Opera modern dress production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni isn’t available on DVD: (FT review )
Don Giovanni ist ein höherer Angestellter
But we do have Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of the Paris Opéra’s Don Giovanni using the original cast lip-syncing on Venetian locations and Palladio’s magnificent Villa Rotunda. Losey insisted that the recitatives (sung dialogue) be recorded live with an on set harpsichord. The cast is a dream list of performers: Don Giovanni (Ruggero Raimondi), Leporello (José van Dam), Donna Elvira (Kiri Te Kanawa), Zerlina (Teresa Berganza), Donna Anna (Edda Moser) and Don Ottavio (Kenneth Riegel). Though it was Paris Opéra director Rolf Liebermann who initially suggested the project to Losey, its class politics was perfect material for him. The opera was written a few years before the French Revolution and the film opens with a quote by Antonio Gramsci (a founder of the Italian Communist Party – Losey left America for England because of his political allegiance) scrawled on a wall: “The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interum a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth.”
When as a teenager I saw this film on its big screen release I was bowled over. It must be remembered that though opera was a ‘people’s popular’ form in Verdi’s Italy, the 20th century didn’t catch up until the World Cup Three Tenors in 1987, TV commercials, and the advent of the CD. Amadeus wasn’t released until 1984, and the only significant opera films came later too, Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982) and Zefferelli’s La Traviata (1982). So Losey’s Don Giovanni must be seen in this context. It remains a little ‘stage bound’ but always gloriously in Gerry Fisher’s cinematography. It’s good value too (3 discs) considering the quality of the product recently restored by Gaumont. As for extras, there’s “a thematic analysis” by Michel Ciment the French film critic, a not so interesting making of with a lot of Losey wandering around set without explanation, but the fascination is The Sound Odyssey 1978 – 2006, an adventure in itself, showing how the film almost never saw the light of day due to the problems with poor Dolby sound. Sony couldn’t find the masters but the sound recordist unearthed illegal reference reels in his cellar, and eventually hey presto, the new DTS 5.1 surround sound mix. Conductor Lorin Maazel recently led the New York Philharmonic to North Korea. (BBC Newsnight vid) Picture restoration site, Gaumont French DVD site. And Losey's Don Giovanni on YouTube (if you must :)
For something a little different, Later with Jools Holland had the sparky Southern kitten Devon Sproule (MySpace), NPR interview (National Public Radio)
Leonard Rosenman obituary: Oscar-winning film composer who introduced modernism into Hollywood movie scores
Gérard Depardieu’s character Alain Moreau in The Singer (Quand J'étais Chanteur), my blog review keeps himself and the world moderately happy and alive through singing French crooners from the likes of Christophe and Michel Delpech (Les paradis perdu). I loved this film when it was first released last year and I love it even more hearing the 50 min interview extra with director Xavier Giannoli. “One fight too many,” says Moreau. “My characters fight for love.” Giannoli champions Stallone’s films like Rocky “as French director Jean Vigo put it, ”These movies eat meat.” He says in English to camera, “I’d like to make a film with you Sylvester Stallone.” There’s also an engaging extra about Alain Chanone: The Real Singer who inspired Depardieu’s character. Giannoli: “The question I asked myself was can beauty and grace still remain in a world obedient to local dance, to popular culture and entertainment. Can we see traces of beauty.”
Luchino Visconti was always in search of beauty and Rocco and His Brothers [Rocco e i suoi fratelli] was released the same year as Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Out on Eureka DVD (2 discs), you get not only quality but a real bargain here: the entire un-cut 3 hour film in a gorgeous transfer, 3 hours of extras, (the CD of Nino Rota’s soundtrack had to be withdrawn, still a bargain set though), and a great booklet. I last saw this film in a print as if through a perpetual hailstorm of scratches. So what an unforgettable joy was this DVD. A mother and her 5 sons move from rural southern Italy to the metropolis of Milan. So topical and close to bone was the film that the City of Milan initially refused to distribute it. Visconti began in theatre staging several of Arthur Miller’s tragic observations of family life including After the Fall and A View from the Bridge. Oh to have seen those. When Tennessee Williams saw Visconti’s Rome production of A Streetcar Named Desire he thought it came closest of any staging he’d seen to what he intended. Composer Hans Werner Henze who saw Visconti’s La Traviata at La Scala with Maria Callas credits the director with coaching Callas into the actress we know of legend. And the citations go on and on including Burt Lancaster “the best experience of my life both as a man and as an actor”. Rocco (Alain Delon) succeeds in boxing to success getting his face onto street posters while his dearest brother and enemy is seduced and destroyed by the bourgeois ideals of the Milanese. Lots of Rilke’s terrible angelic beauty here.
Lionsgate DVD in the States has just issued The Alain Delon Collection that doesn’t overlap with Optimum UK’s fine set. (My blog review)
Also in stunning B/W anamorphic is The Round Up (Svegénylegények) (Miklós Jancsó, 1966) now out on DVD (Sight and Sound gave it a place in its Best 365 Films of all Time). London Q&A with Jancsó, John Cunningham’s Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex - he gives an illustrated talk Sat (15 March). Like Josie in the Irish film Garage, Jancsó’s characters also seem caught out in a world they thought they knew: “It seems that life is a continual movement. In a procession, a demonstration, there’s movement all the time, isn’t there? It’s physical and it’s also philosophical: the contradiction is founded on movement, the movement of ideas, the movement of the masses...A man is always surrounded by movement, threatened by oppression: the camera movements I create suggest that too.” The film is set after the 1848 Hungarian defeat against Austrian domination and a number of ‘Robin Hood’ resistance rebels rounded up (the Hungarian title literally means The Hopeless Ones). The stunning anamorphic widescreen transfer is so crisp it resembles high definition at times. In the short but detailed accompanying booklet, Jancsó is quoted from a 2002 Riverside Studios festival: “Now I have realised that the only thing that you can do about the world is to laugh at it. In the old times I tried to take myself very seriously, because I thought it was possible to change the world, but not anymore.”
BBC Four's The Curse of Comedy series airs this week.
Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay as part of its 20th anniversary, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien’s French-language directorial debut. Juliette Binoche is single mum Suzanne who works at a Chinese puppet theatre and lives with her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu) and nanny Song (Fang Song) in a higglety pigglety life and Paris flat with a problem tenant (Hippolyte Girardot) downstairs. Song is a film student video hommaging Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 children’s classic short The Red Balloon and Simon has created for himself an inner world of beauty and magic. You’ll either find it too slow or very zen. Hsiao-hsien’s regular cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing beautifully evokes the mixed metaphor of the red balloon’s loneliness and childhood. New York’s Janus Films’ (through Criterion DVD) re-releases Lamorisse’s Red Balloon and White Mane in April.
Juliette Bincoche Q & A Toronto Fest (YouTube,Part 1)(Part 2)
French trailer
Bad boy of cinema and bars Harmony Korine has his latest film Mr.Lonely on release. A Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a similiar Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) in Paris inviting him to her Scottish retreat full of other lonely impersonators including the Pope, the Queen, Lincoln, Chaplin and Shirley Temple. I only managed to see about half at last year’s London Film Festival. And though Korine is certainly an acquired taste the minute the images start hitting the screen it’s quite different to anything else you’ve seen.
Acclaimed Brit writer/director Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) airs his comedy horror The Cottage that he’d previously written, and it’s pretty (well, uglyishly) impressive using fantastic anamorphic camera work (Christopher Ross). Reminded me a bit of Brit break out Hot Fuzz. With no pretensions to ‘genre’ political overtones it’s far funnier than you’d expect. And that’s not meant a backhanded complement. It probably wouldn’t sustain repeated viewings like the classics, though.
But one of the few movies on the planet that you could enjoy a successful date even with kids in tow is, finally, a successful and faithful adaptation of Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel): Horton Hears a Who! fashioned by the astute and magical team that brought us the clever Ice Age animations (the original just out on Fox Blu Ray disc with commentary). Horton (Jim Carrey) the elephant with a trunk of gold becomes the elephant with a trunk of one pink non-decidious dandeloin flower and destined for the forest psychiatrist’s log by his fellow fauna. On the flower’s tippy tippy top is a speck from which he claims he hears the voice of a Who (Mayor, voiced by Steve Carrell) – a citizen of the world of Whoville. Surely a story that shows that elephants too can overcome the obstacles of mountains should be required screening at all political summit meetings re-iterating the delicate balance of planet earth. After all, aren’t most politicians just kids who never really had that childhood? The ageing vulture (in need of his annual preen) and the kangaroo get a bad press but her joey saves the day. Can’t reform everyone I guess.
BBC's Nightwaves :The cultural history of the Soviet Pioneers and Peter and the Wolf (and it seemed so innocent) is discussed with film historian Ian Christie and Catriona Kelly whose book on the subject was published last year. Easter bunnies will never look the same after listening to this.
Monday, 10 March 2008
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Couldn’t manage a trip this week to the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art (just opened at the Barbican art gallery). I hope somewhere in the cosmos aliens are experiencing an enlightened ponder by deciphering the 1’s and 0’s of my website. If such creatures were to find themselves face to face with a London underground ticket machine would the machines’ lack of logic amuse them or baffle them? The logic of the coin slot only opening when you Oyster touch your card is clear (though instructionally unstated), preventing some dumb (sorry, utilitarian time consumption challenged) human from jamming the bloody thing. But other machines at other stations leave space for the ‘u.t.c.c. human’ to wreak their havoc by keeping the slot open. 2012 Olympic visitors will no doubt be utterly confused and think a closed slot means a broken machine. The Labour ‘nanny state’ would be useful in this instance, n’etais pas? Personally, I feel akin to participating in a ‘lab rat’ experiment. What worries me is that the devil is always in the details. Public transport in some countries runs all year round in climatic conditions resembling Saturn, but in England everything still grinds to a halt with one morning of gales, thunderstorms or snow.
Some earthlings are so stupid (sorry, ‘sat nav challenged’) that they cause themselves injuries by bumping into lampposts while text messaging: Lamppost 'cushions' for clumsy texters. What would we do without nannying?
Humans will make contact with aliens within two decades, say astronomers.
The influential and relatively unknown Brit artist John Latham who died recently has a small but wonderful show from his 50’s work, The Spray Gun And The Cosmos, what he called ‘process sculpture’. More than equal to his American counterparts of the period while his widow continues to light up a gallery event like a meteorite
And I really do have to side with our unelected PM Brown in the following: PM praises Proms after minister's attack after his own culture minister Margaret Hodge attacked the annual summer BBC Proms (Royal Albert Hall) for being too elitist. I concede that the ‘Promenaders’ have things a little out of perspective practically starting a riot when someone as ‘popular’ as Michael Ball (of West End musicals) is given a whole evening (27 Aug). But when the Proms does try to broaden its appeal they do it not only in great style but with great musicianship e.g baroque specialist Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s French evening (Prom 3, 15 July) last year mixing dance and South African performers (Buskaid Soweto String project) or, of course, the jazz events and Nitin Sawhney (10 Aug) not forgetting the unforgettable Simon Bolivar youth orchestra from Venezuela (19 Aug). And Claudio Abbado/the Lucerne Fest Orch doing Mahler’s Symphony 3 (22 Aug) – one of the greatest musical experiences one will ever have. £5 to stand and hear the greatest classical musicians in the world sounds bloodlessly democratic to me. The weather’s nice, though, isn’t Ms Hodge: Sunshine winter brightest ever - daffodils in mid-Feb and all that.
Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud’s Apeiron (sample MP3) based on the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander who posited that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things as opposed to the determinate and order. And BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music profiled a symphony by the even now little known (outside contemporary music circles) Henri Dutilleux who created music in revolution as opposed to his rival Pierre Boulez’s revolution in music.
There’ve been ‘Black’ seasons on Brit TV so BBC2 is provocatively airing a White season. It’s a subject that is reasonably still taboo in this country for obvious reasons. But like the machines in the underground perhaps the details still aren’t that obvious. One shopkeeper being interviewed vehemently stressed he had no problem with ‘colour’ only with an immigration policy unsupportable by the country’s current infrastructure and one ultimately to the detriment of its existing citizens. There most certainly are Richter scale tremors in Britain of ‘this is our country now’ from many groups, understandable of course given the repressive ‘colonialist’ policies of almost every major player on the world scene time immemorial. But there’s neither victory nor honour in taking from the ‘haves’ simply because you’ve been a ‘have not’. People assimilate into cultures in their own fashion. When Peter Sellars took the reins of Los Angeles’ hitherto ‘European culture’ International Arts Fest back in the early 90s and invited cultural groups from the Pacific Rim instead, what astounded was the uniqueness of different cultures not their qualities of assimilation and homogeneity. my Times article, another, originally commissioned for the Financial Times
Australian PM Rudd says sorry to Aborigines' stolen generations (YouTube vid), LateNightLive
Mark Lawson Talks to Rabbi Lionel Blue will cheer up the non-conformists, he says on nationalism: “you end up loving your own more and others less”. (BBC Four often repeated and available on downloadable BBC's iPlayer for 5 days).
London Nobody Knows / Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is a DVD of two shorts and with no extras admittedly not great value. But the first from 1967 based on Geoffrey Fletcher’s book, is narrated by James Mason who, though becoming a Hollywood star, was still genuinely interested in the fate and future of English cities. There’s a wonderful 1 hour extra (on Optimum’s Mason set) with Mason exploring the history of Huddersfield (northern England). Interesting how Spitalfields in East London went from prosperity to poverty in the 60s and back to prosperity again nowadays. Back in the 90s I tried to arouse interest in creating a flexible, temporary performance space in the Old Spitalfields Market now, of course, thriving again as a market. And I wanted a Busby Berkeley style performance art piece with hundreds of tap dancers in the eerie nightime emptiness of the Broadgate office block windows opposite. Hard to imagine now given the area’s renaissance.
Richard Rogers Inside Out (BBC1-Imagine) was also inspiring for non-conformists particularly for his tales of how his Lloyds building went from being lampooned to, if not quite loved then certainly caressed by its visitors.
And Rogers’ Heathrow Terminal 5, photos, is officially opened by the Queen this week.
John Virtue’s London - Venice, National Gallery photo at < Marlborough Fine Art offers up a ‘Turner-esque’ London of complex blacks that many will recognise if not applauded by the tourist board. These were a trial run for a project in Venice (also in the show) using only monotypes – painting on a metal plate then pressed onto absorbent paper for only one print. His brushstrokes seem to collide trying to overtake each other in their dark recesses while still retaining their secrets.
Around the corner at the Stephen Friedman Gallery is American Wayne Gonzales’ first solo UK exhibition. Using only one or two colours he takes familiar images from the internet painting them in neo-Seurat fashion but with brushstrokes not pointillism as if on a pixelated screen. The closer you approach the image the less ‘real’ and more abstract it becomes as if watching a crowd from a distance and then becoming a part of it.
Humanity’s darkness is omni-present in Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) written and directed by German Chris Kraus. The light shines from former pianist Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) who’s taught piano in a Luckau women's prison since 1944. Her latest is the young convicted murderer and prodigy, Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung), “I can help you be a better pianist, but not a better person.” There was a chilling French film some years back The Beat that My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coer s‘est arrêté) about the forces of man’s darkness trying to destroy a similarly distraught pianist’s male musical beauty. Chamber theatre of insidious psychological passage. Krauss’ film almost goes one better, though more operatically so, with Annette Focks’ dark ‘Scott Walker’ score and Judith Kaufmann’s (16mm-blown up to-35mm) cinematography using Visconti’s palette but different brushes “the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall” wrote the poet Rilke. “Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.”
Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) opens this week: (Facebook page), my blog review and interview with Sciamma last year.
Birds Eye View - film festival of emerging women filmmakers.
French Film Festival, most of these films haven’t even found a UK distributor. And there’s the annual Australian Film Festival at the Barbican. Pop into the Martian Museum while you’re there as an aperitif.
While we’re out in Oz space, Roadgames (1981) is out on budget DVD with Stacey Keach as the harmonica blowing, poetry spouting, existential truckie driving meat across the Oz desert to a Perth on strike. His pal is a pet dingo “an aristocrat like me” appropriately named Boswell (funny if you know Boswell’s life). Oh, and he reads Hitchcock magazines and the New Yorker. Jamie Lee Curtis is the gamine escaped diplomatic heiress hitchhiker in Richard Franklin’s very clever, accomplished film. This is the era of wonderful, weird films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Mad Max (1979) before tax concessions introduced to rev up the industry meant that every shyster nailed ‘film producer’ on their door and made crap.
Cranach at the Royal Academy caused a recent stir with its poster on the London Underground argued as too sexually alluring - the credits for Desperate Housewives open with an animation of Cranach’s Adam and Eve. Apart from being the court’s (Elector John Frederick) favourite painter, and later mayor and richest man in Wittenburg, he was even their chief decorator (in sort of savvy modern-day TV fame mode). He was no stranger to controversy being both a friend and advocate of the Protestant Martin Luther going so far as to supervise the woodcuts and printing of propaganda pamphlets while still working for Catholic patrons. Apart from the London underground, Cranach (c.1472-1553) himself hasn’t had much press at all over the centuries. So should we still be interested?
The response is a resounding yes going on what this exhibition has to offer, and you’re unlikely to see most of the paintings on one’s travels unless you’re a Cranach geek. What immediately struck me in the first room was the movement in his work, the Stigmatism of St.Francis (1502-3) and the top left putti of the Mystic Marriage of St.Catherine. One reviewer (BBC’s Nightwaves conjectured that the eyes of his figures conveyed an uncertain world in contrast to the certainty of the prevailing Catholicism. What we see, without conjecturing though, is Cranach’s total fascination with the human race. He was more than simply a supremely talented artist (he had a Damien Hirst like studio of talented assistants too). There’s a wonderful tiny watercolour of the Head of a Peasant (1520-25) that seems plein air (outside on the hoof) in its simplicity and instantaneity compared to the craftsmanship and detail of his Luther portrait (1525). The small Hercules and Antaeus (1530) wrestling nude in the last room beside the Adam and Eve and Venuses is very Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Woman in Love and a huge contrast to his stunning ‘blockbuster’ commissions like the Triptych with the Holy Trinity (1509). The greatness of the show is that it begs so many questions about Cranach. Was he a Democrat or a savvy, astute Republican? What was his attitude to women? What was his sexuality? As Bertrand Russell wrote, the answer will always be there. The purpose of philosophy is to help us ask the right questions.
Norman Rosenthal, who is stepping down as Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy talks to Nightwaves.
Behind the Academy in Savile Row at the James Hyman Gallery is Hughie O’Donoghue’s The Geometry of Paths . Even if you hadn’t read the gallery blurb you’d feel these paintings were sucking the viewer into a vortex of mind and memory so magnetic is O’Donoghue’s use of paint. At first they don’t seem revolutionary at all but ever more slowly one is compelled towards the edge. The Yellow Man re-imagines the lost Van Gogh painting of the artist walking along a road. “Van Gogh is a man in a hurry or perhaps a man who knows he is running out of time. Sometimes he makes two paintings in a day. He doesn’t really understand all the theories about modern painting or perhaps he understands them too well in any case he is constantly in fear. Yet the paintings seem to stare this fear down,” writes O’Donoghue in the catalogue.
Overlord DVD is out now with director’s commentary
Hughie O’Donoghue’s exhibition catalogue preface is from Czeslaw Milosz’s 1946 Child of Europe: “The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.” Just released on DVD is one of, if not the most important docu-drama in British filmmaking (perhaps even more so than Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home), Bloody Sunday (2002) written and directed by Paul Greengrass (prior to his United 93 and Bourne Ultimatum). On January 30th 1972, civil rights protesters defied the British Army’s order not to march in Derry resulting in the shooting of 27 people 13 of them killed. “It was our Sharpeville, our Amritzah massacre,” says Ivan Cooper, the parliamentarian who led the march (played by James Nesbitt) and the film’s central character. It’s a mind and gut-wrenching experience watching this film. There are two separate audio commentaries: one with Greengrass and Nesbitt, the second with Don Mullen the 15-year-old eyewitness to the event and author of the book. “It’s uncontested now that all of them who were shot on the day were unarmed, innocent people,” says Mullen who “if I’d been a few years older” would probably have joined the IRA. “They lost all faith in due [legal] process and many made an understandable and rational decision...The way to fight this was to take up arms. I don’t agree with the decision but I understand the decision that many of my peers made at that time.”
Recently released documents between Lord Justice Widgery who headed the initial ‘whitewash’ enquiry and Brit PM Edward Heath show that Heath urged Widgery to remember that “we are also fighting a propaganda war”. “Bloody Sunday handed the initiative to the men of violence on all sides,” notes Mullen. Paul Greengrass is at pains to point out that for the British soldiers (most of the soldiers seen in the film were professional Brit soldiers not actors) it was “another day at the office” and that the real conspiracy occurred after the killings. “War is normality punctured by random violence,” he says, “there was an instinct to cover up from the very bottom to the very top.” None of the soldiers who opened fire were ever disciplined and the Queen later decorated the officers who planned and led the operation. It’s taken 30 years of campaigning to bring about the current Saville Enquiry. Greengrass: “This idea that how do you reconcile conflicts between groups of people who inhabit the same land...you can only do it on the basis of developing shared rights not contested nationalism. That is why the peace process in Northern Ireland is such a [world] inspiration.” Nesbitt: “Paul once said that he hoped Bloody Sunday would be a pebble in the wall of peace. Five years later there is peace and I’d like to think we’re all pebbles on that big and multi-coloured [wall].”
Omagh (2004) is also written by Greengrass but directed by Pete Travis whose Vantage Point is currently on cinema release. This is the Omagh high street car bomb of August 15, 1998 exploding in the wake of the Good Friday agreement. “There’s something very chilly about how ordinary this is,” says Travis on the commentary with Michael Gallagher the father who led the victims’ families’ quest for justice. In April this year their civil action will finally be heard in court. When Optimum’s Peeping Tom DVD was released last year I wrote that it was possibly the most important DVD release for many years. Well, Bloody Sunday and Omagh are unarguably the most important docu-drama DVDs thus issued and required viewing for every human on the planet, not to mention any aliens that might catalogue our species under ‘cult cinema’.
Susan Faludi and her new book The Terror Dream.
My blog review of Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
Chatting with Hughie O’Donoghue at his opening I was still reeling from seeing Garage directed by Lenny Abrahamson, his second film after the successful Adam & Paul. (Trailer) Written by Mark O’Halloran, Abrahamson describes the film as ‘slapstick tragedy’. (French trailer)Pat Shortt, who first came to attention as one of D’Unbelievables physical comedy group, plays the ordinary, solitary bloke Josie doing the daily round of his tiny garage in a tiny Irish town. Slapstick just isn’t the right word to describe the beautiful bloke Josie, though. The films runs to only 80 minutes and has the simplicity and restraint of a late artist’s work resisting the ‘hardship’ of Agnès Varda’s glaneuses (French gatherers of food scraps). O’Donoghue recalled seeing those single colour field canvases of New York artists leaving such a lasting impression on him. But Josie is Cranach’s peasant, always cheerful, always sporting his ‘Australia’ baseball cap with unwitting irony - too quiet to even figure in a larger Cranach canvas, a shadow of an Arthur Miller Willy Loman figure who never meant no harm, no wrong, no incident. A man somewhere subsumed in the canvas’ densities of colour. He is in front of your eyes and yet not. The more you think about Josie the more you weep for a world that could destroy him. “No such thing as us towns anymore.” The town would no doubt view Josie as the dead animal by the side of the road, momentarily thought of, loved and forgotten within a world where nothing proves particularly wise about conventional wisdom and in which the cliché is one’s last remnant of the truth.
A Donmar Warehouse revival of Arthur Miller’s storm-grey play The Man who had all the Luck (Nightwaves discussion)
Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, gripping polemic complete with on-stage swimming pool has just opened at the Royal National Theatre, (Second Sight Major Barbara DVD), My blog review. David Lean co-directed that film and directors Hugh Hudson and Mike Figgis join Alan Parker musing on David Lean's caustic character in BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour (listenable for a week). (The David Lean Foundation funds the Royal Academy schools programme)Hudson and Parker also feature in BBC4’s The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man about the non-establishment new boys giving a ruffing and sprucing to 70s Brit advertising. Remember the Cadbury’s ad with the aliens for their canned Mash potato?
Kneehigh theatre company’s Brief Encounter has overtaken the big picture palace auditorium at the Cineworld Haymarket cinema (Nightwaves, Thurs 14 Feb) (YouTube vid of a 2005 performance of theirs)
And Jeff Goldblum et Kevin Spacey continue sparring like a wicked married couple in David Mamet's play Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic .
A little bit more tomorrow...
Some earthlings are so stupid (sorry, ‘sat nav challenged’) that they cause themselves injuries by bumping into lampposts while text messaging: Lamppost 'cushions' for clumsy texters. What would we do without nannying?
Humans will make contact with aliens within two decades, say astronomers.
The influential and relatively unknown Brit artist John Latham who died recently has a small but wonderful show from his 50’s work, The Spray Gun And The Cosmos, what he called ‘process sculpture’. More than equal to his American counterparts of the period while his widow continues to light up a gallery event like a meteorite
And I really do have to side with our unelected PM Brown in the following: PM praises Proms after minister's attack after his own culture minister Margaret Hodge attacked the annual summer BBC Proms (Royal Albert Hall) for being too elitist. I concede that the ‘Promenaders’ have things a little out of perspective practically starting a riot when someone as ‘popular’ as Michael Ball (of West End musicals) is given a whole evening (27 Aug). But when the Proms does try to broaden its appeal they do it not only in great style but with great musicianship e.g baroque specialist Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s French evening (Prom 3, 15 July) last year mixing dance and South African performers (Buskaid Soweto String project) or, of course, the jazz events and Nitin Sawhney (10 Aug) not forgetting the unforgettable Simon Bolivar youth orchestra from Venezuela (19 Aug). And Claudio Abbado/the Lucerne Fest Orch doing Mahler’s Symphony 3 (22 Aug) – one of the greatest musical experiences one will ever have. £5 to stand and hear the greatest classical musicians in the world sounds bloodlessly democratic to me. The weather’s nice, though, isn’t Ms Hodge: Sunshine winter brightest ever - daffodils in mid-Feb and all that.
Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud’s Apeiron (sample MP3) based on the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander who posited that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things as opposed to the determinate and order. And BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music profiled a symphony by the even now little known (outside contemporary music circles) Henri Dutilleux who created music in revolution as opposed to his rival Pierre Boulez’s revolution in music.
There’ve been ‘Black’ seasons on Brit TV so BBC2 is provocatively airing a White season. It’s a subject that is reasonably still taboo in this country for obvious reasons. But like the machines in the underground perhaps the details still aren’t that obvious. One shopkeeper being interviewed vehemently stressed he had no problem with ‘colour’ only with an immigration policy unsupportable by the country’s current infrastructure and one ultimately to the detriment of its existing citizens. There most certainly are Richter scale tremors in Britain of ‘this is our country now’ from many groups, understandable of course given the repressive ‘colonialist’ policies of almost every major player on the world scene time immemorial. But there’s neither victory nor honour in taking from the ‘haves’ simply because you’ve been a ‘have not’. People assimilate into cultures in their own fashion. When Peter Sellars took the reins of Los Angeles’ hitherto ‘European culture’ International Arts Fest back in the early 90s and invited cultural groups from the Pacific Rim instead, what astounded was the uniqueness of different cultures not their qualities of assimilation and homogeneity. my Times article, another, originally commissioned for the Financial Times
Australian PM Rudd says sorry to Aborigines' stolen generations (YouTube vid), LateNightLive
Mark Lawson Talks to Rabbi Lionel Blue will cheer up the non-conformists, he says on nationalism: “you end up loving your own more and others less”. (BBC Four often repeated and available on downloadable BBC's iPlayer for 5 days).
London Nobody Knows / Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is a DVD of two shorts and with no extras admittedly not great value. But the first from 1967 based on Geoffrey Fletcher’s book, is narrated by James Mason who, though becoming a Hollywood star, was still genuinely interested in the fate and future of English cities. There’s a wonderful 1 hour extra (on Optimum’s Mason set) with Mason exploring the history of Huddersfield (northern England). Interesting how Spitalfields in East London went from prosperity to poverty in the 60s and back to prosperity again nowadays. Back in the 90s I tried to arouse interest in creating a flexible, temporary performance space in the Old Spitalfields Market now, of course, thriving again as a market. And I wanted a Busby Berkeley style performance art piece with hundreds of tap dancers in the eerie nightime emptiness of the Broadgate office block windows opposite. Hard to imagine now given the area’s renaissance.
Richard Rogers Inside Out (BBC1-Imagine) was also inspiring for non-conformists particularly for his tales of how his Lloyds building went from being lampooned to, if not quite loved then certainly caressed by its visitors.
And Rogers’ Heathrow Terminal 5, photos, is officially opened by the Queen this week.
John Virtue’s London - Venice, National Gallery photo at < Marlborough Fine Art offers up a ‘Turner-esque’ London of complex blacks that many will recognise if not applauded by the tourist board. These were a trial run for a project in Venice (also in the show) using only monotypes – painting on a metal plate then pressed onto absorbent paper for only one print. His brushstrokes seem to collide trying to overtake each other in their dark recesses while still retaining their secrets.
Around the corner at the Stephen Friedman Gallery is American Wayne Gonzales’ first solo UK exhibition. Using only one or two colours he takes familiar images from the internet painting them in neo-Seurat fashion but with brushstrokes not pointillism as if on a pixelated screen. The closer you approach the image the less ‘real’ and more abstract it becomes as if watching a crowd from a distance and then becoming a part of it.
Humanity’s darkness is omni-present in Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) written and directed by German Chris Kraus. The light shines from former pianist Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) who’s taught piano in a Luckau women's prison since 1944. Her latest is the young convicted murderer and prodigy, Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung), “I can help you be a better pianist, but not a better person.” There was a chilling French film some years back The Beat that My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coer s‘est arrêté) about the forces of man’s darkness trying to destroy a similarly distraught pianist’s male musical beauty. Chamber theatre of insidious psychological passage. Krauss’ film almost goes one better, though more operatically so, with Annette Focks’ dark ‘Scott Walker’ score and Judith Kaufmann’s (16mm-blown up to-35mm) cinematography using Visconti’s palette but different brushes “the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall” wrote the poet Rilke. “Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.”
Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) opens this week: (Facebook page), my blog review and interview with Sciamma last year.
Birds Eye View - film festival of emerging women filmmakers.
French Film Festival, most of these films haven’t even found a UK distributor. And there’s the annual Australian Film Festival at the Barbican. Pop into the Martian Museum while you’re there as an aperitif.
While we’re out in Oz space, Roadgames (1981) is out on budget DVD with Stacey Keach as the harmonica blowing, poetry spouting, existential truckie driving meat across the Oz desert to a Perth on strike. His pal is a pet dingo “an aristocrat like me” appropriately named Boswell (funny if you know Boswell’s life). Oh, and he reads Hitchcock magazines and the New Yorker. Jamie Lee Curtis is the gamine escaped diplomatic heiress hitchhiker in Richard Franklin’s very clever, accomplished film. This is the era of wonderful, weird films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Mad Max (1979) before tax concessions introduced to rev up the industry meant that every shyster nailed ‘film producer’ on their door and made crap.
Cranach at the Royal Academy caused a recent stir with its poster on the London Underground argued as too sexually alluring - the credits for Desperate Housewives open with an animation of Cranach’s Adam and Eve. Apart from being the court’s (Elector John Frederick) favourite painter, and later mayor and richest man in Wittenburg, he was even their chief decorator (in sort of savvy modern-day TV fame mode). He was no stranger to controversy being both a friend and advocate of the Protestant Martin Luther going so far as to supervise the woodcuts and printing of propaganda pamphlets while still working for Catholic patrons. Apart from the London underground, Cranach (c.1472-1553) himself hasn’t had much press at all over the centuries. So should we still be interested?
The response is a resounding yes going on what this exhibition has to offer, and you’re unlikely to see most of the paintings on one’s travels unless you’re a Cranach geek. What immediately struck me in the first room was the movement in his work, the Stigmatism of St.Francis (1502-3) and the top left putti of the Mystic Marriage of St.Catherine. One reviewer (BBC’s Nightwaves conjectured that the eyes of his figures conveyed an uncertain world in contrast to the certainty of the prevailing Catholicism. What we see, without conjecturing though, is Cranach’s total fascination with the human race. He was more than simply a supremely talented artist (he had a Damien Hirst like studio of talented assistants too). There’s a wonderful tiny watercolour of the Head of a Peasant (1520-25) that seems plein air (outside on the hoof) in its simplicity and instantaneity compared to the craftsmanship and detail of his Luther portrait (1525). The small Hercules and Antaeus (1530) wrestling nude in the last room beside the Adam and Eve and Venuses is very Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Woman in Love and a huge contrast to his stunning ‘blockbuster’ commissions like the Triptych with the Holy Trinity (1509). The greatness of the show is that it begs so many questions about Cranach. Was he a Democrat or a savvy, astute Republican? What was his attitude to women? What was his sexuality? As Bertrand Russell wrote, the answer will always be there. The purpose of philosophy is to help us ask the right questions.
Norman Rosenthal, who is stepping down as Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy talks to Nightwaves.
Behind the Academy in Savile Row at the James Hyman Gallery is Hughie O’Donoghue’s The Geometry of Paths . Even if you hadn’t read the gallery blurb you’d feel these paintings were sucking the viewer into a vortex of mind and memory so magnetic is O’Donoghue’s use of paint. At first they don’t seem revolutionary at all but ever more slowly one is compelled towards the edge. The Yellow Man re-imagines the lost Van Gogh painting of the artist walking along a road. “Van Gogh is a man in a hurry or perhaps a man who knows he is running out of time. Sometimes he makes two paintings in a day. He doesn’t really understand all the theories about modern painting or perhaps he understands them too well in any case he is constantly in fear. Yet the paintings seem to stare this fear down,” writes O’Donoghue in the catalogue.
Overlord DVD is out now with director’s commentary
Hughie O’Donoghue’s exhibition catalogue preface is from Czeslaw Milosz’s 1946 Child of Europe: “The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.” Just released on DVD is one of, if not the most important docu-drama in British filmmaking (perhaps even more so than Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home), Bloody Sunday (2002) written and directed by Paul Greengrass (prior to his United 93 and Bourne Ultimatum). On January 30th 1972, civil rights protesters defied the British Army’s order not to march in Derry resulting in the shooting of 27 people 13 of them killed. “It was our Sharpeville, our Amritzah massacre,” says Ivan Cooper, the parliamentarian who led the march (played by James Nesbitt) and the film’s central character. It’s a mind and gut-wrenching experience watching this film. There are two separate audio commentaries: one with Greengrass and Nesbitt, the second with Don Mullen the 15-year-old eyewitness to the event and author of the book. “It’s uncontested now that all of them who were shot on the day were unarmed, innocent people,” says Mullen who “if I’d been a few years older” would probably have joined the IRA. “They lost all faith in due [legal] process and many made an understandable and rational decision...The way to fight this was to take up arms. I don’t agree with the decision but I understand the decision that many of my peers made at that time.”
Recently released documents between Lord Justice Widgery who headed the initial ‘whitewash’ enquiry and Brit PM Edward Heath show that Heath urged Widgery to remember that “we are also fighting a propaganda war”. “Bloody Sunday handed the initiative to the men of violence on all sides,” notes Mullen. Paul Greengrass is at pains to point out that for the British soldiers (most of the soldiers seen in the film were professional Brit soldiers not actors) it was “another day at the office” and that the real conspiracy occurred after the killings. “War is normality punctured by random violence,” he says, “there was an instinct to cover up from the very bottom to the very top.” None of the soldiers who opened fire were ever disciplined and the Queen later decorated the officers who planned and led the operation. It’s taken 30 years of campaigning to bring about the current Saville Enquiry. Greengrass: “This idea that how do you reconcile conflicts between groups of people who inhabit the same land...you can only do it on the basis of developing shared rights not contested nationalism. That is why the peace process in Northern Ireland is such a [world] inspiration.” Nesbitt: “Paul once said that he hoped Bloody Sunday would be a pebble in the wall of peace. Five years later there is peace and I’d like to think we’re all pebbles on that big and multi-coloured [wall].”
Omagh (2004) is also written by Greengrass but directed by Pete Travis whose Vantage Point is currently on cinema release. This is the Omagh high street car bomb of August 15, 1998 exploding in the wake of the Good Friday agreement. “There’s something very chilly about how ordinary this is,” says Travis on the commentary with Michael Gallagher the father who led the victims’ families’ quest for justice. In April this year their civil action will finally be heard in court. When Optimum’s Peeping Tom DVD was released last year I wrote that it was possibly the most important DVD release for many years. Well, Bloody Sunday and Omagh are unarguably the most important docu-drama DVDs thus issued and required viewing for every human on the planet, not to mention any aliens that might catalogue our species under ‘cult cinema’.
Susan Faludi and her new book The Terror Dream.
My blog review of Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
Chatting with Hughie O’Donoghue at his opening I was still reeling from seeing Garage directed by Lenny Abrahamson, his second film after the successful Adam & Paul. (Trailer) Written by Mark O’Halloran, Abrahamson describes the film as ‘slapstick tragedy’. (French trailer)Pat Shortt, who first came to attention as one of D’Unbelievables physical comedy group, plays the ordinary, solitary bloke Josie doing the daily round of his tiny garage in a tiny Irish town. Slapstick just isn’t the right word to describe the beautiful bloke Josie, though. The films runs to only 80 minutes and has the simplicity and restraint of a late artist’s work resisting the ‘hardship’ of Agnès Varda’s glaneuses (French gatherers of food scraps). O’Donoghue recalled seeing those single colour field canvases of New York artists leaving such a lasting impression on him. But Josie is Cranach’s peasant, always cheerful, always sporting his ‘Australia’ baseball cap with unwitting irony - too quiet to even figure in a larger Cranach canvas, a shadow of an Arthur Miller Willy Loman figure who never meant no harm, no wrong, no incident. A man somewhere subsumed in the canvas’ densities of colour. He is in front of your eyes and yet not. The more you think about Josie the more you weep for a world that could destroy him. “No such thing as us towns anymore.” The town would no doubt view Josie as the dead animal by the side of the road, momentarily thought of, loved and forgotten within a world where nothing proves particularly wise about conventional wisdom and in which the cliché is one’s last remnant of the truth.
A Donmar Warehouse revival of Arthur Miller’s storm-grey play The Man who had all the Luck (Nightwaves discussion)
Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, gripping polemic complete with on-stage swimming pool has just opened at the Royal National Theatre, (Second Sight Major Barbara DVD), My blog review. David Lean co-directed that film and directors Hugh Hudson and Mike Figgis join Alan Parker musing on David Lean's caustic character in BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour (listenable for a week). (The David Lean Foundation funds the Royal Academy schools programme)Hudson and Parker also feature in BBC4’s The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man about the non-establishment new boys giving a ruffing and sprucing to 70s Brit advertising. Remember the Cadbury’s ad with the aliens for their canned Mash potato?
Kneehigh theatre company’s Brief Encounter has overtaken the big picture palace auditorium at the Cineworld Haymarket cinema (Nightwaves, Thurs 14 Feb) (YouTube vid of a 2005 performance of theirs)
And Jeff Goldblum et Kevin Spacey continue sparring like a wicked married couple in David Mamet's play Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic .
A little bit more tomorrow...
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