Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:

There was something my better self couldn't suppress. It's not a question of telling the truth or a lie ... I was writing for myself. Poetry is its own answer, its own end- Peter Porter

It's tricky to admit wanting to retreat from the world. People will assume that you don't care, aren't up to coping with it all etc. etc. But isn't what one really longs to escape the indifference exhibited by many fellow inhabitants? Indifferent to those who don't quite dovetail into life's machine of work and happiness. Indifference from those for whom an English goal keeper fumbling a World Cup ball has more tragic consequences than fumbled observational skills of personal and family interaction. One of the commentaries on Eureka's recent DVD/Blu-ray must-have 'archival' release of Fritz Lang's M (1931) observes that "the you at the end of the film is a larger social unit - that is us and the audience." Writer Friedrich Kittler re-enforces this: in a city where "things are becoming streamlined and rational, someone whose behaviour doesn't fit into that, becomes all the more deviant and becomes more and more a source of irritation." Fritz Lang concurs: "I don't want to have an artistic photography...[but] a newsreel photography because I think every picture that depicts people today, or out of the C15 [for example], should be a kind of a documentary of its time. Only then, in my opinion, do you get a quality of truth into the picture... In a certain way Fury, M and my so-called crime pictures are also a documentaries." As another commentator notes "The big irony was...that Hitchcock [who was very influenced by early German cinema] was referred to as the English Fritz Lang and later on in Fritz Lang's career he was referred to as the German Alfred Hitchcock." Amongst many other fascinating technical information about Lang's early sound film - (one-third doesn't have sound due to its expense at the time, and what sound there is oftentimes leads the image without ever using music) - we learn that though Lang didn't do acting cameos in his films as did Hitchcock, the close-up on hands were always his own.
Frau im Mond and Dr.Mabuse have also been released by Eureka. And Metropolis that includes 25min of footage previously thought lost to the world is out Sept 10.

Off the busy Euston Road in London, what seems the impossible curatorial goal of mounting an exhibition about Skin, triumphs at the Welcome Institute (more later in this blog). While quite appositely, radiologist Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) mammograms the skin in the opening of Nicole Holofcener's comedy/drama Please Give - a movie all about people who eventually see that the mystery of themselves might just lie in their surfaces (my Oscar Wilde misquote). Catherine Keener's Kate easily sees money to be made in buying up 50's furniture from deceased New Yorker's estates and flogging it as 'retro', but in her endearing and infuriating way, can't spot the difference between offering food to a homeless person and the black man she embarrasses whose only reason to be waiting outside a restaurant is for a table. Rebecca is a grand-child of Andra - the elderly next door neighbour whose apartment Kate has bought to expand into after her death. Andra's other sibling is beautician/masseuse Mary (Amanda Peet) who not only sorts out the spots of Kate's teenager Abby (talented newcomer Sarah Steele) but has an unlikely affair with Kate's husband Alex (Oliver Platt). Please Give is by no means revelatory but it certainly proves to be one of the most intelligent American comedy exports we've had in a long while. Released by Sony Picture Classics huge unsung credit due to producer Anthony Bregman's company Likely Story.

It's a shame that Ajami (released Stateside in Feb by Kino) can't make us laugh in spite of its violent serious subject matter. The middle-class pre-occupations of Please Give seem a world away from the gritty realism of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. But the characters in this Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Language film are just as real - as if straight out of a TV episode of The Wire. Directors Scandar Copti (an Arab Israeli) and Yaron Shani (an Israeli Jew) use non-professional actors and cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov (My Father, My Lord) to create as far as possible unrelenting docu-realism. Ajami's multi-strand characters are first and foremost ordinary people and political props a distant second. Reading the sub-titles (if not fluent in Hebrew or Arabic) can be quite demanding for an audience but at no point lessens the impact that this senselessness of violence has on us. What's most disturbing is the reminder of how everyday human battles are so easily co-opted for political means. Yet also how similiar the 'daily round' of family is on both sides: "Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other," said Shani. The film would be a good double-bill with the recent Lebanon - the war reduced to the inside of a tank and the minds of its soldiers, much like Polish director Andrzej Wadja's distillation in Kanal (1956). An interesting comparison too with video artist Shirin Neshat's recently released first feature Women Without Men and whether her political contextualising of the 1953 British backed Iranian coup works better than the focus on individuals in the source novel.
Vertigo UK's trailer for Ajami.

Akira Kurasawa's classic Rashomon (1951) asking where the truth lies is re-released as part of the BFI's director retrospective. And worth visiting this year's Cannes Fest winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Phantoms of Nabua installation in the BFI gallery and reading about his spooky project.

Former Spanish commercials director Gabe Ibanez in his first feature Hierro delves into the mind of a mother who thinks her 5 year-old's been kidnapped. Stunning widescreen lensing by Alejandro Martinez but the film always seems to telegraph us in advance that we should be scared. So we never are.

Directed by Marcus Dunstan with a screenplay co-written with Patrick Melton,The Collector, on the other hand, is one of those gory horror films you sorta wished hadn't watched because certain elements just keep recurring in your brain. But far better to have your enemies ingeniously dispatched silently in your imagination than the alternative. Since winning HBO's Project Greenlight competition in 2004 with their screenplay Faust, these filmmakers have penned the later/latest Saw torture/horrors and worked uncredited on some other well-known ones in the genre. They admit to being fans of the Italian Giallo horror films (Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Brava) in which "the camera gets to do all the talking- it's not about cutting or things that normally break up the rhythm of what could normally be a suspenseful moment," says Dunstan. There's no psychology in The Collector just pure gore, stunning lighting/camerawork and definitely no laughs.

The Collector is all about skin. It's leather hooded torturer utilises everyday objects that pierce and cut his victim's bodily surfaces. The Welcome Institute rarely takes the obvious route to its gallery subjects and 3 weeks ago celebrated its 1 millionth visitor. Any one of the thematic strands of their latest exhibition Skin could have (and has in other galleries) entire shows of their own. One achievement of Skin is that you never feel overloaded by the information presented rather it engenders a curiosity to further explore. Historical works of art inhabit the same space as the work of contemporary artists and scientists. The ceramic apothecary jars of Tamsin van Essen appear decorative until closer inspection reveal they model stigmatised skin ailments- syphilis, acne and psoriasis. Brian Dettmer presents a book 'autopsied' into a sculpture (2002) while a specially commissioned work from Rhian Solomon combines surgical processes with the techniques of 'suturing' textiles. On loan from the Hygiene Museum are modelled hands scared with their 'owner' occupations. The front of another display case pairs the Science Museum's C19 tattooed skin collected by osteologist and anatomist La Vallete from soldiers and prisoners, while the back is devoted to Maori tattoos-essential to the exhibition given the word's derivation of 'striking' the skin. "There is no word for art in the Maori language," stressed George Nuku at the show's opening, his face entirely tattooed, "because everything is the art of something...[The art] had almost died out by the 1980's in New Zealand. And now it's almost impossible to find a job or accomodation if you are facially tattooed. They say I'm craft not art...Cutting the skin creates memory. It's about re-creating a memory of the female birth on your face. Everything [in one's life] is recorded on the body. And lots more Maori women are being tattooed now as it reinforces the miracle of birth."

Rick Famuyiwa's Our Family Wedding bravely attempts a comic broach to the subject of Latino/Black ethnic rivalry in the States - Lucia (America Ferrera) /Marcus (Lance Gross). But it's a cake whose oven would have to swim the Atlantic to reach the dinner table. Peter Sellers' elephant in The Party flashes through our mind as a goat on viagra in the bathroom humps a wedding guest. There was a recipe here someplace for America Ferrara's talented ingredients until someone let the pet dog gnaw it to bits.

Writer-director Nicholas Stoller's Get Him to the Greek is an infinitly more fun experience. "We don't lie to people, we just believe invalid truths," says company A&R man Sergio Roman (Sean "P. Diddy" Combs). Aaron Green (Jonah Hill) is the record company talent wrangler with 72 hours to get his rock star intact, clean and sober to his televised gig at LA's Greek Theatre. One would like to say zoo keeper but the comparison to Russell Brand's druggie Brit rocker Aldous Snow (last seen in Stoller's 2008 Forgetting Sarah Marshall) could most probably have the animals suing for defamation. Jason Segal's script for Sarah Marshall, from memory, was tauter than Stoller's with more of a lightness of comic rapier. Stoller is more from the Judd Apatow school of gross out comedy wearing a moral heart on its sleeve. But as a director he grounds Get Him to the Greek with that much maligned and neglected quality - relationship. "Life is full of superficial, surface encounters," says Aldous, grasping for a philosphical truth in his life that he has numbed with celebrity life-style and one that we'd wish he'd exhume into a rock ballad.

Much of Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely (out on ICA DVD) co-written with his brother Avi, is located on a remote commune in Scotland "a place where everyone is famous and no one goes". Fresh from an old people's home gig in Paris, Michael Jackson 'lookalike' (Diego Luna) is persuaded by Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) to retreat to the isle with her 'family' who include the Pope (James Fox) his bed-mate the Queen (Anita Pallenberg) and Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant). Michael's philosophy is to slow down life so that "we can live forever". "Does anything ever really change?" asks Marilyn? Some will find Korine's film somewhat mawkish, but at its many bests it casts a strange, elegiac spell and is certainly Korine's most accessible film thus far for a general audience.

His Trash Humpers just released in UK cinemas (Cinema Village, New York in May) goes to the other extreme of cinema perversity looking like "a VHS tape found in a ditch". Many audiences will find it just plain disgusting (similarly his Gummo) as two latex-masked crazies trash the urban alleyways of Nashville singing rhymes such as "three little devils jumped over the wall, chopped off their heads, and murdered them all.". As in all Korine's work there's a laser energy here firing in all directions but seemingly aimed at the light bulbs, the moths around the flame, the neon, the glitter: stealing the fire for want of a darkness, the only way to experience any eternal light.

"If you had just one word to give away, who would you give it to?" asks Vincent Gallo's Tetro of his lover Miranda (Maribel Verdú, Pan's Labyrinth). Tetro is Francis Ford Coppola's first original screenplay since The Conversation (1974) - "nothing in it happened, but it's all true" said the director last year at the Cannes Film Festival. Shot in glorious B/W (as was his Rumble Fish in 1983); this film is lensed in HD (Hi-def) video using colour flashbacks (Mihai Malaimare Jr. cinematographer, image/sound editor maestro Walter Murch). In the UK we've had to wait a year since its US release but small independent distributor Soda Pictures had the belief - even advertising with expensive poster ads on the London underground. Like the 'operatic' films of Italian director Visconti who began his career in the theatre directing American classics of family life from Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, Coppola's film (and arguably his oeuvre) is also 'an opera': private passions played out within a courtyard of larger events. And it's the very personal nature of Tetro that makes this film both frustrating and sublimely lyrical: as if the conductor has given you something in the music that only you alone have heard but no one would believe you. Coppola's tempi are more akin to the oft eccentric (but thrilling and achingly beautiful) ones of German maestro Furtwängler rather than the rigour of Arturo Toscanini. And with more than a dash of Leonard Bernstein's passionate promulgation of music as a life enhancing art for everyone. "He's like a genius but without a lot of accomplishments," is how Miranda describes Tetro (Vincent Gallo) a writer adored by his 17-year-old younger brother Bennie who arrives off a boat and out of the blue into Buenos Aires' La bohème La Boca district. Alden Ehrenreich could so easily have been just another clean cut young actor but his Bennie is awash with subtle shades of emotion. And he is believably young enough to be malleable without ever breaking.

Their eminent New York conductor father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is at the heart of Coppola's narrative as is the conceit of an orchestra's body controlled by a conductor and the frailty of the human corpus. In Coppola's film his protagonists' bodies are constantly battered by external 'marionette' forces. And Tetro is a fan of Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film Tales of Hoffmann with its extraordinary surrealism of a doll torn apart limb by limb. For Tetro, 'love' in his family has always been "a quick stab in the heart". In homage, Coppola creates a ballet too. The heroine of Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes has the physical strength to dance her way to the top, but her emotional dependence plummets her to death. Here is what Coppola meant when he said of his film that "nothing in it happened, but it's all true". Coppola's story is true for all of us, but it never was. Nor is forever after. Just as the cinema never lies but always does. The eagle-eared may also spot in Osvaldo Golijov's score a snippet from the finale of Rossini's William Tell and a dash of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

French director Alain Resnais also always makes the film he wants to rather than the one an audience may wish for. Wild Grass means literally in French les herbes folles - a 'crazy' plant that grows in a place where it ought to have no hope of surviving e.g. a crack in a wall, "correspond [ing] to these characters who follow totally unreasonable impulses" according to Resnais. It's a film by ALAIN RESNAIS is really all that needs to be said. Whether one loves or loathes such an artistic enterprise will always be a matter of personal taste. The fence to sit on never existed in the first place.

For years Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow (1956) lay forgotten - chronologically between the acknowledged masterpieces All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. There wasn't even an extant trailer but the Eureka DVD has a 'working copy' as an extra as well as great interview footage of Sirk, their usual fab booklet, plus a PDF of the continuity script. Shot with stunning subtlety in B/W by Russell Metty (Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), the story is also so stunningly simple and morally duplex that it is almost Brechtian. Happily married/family suburban man Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray))bumps into old flame of youth Norma Miller (Barbara Stanwyck). What follows isn't 'film noir' psychological narrative manipulation, just plain happenstance of life albeit chaperoned by a Hollywood score. Some reviewers have thought that MacMurray's character is unhappy. Yet what is most fascinating is that he doesn't think that of himself for the first half of the movie. Even after spending a glorious pool-side weekend with Norma when a business meeting is cancelled, he returns to a loving wife and family. Nor is Norma in any way manipulative and has no intention of breaking up the family unit - even though she may secretly wish she had one of her own. Sirk's film reminds one of Peter Weir's (Andrew Niccol's script) The Truman Show - for the first time in his life MacMurray's character notices that he has a life. A choice. He has never realised before that happiness will only ever be relative. His young daughter is a dancer and it's her sprained ankle that cancels MacMurray's trip away with his wife and is the plot's catalyst. Should life have told Clifford Groves this secret about happiness? Will he be better able to cope when life deals him its real first blow?
Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die is also a must-see DVD from Eureka.

Villa Amelia is another frustrating film. Oh dear, we feel initially: very well done French angst. Though verily it could never be echt angst because it ain't German. Happenstance hits Ann (Isabelle Huppert) a renowned French pianist when childhood friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade) enters the fray with her lover/partner Thomas (Xavier Beauvois). Ann burns and discards her 'skin' -music, CD's, every material 'professional' possession and an infuriating naivety ensues with this film. Are we captivated because it's 'La' Huppert or the film? What intrigues, though, is Ann's longing for anonymity without anonymity. Her journey resolves upon a cliff top 'outhouse' that is exotic to an audience with its unobstructed 'fantasy' vistas of the sea, but second nature normality to its inhabitants. Without the realisation of what 'fame' really is, could Ann have ever reached that epiphany? Or is it, indeed, still somewhat of a fantasy for her? Whether such thoughts crept into the mind of director Benoît Jacquot’s champion Bertrand Tavernier we don't know. But at the end of the day, we feel the same pain with our secret wishes.
The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants)is out on DVD

Craneway Event (just closed at the Frith Gallery) is Tacita Dean's second film featuring the late, great choreographer Merce Cunningham. Shot in an old Ford factory in Richmond (outside San Francisco), it documents a rehearsal for John Cage's 4'33" from 2008 when Cunningham was 89. Lensed in 16mm anamorphic colour widescreen the image has a distant syrupy quality with very muffled, dampened optical sound. Yet the longer you watch, the more transcendental it all becomes. Are we interested because the quayside corner warehouse space with ship masts floating by is just such a beautiful space? Is it that we know Cunningham was one of the world's greatest choreographers so we watch in awe? Whatever the reasons, after sitting through its 108 minutes we're in a totally different zone to the one we were in at the start.
Bringing experimental film back into mainstream cinema


Some photos of London Festival of Architecture (June 19-July 4) on this site.

The Easiest Room in Hell

At the top of the stairs is a room
one may speak of only in parables

It is the childhood attic,
the place to go when love has worn away,
the origin of the smell of self.

We came here on a clandesdine visit
and in the full fire of indifference.

We sorted out books and let the children
sleep here away from creatures.

From its windows, ruled by willows,
the flatlands of childhood stretched
to the watermeadows.

It was the site of a massacre,
of the running down of the body
to less even than the soul,
the tribe's revenge on everything.

It was the heart of England
where the ballerinas were on points
and locums laughed through every evening.

Once it held all the games
Inconsequences, Misalliance, Frustration.
even Mendacity, Adultery and Manic Depression.

But that was just its alibi,
all along it was home,
a home away from home.
Having such a sanctary
we who parted here
will be reunited here.

You asked in an uncharacteristic note,
'Dwell I but in the suburbs
of your good pleasure?'

I replied, 'To us has been allowed
the easiest room in hell.'

Once it belonged to you,
now it is only mine.
...........Peter Porter (1929-2010)

artist AVIGDOR ARIKHA is dead

Romanian-born artist Avigdor Arikha died at his home in Paris on Thursday aged 81. His paintings and drawings of the every day so affected playwright Samuel Beckett that the two struck up a life long friendship. But few outside the cognoscenti art world knew his name. Meeting him at the 2006 London opening of his Recent Work at Marlborough Fine Art, his gaze was coruscating and he didn't suffer small-talk fools gladly. In fact one interview (Haaretz) pointed out that "Arikha insisted on proper etiquette, the correct titles, the precise words. He told me about what he considered a formative moment: the day Samuel Beckett said they could address one another in the informal second person singular, tu, rather than using the formal plural." Arikha's world was an abstracted parallel universe in replica that caused the objects he drew or painted to quietly pulsate with a new everlasting life. But never pretentiously so and with a Beckettian absurdity of such a new lease of life. In the same Haaretz piece the interviewer Lisa Peretz recounts: "I asked how he decides exactly which part of the person to include in the composition and which to leave out. "It's like laundry, you have to decide where to hang it from." She received a postcard. "On one side was a drawing Arikha made in 1990, of a tiny silver teaspoon on white cloth. His close friend Samuel Beckett received it at birth. When Arikha's daughter Alba was born, Beckett, her godfather, gave it to her. It took Arikha a year to come to terms with Beckett's death and finally he immortalized him with this picture."
Phaidon's monograph
In 2006, the artist donated 100 works to the British Museum - Avidgor Arikha From Life-Drawings and Prints.

Flaming desire

Perhaps the Olympic torch had other uses! This week's closure of an underground station due to staff burning their toast was- what can one say, very, very British. A Greek by the name of Paximos may have invented toast when he realized that toasted bread lasted longer while traveling. He was a Hellenistic author of books on Boetica, farming, sexual positions, dyeing, and cookery. And Andrew Dalby (Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece) cites Claudius Galen as first using the word Paximadia in his Handy Remedies. So old Paximos (or maybe he was a sprightly Olympic athlete as well) inspired a biscuit. Maybe one should set up an interactive new underground station called Burnt Toast to highlight the challenges faced by London's transport system.

There hasn't been much of an amazing bunch of film releases the last month or so but Greek film Dogtooth is the closest anyone's come recently to Pier Paolo Pasolini's brutal, comic, sadistic view of the world. Far more acutely so than even Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime. Low budget Crying with Laughter (great HD camera work) was somewhat of a quiet gem at last year's Raindance Film Fest. The final pay-off doesn't quiet reap rewards for the viewer but with performances and production values such as exhibited here, it definitely flies the Scottish flag for the future of Brit film. Next week's much talked about release (London Film Fest last year, Tornoto, and this week at Tribeca) The Disappearance of Alice Creed is the first big splash for new UK distributor Cinema NX. Writer/directer J Blakeson offers up fairly routine hostage thriller fare (in comparison say to the Wachowski brothers' Bound) but it's all in a very classy tin that is certain to get Blakeson's calls returned in Hollywood.

For another closed world one could try No Greater Love Michael Whyte's doco on the Carmelite monastery of the Most Holy Trinity in Notting Hill (founded in 1878). Same distributor Soda Pictures release this week.La Danse looking at the lives of the Paris Opera Ballet. American doco filmmaker and chronicler of the world Frederick Wiseman (given a MoMA retrospective this year in New York) chooses to film life without music, without voice over while editing as little as possible. But perhaps even more fascinating was his 1995 Ballet profiling American Ballet Theatre and accompanying them on their Greek tour. Agnes de Mille choreographs her final piece The Other from a wheelchair and there's a hilarious scene with Jane Hermann (co-director of the company) screaming expletives down the the phone at a Metropolitan Opera House bureaucrat for programming the Kirov right after them ruining A.B.T. sales.

pretender of flesh

A year ago in a Lakeview Terrace DVD review I wrote that:
It’s not that the American dream is inherently evil or self-destructive just that the people striving inside it can often be rather lacking, wounded, and suspect. “Can’t we all get along and the movie says: barely,” [director Neil] LaBute. And who else but Michael Moore is better than rounding up the usual suspects. His latest Capitalism: A Love Story has more of his trademark arresting stunts e.g. wrapping police crime scene tape around Wall Street abodes of financial baddies or thrusting swag bags at bank security staff demanding cash back for the American people. As ever, regardless of what one may think of his methods, Moore always gets to the heart of the matter with examples of outrageous and grievous assaults on the freedom of the people. A reform school for teenagers is privatised and the judiciary sentencing young offenders is given kick backs to swell the numbers and hence profits. Companies take life assurance policies out on "dead peasants" (employees) and in the event families of the deceased receive nothing. And airline pilots and flight crew are forced by financial hardship to work a second job. Moore is asked in the film's press release, "What do you hope audiences will take away from this film?" and he replies "Popcorn and pitchforks."
A doco Oscar nominee this weekend, Burma VJ is out on Dogwoof DVD.
And believe it or not, Neil LaBute goes PlayStation with Heavy Rain (The Times, The Independent)

Criticise Moore as much as you want but what those films do have is an old-fashioned heart. As for London's latest releases? Well, first time director Tom Ford's A Single Man towers above them all. (In his BAFTA acceptance speech last week the rarely awarded actor Colin Firth joked that if a man hadn't come to fix his fridge and interrupt his email reply to this unknown 'Tom Ford' quantity things would have been very different). And as with people, one can forgive a film's other shortfalls for that one basic element of heart (notably absent in thankfully only one or two London film critics). [Brit] Tom Vaughan's direction or use of his cinematographer (irritating soft lensing) isn't that exciting in Extraordinary Measures nor is the script of Robert Nelson Jacobs but this true story of a doctor (Harrison Ford) whose obsession leads to a cure for the rare genetic Pompe disease is nonetheless affecting. Not solely the story but Ford's film presence gives the character weight and believability. The minute he sets face on screen you're curious. Not of Harrison Ford the actor and his traits but of a rather dull but incredibly determined and sincere man of medicine Dr. Stonehill (the real life Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen thence Geeta Anand's book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million-and Bucked the Medical Establishment-in a Quest to Save His Children). "You know how shitty my funding is?" asks Dr. Stonehill. We can all relate to that even if the film doesn't convince us that enzymes have 'bling'.

Everybody's Fine is another case in point. Everything's never fine in life but some of us do the best we can and alas many the worst. Based on Italian director Giuseppe (Cinema Paradiso) Tornatore's Stanno Tutti Bene (1990), Brit director (and scriptwriter) Kirk Jones gets on with allowing Robert de Niro to do his job of inhabiting a father's hopes for his grown-up family of four. A tale so simple, familiar and so universal but De Niro's skill is in making us believe it's our own family there on screen. Formulaic in many places, the heart wrenching moments in this film are so convincing that they almost make redundant Dario Marianelli's (as always) fine score and Sir Paul McCartney's original song. Henry Braham gives understated but acutely aware cinematography as does editor Andrew Mondshein.
Rahmin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo out on Axiom' s new World Cinema Limited DVD label - an output deal to exclusively sell and distribute all of Axiom's DVD titles in the UK and Ireland.

1234 is first of the New British Cinema Quarterly initiative that will pick a new film from the UK's major festivals. My blog mention from the 2008 London Film Festival:
Nothing new in this aspiring 'band makes good pic' but it feels fresh because Borg has allowed a natural mountain stream of talent to gently flow: “a film for people who still dream it might happen, even if they don’t really know what ‘it’ might be.” Director Giles Borg writes in the press notes for this week's release that he was "bored of seeing films in which everyone in the band was some kind of drug taking monster, we wanted to show the music world we were more used to, where the guitarist is more likely to stay in and read a book than go out on the town, a more literary self aware rock world, where everyone in the band has seen Spinal Tap and knows the pitfalls but isn't really interested in them. I'm sure there are plenty of drug-addicted drummers out there, but I don't know them and so wanted to steer clear of that cliched view...This is a British film and British people are notoriously bad at expressing their feelings. Coupled with the slightly geeky slacker world and it's a situation for silences and the unspoken. I wanted characters who could express themselves in their music but found it much harder to express how they really feel face to face."
The very best that can be said of Freestyle is that it has youthful energy and was released multi-platform in cinemas, Video on Demand and electronic sell-through (Sky Box Office, iTunes, FilmFlex and LOVEFiLM) and concurrently on DVD.

She, A Chinese is the odyssey of a young provincial Chinese girl whose poster of Big Ben becomes a reality when her 'hit man' boyfriend's loot is suddenly hers. Not a revelatory film but one whose honesty is still affecting on a second viewing.
Actress Samantha Morton's impressively shot directorial debut The Unloved has its final screening at the ICA and won't disappoint on DVD. Would they really be watching a B/W subtitled foreign film in a youth care home though? Morton almost convinces us that they well might.
Birds Eye View Film Festival

Art Digest magazine ran an article, Gorky: Was He Tops or Second Rate? and Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern does a good job deliberating on that question. Whatever other criticisms may be levelled at him he certainly knew how to paint and more so than just a copyist of other painters' styles and re-inventor of his own work. Artist Cy Twombly: "Gorky would copy a drawing into a painting," something particularly obvious in the re-workings of his pastel into oil (the Betrothals of Room 11). The round, voluminous shapes of his early work and inner swirls of Khorkom (1934-6) grew into canvases of quietly heaving colour - an ever ghostly abstract of his family's struggles in the 1915 Russian Armenian pogroms and of course his mother's death through starvation 4 years later.

New to many will be the rarely seen exquisite painterly films of Georgian/Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov who receives a BFI retrospective and many other events. Is Mat Collishaw's gallery installation a fitting tribute?
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

The Real Van Gogh the Artist and his Letters (Royal Academy of Arts) is being sold on the fascinating 40 or so letters (recently collated and published by Thames and Hudson). But it's the paintings (many from private collections) and the vibrant little drawings illustrating them that still knock one sideways. Moreover, the myth of self-taught Van Gogh as mad creative genius is somewhat debunked as the exhibition points out he worked mostly in his long periods of lucidity rather than the last 2 years of his mental illness. Often loosing their vitality through reproduction, reel in movement strokes of background colour Vase of Cornflowers (1886) or the one from 1890. "The dark patch in sun drenched landscape" is how he described his 1889
Saint-Rémy Cypresses in Letter 783 - those swirls surging in an entire Mahlerian world of hope and despair.
Former Labour Party leader Michael Foot died yesterday

Up for an Oscar this weekend in Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges' hard drinkin' country music gravellin' Bad Blake oughtn't to be attractive to anyone. Yet his lyrical sincerity continues uniting a crowded bar and earning everlasting respect from his more X-Factorish protege Tommy Sweet (Ryan Bingham) - who even tells an autograph hunter that it's Bad's moniker he should be after rather than his. Cue a bewildered, dismissive look from the fan. On paper, the story of single mum journo Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) falling for this pot bellied fiery-breathed man twice her age is more than a little cringey. But the acting chemistry between Bridges and Gyllenhaal creates a completely different dynamic. Jean beds and befriends Bad not 'cause second-best is better than nothing in her life but because [in Harlan Howard's lyrics] "country music is three chords and the truth" and whatever Bad's shortcomings he still has more of a soul than other male hicks. She wants her son to grow up at least with that. One of the many unlaboured truths in this fine film is when Bad parks her young son Buddy (Jack Nation) on a bar stool after a great day out and the next minute he disappears. No apparent reason makes the child's entire history a subtext for us.

For those who've never experienced 'neighbourhood Manhattan' the comedy Motherhood may feel just too cute and quirky. Others in the know will just keep chuckling to themselves as they recognise the tiny trials and tribulations of Uma Thurman's writer-turned-mom blogger Eliza as she prepares her daughter's 6th birthday party in their rent-controlled 'walk up' in otherwise gentrified West Village. Minnie Driver is Eliza's funny self effacing, loud mouth best friend and The Daily Show's Samantha Bee pipes up in a shop queue.

The great cast of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D (hopefully more impressive in Imax) hits the screens after exhibition differences. But Jonathan Miller's B/W 1966 BBC version also weaved many wonders.
Or there's the animated future of 9 on DVDAt the Barbican French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's installation for The Curve is a walk-though aviary with zebra finches, electric guitars and more. (Youtube)
For water babies there's Colin Farrell looking mean and moody with lady of the sea Alicja Bachleda in Ondine (Magnolia Pictures June 4 in the States)- but far be it from me to pour cold fish over such hot blooded mythic Irish amphibian passion.

Roots of eroticism are a forte for director Atom Egoyan and Amanda Seyfried's lady of the night Chloe -or in the case of Liam Neeson's husband, daylight nymph - allows for much male projection. Unusually, the script isn't by Egoyan himself but Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) - itself based on a French movie Nathalie. Julianne Moore 's wife is just as sexy as Seyfried's Chloe who she hires to seduce her husband and in turn gets seduced herself. While the nuances seem more Egoyan than the script there's little of this director's trademark narrative complexity here. Nonetheless, a classy way to spend 99 minutes.
Egoyan talks about Arshile Gorky's influence on his work (April 21)

Formerly an actress, director Mia Hansen-Løve's Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants), based on French art house film producer Humbert Balsan's 2005 suicide after insurmountable debts, teems with an actor's eye for character detail. In the production notes the director recounts a text by Eric Rohmer "in which he quotes Stendhal as referring to the "slightly abrupt clarity" that might define French art...a quest for the invisible." One pellucid moment is when the bereaved eldest daughter Clémence is seated in a cafe after spending the night (we assume) with a boy she met at her late father's office. Did she sleep with him? Was she a virgin? Or is that not it at all? Her thoughts form with difficulty even deciding what coffee to order. "More than bereavement," says Hansen-Løve "I'd say the film talks about starting over." Father of My Children is a film of thoughts. Present thoughts not past regrets. And about a filmmaker who follows in the quiet persistent footsteps of a Maurice Pialat.

If all those pensées make 'Jacques' too dull a boy then this remake of George Romero's 1973 The Crazies will rock you. Stunning production values from cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (who learnt his trade with some of the great cameramen) and Andrew Menzies' production design. For once one is proud to flaunt the promotional T-Shirt. Scriptwriter Ray Wright also offers us Case 39 this week - the English-language debut from German director Christian Alvart (he of the 2005 skin scalpeling serial killer film Antibodies). Reminiscent of the recent demon child horror Orphan it's a film that eventually starts to grow on you sprouting a lease of life half way just as things seem to be dipping. In spite of some silly stuff, one can't help thinking that like Zombie movies, the deep undercurrent of humanity's love and latent lust for pychological manipulation and control is what Ray Wright's script is really all about. Think down that road and the heebie-jeeebies truly start the joint jumpin'.
70s counterculture icon Kenneth Anger has been revived over the last few years P.S. 1 retrospective and now his 1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother (pulsating Mick Jagger soundtrack) at Sprüth Magers gallery. His aim is to get through to 'the great Collective Unconsious'.
Barry Miles' London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 BBC's Front Row (Wed March 3)

Frieda Hughes, daughter of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, is this week's guest on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions

Anyone who has painted the heart knows
that first he had to
discard his spectacles,
his mirror,
throw away his fine-point pencil
and carbon paper

and for a long while
walk
outside. Miroslav Holub

Twilight's Kristen Stewart shivering on the cold red carpet and gallantly signing autographs - pens left right centre. All worth the wait for her audience voted BAFTA. Vanessa Redgrave regal as ever every step of the way for her British Academy Fellowship presented by Prince William. Carey Mulligan with genuine surprise as winner of Best Actress for An Education: "[it] came out of nowhere...so they can't blame me if I do a crap job on my next film," she joked on the red carpet. Meanwhile, Mickey Rourke said the word 'arse' while being interviewed live and the BBC apologised for fruity language. And Inglorious B**tards [sic- Inglourious Basterds:) could only become Bastards after the 9pm watershed. Language foreign of course to the housing estates of Andrea Arnold's Outstanding British Film Fish Tank.
Full list of winners

Designer Ron Arad has a Restless 'experience' rather than a retrospective show at the Barbican
My photos of the Zion Square Sculpture (Jerusalem) model:
ONE
TWO

And Howard Hawks' 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes looks superfagelistic after its digital clean and still raises smile after smile with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in their double act.

don't change a hair for me

Should this site move up the alphabet from alliterative 'u' to 's' - 'Sexy, Salubrious London'? Arthur C. Clarke formulated 3 "laws" of prediction in Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination (1962): "As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there."
1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Now as much an anti-Valentinista Day insurgent as one may dream of being, perhaps Clarke's laws could apply to 'love' (as WALL-EE would no doubt agree). For the record, Clarke adds a 4th Law in 1999: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert." But experts can easily be seduced by enverts as teen Percy (or Perceus, Logan Lerman) discovers in Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief on his quest for the stolen lightning bolt and return to Zeus (Sean Bean) on Mount Olympus. One stop on 'the map' is a Las Vegas casino - through imbiding its 'lotus flower' nibbles you swallow its motto 'You will never want to leave'. The State as potential happiness wheel. As with Uma Thurman's slinky seductive leather-clad, snake-headed Medusa, one needs to keep an eye on the ball and not be seduced by the patsies. Greek inscriptions morph into English (Percy is dyslectic and an unintended pun for sure on the current state of the Greek economy) and if director Christopher Columbus' (first two Harry Potters) film starts teenagers riffing on greek mythology that can be no bad thing. But that's quite a big 'if' (don't tell them about Lindsay Anderson) and adults may need a little help from Bacchus. Neither Prometheus (foresight) nor his so-called foolish lesser known brother Epimetheus (Ἐπιμηθεύς , hindsight) make an appearance. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler championed Epimetheus.
Les Amis's book Commemorating Epimetheus, 2009
BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves (Thurs) met fashio designer Hussein Chalayan, an obit for Alexander McQueen who was found dead in his flat on Thurs, designer Tom Ford on his film A Single Man, and Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz on where we are now.

Warner Brothers offers up Valentine's Day a sort of Magnolia maze of character storylines. One of the best bits is a po-faced Julia Roberts jesting on how shopping in Rodeo Drive ruined her career (the end title 'blooper' sequence). To be fair, everyone's performance is infinitely watchable and raises a smile or even two. But a date movie? Nothing much wrong with the chocolates themselves, but how many can you eat all at once?

Miguel Arteta's Youth in Revolt (adapting C.D. Payne's 1993 3-part novel) fairs better. "I was attracted to the very simple Odyssey type story-line. A boy meets girl on vacation and spends the rest of the story trying to get her back," screenwriter Gustin Nash (Charlie Bartlett). Oftentimes its coming of age raging heart gets somewhat smothered by clever gloss but then the characters do that to themselves too. Many will aspire to Michael Cera's cunning, effortless but jejune Nick Twist sprouting French new wave cinema, Fellini and Sinatra while his moustachiod, smoking jacket more seasoned alter ego Francois eggs Nick on to conquer Sheeni (Portia Doubleday). Cera's performance convinces us that this Twist kid might have it in him to be one day at least a Senator.

Greg Mottola's Adventureland goes for the incision of the heart rather than the check up and is out on Reg 2 DVD
as is Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying (Reg 2 Universal DVD and Blu-ray)
Beyond the Pole opens this week - a comedy about global warming produced by actress Kate Beckinsale's company.
Front Row interview
Holy Water is an Irish comedy set in a tiny village where locals hijack an armoured van of Viagra (no product placement as Pfzizer disowns the film entirely). Lots of funny bits to this film but they remain TV sketches rather than cohering.
And watch out for the DVD of OSS 117: Lost In Rio (just finished at the ICA) the almost equally funny sequel to last year's French James Bond spoof.
Bellamy's People (BBC 2 and based on the Radio 4 show) cleverly mock-docos ordinary Brits. No relation to those very much alive of course.
A defence in The Guardian of Sandra Bullock (Oscar nominated for The Blind Side and pilloried for her recent comedy All About Steve)

One of the most original (its debt to pianist Glenn Gould's little known radio plays uncredited) low-budget horror flics in recent years is Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (just out on Kaleidoscope DVD). Adapted by author Tony Burgess from his novel, it's set in wintry Ontario, Canada on Valentine's Day and filmed entirely in one set - the local radio station's basement premises. A way more interesting film than the recent Paranormal Activity it's hard to go wrong with Pontypool as an alternative 'date DVD'.
Greencine podcast
Park Chan Wook's Thirst is out on DVD
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme interview

Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu (House), an incredibly kookie and trippy 1977 Japanese horror/comedy is out on Eureka DVD (having just had a cinema release in New York at IFC through Janus Films). "It opened up a new chapter," says the director in the 90 minutes of interview DVD extras. "What Spielberg did with Jaws, Hause did the same for Japanese cinema." After acclaimed work in commmercials Toho Studios approached giving Obayashi carte blanche for a first feature. The same year as Dario Argento's low-budget Suspiria (new DVD from Nouveaux) Hausu makes for interesting historical comparison.

This week's release The Wolfman rather pales in comparison. Mark Romanek (director of the indie Robin Willliams gem One Hour Photo) was originally slated to direct and his attention to character detail is sorely missed in Joe Johnson's (Jumanji) slick but rather boring version. Distributor Universal owns Curt Siodmak's original 1941 classic with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Rains as Wolfman's dad. The remake has Benicio Del Toro and Sir Anthony Hopkins excitingly fanginly transformed by prosthetic make-up Hollywood legend Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, 1981). Even this cast and a stellar production team that includes Walter Murch as co-editor and Rick Heinrichs as Production Designer can't really get your flesh creeping.
The Wolf Man (1941) Special Edition (Universal Reg 1 DVD)
Zombieland (Sony Reg 1 DVD, UK March 15)
Jennifer's Body (Fox Reg 2 DVD, Feb 22)
British director Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga made on only £25,000 with an 11-strong crew out on Artificial Eye DVD (recently acknowledged at the British Film Awards).

Horror and prison movies often go hand in hand given both have outcasts that society shirks in owning up to any responsibility in creating - 'love' that never spoke its name. Jacques Audiard's A Prophet wowed critics at this year's Cannes Film Fest. Audiard's films - e.g. A Self-Made Hero (1996) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) - concern marginalised individuals who survive the system through their Darwinian instincts and good fortune. Not necessarily likeable, they are the dark side of our heart. A Prophet's protagonist is 19-year-old illiterate French-Arab Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim's debut) doing 6 years' prison time for petty crime. Corsican gang leader Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), who has run of the prison, sees an opportunity to manipulate Malik for his own ends. Some may understandably approach this movie with prison flic overload but what makes Audiard such a world-class director is his particular psychological precision in the lineage of films such as Rififi (1955), Le Trou (1959), Quai des Brumes (1938) and directors Jean-Pierre Melville or Bertrand Tavernier. Half-way through the 150 minutes, Audiard's gritty realism (he hired former inmates as advisors and extras) soars with the poetic of the aforementioned. Malik is allowed out on day release and his criminal associates fly him down to Corsica to do some business. He returns to gaol surreally gazing at the sand in his shoes. Another great score by Alexandre Desplat includes Jimmie Dale Gilmore's version of Mack the Knife.
New Film Focuses France on the ‘Disgrace’ of Its Overcrowded Prisons

Jean-François Richet's Mesrine - Parts 1 & 2 is out on DVD and Blu-ray.
The Army of Crime on Optimum DVD and Blu-ray
Morally provocative Brit film Boy A out on DVD
Fish Tank on Artificial Eye DVD (included is Arnold's short Wasp)
Actress Samantha Morton's directorial debut The Unloved about growing up in a children's home opens at the ICA next Friday.

Edge of Darkness is based on a 1985 BBC 6 x 50 minute episode TV drama written by the much revered Troy Kennedy Martin who died last September: the BBC police drama Z Cars (1962 - 1978), Colditz (1972 - 1974), The Sweeney (1975 - 1978) and screenplays for The Italian Job (1969) and Kelly's Heroes (1970). At the time secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry and the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist James Lovelock were hot topics: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Russia (1986); 1985 saw the first screening of Peter Watkins' nuclear war television film The War Game banned on TV since 1965; it was the era of the Trident nuclear submarine, a time when most left-wing activist were heavily surveiled in the UK, the Greenham Common protests; the Sizewell B nuclear power station and concerns about the safety record of the Sellafield nuclear power plant; and President Reagan's 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) using ground-based and space-based systems against nuclear attack. Walt Patterson, who acted as series adviser, was a leading commentator on nuclear affairs, best known for his book Nuclear Power. Following Edge of Darkness, he acted as specialist adviser to the British House of Commons Select Committee on Environment for their 1986 study, Radioactive Waste.

The BBC series director Martin Campbell went onto direct Hollywood movies and it seemed a sensible and possibly exciting move for him to direct Mel Gibson's film version (distributed by Icon in UK, Warner Bros. in the States). Ray Winstone, by accident or design, replaced Robert de Niro (who left first day of shooting) as CIA agent Matt Jedburgh. Winstone's world-weary red wine connoiseur gives the film's only remnant of the more surreal quality Troy Kennedy Martin was striving for. Martin's original script and impetus image (vetoed by the BBC) had Craven (originally played by Bob Peck) turning into a tree for the final episode. For the most part, though, the remake is saddled with a quarter century of conspiracy/thriller films (Gibson himself was in one of the better ones Conspirary Theory, Richard Donner, 1997) never managing to inject the genre with new juice. Screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed) casts Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) as a Boston Police Department homicide detective. And Mr. Gibson, now craggy faced, can certainly still powerfully hold the screen and an entire film. But sadly, this film totally missed the chance to graze contemporary damage limitation territory akin to Graham Greene.
Congressman Charlie Wilson of the Tom Hanks' film Charlie Wilson's War died this week (aural obit on BBC's Last Word) as well as Brit jazz legend Johnny Dankworth and Alexander McQueen.

Under appreciated on its initial release, the surreal qualities of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! (Reg 1 Warner DVD, Feb 23) repay a second viewing. Based on New York Times journalist Kurt Eichenwald's 2000 book, The Informant: A True Story, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is a $350,000-a-year corporate V.P who whistle blows on his company engaged in global price-fixing to the tune of billions. "We carry this around [a Christmas-card photo of Whitacre and his family] to remind ourselves that Mark Whitacre is a real person, with a real family, and that he's depending on us," says an FBI agent. "It's like a Michael Crichton novel" Whitacre's inner-voice voice-over keeps saying. This existential voice also muses on Oscar de la Renta ties that are always on sale because nobody buys them and the noses of polar bears. A great script by Scott Z. Burns, a score by Marvin Hamlisch (The Way We Were), and great looking HD (hi-def) photography - all playing cheesily with the bleached out look of 70s TV shows (remembering TV shows were mostly shot on 35mm film stock) though the film is set in the 90s.
Warner US also issue as part of their 'double' DVD series Harrison Ford in Presumed Innocent and Roman Polanski's fascinating Frantic. Also Richard Kelly's The Box in both DVD formats (Warner Reg 1).

One American reviewer called Atom Egoyan's Adoration (New Wave in the UK, released last May in the US by Sony Pictures Classics) "muddled" and admittedly some will find writer/producer/director Egoyan's latest style over substance. But as in all this director's films Adoration inhabits a childlike world of complexity weaving in and out of dream and acute observation. The story's based on a real incident from 1986, in which a Jordanian terrorist hid a bomb in hand luggage of his pregnant Irish girlfriend (unbeknownst to her) on an London-Israel El Al flight. Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) gives this story as a translation exercise for her high school students as if one's father were the terrorist. She encourages Simon (Devon Bostick) to present it as fact and he in turn promulgates it over the internet. "An exercise in what?" asks Simon about the story proposal. What follow are acrobatic narratives that though sometimes overpowering are also quiet, meditative and intense - just as those of real life. The film is full of lines such as "anger sucks up a lot of intelligence" and people "embrace being a victim until it blinds us". The idea of projection and the remembrance of a catastrophe that never happened is intriguing: how we deal (or not) with grief and the death of a loved one. The film's violin storyline at first seems a little trite but its enduring image is strong - no matter how beautiful the neck scroll of a violin it doesn't change the sound only appearance if sawn off. Love and grief are the things themselves: how far do we go in preserving appearances over emotion's intimacy. It can't be co-incidence that Mychael Danna's score (Egoyan's erstwhile composer over the years) utilises a musical trick (made manifest by Jerry Goldsmith's Basic Instinct score) that eerily oscillates between two remote key signatures.

By now most people have heard about Lee Daniels' Oscar nominated film Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (a New York poet and writer) with its compelling central performance by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe. For those viewing this out of a sense of moral duty they'll be surprised at just how mordantly funny and affecting it is given the weight of political values it's been forced to carry. The scenes with Mariah Carey as the social worker really are tremendous (and would be in any film). Seeing for yourself is always believing - that's given the wood from the trees.

Inspired by the Brothers Grimm The Frog Prince, female empowerment would not be the appropriate description for Disney's The Princess & the Frog (the studio's first hand-drawn feature in over five years). African-American Tiana (voice of Anika Noni Rose), waitress and the daughter of a New Orleans seamstress (mum voiced by Oprah Winfrey) clenches her lips and kisses a talking frog - Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) in the hope of upsizing him and funding her own restaurant in New Orleans. Instead she's downsized to the lily pad and the couple start hopping around the swamps of the Bayou. The characters they meet (Ray the firefly, Louis the jazz alligator) are jolly as is the canoe slapstick routine escaping amphibian hunters. And there's a moment when you think the couple just might remain frogs and ribbit happily forever. But the darker side of this world (Dr. Facilier and his talisman) is no match for Disney's classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) has no place in this 20's Cajun celebration under the Obama carapace as we tap our toes out the cinema to Randy Newman's catchy songs. Out on DVD formats in the States March 15.
Leap of faith, The Independent article
Disney by Hand - the art of traditional hand-drawn animation at the Barbican

Randy Newman was an essential element of Pixar's Toy Story 2 (3D) - hard to believe now that at one point Disney was on the brink of shelving the entire project. When She Loved Me (performed by Sarah McLachlan) was Oscar nominated in 2000 for Best Song and used for the flashback montage in which rag doll Jessie experiences being loved, forgotten, and ultimately abandoned by her owner, Emily. Andy's first instint on his return from camp is to immediately embrace Woody forgetting that the reason he left him behind was the doll's broken un-seamed arm. 2D worked just fine but the use of 3D really does enhance the depth of these characters' 'reality' - a world where perspective on childhood, love and loss is the most important element in keeping one's sanity. As is make believe.
3D TV BBC Click
Up is out on DVD Feb 15

"We can design a system that's proof against accident and stupidity; but we CAN'T design one that's proof against deliberate malice."- Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey
"We will go on living," says Olga in Chekhov's Three Sisters, "The music is playing so happily, so cheerfully, that it seems, in just a little time, we will know why we live, and why there is all this suffering… If only we could know! If only we could know!"
Yinka Shonibare’s project Scapegoat Society has Ali MacGilp and Cassandra Needham suggest examination of the hostile process whereby people absolve themselves from responsibility by moving blame towards another person or group.
Crash (Gagosian Gallery) brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe.
The Last Station opens next Friday (19th).

{mucho addition]

There's not much that's surprising in Clint Eastwood's latest directorial feat Invictus. The great exception being that you are surprised why you are constantly surprised. One's not surprised that Morgan Freeman creates a great Nelson Mandela on screen. But you constantly marvel at the blend of star actor and fictional character in front of your eyes. So much so that one part of you truly believes you are watching Mandela the man while the other part of you subsumes in the knowledge that this is great screen acting. His joyous little hip jive watching the the Spingboks-All Blacks 1995 World Cup Final at Ellis Park Stadium. The way his eyes fix into those of Boks captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) at their first meeting - not in an interrogative way, but in knowledge and camaraderie. Perhaps the greatest stroke of luck for Freeman was the long in development adaption of Mandela's autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom not getting off the ground and instead receiving the 4-page proposal for John Carlin's book on the '95 Cup Final (screenwriter Anthony Peckham who recently co-wrote Sherlock Holmes).

Like all successful films about life's struggles Invictus will speak to a world-wide audience because of its specificity - not just one event that changed a country but all the small cogs that made it turn. And yes, it's about sport but it goes beyond sport, race and politics becoming more about why sport is so important in the lives of many people - the need for a winning hero, the need to fight battles. Many will have different interpretations of Mandela's dictum: "forgiveness liberates the soul that's why it is such a powerful weapon". Mandela relates how in prison he and the other inmates would really piss off the white guards by cheering and supporting the basically all-white Springboks. After Mandela's election as President many South Africans wanted to eradicate the team's name and emblem echoing of apartheid. The film tells the story of why Mandela chose not to. It's really a companion piece to Clint Eastwood's previous Gran Torino (directing while acting in almost every scene): how your hated neighbour turns out to be if not exactly your friend then at least someone you understand far more. "We must all exceed our own expectations," said Mandela. You may hate sport but you will love this film. You mightn't give a toss about politics but you will understand the need for diplomacy. And even when you look into the mirror next morning you will want to say 'be yourself but not at the expense of someone else'.
BBC's Our World: Mandela - 20 Years of Freedom
Clint Eastwood - The Collection, a brilliant bargain box set containing 8 of his best movies was released by Universal (June 2007)
Clint Eastwood: 35 Films 35 Years at Warner Bros DVD (Reg 1)
Dirty Harry Collection USA Warner DVD/Blu-ray
The Firm (2009) (UK Warner DVD) (my review-8 paras into post)

"To be violent is the ultimate ­laziness," says theatre director Peter Brook - 11 and 12 at the Barbican Theatre
interview on BBC's The Culture Show (Feb 4)
The prayers of Peter Brook (The Guardian)
last 2 shows of Helen Chadwick's music theatre piece Dalston Songs about what home means to the people (79 languages) of her local community in East London. A welcome revival of Jonathan Miller's Cosi fan tutte Mozart staging (with fab Armani costumes) and a new production by iconoclastic theatre/opera director Richard Jones is always an exciting event: Prokofiev's The Gambler (1929)
While in fashionista mode, Dame Vivienne Westwood gave us provocative 'homeless chic' on the European Spring catwalk.
And Julien Temple's world meets that of the 70s Brit band Dr. Feelgood as he documents their habitat of Canvey Island in Essex: Oil City Confidential - a doco whose cinematic sweep makes the trip to the cinema well worthwhile.

Designer Tom Ford's fantastic foray into film A Single Man opens next Friday (reviewed here [12 paras in] at last year's Times BFI London Film Festival). Up to now woman have had the monopoly in film when it comes to the 'presentation of self' but Ford shows us the relationship between the cut of the suit and that of the soul.
Distributor Park Circus asks us to look again at Pretty Woman (Gere and Julia Roberts, 1990) revived in time for Valentine's Day.

The heart of Astro Boy was well worth reviving, "a timeless story in the tradition of Pinocchio or Oliver Twist" says director David Bowers: "It's very Dickensian, but at the same time, it's very modern. He is a child [robot] created to replace the son that a father lost...[but] comes to realise that the boy can't truly replace his lost son." Osamu Tezuka's 1951 manga (Japanese comic book) character paved the way for anime and became a world icon. The film's designers at Imagi Studios were inspired by Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (his museum in New York recently opened) - whose abstraction inspires the line to take flight rather than the pixel in Astro Boy just as Disney animation inspired its creator Tezuka. "I am not going to fight you," stamps Astro Boy (Freddie Highmore) as Zog (Samuel L. Jackson) the big old robot he repaired with some of his own 'heart' lumbers toward him, forced into combat by the evil Hamegg (Nathan Lane). Often, as the saying goes 'sticking to your guns" pays off.
Ponyo from Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away) opens Feb 12.
Some kids, though, (and those with Avatar overload) may prefer the very exciting 3D re-mastering of Battle for Terra. Made outside the studio system in 2007 (Tribeca 2008, Lionsgate distributed in the US May, 2009), there are touches of René Laloux’s beauty, battle, and innocence in Fantastic Planet (1973) and Gandahar (1988).

Longtime assistant director for the Wachowski brothers James McTeigue (The Matrix trilogy, Speed Racer) wows with good and evil (secret clan vs. European security services) battling it out in Ninja Assassin. "Ninjas have been used so often for comic effect that it felt as if no one was taking them seriously any longer," said co-writer J. Michael Straczynski. Though quite wry, lines like "ninja may be on their way here - I think I can handle a few whack-jobs wearing pajamas" do break the film's serious tone and intended authenticity. The fight scenes are exhilarating, faultless, as is Korean pop-star Rain (great in Chan-wook Park's film I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK). Will McTeigue in the future get to use his talents for something a little less whizz-whack?

Korean talent abounds in director/writer/producer/actor Yang Ik-June's debut Breathless (Ddongpari) - but again perhaps the amount of 130 min violence ultimately bludgeons one's sensibilities. The Pusan Film Fest programmer likened the film to American indie legend John Cassavetes, and without having read that first, it's a comparison that did cautiously spring to mind. Violence is as second-nature as bad language for these characters who've dragged themselves through domestic waste-land sludge - the director's camera lands you neck deep in it.

The feature debut from Gerard Johnson's London serial killer Tony by contrast is a taut 78 minutes. Tony (Peter Ferdinando) is the most boring Council estate unemployable sod imaginable. When a visitor to his flat pisses him off he does a Sweeney Todd without a Mrs. Lovett nor the meat pies. Well-worn territory though it may be but Johnson has an eerie eye for the unexpected using framing and location to great effect and a sense of tone that subtly keeps shifting from black comedic, horror, to docu drama. This quality marks him for an exciting future film project rather than quality TV drama.

Armored is a clever American heist script (James V. Simpson's debut, Nimrod Antal director) with cinematographer Andrzej Sekula (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) giving it the gritty realism of Tarantino touched with Antonioni urban alienation. Don't expect Peckinpah but look forward to interesting times from these collaborators.

George Clooney's corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air is one of the best things he's ever done. We don't expect (nor want) the Clooney face on screen to cry. But when Bingham is downsized emotionally we are the ones to weep. And that's what film acting is all about. Jason Reitman's film resembles a fall out fragment of demolition skimming innocently across the water until hitting one between the eyes. Clooney's also blessed with a brilliant cast that could never be called simply supporting.
Episode 3 of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe comedy round up of the week on Brit TV looking at celebrities endorsing things (worthwhile charity causes) (4 days left to watch)