The 54th BFI London Film Festival

The 54th BFI London Film Festival has descended upon us. Photos of Never Let Me Go (you are cordially reminded that all photos on this website - and those in future - are Copyright 2010 Andrew Lucre unless otherwise attributed)

One would need the heart of a rock not to hear the silence of this film's stones.
Opening in the UK early next year.

ONE, singular sensation, every little step he takes

How do the street regulations, noise restrictions, tube transport nightmares of 2010 London temporarily/or permanently change our idea of self and what lessons are there to be gleaned from the Italian Renaissance? Louise Duggan (a cyclist herself) from the quango CABE delivered a paper in last weekend's Street Life and Street Culture: between Early Modern and the Present (PHOTOS HERE)on how removing the manifested bureaucratic clutter (e.g too many road signs, railings) in Kensington High Street resulted in a 47% accident reduction compared to the 35% in other parts of the borough. It reminded one of artist Ryan Gander's 'desire paths' - the routes within the urban environment that we as humans naturally create for ourselves rather than following those of authority's artificial constructs.

Niall Atkinson's (University of Chicago) impetus was Tiepolo's Amphion (The Force of Eloquence, Amphion raising the walls of Thebes with his lyre [1724-25 -fresco] and the stones that would create the ideal city resulting in human conflict, commerce, clatter confined within the city square. He lead onto how the sounding of bells in Renaissance towns was a parochial control of communal space e.g. nuns were allowed to demolish bells that were too loud. Space was sanctified by the use of sound, seepage prevented. Atkinson related how an artisan's pay strike bore terror into denizens and the beings of authority when they sounded bells in a different order than usual. The powers that be conceded defeat. Communities larger than local neighbourhoods became possible only through the use of bell ringing. Montreal had/has a law whereby street musicians are banned from performing at night. In Renaissance Florence prostitutes would wear bells on their ankles to signify their presence. Even night must brace itself for order and control.

Georgia Clarke from the Courtauld Institute began this final follow-on conference from last year by describing the multiplicity of differing accounts for Charles V's 1529 entry into Bologna. Eye witness reports of the King's hat, clothes, street adornments different enormously from one anther. Sound artist Dan Jones (also film composer for some of David Attenborough's TV nature series) evoked his aural Sky Orchestra of surround sound balloons and regaled us of his latest project orchestrating ice cream vans. While Ornette Clennon (Oxford Brookes Uni) cited Merleau-Ponty, Butler and Lacan in exploring collective improvisation - how kids in their identification with each other approached a communal psychic space. And subjectivation in search of the nexus of youth street culture's essence and that of the modern day 'media' version: the juissance (foreknowledge of death) becoming a fetish (e.g. youth enforcement of 'respect') "hailing its subjects into being that will ultimately destroy the culture that brought them into existence. Kristian Kloeckl of the MIT's Sensible City Lab concluded the day with their findings on mobile phone network data gathered from AT&T and tasters of recent similar projects.

Was it the Italian vino or the stimulated, focussed mind resulting from the day's symposium that made the tube gremlins just that more bearable on the return journey home? A young staff member of the London Transport Museum was in attendance at the conference and I bemoaned the fact that nowadays we enter the 'tube' as if a 3D version of Dante's Hell whereas in the museum's recent show Suburbia the London underground of yesteryear was an exciting adventure (city rush-hours not permitting of course). Admittedly, last weekend's tube underwent engineering works that closed 2 lines and substantially another but by late Saturday evening the Bakerloo was shut- no fault of engineering work (at least that's what staff said at Piccadilly Circus and the packed Piccadilly line crawled its way westwards due to: yep you guessed it- signal failure. Announcements were chaotic and contradictory as always whereby you'd be at a complete loss even with a Baedecker Underground Guide phone app. Friday morning was, alas, no better. And several days this week were no better.

The Royal Academy's Treasures from Budapest: European Masterpieces from Leonardo to Schiele is a strange enterprise given that weekend trips to that splendid city are cheaper than a taxi into London's West End and less stressful than schlepping on transport. But such an exhibition does focus the mind in a way probably not so possible if one were simply sampling a weekend of that city's culinary delights. Pedestrian in its curatorial chronology, there are many wonders to behold nay scrutinise in this show from the Museum of Fine Arts (established in 1906). A couple of stunning Tintorettos, the spellbinding intimacy of Raphael's unfinished Esterhazy Madonna (1507-08), the detective like detail of Altdorfer's Crucifixtion (1518) with an older white bearded man hidden way back in the crowd perhaps barely able to see anything. Goya's Water-carrier and Knife Grinder (1808-12) are rarely, as here, seen as a pair as one or other is usually on loan. Their simplicity is quite staggering. Little gems in the show include Cornelius Dusart Peasant (1680s-90). Then onto Caneletto's Lock at Dolo (c.1756) with the tiny specks of white oil paint that conjure in the viewer either a shimmering sunset or devouring dawn. And check out the eeriness of Kokoschka's Veronica's Veil (1909) (his caretaker's window washing daughter) and reputably his favourite religious work. The penultimate room showcases the Schiele (on the poster) and the stunning simplicity of a 1905 Picasso water colour Mother and Child - just when one thought the old man couldn't surprise you anymore. In the bookstore on the way out splurge on the exhibition's little pad of stickies as a riposte to the age of the techno app.

The psychic 'tube' effect on people who are already suffering stress through work, health or relationships has probably yet to have a paper written up about it. Does Julia Roberts' new film (an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's book) Eat, Pray, Love (150 week stint on the New York Times best seller list) work medicinally for us as well as for those who've suffered the author's fate of divorce and depression? In a recent BBC Woman's Hour interview Gilbert described the book's experience as permitting "yourself to dive into what you want without holding back...For most women almost [a] pornographic fantasy of what it would be like to eat whatever you want and ignore the consequences." Gilbert goes on to speak of life's oftentimes "dryness without an absence of wonder". For Julia Roberts fans (yes they still exist and I openly confess to being one:) they will love seeing her delightfully cascading through Italy, India and Bali (lovingly photographed by double Oscared Robert Richardson). In fact Roberts even looks 10 years younger for it all. Along the way there's Richard Jenkins hiding and healing his past in an ashram and Javier Bardem's dishy Felipe - the kinda guy a girlfriend would warn their best friend against while simultaneously harbouring a little canoe of lust. Some audiences, though, will be bloated by all this as if a Thanksgiving Dinner with friends that every year reminds one of why you don't see these guests more often.

Critic Mark Kermode's BBC Film blog refreshingly seems to attract normal people who are bored of 'normal' people and 'normal' films. Last week's release of Made in Dagenham (released Stateside by Sony Classics in November) elicited some interesting 'threads' on the strength of it's trailer:
"I'd like to see the formula challenged, for example that they fail in their objectives royally, eg Full Monty - they decide not to strip, Billy Elliott- he breaks his leg, Calendar Girls - no one buys their calendars. I'd watch this film if I knew all the staff who asked for more pay were not sacked from the jobs, but then had their brains eaten by some Romero zombies while Zombi (the band) provide an awesome Synth heavy soundtrack,"wrote S Ford on Kermode's site. Amber from the States wrote that it may be a film "I can maybe watch with my mother and we can both enjoy without me vomiting sugar rainbows on the cinema floor and her not regarding me as a sociopath for the rest of my life."

It takes some time for Made in Dagenham to catch fire but once alight it's more funny and engaging than many 'issue' based films about workers rights though lacking the comedic jet blackness of Ken Loach's more wry films. And Sally Hawkins as the 'wrong side of the tracks' council housed unwitting activist gives a performance that is far more interesting than just a 'look I can act something different to my role in Happy-go-Lucky' (Mike Leigh).

A film of surer tone is Bernard Rose's bio-pic of 70s/80s Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks Mr. Nice -who after concurrently working for Brit intelligence and later doing prison time went on to create one-man stage shows and write newspaper columns. Rose's direction is quiet, fastidious and distanced as if a meditation on the absurdity of life's daily round.
Greg Berlanti's Life As We Know It doesn't always work but there's so much good casting chemistry and tiny excruciatingly funny moments that you easily forgive the film any of its shortcomings. Holly (the ever deliciously 'smile your troubles away' Katherine Heigl) and the sadly sincere straight man Eric (Josh Duhamel) are lumbered with a 1-year-old Sophie when old friends die in an accident. Trouble is, this couple never got it together from their friends' arranged blind date that years ago never gelled. Brit cinematographer Andrew Dunn seems to be shooting digitally that, while sometimes a little off putting also allows the film a halcyon immediacy.

Actor/writer/director Ben Afflecks's bank heist The Town is, as you'd expect, fairly darn impressive. While Affleck succeeds in giving his characters moral dilemmas, the final sentimental though moving pay off for Rebecca Hall's garden allotment bank clerk doesn't quite feel 'earned' from a higher deus ex machina plummeting us into catharsis. Nor does the film's apparent condemnation of cop killing quite find its own moral equilibrium.

The rapid fire editing of Takers didn't perturb me as some other reviewers. And though it's effective in entertaining as the heist runs its course, there's little that's memorable (perhaps why it's US distributor Warners passed it over to Sony for UK release). Director John Luessenhop and most of his co-screenwriters made their money in the markets or law and there's certainly a cold, calculated quality to the whole filmic experience. Cozier's (Idris Elba) just out of rehab sister is played by the always watchable Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies). But it's a 'nothing' wallpaper role. Sony's recent debut directed Armored was far more nuanced.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps we feel the screen allows us to know this man Gordon Gekko intimately. We look into Michael Douglas' eyes and he convinces us with every minutai flicker that there is a human being within those corneas. But it's a trick of the movies. And that seems to be the point of Oliver Stone's thrillingly directed Wall Street sequel. Stone and his cameraman (Robert Richardson again) probe his gallery of masterful actors. We feel that there is indeed a filial bond between Gekko and his eco-daughter (Carey Mulligan) and her boyfriend Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and that they feel that too. And yet like the constant ebb and flow of money market tide it all seathes - illusory within the shifting sands. "Money's a bitch that never sleeps," says Gekko. Dialectically intriguing about Stone's film is not that it fails to look the economic debacle in the face without blinking - rather that with a 'better' script that tried to make 'sense' of it all Douglas' Gekko screen persona would be Godly invincible without batting an eyelid. They are convinced of running from a Medusa within. Yet the hiss and roar is the crashing tide by turns consoling, infuriating, somnambulant.

Out this week is Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, Sophie Fiennes' alluring documentary about German artist Anselm Kiefer's La Ribaute - installations in a derelict silk factory near Barjac, France.
Or there's Pierre Coffin's Hollywood animation Despicable Me to cheer up everyone. The 3D doesn't add much to the film's many wry moments but the final titles would get a 3D award if such existed for credits.

Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's A Town Called Panic a Belgium stop-motion animation (based on the cult 2003 TV series) with little toy figures (Cowboy, Indian and Horse) bobbing around on their tiny plastic plinths is possibly the only cinematic anti-venom for the world's economic woes. Totally wacko, trippy, bonkers and chronically smile inducing it should be made available free of charge to all patients on the NHS (National Health Service). (Zeitgeist released last Dec in the States)

The French language digital animation Dragon Hunters had a brief cinema release before DVD and is lovingly inventive in the tradition of Laloux's animations. The film's floating rock formations look very similiar to those in Avatar - but crazy minds to have a tendency to think alike.
The Secret of Kells is just released by Optimum

And musing on other worlds, one of the many 'hidden' delights of this year's 18th Raindance Film Festival was New Zealander Thomas Burstyn's doco This Way of Life shot over 4 years (winner of the fest's Best Doco last night). Watching the survival struggles of a Maori family's 6 kids and 50 horses is a salutary microcosm of the bigger world. Every year one thinks that Raindance will prove to be just a bratty cousin to the enormous London Film Festival. Yet it never is and many of this festival's films, as always, are certainly the equal if not more so of that bigger fest juggernaut: the hits I caught in no particular order-

Ben Miller's Brit comedy Huge
All I Ever Wanted: The Airborne Toxic Event Live (DVD out next week)
Five Daughters (winner Best UK Feature)
I Believe in Angels
Rebel without a Clue
Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in the Queer X Show
Macho(winner Best Micro Budget film)
Vampires
Armless

Galloping or for some lollapalling through our now very strange, troubled world should we stand by the oft quoted moral of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: when the legend becomes truth print the legend? With every tag line of World's Greatest Dad our hearts sink - Robin Williams as a poetry teacher (again), the film's title...But hangon, how could that be, it's produced by Richard Kelly's Darko Ent.? Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait's film is right up there with the year's best in its critique of the fame/respect game. What's fascinating about the film is that it offers no answers never really negating the Liberty Valance ideal - just exposing a world replete with ironies. For some of us our existential penny drops when the lambs stop bleating; for others when the snakes slide forever into their silence.

There's spades of heart and morality in Jackie Chan's Little Big Soldier and plenty of comedic animal antics. The doco Budrus (a highlight of this year at the Tribeca Film Fest) brings us crashingly back to realpolitik as does Restrepo (this year's Sundance Fest Jury Prize winner). And interestingly so too does Anusha Rizvi's satire Peepli Live one of the very few films from the Indian subcontinent in recent memory to even approach Satyajit Ray's comedy of life. And don't for a minute think the film's corporeal politics is a million miles away from your London doorstep.

Nor is the US truck driver (Ryan Reynolds) in Iraq held hostage in a Buried coffin (Lionsgate released in the States, Icon in the UK). A very clever, accomplished conceit from director Rodrigo Cortes though some may find the ending copping-out but for others it'll be there but for the grace of 'youknowwho' go I. Frozen may be relatively thin ice for some but its cinematography is so stunning and boy: after watching this movie one really will think twice metaphorically and actually before braving a ski-lift as night falls.

If the film could mix a vampiric humour riffing on that ep of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which strict Jewish customs prohibit after dark opposite sex proximity then it would prove an invincible iceberg. Now: where's Werner Herzog's lone penguin gone? ^ =

A Considerable Speck

Hard to know what really to say about London these days. The city hurtles towards the 2010[sic] Olympics with many still wondering how on earth the West End, let alone its tentacles, will cope with the overcrowding. Yet no one dares be seen as a nay-sayer. The post-war 'austerity' games of 1948 came through all right though didn't it? After all, ain't a few months of national pride and economic bling worth any collateral damage? Another signal failure on the underground the other day that almost resulted in a head-on collision. Those words signal failure are heard so often over the Tannoy we get the heebie-jeebies. Another devil in the detail - my Oyster travel card almost went berserk because a 'bendy bus' had recorded the afternoon time as being that of the wee hours of that same morning thereby increasing the fare total for the day: impossible as the bus doesn't even get up that early! Most people are just too busy to complain, though, amounting to a nice little revenue spinner for Transport for London. These 'glitches' have happened so often but for the first time one was actually provable beyond all reasonable doubt.
Happier thoughts with the Underground artist who puts smiles on commuters' faces

After two mornings this month of no water whatsoever from the privatised Thames Water (burst water main the first time) they have the audacity to send an offer of a payment protection plan. One has to suffer 48 hours of no water before even being compensated £20!
And speaking of holy water, the Pope was in town. Still available to watch on TV:
BBC 4-Vatican: The Hidden World
BBC4- The Lost Gospels (no doubt it'll be available on iPlayer again after they repeat it this week)

One imagines there are some(where) poor cogs in the wheel that just want to throw up their hands in disgust, if not quite going so far as to sacrifice themselves as the man in Kafka's In the Penal Colony - presented by Music Theatre Wales- opera version by Philip Glass.

BBC Radio 3's In Tune profile
Daily Telegraph interview
Così fan tutte
Don Pasquale
Janacek's opera The Makropulos Case which opens at English National Opera.
In Tune spot
And director Des McAnuff talks about Gounod's Faustt, opening soon in a new production at English National Opera.
Radio 3's In Tune discussion

Meanwhile, David Shrigley (his video here) and other Brit artistic luminaries demonstrated outside Tate Britain against arts funding cuts.

But how much really do the arts matter anymore? (that's a topic for discussion not a statement!) In Czech novelist Milan ­Kundera’s new book of essays Encounter he relates “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.” Will Self promoting his latest book Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall recalled as a judge of last year's Edinburgh Film Fest British feature-film category that "of the 10 films shortlisted not a single one- a single one!- gained a cinema release." Hmmm...not sure that is entirely true but we know what you're getting at Mr. Self. The New York Times lead film critic also recently considered the state of things in Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better? concluding that "some of the best movies of the future may be movies for the few, or even for no one, expressions of idiosyncratic personal visions or ideas that linger happily at the margins."
Daily Telegraph with Will Self
The Independent
The Brit Indie Collection

The niche arts and ideas Nightwaves (BBC Radio 3) had presenter Philip Dodd conduct perhaps one of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's most revealing interviews (his latest memoir just published)
. On several occasions Blair pretty much implied that Radio 3's audience wasn't his usual demographic more than hinting, however, that he relished such a challenge, "I knew this would be an interesting interview" (or 99.9% words to that effect) as he bought thinking time to answer Dodd's question. The interview is there on the web for you to decide but germane to this post was his apparent refusal to accept his rise to power as being somewhat of a Faustian pact of duality. He has often said that people either love or loathe him. But is such dichotomy a bad thing? Moreover, does there ever need to be a dichotomy? Alongside the thorny question of can one ever really change anything when compromise comes into play? The NYT film critic concludes quoting Oscar Wilde who "observed that there are as many publics as there are people, a notion that flips the utopian idea of movies for everyone on its head. At the movies, you’re on your own."
BBC2- The Special Relationship

The beguiling quality of Will Ferrell's new film The Other Guys is that it questions our notion of a utopian reality: that films have to be 'issue' based, or comedy/dramas, or entertainment or any other number of definable genres. Early on at a police press conference one reporter identifies himself as " New York Observer...(Pinter pause) Online". Online these days has anointed eqality but (as this blogger well knows) it is still forbade the same kudos as print journalism. Allen (Ferrell) shares precinct pen pushing with Terry (Mark Wahlberg) - the latter known only for mistakenly shooting a sports star in the leg. What's fascinating about the film is that nothing is ever quite funny or quite serious or quite anything. It seems to ask how does one deal with the dualities of a world reality that is both beautifully blessed and downright disgustingly damned.

It's plot line is that of a 'Bernie Madoff' villain (Steve Coogan); of how does 'pen pushing' personality Allen always get the beautiful girl; of why does the shit always hit the exemplary Terry and not the real twats around him. There are action/chase/shootout/explosion sequences that are neither exhilarating nor sent up. In fact after one explosion, there's an aerial shot of the near missed pair jettisoned to the ground, deafened by the blast and screaming of just how bullshit those action escapes are where one walks away unscathed. If you laugh in this film its always somewhat uneasily (reinforced in the closing credits - stay till the very end) knowing full well that outside the movie theatre is a world just itching to either embrace or destroy you. Can't get more life-affirming than that.

It's hard to feel as tepid as other reviewers about Why Did I Get Married Too?. You don't need to have seen Tyler Perry's buppie prequel to enjoy the follow-on. And your life's been a sheltered one if most of these characters aren't cringingly recognisable - particlularly the screeching Angela. Formulaic it may be cruising down its plot roads while not quite immersing you in individual psyches. But there are a helluva lot of indie indie films that never achieve such finesse as the multi-talented Mr.Perry and it leaves Adam Sandler's Grown Ups groveling in the dust for mercy. What's not to like about a Steve Carrell comedy vehicle Dinner For Schmucks who's claim to fame are taxidermy mouse sculptures? Well...could do with some Will Ferrell.

"Dreaming at the movies. I don't dream about a movie. The movie dreams about me. Where is my self? " asks Lulu in Heimat-Fragments:The Women
(2006). She searches for something which she calls “the old future of childhood” through 40 fragments of the lives and dreams of the women of a century. This is the coda to director Edgar Reitz's mammoth historical exploration of his German homeland (heimat) - Part One, Part Two. Initially it all seems a bit too soul-searchy Germanic and something we've all seen before. Wrong. The film sees us and is in pursuit inveigling till the very end.

Second Sight DVD also have Fassbinder's 3hour plus made for TV sci-fi World on a Wire (1973) in the restored 35mm print- proclaiming the early skill of cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (later DP for Scorsese andd Coppola). It received its first ever theatrical run this April at MoMA in New York after the Berlin Film Fest premiere. Scientist Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) suspects that a government's Simulacron AI (artificial intelligence) project is far from benign. This is a film way ahead of its time; it too, gently laughing at itself and the absurdity of it all. The 2-disc DVD also includes a fascinating 50min doco.

Comparing World on a Wire to Avatar isn't quite equitable. And if there's a major criticism of the latter perhaps it's that a little dose of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove would have gone a long way. But I tell you: seeing Avatar again in the extended version, sitting goggled with those 3D specs dead centre front row (the far edges of screen in peripheral vision)..........one was totally immersed and gobsmacked of director James Cameron's artificial world. That's not to say 3D IS the future. But a filmic experience has to viscerally take hold of the viewer: psychosomatically - mind and body, no matter what film format is used. Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge do it their way, Frederick Wiseman his, Godard another, Visconti in The Leopard, Douglas Sirk, Naruse and so on and on. As the New York Times man says: you are inevitably "on your own" in 'relating' to a film. Collectiveness is only ever really achieved in the theatre.

Nino Rota season at the BFI, BBC Radio 3's Music Matters on a new Rota book
The Leopard (1963)
The only downside of Abrams glossy hardcover The Art of Avatar with the film's production designs is that there's no technical info on the 3D cameras. Nice Christmas present, though.
BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music shows just blase we've become about Gustav Holst's The Planets and how ahead of its time it was. Last week's world premiere of Graham Fitkin's Tidal was a captivating soundscape too but it's no longer available.

"From 18 - 26 September 2010, the Anti-design festival will explore sound, film, art, design, image, performance, writing, product, 3D, interiors, transmedia and interactive across ten venues around London's Redchurch district," says the website as an anti-dote to the London Design Festival.
Design guru Neville Brody (The Face, now Royal College of Art) explains on Nightwaves

French director Claude Chabrol died last weekend having offered cineastes a film practically every year. Yet another cinema world to explore for those unfamiliar - a world that regrettably never grows out of fashion. Senses of Cinema article
Roger Ebert interviews Chabrol many moons ago.
Guardian 2001 article, 2010 obit

Many of his films are available on Arrow DVD
Improve your je ne sais quoi with French Radio London

Jacques Demy's first film (re-released 10 years ago) Lola (1961) can superficially seem French trite. But closely observed it's arguably the best of Demy's oeuvre and certainly the equal of Godard in its incisive use of cinematic grammar. It's almost better that Demy couldn't raise the money to make it a musical like his later films - Michel Legrand nonetheless scores. All the film's protagonists dream of a different reality to that surrounding them. "It's always beautiful in the movies," says Roland (Marc Michel) after seeing a Gary Cooper pic. "So is life," says his friend.
The BFI revives Oscar-winning 1953 film From Here to Eternity

Many of those even reasonably knowledgeable about film only vaguely know the work of Russian director and actor Ники́та Михалко́в. Long. long overdue is a Kino DVD box set of Films of Nikita Mikhalkov: Vol 1- A Slave of Love (1976), Without Witness (1983), Five Evenings (1979) and Oblomov (1980). The Academy Award winning Burnt by the Sun (1994) is available on Second Sight. His father wrote two sets of lyrics used for the Soviet national anthem and the current lyrics of the Russian national anthem while his older brother Andrei Konchalovsky (Asya’s Happiness) moved to Hollywood (Runaway Train). Though it's never stated, Mikhalkov would probably be promulgated more in the West if it weren't for his pro-nationalist, pro-monarchist views. His autocratic rule of the Russian Cinematographers' Union has equally been heavily criticised. The talent for filmmaking, though, able to grab the viewer and hold them captive is undeniable.

Eccentric and ever fascinating Mr. Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? didn't even manage a mainstream 'art house' UK distributor with David Lynch as Exec Producer. Scanbox (better known for their 'horror' genre) are the lucky ones (it screens at the Curzon among others). It may not be vintage Werner Herzog but not even the willful dark colour tones can sully one's intrigue. Worth checking out for the performances alone. Ahhh, Udo Kier again. All that actor has to do is look at you and one surmises something's afoot.
Times article on Herzog

If pressed, do any of the recent 'horror' movies warrant our time granting us a new perspective on the world? The Last Exorcism that reaped rewards at the US box office a few weekends ago gushes with talent, you just wished it was lavished on material less familiar. Former big budget steadicam operator turned director Imran Naqvi's The Last Seven is nicely packaged and uses experienced cameraman David Mackie without showing much that's exceptional about London except it's deserted. Daisy Head (of the famous screen acting family) shows promise as Chloe but we don't really care much about any of these characters even with an end twist. Another Brit offering Splintered fares better than The Final from a few weeks ago.

Better off sticking with the old hands, and Arrow DVD has a slew of upcoming Dario Argento titles: Inferno (1980), Bird With A Crystal Plumage (1970), Tenebrae (1982) and Brian De Palma's Obsession (1976) with Argento's Cat O Nine Tails (1971) on Oct 4.

And kids films? Well, Diary of a Wimpy Kid (based on the books by Jeff Kinney) and directed by Thor Freudenthal is probably the best of the bunch - rarely mawkish, sensitive, funny, and spot on performances by Greg (Zachary Gordon), Rowley (Robert Capron), and Angie (Chloe Moretz). But any Hollywood movie that has it's young female lead hiding under the bleachers reading Ginsberg's Howl has to be worth a teenage look. In all his roles, Michael Cera seems to portray fading youth on the brink of either becoming a cynical cog in the political wheel of life or a spaced out seer. And while Edgar Wright's direction oozes invention and brio in Scott Pilgrim vs the World I can imagine teenagers being a bit miffed they'd weaned themselves away from their gizmos to see it.

The anarchic, inventive, anger of Kim Chapiron's Sheitan seems rather mollified in his latest Dog Pound despite its consummate elements. And scary Brit offering F fares better than the heartfelt story of The Kid

But as most normal people barely make it to even a couple of films a month, the remaining choices boil down to a very potent broth of Cyrus (the first bigger budget from two indie brothers); Winter's Bone and director-cinematographer Pedro González-Rubio's Alamar (released by Film Movement in NYC, DVD Oct 4, New Wave Films UK).
The London Spanish Film Festival opens this week

Writer Will Self is right: who has the time to see all these movies- the ones that even manage a release? Who has the time to read all this blog when the writer himself barely finds time to read all the other blogs he admires? This year's 54th BFI London Film Festival will soon be upon us. Some of us may indeed be on our own. But there's safety in numbers. Better that than believing we don't really exist.

Physicist Richard Feynman is profiled on BBC Radio 4's Archive.

Ruined pieces of nature

"I can't be your friend," warns vampire youngster Eli who's befriended the bullied Oskar (aged 12) in the subtitled Swedish film Let the Right One In. Receiving another outing (Momentum released last year and on DVD) at the open air Somerset House screenings (sponsored by Film 4), a crowd of 2,000 (many seemed not to have seen the film before) nabbed every blanket space. The rain held off and you could feel the bodies heat the sanctum of the courtyard's four walls on a predictably chilly London summer Saturday night. With a ticket price of £14.50 (£18 double bills, not including further purchase of blanket or pillow) none seemed disappointed with many descending in vampire makeup and staying well past the last tube to see The Lost Boys after intermission.
Opera this weekend at Somerset House
For loads of free film admission try the Portobello Film Festival.

In the warm-up intro (including tame expletive) by Film 4's rep, the crowd booed when told of Hollywood's intention to remake Let the Right One In. If the film's plot were scribbled and popped it into a hat (John Ajvide Lindqvist's screenplay from his own chilling novel) alongside other Hollywood vampire scenarios, it wouldn't appear to be in very different company. What amazed at the Somerset House screening (excellent sound and projection as you'd bloody well expect for the price) was the film's 'cinema magic'.

Audiences don't analyse films (thank goodness for the world's geeks) they experience them (most normal people barely seeing a couple of films per month unlike the critics). Some may note a lack of actors' chemistry etc etc but few are ever able to delineate the individual virtues of director, script, cinematographer, music, editing and acting. Elements that should feel seamless yet more often are threadbare. Take Hoyte van Hoytema's exquisite cinematography for Let the Right One In. The symmetrical use of doubling (get it? -masc/fem, vampire/mortal, father/son, fire/air/earth/water) could seem almost artistically laboured if it weren't welded to the film's other constituents. You barely notice this repetition on a first viewing. The film is all to do with Oskar and Eli - we learn little about the bullies, and even Eli's father (more detailed in the novel) becomes somewhat secondary. And as with all great films we exit quietly carrying off our subliminal knowledge of the protagonists into a world that's less real in and of itself and more so in light of the film inside us. Double bills thence demand a master chef in programming.

Director Tomas Alfredson: "Everyone reads one of two newspapers in the morning, one of two at night, watches one of two news shows in which politicians go on about that submarine which ran aground on the coast. Two ways of thinking, red or blue. How do they stand it, those who live there in spite of it all? The people who don't turn to each other for warmth, who hold their tongues and turn their backs for fear of cracking into pieces like statutes, for fear of killing each other?"

Director of The Final Joey Stewart has been working in movies ever since his break as a PA on Oliver Stone's JFK in 1990. His debut horror feature of bullied teenagers dutifully follows instructions on the revenge bottle. A handsome DVD when it's released that will lift the spirits of the oppressed on a Friday night, while not being particularly original or inventive.

Another debut and winner of this year's World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance Undertow bodes well for writer/director Javier Fuentes-León's future (on the cards is a thriller). And though some may feel slightly underwhelmed, the film's quiet, insidious quality is also its virtue while never overplaying it's gay relationship theme. Fuentes-León is also adept at extracting great performances from his actors and his cinematographer.

But if you were to see one 'art-house' movie this summer Sebastian Silva's The Maid (La Nana) is probably the one (Sundance 2009 Grand Jury Prize). It resembles a little Paque Via (as yet unreleased from last year's London Film Festival) but is far funnier. What makes Silva's mostly hand held digital film stand head and shoulders above others is an unforced observation of daily mundanity. Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is the taciturn maid servicing the middle-class Valdes family. Hers is not a revelatory story and that, of course, is also the point. Nor is the film overtly 'political' in any way. The inevitable problem with cinema distribution these days is that a justly poignant, somewhat indy film, like Precious gets hyped to the 'nth' degree. As LA Film Festival artistic director David Ansen reflected in an interview not long ago there can be queues around the snowmen at Sundance but when a foreign film plays its 'home crowd' in New York there can be barely a trickle outside the theatre. The Maid is one such film that deserves just as much hype as a 'Precious '. It's just not sporting the same colours.

"My loneliness was my only friend," says Angelina Jolie's eponymous Salt (an ironic stab perhaps at SALT - the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty). She's accused of being a sleeper Russian spy: trained with other Soviet orphans in childhood, and coaxed with covert identities that masqueraded as love and affection. Don't be put off by the negative press on this film: director Philip Noyce has never delivered a pic not worth one's time. It also makes interesting comparison to The Expendables this week: a movie with more single product above the title marquee action names (so much so that two go uncredited) than you could throw a script at - probably why one seems obscured. But again, don't be put off - all these guys are consummate in holding your screen attention.

Moreover, Stallone's workmanlike direction of his production crafts-people shows up the slack charlatanism of many Hollywood helmsmen. It's the finesse of a Philip Noyce director we miss, making such talent all the more appreciated. No damp praise intended, but Stallone 'gets on with it' delivering a punching product as he's always done much to the chagrin of his detractors. The Expendables is Salt without the detail - something in a sense it never needs. What would've totally succeeded is more humour - a talent all of those actors have though rarely get the chance to show off. We're both the same "we're both dead inside" says bitter, mercenary CIA op Eric Roberts to Stallone in the final shootout.

Kurt Wimmer's Salt script also deals with childhood, the notion of safety and "the arse-wipes" (The Expendables) that are humanity at its worst and are often most prevalent. Without plot spoiling, when Dolph Lundgrun buddies in the bar with the others, forgiven after trying to blow (or in his case whack) all their heads off, it's not so unbelievable. Life for them is about survival not friendship. "If we need to loose someone for the greater good we will." (Salt) Mickey Rourke's monologue in The Expendables is shot entirely in big close up i.e. nudge - this is profound - like hearing a cello solo far off before the waves of Hollywood's score come crashing down. She walked in. A woman without a past and without a future.

Salt was a script originally slated for Tom Cruise but he fares far better with Knight and Day - entertainment not a million miles away from The Expendables, just with a lot more panache and wit. Salt has gravitas thanks to the extensive research of the production team. It's also Noyce's first studio pic in 10 years: "When I first read [the script], I was overwhelmed by the intoxicating combination of historical fact and popcorn fiction...a film that both pleases the mind and tickles the senses". And Jolie is consummately convincing (more so than Cruise could have been) echoing writer Maxim Gorky's idea that only women ever really know the future because they bear human life inside themselves. The A-Team (based on the 80s TV series) is simply great fun and for most part believable. (Could 4 hi-tech parachutes exist strong enough to keep a tank afloat as it free falls from 20,000 feet? Perhaps.)

Wimmer's Salt script hasn't quite escaped the Hollywood studio formula but at least the handcuffs are off. But when one's suspension of belief starts buckling, belief in events is strained just that bit too far. Then again, life is full of 'buckling' - hence this blog! Or is it that in reality, gritty popcorn and gravitas make very uneasy bedfellows? As Inception director Christopher Nolan observed it's about being "in the maze with the characters...stories that are too objective where you're hovering above the maze watching people make the wrong turns are a little frustrating". We know where we are with The Karate Kid (beautifully/cleverly shot in China by Roger Pratt). The integrity of Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) results in this martial arts prize fighter eking out an existence as a maintenance man. He too has a monologue like Mickey Rourke's - perpetual self-inflicted guilt ever since a car accident. But in the end, good triumphs over an evil will to power and the kid will have the inner and outer strength to be bullied no more. All thanks, of course, to Jackie Chan.

Salt is an exhilarating short story until it's time to duck into the Presidential bunker. Then, the film starts aching to be a novel - yikes! but it isn't long before the movie credits crawl. Like one of those film serials one used to watch as a kid you wish they'd waited until next week to reveal the short conclusion. And the film practically sells itself as a franchise thriller replete with rare Hollywood cliffhanger: who is Salt, where is Salt, what is Salt? Governments are there to reassure their citizens of how 'safe' we all are in their hands and never how vulnerable. It sounded crazy to some at the time but there was 'method in the madness' of the Bush administration when after the 9/11 attacks it asked Hollywood creators to come up with other possible attack scenarios. The Salt team worked hand in glove with former CIA advisors to be factually accurate. Indeed, as a kid Noyce used to follow people taking after his dad who was an Australian spook.

Paradoxically, it's the artifice of Let the Right One In that lets in the truth- the space in the architecture. Salt doesn't give itself time for that but as with all Noyce movies it makes you think not only about the subject matter but also how the film's placed within genre and its close cousins.

Humour is the distinguishing element of Oliver Stone's doco South of the Border, in which he visits the 7 South American presidents frequently maligned on Capitol Hill, by the CIA and the US media. He jokes with Argentine's Cristina Kirchner about her shoes and with Chávez (Venezuela) - or was it Morales (Bolivia) - about the President reading a heavy political time before bed and he chews coca leaves (good for altitude sickness) with Morales. If it weren't for Stone's involvement such a doco would have been relegated into 'well-meaning' but low key slots. People from all American political parties respect and listen to Oliver Stone. And there's a doco feel to all the director's work - knowing that there are many sides to the one story. Stone is one American brave enough to crane his neck and look around those corners - not as a nosy kid, more the neighbourhood cop. A shame his questions tend toward those of a rookie and not a detective.

For most people life, alas, doesn't resolve as does Let the Right One In or The Karate Kid. It veers far closer to co-writer/director Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. Restored for this year's 40th anniversary by Sony Pictures (Film Forum this Feb/March in NYC), Park Circus has just released the film in London. "All the people in my writing are different aspects of myself," she says, "and each of us has feminine and masculine components in our nature," confessed the film's co-writer Carole Eastman (aka Adrien Joyce) in a 1972 interview on American women in film making for Time Magazine.

Jack Nicholson's 'Bobby' - Robert Eroica Dupea (named after Beethoven's 3rd Symphony) - must really have been a great classical pianist for his sister Partita (Lois Smith) to so love him; not simply a brother. After years of working the blue-collar oil wells (long having abandoned the keyboard), he returns to the family home on an island off the coast of Washington state. En route we get one of cinema's classic scenes when Bobby can't get his toast at a roadside diner:"Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce . . . now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules."

Although it's a film of its time with requisite rebellion it is also out of time with echos of playwright Eugene O'Neill's family dramas (the Royal National Theatre recently hosted a wonderful revival of his first published play Beyond the Horizon). Like a magnet Bobby's constantly drawn back to his family yet equally keeps turning around and repelling himself. In trying to please everyone he ultimately pleases no-one, least of all himself. It's not that this family isn't strong, just not strong enough and/or their support mechanism is too close to what they are all running away from. What makes Five Easy Pieces such an iconic film is that Bobby is the character we'd all like to be, dream to be, should and definitely should not be.

He has a fling with a student house guest Catherine (Susan Anspach) who asks him to play something. He proffers a mediocre performance (intentional by the soundtrack's pianist Pearl Kaufman) of Chopin's simple haunting E Minor Prelude. When she enthuses he just taunts and enrages her. "I faked a little Chopin. You faked a big response," he grins. They are both faking it, the family is faking it, the world is always faking it to some extent. Bobby is a shit to women because he's a tortuous shit to himself. The piano becomes a metaphor for everything in the world that is gentle, humble, creative, quiet and necessarily cocooned in some way. Bobby is brave enough to break out and learn that the world isn't just full of butterflies. It ain't necessaily so but for so many talents like Bobby's it just always is. You want to climb the distant mountains that you can't or wont assail within. Is there artifice in this film? This is early work of the great cinematographer László Kovács (Easy Rider). As Daniel Barenboim showed in his masterclasses on the Beethoven piano sonata, the more you excavate with precise brushwork the more you can sit effortlessly looking out at the ocean and begin to fly. And as Barenboim knows only too well, nothing will ever, could ever be perfect. To some extent everything is always an illusion. It's an umbilical chord of trust.

I sort of imagined a scene akin to Woody Allen's Annie Hall where a guy's in the movie queue opining Marshall McLuhan's philosophy and the great man pops up the rear in a cameo exclaiming that the Columbia professor clearly knows nothing of his work. Beethoven appears behind Barenboim moaning that he couldn't hear a bloody thing when composing the sonatas, and that Barenboim's got it all wrong. But now dead, Ludwig hears everything though can't see a f***ing thing and that Barenboim sounds like such a genius whatever he does is fine by old Ludwig. Stranger things happen in Alaska.
Trailer

Or what about the Welsh who escaped to Patagonia in the late 1700's? The doco Seperado! by singer/songwriter Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals) goes in search of René Griffiths, obscure 60s pop star, who sang Welsh ballads a la Argentine cowboy - turns out he was an uncle. Great stuff!

Initially, Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner's Wah Do Dem (Jamaican patois for “What’s wrong with them?”) doesn't seem that promising. Jilted Max (Sean Bones) is vacationing alone on a Caribbean cruise (the filmmakers won the trip in a raffle), but wakes up on a Jamaican beach fleeced of everything. Everyone's worse nightmare as he barefoots it to Kingston's American Consulate 48 hours away. By following life's interesting details, this film is a lesson in just how subliminally powerful cinema can be.

One treat some film lovers will envy of New Yorkers is this fortnight's festival of historic 3D at Film Forum (Hoberman in the Village Voice). As the Wall Street Journal reported "When Film Forum expanded and relocated to its current West Houston St. headquarters in 1990, Mr. Goldstein saw to it that one of its three screens was equipped with the necessary hardware to show 3-D movies—what enthusiasts call 'stereo films.' It was an act of faith, as there were barely a handful of two-strip 3-D films available for exhibition at the time." Some critics - Mark Kermode, Roger Ebert - are very vocally against 3D, deeming it a superfluous waste of time and money. And admittedly, most recent efforts pale in the after-light of Avatar. Dance movie Step-Up (3D) doesn't do much for the dancing of its very talented cast (the girls win in the acting stakes) and for the most part falls into the 3D trap, as Ebert noted, of looking quite dark. And really, couldn't they think of something more exciting than balloons and bubbles popping out of the screen? A shame because it's not a bad movie in the least.
The pro 3D arguments

Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore has the very experienced Steven Poster at the camera helm (president of the Intl. Cinematographers Guild) and certainly seems to give more of a natural 3D illusion mixing live action, puppets and CGI animation. Perhaps it's in a scenario such as this where our belief is somewhat suspended that 3D works best. Where we are already prepared to enter a world other than our own. But the Cats and Dogs plot execution makes Toy Story 3 (3D) seem like Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's another holiday fun movie, though, with plenty of silly, cheasy one-liners (great voice-over work) to take parents' minds off the woes of the outside world. And make trudging through the local park just that bit more naughty.

More cinematography in the story of British film pioneer and unsung talent William Friese-Greene and his legal battle over the Biocolour process in The Magic Box. In 1889 he filed a patent for the 'chronophotographic' camera that took up to ten photographs per second using perforated celluloid film and he was experimenting with stereoscopic cameras as early as the 1890s (the BBC ran a series about his son Claude). Champion of forgotton Brit cinema Martin Scorsese is currently shooting his 3D film The Invention of Hugo Cabret now - (how you got away without using moi in London Mr. Marty none shall never know ;)) And Werner Herzog is using 3-D to film the prehistoric Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave paintings in France. Piranha 3D is just out but whether it beats the low-budget ingenuity of Mega Piranha is your to decide.
Earlier this year, Sony opened a 3D Technology Center in LA to train technicians. "Bad 3D will sour consumers on the experience," said Chris Cookson (President of Sony Technologies). "“It’s in Sony’s enlightened self-interest that everyone learn how to do this,” said Sony's George Joblove. “For us, it’s about information sharing. If other studios do bad 3D work, it hurts everyone.”

And musing of robots and the like, the big news of the year was, of course, the restoration of 96 new fragments to Metropolis. Director Fritz Lang was by all accounts the ultimate cliché of an über-tyrant. “I have to feel you are inside the robot,” Lang insisted to Helm [his leading lady] at one point, as she slowly asphyxiated in the wood and plaster armor that transformed her into the robotrix Maria." According to the catalogue essay from the North American LA Premiere at this year's TCM Classic Film Festival the film ran an estimated 153 minutes at its 1927 Berlin premier, Paramount in the U.S. cut the film to approximately 90 minutes and the 2001 restoration ran 124 minutes. But in the summer of 2008, the curator of the Buenos Aires Museo del Cine discovered a 16mm dupe negative and the new version was premiered at this year's Berlinale on February 12th. Kino releases in America and Eureka on September 10 in the UK. The DVD for both regions is due November but Eureka promises more extras than Kino with a specially commissioned commentary. Oh to have been at the Berlin premiere this year with live orchestra playing Gottfried Huppertz original score. Still, well worth reaching into your near empty pocket to pay and see this film on the big screen. Decades later, cinematographer Karl Freund was approached by Desilu, the new television production company founded by the married acting couple of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball and developed what became known as the 3-camera method for shooting TV shows affordably on film with I Love Lucy. Strange are all our journeys.
Lang's Metropolis beat Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World by about 5 years, by the way.
Meanwhile in New York, Josef von Sternberg was busy with Underworld (1927), The Last Command (1928), The Docks of New York (1928) just out on Criterion DVD in the States.
Park Circus (UK) have Blu-ray of Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925) along with Modern Times (1936).

Still in weird German vein, Eureka also releases this week The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (IFC Films released in May, NYC). Dr. "I hate human beings" Heiter (Dieter Laser) fails in his engineering experiment of joining 3-dogs into one and goes the human route. When a couple of stranded female American tourists come knocking on his palatial door in the rain he seizes the opportunity, sedates them, and begins suturing them mouth to anus to his already kidnapped Japanese front man (Akihiro Kitamura) -hence the title. It all sounds totally disgusting. But writer/director Tom Six, who learnt his craft directing Big Brother shows in the Netherlands, Europe and the States, doesn't for one moment titilate the viewer - there's not a bare breast or arse in sight. What also makes the film quite strange is that it's not even particularly horrifying (compared to most films in that genre). It's cool, calm, clinical, and mordantly funny without being tasteless. Moreover, it makes one consider whether the experiments on many people's will to fame ever since reality TV grabbed hold is actually any more disgusting than the method elicited here. Salt director Philip Noyce mentioned in an interview that his 'spook' father always believed that the deadliest weapon was the human being. At least the reality show contestants had free will. Or were they more like the frog in the simmering water. Pavlov's dog coming to the boil.

For those sick of Brit social realism then Ben Wheatley's blackly comedic debut Down Terrace may prove an antidote. Others are hailing Frontier Blues as eye-opening realism on the northern Irani front. But if bleak, darkly realist comedy of life is your thing then Tulpan's god was a far better stand-up comedian.
Frightfest is this weekend

Biographies are always problematic. Our thirst for the facts or the spurious in other people's lives never goes away. One of the characters in 101 year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl (adaptation of a short story by Eça de Queiros) quotes poet Fernando Pessoa - a man who willfully always blurred the boundaries:

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
mine.

Oliveira simply holds the camera's gaze on his subjects for a mere 64 minutes. So why is this so fascinating? The distillation of experience, perhaps.
Anthology have also just released in NYC

The bio-pic (though ascending far beyond the normal lows in that genre) of chanteur French royalty Serge Gainsbourgh goes in the opposite direction (as you'd expect from comic book artist turned director Joann Sfar). Many will cringe at this film (as they did of Serge in real life) - his simple, romantic little dittis, his insatiable appetite for women. But you can't fault Sfar's technical inspiration and execution. Nor Gainsbourgh's belief that art (he was painter/novelist/l'homme allamonde) can change if not politics then certainly states of mind. Not to mention the fact that he reminded France that their national anthem was once one of revolution not complacency.

Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky was one of the foreign films that the UK Film Council (a quango recently axed as part of the Conservatives austerity drive) supported through its prints and advertising subsidy. Distributer Soda Pictures have gone wide on this release with full poster campaign on the London Underground. Ken Russell affectionados (remember his outrageous BBC composer films) may not warm to Jan Kounen's film (based on Brit author Chris Greenhalgh's book) that only just keeps its head above bio-pic tide-mark. But the performances and production values are magnificent. 'In the know' music lovers will attend out of curiosity while for others Mr. Stravinsky will be a new aural experience. He too got in trouble with a national anthem when in 1940 he orchestrated the American one and was arrested in Boston. Plus ça change.

Coco might make an interesting, slightly perverse double-bill with Éric Rohmer's My Night with Maud (1969) - a film that for years has stuttered along in poor revival house prints. One still has to concentrate hard on Rohmer's cheeky intellectual exercise but the BFI's restoration (the great camera of Nestor Almendros in B/W) makes it so much easier. Knowing your Marx from your Pascal and Jansenism helps but talk about making religious philosophy sexy with the Maud of Françoise Fabian! They sure don't make date movies like that anymore. maybe Woody Allen will tackle John Locke: Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy ;)
The Sign of Rohmer (August 18-Sept 3,Walter Reade, New York)
Moral Tales is out on Artificial Eye DVD

And if this blog were to have a Top 10 list of all time (the only confession you'll ever get) then Visconti's The Leopard (1963) would certainly stand proud. It's been newly restored and while previous prints were a huge wonderful seashell on the mantlepiece, to see this restoration is like having the living organism inside. "The middle-classes don't want to destroy us, they want to take our place," says the Prince on the brink decade of Italy's unification. To not have seen for decades the cinematic detail of every doorway, every curtain waving in the wind "without the wind the air would be fettid", every hue of the Sicilian countryside, is not to have seen this film. It is quite simply a masterpiece of cinema.

One contemplated writing something of the first 100 days of the new UK 'coalition' government of Conservative and Liberal Democrat. But there just isn't much that's funny anymore. (The Lib Dems used to be the butt of many a joke but not anymore) On launching his new bike scheme in London Mayor Boris Johnson joked that it needed a Conservative to undertake a Communist policy. Go see Giuseppe Tornatore's Baarìa instead. It hasn't got great press this film and at 2.5 hours you'd think it would plummet into boredom at any moment. But it never does. "He may be a Communist but he's in a painting with saints," one character says of the frescoed brigands in the Sicilian church of Bagheria. For the great, still inventive, film composer Ennio Morriconi the film's "a work that can make time stand still". The Prince in Lampedusa's The Leopard, in Tornatore's words,"claimed that young men should leave Sicily before they turned 17 to avoid absorbing...the typical Sicilian flaws. So I had time to consume them all." From "the University in Via Gioaccino Guttuso 114" to the "the Roundabout di Palagonia...is only, all in all a few hundred metres. But if you walk them up and down for years, you could learn what the whole world will never be able to teach you."
The Age of Austerity Challenges Stonehenge
The Paolo Sorrentino Collection will soon be out on Artificial Eye DVD.

"There came a time, he realised, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realise the strangeness of anything."
James Hilton Lost Horizon

Why did the ostrich cross the road upside down?...

Everyone who loves cinema has been waiting expectantly for Christopher Nolan's Inception - likewise Warner Brothers for an intelligent summer blockbuster (opening US/UK today). Well: as you'd expect, it certainly ain't boring even at 2.5 hours. But what at the end of the day what is Nolan's point? We never really know so we leave the cinema dissatisfied. And not in a joyful perplexed David Lynch way. In fact Inception seems to owe more to David Cronenberg’s stunning 1969 student film Stereo. And the film quotes the never ending Penrose stairs created by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger. By casting the petite 'girl next door' Ellen Page as the 'architect' (Ariadne, of course) of upside-down urban dreamscapes and inside out neural mazes- Escher optical illusions drunk on Piranesi ruins - there seems to be a referencing of Ayn Rand's male architect in her 1943 novel The Fountainhead (for which Rand wrote the Warner Brothers screenplay.)
"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision." - a Fountainhead quote on a Walt Disney Center plaque.

One could even argue that Leonardo Di Caprio's corporate spy mercenary Dom Cobb is akin to John Galt of Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957) and that he's a sort of Batman/Clark Kent character diving into the minds of the rich to save the world. In accessing their dream states e.g. the corporate inheritance of Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy), is Nolan commenting ironically on Rand's idea that we are doomed by those who attempt to live through others, placing others above self? That the individual "must exist for his own sake neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself." (1962) On the contrary, Nolan seems to be siding more with Kantian philosophy (Rand's bête noire) that reason is unable to fully comprehend reality. But instead of us the audience rather smugly and happily experiencing this rollercoaster from the sidelines, we feel like the guy trying desperately to keep balance atop his giant medicine ball. Fun for a while but not hours on end. And perhaps the problem with Nolan's film is that he's trying to subvert Warners' action/heist genre while never really changing its conventions. He never acknowledges Edgar Allan Poe's verse "all that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream" but nods to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - the rotating corridors/hotel room, the large opulent room empty except for the old man's death bed (another Warners film rather than e.g. Vincent Ward's What Dreams May Come ). Cobb himself tells Ariadne that you can't just use what you've seen but must imagine new realities in order to create the dream. Yet there is barely (if at all) a hint of surrealism in the film's imagery so Ariadne's potential to be a Leonora Carrington is stymied.

V & A's 1:1 Architects Build Small Spaces
The Serpentine's latest temporary summer pavilion's been designed by Jean Nouvel. More photos HERE.
Incisively curated (Emma Dexter and Oscar Humphries) show of post-WW2 art and furniture The Tightrope Walker at Timothy Taylor Gallery, including the oft overlooked wife of Hans Hartung, Anna-Eva Bergman and designer Charlotte Perriand.

Toy Story 3 seems to succeed far better in all this. Cobb's dad (Michael Caine) early on in Inception says wryly something to the effect that by giving a child the cuddly bear from childhood they thought it would make for happiness - visually reinforced in the film's final minute. Or as Lady Macbeth spake: "what's done cannot be undone". Inception has the happy ending of the heist movie: Cobb returns home. 'Bruce Willis' has dealt with all his demons in the process of defeating the bad guys. But The Thomas Crown Affair remake does this better. We never know the demons of either Pierce Brosnan's corporate guru turned art thief or Renee Russo's insurance investigator seduced by the intellect of her chase. The not knowing is all the more intriguing for us. The past may be a foreign country but they're still not doing things any differently there. "How do porcupines mate?" Crown asks his psychiatrist. "Very carefully" is her reply. Home is where the heart is - at least what's left of it without losing your mind.

Mind control is the name of the toys' game in Toy Story 3 when Andy's on the eve of college and his toys are packed off to the kids daycare home Sunnyside. Woody (Tom Hanks again), of course, is the only skeptical seer of the pack. Initially, Sunnyside's strawberry scented teddy bear Lotso (Lots-O'-Huggin Bear) lumbering on a walking stick appears a lovin' uncle. By night under the watchful CCTV controls of a wide-eyed cymbal clashin' monkey the home is a Stalinist state with Lotso's patrolling henchmen biding time by gambling. A nice irony that Lotso is voiced by Ned Beatty who was Academy Award nominated opposite Peter Finch in Paddy Chayefsky's 1977 Network - a vicious satire on network news control. As a kiddy’s film it's quite scary - but then probably no more so than the modern day playground, while at the same time being very funny indeed both for them and the adults. The Shrek sequel's not bad either but if there was a choice...

Toy Story 3 also references the heist movie genre in the playful manner of an Aardman animation never loosing momentum right to the very end. Having Buzz Lightyear temporarily switch to Spanish language mode (with requisite Flamenco dance moves) is a nice co-incidence with Spain's World Cup success this week (and a clever net to catch Latino audiences).
Everybody's Fine is out on DVD

Mega Piranha is that sort of film for when you have absolutely nothing else to do (or don't want to) - and that's not a scaly backed compliment. In fact its intentional 'B' movie acting style resembles Buzz Lightyear in all modes except Buzz dubbing is better. Its soundtrack is daytime TV serial deliriously endless and it's edit points always comedically spot on. A total waste of time in a totally fun way.
Birdemic: Schlock horrors that come low on the pecking order


The Concert is a feel good post-Communist comedy (Romanian/French director Radu Mihaileanu) that is beguiling if a little thin, though not in subject matter. Once leader of the Bolshoi Orchestra, Andrei's (Aleksei Guskov) Jewish ness demoted him to cleaner during Communist rule. Thirty years later the orchestra is to play the Châtelet in Paris and Andrei is determined to reunite his own orchestra in their place. Young violin virtuoso Anne-Marie (Mélanie Laurent who learnt violin for the role) harbours a longing to discover her childhood and family that's finally resolved.

Bluebeard (Barbe Bleu) (finally in the UK -IFC opened March in NYC) is Catherine Breillat's version of Charles Perrault's 1697 blood thirsty fairy tale of murdered wives hanging in the back room. "I like that Bluebeard isn't an ogre or a giant—he's a man. It struck me that girls read this tale at a very young age: I myself read it when I was five. It's a story that teaches these little girls to love the man who's going to kill them," said the director. Like all her films the camera in Bluebeard lingers long on character whereas Béla Bartók's well-known opera has only hints of a man rather than the monster. The only thing lacking in Bluebeard's regal life is someone whom he can trust unconditionally. The only thing, absolutely the only thing, he asks of his new young bride is not to use the tiny key he's given her. In Breillat's film one imagines it's the same request he made to his very first wife. Only then the room was probably empty.

Claire Denis is as strong as Breillat with her subjects and Isabelle Huppert's White Material white African coffee grower standing in the tide of revolution is relentlessly no exception.

Trust is also at the heart of the surprisingly engaging French kidnap film Rapt by actor turned writer/director Lucas Belveaux. At over 2 hours you'd think the film would sag yet it never does. Nor does it ever feel the urge to move on until characters have established themselves in a scene. There's nothing new here but the direction asks you to consider whether you've looked hard enough in Claude Chabrol fashion. It's almost blackly comedic when the released corporate tycoon returns to his family and his only real care is for his dog- oblivious to the forgiveness all around for his now public errant, salacious lifestyle.

Skeletons won its writer/director Nick Whitfield the Michael Powell Award for best new British feature at this year's Edinburgh Film Fest. Describing it as a Scottish Ghostbusters doesn't really do either film just favours. Skeletons is small, finely crafted (acting/cinematography) seemingly without big ambitions. In other words a very British film and the equal of most indie American comparisons. Whitfield's gentle comedy works just fine "a kind of surreal Laurel and Hardy" but perhaps what it needs is a touch of Catherine Breillat - Danish actress Paprika Steen being as always outstanding. Whitfield said himself that a favourite film of his "is Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven and the way that film is a benchmark for me. The camera doesn't ever want to be admired." Perhaps Whitfield will give Britain its next 'break-out' film. Or perhaps its quiet bigness may not be heard by all.

Derick Martini's US indie first feature Lymelife (written with his brother Steven) took over a year to be released here (April 2009 in the States) but its story of family meltdown or rather universal deficit of coagulation has its impetus in Charlie Bragg (Timothy Hutton) contracting the lethargic disease of the title's Lyme tick insect - an epidemic in suburban 70s Long Island. His wife Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is supportive but finds sexual satisfaction elsewhere with Mickey Bartlett (Alec Baldwin showing nay-sayers that he really does do proper acting). While not quite on the level of Tamara Jenkins' The Savages, the Martini brothers are most impressively heading in that direction.

London River is Rachid (Days of Glory) Bouchareb's English language debut centred around the London bombings (tube and bus) 5 years ago with wonderful performances - as you'd expect from Brenda Bleythn alongside Sotigui Kouyate - both searching for their adult children gone missing that day. Co-incidence or not? Many will find this a deeply moving and cathartic film in large part to Bleythn's ability to be so ordinary and yet so magisterially humble. On perhaps the downside is the script's need to contexualise the parents' story with that of the day's events e.g. several scenes at the police station that add little to the power of the central performances. It isn't that they're not well played just that Bouchareb seems anxious to show the extra-ordinary of human nature in the simplicity of the ordinary. And his camera doesn't observe his supporting cast the way Mike Leigh can in that vein.

Catherine Breillat: "Isn't this the fundamental, selfish and cynical relationship of childhood with life: knowing that we are powerless, that we depend on adults for everything, and yet drawing our strength in the knowledge of our temporary immortality in relation to grown-ups. Knowing that we will live on after they disappear. I know that this is the way tales work. Life always gets the upper hand. For children, Nothing is really that frightening because Everything is frightening and they have faith in their lucky star."

Edgar Allan Poe: "Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence."