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)

where trees are actual and take no holiday

"I am screaming you just don't hear it"

It took two decades for Douglas Sirk's 1957 WWII love story A Time to Love and a Time to Die (one of Godard's favourite films) to be re-discovered. His 1956 Written on the Wind was also trashed on release: its ending could not be more appropriate for modern times with the child of an oil magnate caressing an oil well statue. In the final moments of BBC Four's Time, an aerial shot of the Tate Millenium Bridge pulls back with the presenter meditating on "man, a tiny speck" - ironically on a bridge it took London man several structural engineering goes to get right before unleashing. A bridge linking one of London's most visited tourist attractions the Tate Modern to another St Paul's and high finance in the City of London.
Sacred Made Real (National Gallery) moves to the National Gallery of Art in Washington while Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective in Philadelphia travels to the Tate Modern.
We know (as history has proven on countless occasions) that at least for a while, most provocative art is always destined to stay outside the comfort and commodity of gallery walls and that much of what is most celebrated in the present is also often the most forgotten in decades to come.
Michael Landy's Art Bin (South London Gallery)
Michael Landy’s destructive instincts (FT)

A new decade has dawned but are we on the brink of a new world or its precipice perhaps as a US broadcaster might drawl? The Daily Show's Jon Stewart (having despaired 8 months ago after hearing Elizabeth Warren's home truths on the US government bank bail-out) was now so ecstatic interviewing her again (over hopes that President Obama might just be able to wring at least some long-lasting economic change) that he had to control his love-making desires towards Mrs. Warren in front of a studio audience.

Ten years on from actor Kevin Spacey taking reins at the Old Vic theatre, he revives American playwright John Guare's 1990 Six Degrees of Separation (until April 3), in which he believes "this dream of being drawn towards the lives of the rich and famous..I think it's increased rather than decreased since the play was written." (The Culture Show interview, (BBC 2, Jan 28). [Alas for my staging of Guare's equally prescient Landscape of the Body (1977) in the old Spitalfields Market that never materialised back in the 90s.]

And who'd have thought but Brit boxer Alex Reid (not the dead footballer) having entered the final ever Celebrity Big Brother (Series 7) house a month ago to resounding boos (and a newspaper 'tabloid' rating as low as a rat's arse) exited Friday night cheered on as the winner (beating to everyone's surprise with 65% of the public vote even fellow hot-tip housemate Vinnie Jones who'd affectionately dubbed him 'Rocky' Reid). "My whole agenda in here is to be myself," said Reid.

Moreover, Alex was a guy brave enough to have zits of pus on his back squeezed by fellow housemates on prime-time telly. Could that ever be so in the States? (Channel Four were the ones who screened that doco on women surgically altering their labia) One of the reasons for Big Brother's demise is, of course, the internet. Yet what is so intriguing (cultural snobbery not allowing, of course, such an adjective for such a show) about Celebrity BB is that although most members of this house are so used to being surveiled 24/7 in the real world, they are nonetheless human and naturally seek interaction (or not) with each other- many having made ties that will long bind after the show. The irony being that there is far more 'humanity' in a show like this than the seeming 'democracy' of the internet where human connections are often tenuous to say the least, let alone ever able to approach the word 'family'. Auditions as we speak for the final ever series of the 'regular' Big Brother this summer. Perhaps more internet interactivity might have saved the show.
Eric Cantona is acting on stage in Face au Paradis (Facing Paradise) at the Theatre Marigny,Paris (BBC Radio 4's Front Row reported)

BBC 2's The Virtual Revolution (a 4 part history of the internet) began Saturday Jan 30: "how has the web affected us in 20 years...and re-making our world...and how the dream of leveling is played out". "Social misfits who wanted to go on being social misfits" versus "our innate desire to profit and control". "Not a cure for human nature but an amplification of [it]" When in 1989 Tim Berners Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal, his boss at CERN returned the memo with a note scribbled on the top "vague but exciting" and allowed him to work on it in his spare time: 6 August, 1991 the first website went online at CERN.

Berners Lee: "I think it would be very wrong to assume that if you connect a country it would become equal." "Its early supporters," says presenter Dr. Aleks Krotoski "believed that a space without rules and regulations would be more equal" the paradox now being "the very lack of regulation means those with the most resources can shout the loudest and impose their brands and authority". Lee Siegel (Against the Machine) "You can shatter hierarchies but once you become known you have to sign up with one of the recording studios. The old hierarchies are still there they're just scrambling to adjust themselves to this new situation." Andrew Keen author of The Cult of the Amateur on The Huffington Post: "[Huffington's] an interesting woman but about as revolutionary as my dog", i.e."re-establishing the old hierarchies". The programme also points out that "of the more than 130 million blogs active since 2002 it's estimated over 90% are now dormant.

The 3 year-old LUCRESLONDON blog can most certainly testify to the outright hypocrisy and jealousy with which many still view blogs. And the constant pressure (in Andrew Keen's words) to become nothing more than a dog. [I hasten to add a spoiler alert that a recent BBC Horizon doco showed that some dogs have the spatial awareness potential of a 2 year-old child]. I often think I hear my paragraphs breaking into a teeny distant whine.
Will chimps at Edinburgh Zoo be soon replacing Big Brother contestants (BBC's Natural World: The Chimpcam Project)?
Endomol's Big Brother far scarier 1999 precursor We Live in Public is out on DVD.

Immodesty Blaize, the producer (and one of its stars) of Burlesque Undressed quotes Oscar Wilde: "be yourself because everyone else is taken". It's taken several decades for the art of burlesque dancing to get legit whereas being gayly flamboyant in Hollywood still requires discretion. Way back when Brit pop art artist Sir Peter Blake wrote his Royal College of Art grad thesis Don't Point It's Nude he was awarded the lowest possible grade.
Dita von Teese at Crazy Horse Le temple du nu chic (Optimum DVD Feb 8)
On the West End The Little Dog Laughed

This week also saw the death of adolescent angst author J.D. Salinger aged 91. Living in seclusion the past 50 years his reputation primarily rested on Catcher in the Rye (1951). "Most of us never write one great book," said Paul Morley in a BBC Newsnight's The Review Show discussion: "the invention of the teenager...he branded himself so brilliantly that he could withdraw and still be famous". "He's the last in line where the book - a book - would be important." Newsnight the evening before had authors Jay McInerney and Will Self rather less enthusiastic about an author lacking a true body of work, "the writer's non-writer". However, Salinger's Catcher remains in Amazon's Top 200 monthly list.

We learnt also this week that the UK poverty gap is the widest since the 70s and annual growth slowest since 1921 (according to the BBC). Is there really that much difference between Celebrity Big Brother and Westminster politics cynics might ask? Former Prime Minister Tony Blair spent 6 hours (finishing at 17.10pm) on Friday being questioned by The Iraq Inquiry. (60 countries were represented at Afghanistan: The London Conference on Thursday) Blair slipped in 2 hours early through a back door, as there were rumours of a possible 'citizen's arrest' by demonstrators. The somewhat symbolic protest outside The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre numbered 200 according to police, 300 estimated "generally" by the BBC, and 500 by organisers.

The inquiry panel (2 of whom Jews) had been criticised by a columnist for The Independent as being too pro-Zionist) and therefore putting in doubt impartiality. In actuality, though, it was all rather subdued and insubstantial fare. This was not a trial and none of the panel are lawyers. And at the end of the day one had made notes of which none were very startling - only a longing for a more forensic approach to proceedings. The thrill of legality and the Brit invention of habeas corpus 'beyond reasonable doubt' was the crux of first ep in American legal series The Good Wife. A re-trial proved just how fallible are humans (a lazy security guard) when crucial indisputable security camera footage showed the same plastic bag blowing across the parking lot at exactly the same time code on three consecutive evenings.

The Iraq War and Blair's case was different. As he said himself it was a matter of "judgement" rather than mere fact: the perception of threat was growing rather than an actual one. Blair saw no distinction between disarming and removing Saddam. "The Cabinet weren't interested in becoming part of the legal debate,” said Blair, although the Iraq Inquiry panel seemed to think otherwise. He used characteristic self-deprecation when asked about last year's BBC Fern Britton interview "I would have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]” In summing up the former Prime Minister cited emotive arguments - how Iraq's monthly child mortality rate had vastly improved in the years after Saddam's removal. And how a leader who'd gassed his own people was clearly a danger to the international community.

Twenty relatives of soldiers killed in the war were allowed into the public seating via ballot: "Be quiet please," asked inquiry Chairman John Chilcot as one audience member quietly heckled Blair in his final moments saying he felt "responsibility but not regret" with the world better as that result. Although not visible on the one-minute delay live feed the BBC's Nick Robinson reported a "come on” as Blair got up to leave and "you are a liar" (2 woman?) "and a murderer". One woman was apparently in tears after his exit.

The [quiet] heckler was James Sandry (Farsi speaker) who'd just returned from the Middle East. He believes Tony Blair has a "paranoid interpretation of Middle Eastern politics...not even one regret?!!" "I wasn't really planning to heckle...[the event was] something so removed from the reality of the situation...Blair has such incredible ignorance about what is thought in the region." One father in the audience who'd lost a son said Blair just recited "lines he's practiced...he had the opportunity [for]soothing balm to the open wounds....the world maybe a better place with the absence of Saddam...[but] the incompetence...the local darts players at the pub could have told him that ". And that is the problem of the war and the inquiry. The Kosovo intervention (without legal backing) is cited as precedence for the Iraq invasion. The panel members ask for the reflections of its interviewees in summation but the ground between humanity and legality is bedrock for some and quicksand for others. As Britain's Prime Minister Blair became the consummate 'performer' he'd always dreamed of. Even perfecting the impossible double-act with the United States.

If in a decade or more Iraq proves stable, then Blair will be seen by many as a liberator rather than the present villain. I wonder whether as a lawyer Mr. Blair ever saw a Michael Douglas film The Star Chamber (1983)? Ever frustrated by a plea-bargaining system, a panel of 'law lord' Supreme Court judges meet sporadically in total secrecy to meat out justice to those whom they feel were truly guilty but whom the law has let slip. The 'Supremes' are rarely wrong. And if they are does it matter because the culprits are scumbags anyway and there is no collateral damage?
Julie Walters plays Mo Mowlam in Mo (Channel 4, Sun Jan 31) - the female politician (former secretary of state for Northern Ireland) no one dissents as an extraordinary (and fun) politician.

One commentator on the televised proceedings of The Iraq Inquiry was Carne Ross (Iraq expert on the British delegation to the United Nations) who felt that the panel failed to dig deep enough under Blair's claims in "a much more intrusive adversarial way" exploring the breach of "fundamental trust between public and government". Ross was also interviewed on the BBC's two-part The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia (the T.E. Lawrence of David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia) and shared the programme’s overall admiration of the man and disillusionment at the way his promises to the Arabs were broken by the British and the French. In 2002, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past...The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis - again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one." Straw is also referring back to French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes who drafted the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between the two governments arbitrarily carving up former Ottoman Arab territories.

Hannah Arendt in The Imperialist Character writes of Lawrence: "Never again was the experiment of secret politics made more purely by a more decent man. The Imperialists destroyed Lawrence until nothing was left except some inexplicable decency." Lawrence was never forgiven by the Arabs and never forgave himself ending his life in self-imposed menial chores as a provincial army soldier back in England. He wanted "our first brown dominion not our last brown colony". He returned to Oxford after the Paris Peace Conference a broken man "his mother spoke of him sitting for hours on end unmoving with his face frozen, staring at the ground". Lawrence embodied the very 'old-fashioned' qualities of language skills, diplomacy and a human understanding of cultures alien to ours that made the British Foreign Office second to none. Gazing high or low into that magnificent Foreign Office internal courtyard often our only choice nowadays is to bow our heads to the ground in abject silence.

BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears on how to re-produce the world's most debated stage direction of "the distant sound of a breaking string" in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (Вишнëвый сад or Vishniovy sad) (1904). The 150th anniversary of his birth.

"half the tree's gone but it blossoms as if nothing has happened"

Ethan Watters discusses his book Crazy Like Us on The Daily Show:
Japan is 5 years behind the States in the use of drugs for mental health "do we want the rest of the world to think like us?...it's a billion dollar business in Japan...[we'll go] with the cultural trends that are there and sell a lot of drugs."

The Tokyo City Promotion 2010 couldn't have begged for better free publicity across the world as it's banner shouted proudly above The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (venue for The Iraq Inquiry). One of their greatest movie exports Yasujiro Ozu is currently receiving a 2-month retrospective on the BFI Southbank. Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953, B/W) lead last month (twice ranked by critics as among the 5 greatest films ever made in Sight and Sound): cult director Jim Jarmusch "couldn't imagine the world of cinema without [his] perfect, contemplative (and often funny) observations of human nature".
Tokyo Story: "Times have changed, we must face up to it."
"You deserve a better life," - "I'm fine, I'll never get old."
Complementing this in February is Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960, Colour) made 3 years before Ozu's death. As one of the older men says, "It's the people who tend to complicate life. Life itself is simple." At times in the film, the new bustle of modern city life is almost Jacques Tati-esque in its comic, choreographed background movement. Its insights notwithstanding, Late Autumn's lush romantic score does nod somewhat toward Hollywood presentation.

Back in 2007 the BFI held a Naruse retrospective with three new prints including his When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) (Onna ga kaidan o agaru). And for years all Naruse's later was accused (Noel Burch) of being too close to the Hollywood norm. The studio head at Shochiku told him, "Naruse we don't need two Ozu's," so he moved to Toho for the next 30 years. Burch viewed Ozu as a modernist and non-Hollywood, contrary to other judgments of Ozu as establishment and nostalgic for old values. Though many others would argue that the neglected Naruse far more deserved new prints rather than Ozu, Tokyo Story would nonetheless reality benefit - Ozu's sound effects loose much of their power on an aging soundtrack. Hopefully they'll be one for the BFI DVD/Blu-ray release April 19 along with DVD for Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951). But there are new prints in the season for Good Morning (Ohayo, 1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (Samma no Aji, 1962).

"His characters lack the hope and good humour of Ozu's in the face of disappointment," writes Alexander Jacoby in Senses of Cinema, "and, unlike Mizoguchi's protagonists, they are usually denied the luxury of death." Donald Richie in Cinema: a Critical Dictionary (1980): “He lacks that hope which is the highest wisdom.” “If they move even a little,” Naruse famously remarked of his characters, “they quickly hit the wall. From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.” One doesn't, of course, want to detract from any praise of Ozu. But it's fascinating to view all this work in historic cine context. In January 1960, the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty set off violent clashes between students and police and in June 10,000 demonstrated prompting Oshima's radical film Night and Fog in Japan. As David Bordwell points out, "only the most dedicated reflection-theorist could find traces of this tumult in [Ozu's] Late Autumn...utterly insular, portraying a tranquil society that no longer existed."

Naruse's earliest extant work is Flunky, Work Hard (Koshiben gambare, also known as Little Man Do Your Best) from 1931, where he combined melodrama with slapstick, trying to meet the demands set by Shochiku's Kamata studio, who wanted a mix of laughter and tears. Akira Kurosawa called Naruse's style of melodrama, "like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths" and "a magnificent editor aware of the fact that you're caught in the flow of something...emotional tone," adds Phillip Lopate on an audio commentary disc in Eureka's must have box set of Repast (Meshi, 1951), Sound of the Mountain (Yama No Oto, 1954) and Flowing (Nagareru, 1956) - all great prints. It wasn't until a 1983 Locarno retrospective by Audie Bock and a subsequent Toronto Cinemateque and Film Forum, New York retrospective that Naruse became known (included in Eureka's booklet is Bock's essay A Gesture and a Pose first published in Artforum 2005).
Bock: "If Ozu can imbue a film with transcendence by holding a shot of a vase in a corner of a dark room while the soft murmur of a father's snoring continues on the soundtrack Late Spring), Naruse will use a cutaway to an inanimate object for a completely different purpose." Lopate: "One of the charms of Naruse's art is its earned pessimism. It takes for granted that life is unhappy: therefore, we can relax in the possession of sadness, acquiesce from the start to a fated disenchantment."

Naruse made shomin-geki (working-class drama or 'home films' about the lower, middle or salaried classes) with female protagonists - "his forlorn flavour of existence can become addictive" Lopate writes, while James Quandt in The Films of Japanese Master Mikio Naruse notes "Naruse's lucidity (as opposed to pessimism, a distinction Bresson often made about his own work...Naruse's films could never be mistaken, as Ozu's often are, as transcendental." Quandt also compares Naruse to French director Maurice Pialat. "A director of the here and now," says Lopate comparing him to American John Cassavetes, with a "devotion to getting the exact feel of domestic space [his characters] forced to behave well and compelled to express their discontent with that arrangement." The father muses to his daughter in the opening of The Sound of the Mountain: "whenever I see a sunflower, I think of a man's head. I wonder of the inside of a man's head could be as beautiful as a flower. Wouldn't it be great if you could send your brains off to be cleansed? You could remove your head take it down to the hospital and say, 'wash this for me' like at the laundry!"

Hirokazu Kore-eda doesn't let the Japanese side down with his Yokahama family re-union Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) released before Christmas and having just finished its BFI run to coincide with Ozu. Well worth catching the DVD of this. The BFI also has a concurrent season of films influenced by Ozu.
Soda Pictures' has the poignant Korean release Treeless Mountain with a 7 and 6-year-old left in the care of their alcoholic aunt. Another DVD to look forward to.

Director Yojiro Takita's Departures (released last June in New York by Regent Releasing and in the UK late last year) beat Waltz With Bashir and The Class to win the 2009 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. Best known for making soft-core porn, the film divided many critics but you'll be able to decide for yourself soon on DVD. Daigo (Masahiro Motoki-former pop idol 'Mokkun') is a cellist in a waning Tokyo classical orchestra that's victim of the credit crunch. With his wife, they decide to move back up north of and live in his childhood home - unhappily but thankfully with his mother now deceased. Seeking work he spies an ad for "departures" which in fact turns out to be "encoffinment," the preparation of corpses before their cremation, nokanshi . Such a job is frowned upon as Japan’s burakumin (outcast) class. It's a strange, somewhat very intentionally melodramatic film about death and its empowerment through strengthening the soul. Some critics felt the comedy and pathos just too strained. But Yojiro Takita seemed to know always exactly what tone he was creating. John Williams' (unreleased theatrically in the UK) Firefly Dreams was released on DVD sometime ago (reviewed here {8 paras in}) and again worth a look.

Clive Owen's Ozzie (Brit ex-pat) sports journo in The Boys are Back may have landed in hot-water had he pretended to be report from his sofa (not from the broadcast booth) Andy Murray's defeat in the Australian Open final in Melbourne yesterday against Roger Federer. (We learnt from BBC coverage that Murray began from humble beginnings in Dunblane, Scotland pillow fighting as a kid to commanding the world stage. The Boys are Back director Scott Hicks gave us the breakout Oz film Shine (1996) and while this adapted memoir from Simon Carr is by turns touching, amusing, beautiful to look at, and with fine acting (as always from Owen) it never really takes flight into anything surprising or disturbing.

Naruse's battling wife in Repast almost cries all the time while always smiling. And at one point in the film she says quite simply, "I'm so tired of this". We all say this. Often. But Naruse's skill and his actress manage to send shockwaves through us. The afore mentioned critics view Naruse as the most materialist of all directors with many at the "end of their rope in terms of their finances". As in Chekhov and Mike Leigh they continue smiling and hoping for a better life.

[MUCHO ADDITION-Fri Feb 5)

....there are a few more words to inhabit this space...just their removal van went a bit kaputt ;)
and unlike The Three Sisters, some of us do make it to Moscow and beyond. Certitude versus adventure.

.it is what it is.


Businessmen in FOOD, INC (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
Distributed by Dogwoof in the UK

You don't argue...

In spiritual vein, 3 posts for the price of one today. And as you'd not expect from this site there are to be no 'best of 2009' lists, wish lists, twhat lists or even decoupage of our previous Brit decade. The BBC has done that sociologically and depressingly well in The Story of the Noughties. Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe Review 2009 (BBC4 or read his column for The Guardian) is your man for the rap sheet on telly.

Let's try to forget the fact that Britain practically grinds to a halt everytime it snows (the town of Benson hit minus 17 degrees Celcius) and try to accentuate positive Brit. Gritting salt has run out for many a road. Look what happened to the Venetian Empire. A new book David Boyd Haycock's A Crisis Of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (i.e. WWI - Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spencer) does, however, beg the question of whether Britain after the 00ties possesses artistic brilliance or indeed any crisis to speak of. Popping over to Paris on the Eurostar for savoir-faire won't quite feel the same for many after being trapped in a tunnel for 15 hours. And let's face it many - even those in certain artistic realms - didn't know 15 years ago that the Festival d'Automne existed. And still don't. I imagine the riposte to that is 'we don't no French fry fest/ we got chavucatiiiooonn! Even the achievements of Brit Dept of Environment policy advisor and Norfolk lass Chrissie Wellington went relatively unheralded as for the third time in succession she became the Ironman Triathlon World Champion-9 hours of swimming, cycling, marathon. Adrenaline's nothing without the PR love.
Prince Harry may not have found love sleeping rough on the streets of London but he did manage to highlight homelessness at Christmas as we learnt that 1 in 5 schooleavers will be unemployed. Meanwhile BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review enlighteningly mused, "when will we see the Citizen Kane of new technology".

The curious and perhaps ironic thing about the past New Labour decade is that their American go-getting (or is that me-getting) economic push can cite in its defense many past Brit success or near success stories. They just happen to be mostly Americans. But recent men who've been lured to sort out various messes for the masses (you know who you are) just gave up in despair but most certainly not in penury and not without leaving a clean copy book. Britain was famous for its boffins - the most high profile, of course, being Sir Alan Sugar (he of the Amstrad computer) fronting TV entrepreneur reality show The Apprentice. And as BBC2' series The Noughties confirmed, Britain's last decade led the world in entertainment export (the format show). Oh, and football. While culture...well: in 3 episodes that word was never allowed out on its own unless in the company of the word celebrity.

Brit screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine has an otherworldly quality though choosing to work in the more commercial realm - rewrites for Knowing and The Day The Earth Stood Still- and with co-writer Simon Garrity Exam is his directorial debut (seen at Raindance and the Edinburgh Fest). A steely invigilator (Colin Salmon) locks eight candidates into a high-tech bunker with blank sheets of paper and an armed security guard. We watch their predicament in real-time. But what is the question let alone the answer? This could be David Lynch meets David Mamet shags David Fincher but isn't. Lynch is needed at the beginning to quell the wry smiles of 'it's The Apprentice slasher movie'. Fincher's needed in the middle where the mind games sag slightly and Mamet would come in handy at the end to give wry sociological depth. Apart from that it's not a bad debut - no damp praise intended. Seems all very London 2010 to me.

On the other side of the coin or is it the other face of the dollar (adds new meaning to blue 'collar' worker) Brit pioneers most often succeed by being outside prevailing common views - a subject worthy of a book rather than a blog. Classical composers spring to mind. William Walton decamped to sunnier climbs while colleagues battled on. Atheist but spiritual pacifist Vaughan-Williams stayed as did Sir Michael Tippet and Benjamin Britten. Even the populist and financially generous (from his film scores) Malcolm Arnold was left to rot and be swindled in a boarding house. But we always loved you is the salient cry. Nedup. Nedup. Something clearly that was never the case. In recent years filmmaker Peter Greenaway fled to Amsterdam, theatre director Peter Brook to Paris.
Composer George Benjamin interviewed on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters

In Episode 2 of BBC2's The Noughties: "Celebrity culture promised that wealth and success could be gained by merit whether that meant talent or just public appeal." Journalist Toby Young hit the nail on the designer handbag: "Because the celebrity class occurs in such a prominent position at the pinnacle of our society that fools ordinary people into thinking that British society in general is much more meritocratic than it is and that secures their consent to the vast inequality." In a sense and in essence not much in that regard has changed during the last decade though superficially class structure seems more to have broken down with 'ordinary' folk becoming celebrities. Celebrity culture has increased the urge to spend aided by New Labour's encouragement of riches and allowed more to afford the nightclubs frequented by celebrities, while of course, still maintaining a red rope and carpet between the haves and the have nots. But as legal immigrants continue pouring into Britain another worthwhile film release last November from Cinefile
Welcome
sensitively dramatised the plight of some whose only impossible hope is to swim the English Channel.
Container at the Young Vic

This year's Celebrity Big Brother (the last ever) has chosen hell, the devil and temptation as their theme. In Britain Christianity's never high on many an agenda and even the Archbishop of Canterbury is seen somewhat as a cool bloke in a cassock who preaches a lot of sense. So it must seem odd to many viewers having American film actor Stephen Baldwin preach his Christian beliefs on a TV reality show. Over the years the cynical Brit press have derided CBB inmates as washed up and in need of a make-over - all without whom, of course, their newspapers would probably have washed away. No-one in 'the house' is denying the fame or money but there's always more to it than that. Although taking a heavy fall during the recent recession, America remains a country of aspiration and optimism. Americans never really expect their 'celebrities' to be drinking at the same trough as themselves. Whereas in Britain, someone in 'the public eye' is damned if you do and damned if you don't mix with your admirers or past associates. Ivana Trump has just joined the 'house'. Let's hope she doesn't end up like Blanche DuBois. Though many would salivate at the thought. Whatever next.
We Live in Public showed that Big Brother had all been done before. Frighteningly so.
Barbara Kruger's work from the 90s showed at Sprüth Magers
Ever-Present Surveillance Rankles the British Public
Metropia (LFF) and 9 showed the future

Art critic Richard Cork has curated Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill at the Royal Academy (final weeks thru Jan 24)- the decade 1905-1915. Have we seen anything quite like Epstein's 1913 sculpture Rock Drill in recent years? One critic at the time called it "indescribably revolting". Oftentimes, artistic Britain does lead the world but that lead is so ahead and contrary to popular culture that nobody takes a blind bit of notice. Even when Roger Fry held his 1910 Manet and post-impressionists show at Grafton Galleries, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh public response was YUCK! Not all of Wild Thing measures up to the Epstein but all power to an institution like the Royal Academy for mounting a show that proves just what an uphill struggle it always is to tilt against the windmills of popular taste while knowing full well that your life depends on that palette.

Multi award-winner at the Césars (French BAFTAs) Martin Provost's film Séraphine was New York released back in June (Music Box Films) and in London start of December (Metrodome). Self-taught painter Séraphine de Senlis (gregarian and extraordinary Yolande Moreau) is housemaid by day and painter of colour bulging fruits and flowers illuminating the night. Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German collector and art critic, champions what he calls her "modern primitive" rather than “naïve” art - World War I interrupts, "I don't give a fig about war". Years later Uhde bumps into her art once again resulting in her upward mobility, fame and mental demise. Few films about artists have ever surpassed bio-pic curiosity: Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991), Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (El sol de membrillo) (1992), Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1956 doco Le Mystere Picasso, John Maybury's Love is the Devil (Francis Bacon) and perhaps Jacques Rivette's 1991 La Belle Noiseuse - all notable exceptions. Does Séraphine join those ranks? Perhaps not quite, but the film does dig into the obsessiveness of art and creativity. And Yolande Moreau has you believe that she was born to embody Séraphine.

Apologies for not mentioning Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Line (closed Dec 12 Arcola Theatre). Mixed reports about the play but Suzanne Valadon was a fascinating gal and an untold story behind many French men.
Arcola Theatre launches new eco-theatre plans
John Logan's play Red about American painter Mark Rothko at the Donmar.
A handheld translation gadget could bring a whole new audience to the theatre
Worth checking out the plastic bag sculptures of Khalil Chishtee in The State of Things: Recent Art from Pakistan at Aicon Gallery.
Widely influential and relatively unsung German-born American artist Eva Hesse: Studiowork (1936 – 1970) at the Camden Arts Centre.
Rokeby Gallery's new basement space was worth checking out with Tom Bradley's show - intriguing impetus from a Liszt piano etude in 'orchestrating' projected quicktime movie downloads of 'found' clips. He cites French philosopher Lyotard but the work's impish immediacy is what grabs you.
Australian painter residing in London Martin Brown showed striking New Paintings at Fred (the gallery is considering a show for him at Basel Volta). Echoes of the Camden Town Group style etc - his figures almost fleetingly manifesting themselves in their urban environment before seeming to disappear back into he canvas. Reminds one of Arikha's still-life abstraction (championed by playwright Samuel Beckett).

Further down the East End road at the V&A's far flung annexe the Museum of Childhood was Wonderland - an exhibition of 80 wonderful works by East London Printmakers on fairy tales and myths. Wish I'd seen this gem of a show earlier to recommend. Beautiful building to visit anyway if you can brave the tube vagaries of the Central Line to Bethnal Green.
Stephen Rhodes'installation Reconstruction or Something at Vilma Gold (also showing in Saatchi Gallery current survey of new work from America) digitally tinkered rather cleverly with The Exorcist (1973) acompanied by irritatingly catchy musak.
Another bloke who turns film imagery on its head is downtown NYC darling Cory Archangel still showing at Lisson.
David Rickard's Test Flights explore gravity and the power of free fall in The Economist plaza. Very appropriate venue.

wearethepeoplemovie.com was syndicated free with The Guardian on Saturday 28th November: you can watch/download the trailer here
At the Susan Inglett Gallery in New York, The Bruce High Quality Foundation University (B.H.Q.F.U.) is an unaccredited, free collaborative school founded by the eponymous artist collective and presented by Creative Time, where “students are teachers are administrators are staff.” B.H.Q.F.U. responds to what it views as the over-commercialization of the current art school system, offering instead “an education in metaphor manipulation”. Admission is based on a peer-recommendation system; select public programming is also offered.