I have a few posts to put together over the weekend, I saw this today which was far more affecting than anticipated but the highlight of my week was seeing no less than the almighty Scorsese in discussion at the NFT – an epic reportage is being constructed. In the meantime here is a taster of his immense intellect on all matters cinematic – enjoy…
Despite a punishing schedule as my assignment at Southwark wraps up – we’re talking looooong days but only three weeks to go – I’ve managed to book a few more events in the run up to Christmas including something a little different, a documentary on the fan obsession surrounding synth pioneers Depeche Mode which they’ve mysteriously called The Posters Came From The Walls that is screening at the Clapham Picturehouse tomorrow evening. Normally I could wait to catch this but the prospect of seeing Alan Wilder, the exiled central member of the bands success in the mid eighties to nineties in Q&A after the screening is simply unmissable for an old school Mode-Head. Here is probably his most instrumental (if you’ll forgive the pun) achievement to the bands success, embedding is disabled so here is another, weirder version:
I’m vaguely hoping that the documentary will be more than a mere hagiography of the band and bleed out into a wider examination of fan obsessions that are achieving critical mass these days (Twilight anyone?) but since I’ve just read that it’s a record label sanctioned and financed piece I’m not holding my breath. I’m seeing Depeche Mode at the O2 in a couple of weeks, I’ll incorporate my thoughts on the film into my gig review after that. Meanwhile here is some fan derived nonsense from a bored Monday night, starting with some of Alan’s solo stuff, far more esoteric than the usual DM stuff he contributed to but a fine stroll down memory lane for yours truly:
Vaguely embarrassing by todays standards, but fun nonetheless:
Just a little to early for me – I started with the World Violation tour in 1990 – but I’ll always love this gig opening:
And one of my favourite tracks that they are still playing on certain dates:
Finally, in a patently weak effort at some sort of context, here’s a link to the brilliant Synth Britannia documentary that aired on BBC4 recently, one of the best music docs I’ve seen for ages and another exemplary example as to why I pay my licence fee. I loved the JG Ballard references, the cultural contexts and mirage of archive material that the BBC excel at fusing together to construct something that no-one else could make – outstanding.
It’s almost December gentle reader, I guess I should think about putting together a best of year list, perhaps a wrap-up that is complemented with a best of the noughties post as the first decade of the 21st century draws to its close. I thought living in the 21st century was supposed to be all teleportation devices, interstellar travel and disintegration beams? Pah, real life fails to live up to its expectations once again, at least you know where you stand with the movies. I’ve got quite a full agenda for the rest of the year, three movies booked, one of them I’m seeing on its opening day in IMAX then with friends during a welcome visit a few days later, I should have also wrapped up my assignment at Southwark which means I can luxuriate for a couple of months before thinking about what to do next. Oh, and I have one of the most anticipated NFT events I’ve ever attended to look forward to, it could be quite the crowning achievement of a decade of film-talks, previews and interviews that I’ve enjoyed over the past ten years at the South Bank. Anyway enough of this speculation, you want to know if I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight don’t you?
As much as I relished the prospect of enjoying one of my last big releases of the year in a cinema full of teenage girls (a-hem) I opted to see the alleged ‘scariest film ever‘ and coincidently ‘most profitable film ever’ ($15,000 budget against over $100 million in domestic takings alone) tonight, you have to admire the chutzpah of those Hollywood marketing gurus. In the contemporary genre de rigour ‘found footage’ format we meet the young professional Micah in a gloomy San Diego, his girlfriend Katie has been suffering visions of a malevolent spirit watching over her when she sleeps. Plagued by nightmares which is stressing their relationship Katie hesitantly agrees to let Micah film them as they sleep, an exercise designed to provoke the rational aspect of Katie’s intellect to reject such an absurd notion and overcome her paralytic condition. When the footage that emerges presents something seriously amiss, events that cannot be explained rationally, Katie hesitantly reveals that this is not the first time this has happened to her….
The film has been extraordinarily hyped, achieving favourable comparisons in terms of style, effect and marketing savvy with The Blair Witch Project which terrified film-goers a decade ago, can it match the outrageous expectations of fan-boys such moi? Well, yes, its pretty god-damn freaky, more an exercise in sheer technique than anything else, like Blair Witch events become progressively worse as the visitations occur, a palpable sense of dread emerging as the daytime footage bleeds into the nightmarishly murky witching hours. Debut director Oren Peli cleverly sets up the frame to crucially show what is happening outside the room, beyond the characters field of vision, not to mention playing on the terrifying thought of something interfering with you as you sleep, when you’re totally helpless, totally prone. Paranormal Activity plays not just on instinctive human fear of something unexplained, a threat in the dark but also something infecting your safe boundaries, in your home, something essentially other. The fact that people in the audience were freaking out when I saw it (most amusingly two guys behind me were hugging their girlfriends and muttering ‘its just a movie….its just a movie..’) means that you have to see this at the cinema, in the dark, with others.
In terms of references away from Blair Witch then this is the closest approximation I can muster, apparently the final shot of Paranormal Activity has been re-done from a suggestion by Spielberg, having just checked the original finale out I have to say he was probably right. Next up on this type of movie is The House Of The Devil which has been getting praise for its Seventies derived, Polanski inspired atmosphere, it looks pretty good but anyone stupid enough to spend the night in Tom Noonan’s house deserves to die. Oh yeah, and the fact I’m blogging this from my parents, from their cosy, well lit and populated flat as opposed to my cold, empty, isolated place is just a fucking coincidence OK? OK….
Michael Haneke is one of the dozen or so most important film-makers working in the world, a position that has recently been cemented with his latest National Socialist fable The White Ribbon securing the Palme D’or, the ultimate in art film auteur cachet. Haneke has been likened to ‘Bresson meets Hitchcock’ in terms of his stylistic preferences, thematic preoccupations and the austere tone and mood of his films, given that such a simile invokes two of my all time favourite film directors you’ll not be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan. In preparation for the release and extended run of The White Ribbon at the NFT along side a retrospective of his films including the obligatory Q&A, another coup as Haneke is very busy promoting his film worldwide and working on his new script, I thought I’d check out a few of his early films that I hadn’t seen, specifically the first two entries in his so called glaciation trilogy, The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video, both of which in his trademark sterile, challenging and emotionally assaulting fashion address the alienation of bourgeois society, leading inevitably to emotional then physical violence, in each film a shard of our meagre, empty, vacuous society spiralling into destruction and ruination – just how inviting does that sound eh? But before we have a laugh with his early Austrian work lets tackle his latest work The White Ribbon, a first for Haneke on two fronts, it’s his first historical film and the first shot with a startlingly crisp monochrome black & white stock, at the very least the film is ravishingly beautiful to ingurgitate within.
North Germany, 1913. Through the framing technique of a future narrative voiceover provided by the village schoolmaster a strictly Protestant rural community is brought to life in all its cruel, immutable glory as a series of disturbing events assault the denizens of the village. The doctor is injured as his horse is felled by a cable strung between two trees, the baron’s harvest crop is mutilated by a disaffected farm worker, the barons young son is kidnapped and viciously beaten, all infractions conducted by an unknown assailant or perhaps assailants. Recriminations and accusations begin to maturate in the festering environment as certain inhabitants are denied labour and sustenance, insights into the emotional and physical cruelty that is putrefying behind the closed doors of the village are incrementally revealed – the Pastor psychologically tortures and physically beats his children for the most minor of infractions, the doctor is conducting a sordid sexual relationship with his housekeeper, the villages children are developing and maturing in a purlieu that will inevitably frame and rivet their world views, their ideology in a poisonous concoction of god fearing obedience, rigid intolerance and casual brutality for a coming epoch, a generation that will be further defined by the first world war which is announced as the film draws to its efficacious close.
This was, as you can imagine, on a rainy and overcast London Sunday afternoon two and a half hours of subtitled, black and white hilarity. Seriously though it this was a challenging and thematically dense piece of work as expected, a film that demands repeated viewings which I ‘enjoyed’ but I did find it a little overrated, Haneke’s refusal to provide any sort of traditional neat resolution, of mysteries being solved, of narratives being hermetically sealed to provide some complaisant satisfaction can be frustrating as anyone who’s seen the Chinese puzzle box of voyeurism and surveillance Cache knows. That is not what Haneke is about, he loathes what he sees as such manipulative and cynical filmmaking to assert that all the answers are possible, that life and society are so neat, rational and ordered. The beautiful black & white photography serves I suspect as a metaphor for both the villagers fixed, rigid world view and the usual framing device of a period film, the isolated community of course providing a Petri dish to be observed, studied, considered, dissected. The title refers to the garment that the children are forced to wear after a minor infraction of the communities puritanical values, a symbol of public shame and stigma inflicted on the impressionable adolescents which echo a similar practice with the Star of David some twenty years later when the transgressors, as adults, are in a position to return the cruelty in a terrifyingly amplified fashion. There is some gentle grace and humour, some fissures of decency in Haneke’s vision, the schoolteacher makes hesitant romantic advances toward the shy nanny of the Baron’s children and there are even a couple of laugh out loud lines when he visits his amours father to seek his permission for marriage, however the pervading atmosphere of isolation, paranoia and imperceptible threat is what will haunt you long after the final credits have rolled.
The Q&A was unsurprisingly cerebral although Haneke wasn’t quite the completely dour, serious, professor type that you’d expect from his films, heck he even cracked a joke of sorts by complaining that the air conditioning on stage was cold before wryly adding ‘and no, that temperature isn’t coming from my cold, frigid film-making’. So, he has got some sense of humour. In a sense. Anyway, moving on, in a detailed ninety minutes host Geoff Andrew unfurled a detailed analysis of Haneke’s oeuvre, beginning with the aforementioned, Austrian set glaciation trilogy, proceeding on to the wider European phase of Haneke’s career where he started collaborating with some of the leading acting talents in Europe in films such as Code Unknown, The Time Of The Wolf and scathing The Piano Teacher (which incidentally has the best screen performance, male or female, of the past decade by the exquisitely talented Isabelle Huppert) before alighting on the wider mainstream success of award winners Cache and The White Ribbon. The discussions followed his aversion to traditional mainstream film grammar and construction, how he overtly seeks to at least ask questions of what is wrong, what is missing, what is malignant in contemporary life and doesn’t seek to provide any answers which he asserted are not within his purview to provide – it was no surprise that he revealed he almost entered the priesthood when he was 14. An almost exasperated Haneke bemoaned how his entire career contains less violence then one minute of the latest Hollywood blockbuster – an accurate if almost clichéd observation – but you have to consider his mastery of off-screen space and frequent technique of obscuring the horrors in his films that are far more effectively conjured by our own imaginations – the casually brutal murder in Benny’s Video, the child’s beatings in The White Ribbon, the rampages in both versions of Funny Games- stentorian flourishes which culminate in a far more terrifying pursuance than the casual gunplay and pretty fireballs emanating from Hollywood, one can only humorously speculate on just how disgusted his reaction would be to a double bill of the Crank movies. In true film analysis mode Geoff Andrew pointed out that he had only recently realised that all the couples in Haneke’s films are called Georg and Anna (or variations thereof), Haneke explaining that names are unimportant and he doesn’t agree with the artistic notion that a characters name in fiction can in some sense provide a character trait, an indication of their interior monologue and motivations, he plucked those ciphers from a phonebook.
I do recommend seeing any of his films, I’ve not seen the largely overlooked The Castle or 71 Fragmented einer Chronologie des Zufalls (which I understand is his most diffused and fragmented film with no discernable plot to speak of at all) but his other work, if you’re in the right frame of mind for some genuinely challenging, genuinely rewarding viewing then he can’t be bettered. I absolutely adore, if you’ll excuse the expression, how he fucks with convention and expectation to deliver such arresting films, his finessing of the cinematic medium with its components of voyeurism, complicity and subterfuge synchronising with his the themes and obsessions – guilt, dysfunction, violence, isolation – that saturate his work. I have to say that The Seventh Continent is the most depressing film I’ve seen for years, the joyous tale of a bourgeois Austrian couple deciding for no overtly explained or communicated reason to destroy all their possessions and then kill their child, then painfully kill themselves, events rendered more disturbing by the information that Haneke based it on a true story he read about in the papers. Nice. If you’re interested in finding out more then he cannot recommend this article highly enough, it’s amongst the best film writing I’ve read all year and provides a magnificent context for delving into the dysfunctional world of the Austrian auteur.
Permit me, if you will, to open with a joke. Little Johnny is asked by his teacher in front of the class to explain what his Granddad did in the great war. Johnny proudly stands up and says ‘My granddad was caught behind enemy lines, with only a bayonet and bottle of whiskey to his name. He drank the whole bottle and in a blind rage attacked a German trench, killing twenty krauts barehanded’. ‘Wow’, said the teacher, ‘and what does that tell you?’ Johnny shrugged and exclaimed, ‘Don’t fuck with my Granddad when he’s pissed’. In Harry Brown Michael Caine is that Granddad, an elderly loner whose patience with the hoodies and chavs who are terrorising his council estate has reached breaking point after a number of unfortunate events in his life coalesce to plunge him into a destructive spiral of revenge fuelled rage. It’s Death Wish meets Last Of The Summer Wine and marks the fine return of an English institution to UK screens, even if has led him to make some rather unfortunately reactionist statements.
Shot on the decrepit estates around south London’s Elephant & Castle district Harry Brown opens with the lonely titular character attending to his comatose and soon to be deceased wife in hospital, eventually burying her next to the grave of his teenage daughter – clearly this is a man with no remaining family to impede his dangerous decisions. Harry does have a friend, the terrorized Lenny who explains over a pint and a game of chess in the local that he has taken to defending himself with a knife as he cannot take the stress of the continual victimization by the unruly, out of control kids who are running riot across the estates. Harry, an ex-serviceman who alludes to some dark missions he undertook in Ulster when serving with the Marines urges his friend to go to the police, the next day Lenny is found beaten and stabbed to death in one of the squalid corridors near his lifelong home. A police team led by the calmly dedicated DCI Frampton (Emily Mortimer) is assigned the case and soon rounds up the usual suspects, a lack of evidence or any collaborating witnesses leading to the premature release of the clearly guilty dregs of humanity to resume their campaign of terror and violence. Soon these suspects begin to turn up dead and Frampton starts to connect the dots that lead her to conclude that the most unlikely culprit could be behind this bloody vendetta which may even be tacitly supported by her colleagues and superiors….
Normally a UK film which opens with ‘Funded by The National Lottery Film Council’ would stab a shard of numbing fear into the heart of most film fans, Harry Brown whilst not perfect is a relatively accomplished little revenge picture, whilst not pandering directly to the Daily Mail string-em-up brigade it stands alone as a brutal urban morality play, you really do want to see the little fuckers hung, drawn and quartered in the most excruciating manner as possible and besides, a film about building a series of community out reach programmes to develop an empathy with the alienated, disaffected working class youth wouldn’t have been quite as exciting as seeing Carter clip a few hoodies with his trademark ruthless efficiency now would it? Caine is given the opportunity to breathe and develop an empathy for his loner, dignity arousing angel of justice, Mortimer fulfilling the good cop in a corrupt system of statistics and competing priorities role. The graffiti choked, squalid landscapes are all rendered in the usual bleached out, grimly hostile fashion with a parade of cartoonishly hateful young hooligans being paraded before our disgusted and outraged eyes, one scene involving the verminous drug dealing Stretch (Sean Harris whom you may recognise from the superlative Red Riding trilogy) in particular making you want to take a cleansing shower afterward. Its not perfect, some of the plot turns are a little tiresome and the emergence of an unexpected mastermind kingpin in the final reel is unnecessary but compared to the ridiculous Gran Torino (that film is supposed to be a joke, a comedy right? it was terrible) this was a righteous slice of tabloid rendered entertainment. It doesn’t quite achieve a The Wire style analysis of the underlying tensions for societal fracture and disintegration in the cadaver period of a heartless capitalist hegemony but it does have a cool bit when the ringleader of a heroin smuggling syndicate’s brains redecorate the interior of his Peugeot 206.
So then, vigilante movies, always a potent source for some nasty diablerie, these movies always play as something of a vicarious thrill in seeing a figure taking matters into their own hands, of circumnavigating the restrictive protocols of the inherently inefficient police and rule of law, puncturing the protective bubble of political correctness brigade and exercising some righteous vengeance on the despicable delinquents, a cathartic experience that always provides some sense of unconscious satisfaction that we could never entertain in the real world. You can chart ‘em back to the likes of Dirty Harry and The Exterminator, in fact the seventies seem to be riddled with a post Nam anger culminating in the greatest revenge flick of them all. For my mates though here is an amusing wonder down memory lane, who remembers this overlooked classic now?
Dear Hollywood, please let Paul Verhoeven make another American action film:
Pretty juvenile but hey, it cheered me up. As the man said ‘It’s as if Philip K Dick’s words flew right of the page and came to life in front of me…..’
Show me a better combat movie made in the last decade and I’ll enlist tomorrow…
This review is SPOILER ridden so beware, then again if you’ve seen any disaster movie made since 1960 then nothing will be a surprise. Trust me.
Judd Apatow, Tina Fey, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and all the other comedy maestros of contemporary Hollywood should be afraid as there is a new clown in town – Roland Emmerich. In his disaster genre themed new comedy 2012 Emmerich expertly mines the infinitely dense caverns of Hollywood cliché to deliver an arresting treatise on all the most inane and stultifying ridiculous tropes of modern American cinema, a hilarious parody projected against the backdrop of a cataclysmic sequence of earthquakes and tsunamis, a parade of pandemonium supposedly culled from hopelessly inaccurate conspiracy theories orbiting the laughable supposition that the Mayan calendar foretold the Earths Armageddon in ancient Mesoamerica. Played straight by its eclectic cast – in fact one suspects that some viewers may miss the blistering satire altogether 2012 is the funniest film to emerge from the dream factory over the past twelve months.
The films main cast of characters unfurl like a shibboleth of stupidity, a carnival of the most moribund and lazily written stereotypes to be rejected from the last merchandised themed, fast food bracketed, multi-media synergised cinematic abortion. Dishevelled, struggling divorced writer suffering a fractious relationship with his younger son that may be overcome by implausible action heroics? Check (John Cusack). Noble, straight talking scientist to serve as dual purpose talking head plot explainer and voice of humanistic reason during Act 3 shenanigans? Check (Chiwetel Ejiofor). African American president with noble aspirations to honourably meet his fate amongst his people? Check (Danny Glover). Assistant vaguely kooky scientist who solemnly intones that all our vaunted technologies are useless in the face of the infinite power of nature? Check (John Billingsley). Conveniently matched heritage Presidential daughter to serve as convenient scientist hero love interest? Check (Thandie Newton, evidently a post destruction world still prohibits mixed race relationships). Supercilious villain politician who usurps a power vacuum to voice cold, hard realist sacrifice metaphors? Check (Oliver Platt). Eccentric hillbilly conspiracy theorist whose insane ramblings turn out to be shockingly accurate? Check (Woody Harrelson). Slightly nerdy and therefore acceptably dislikeable boyfriend of our heroes ex-wife (Amanda Peet) which enables the audience to shrug when he is conveniently dispatched to enable the final act resolution of a nuclear family? Check (Thomas McCarthy). The obvious prescidents are the Irwin Allen pictures of the seventies such as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure which serve as 2012’s chief cinematic corpses to plunder, however in our era of globalisation the pantomime is broadened to include a crass voguish Russian oligarch and meek Indian scientist, an addition one assumes to ensure some sense of cultural identification by the punters who will snap up poor quality phone-cams of the film that are destined to be hawked on the streets of Leningrad and New Delhi.
Amidst the admittedly grandiose, state of the art CGI rendered carnage squat banal scenes of alleged character development recalling the ghetto of daytime TV disaster of the week specials. Scenes of incidental character whom have barely been introduced and at best fleshed out with the very broadest of character strokes elicit laughter as they make their ridiculous final calls to their loved ones, it is reassuring to see that the worlds communications infrastructure is so resilient that peoples mobiles and landlines work perfectly fine after cataclysmic, extinction level global tsunami’s and earthquakes that realign the earths magnetic core conveniently leave the cell phone signals perfectly intact. Emmerich masterfully employs every cliché imaginable, a glorious pastiche that reveals in its bromide platitudes including a main character supposedly disappearing down a fiery crevice, only to tentatively pull himself up after his son balefully screams ‘noooooo’ as the films score majestically swirls to impressively vapid heights, a joke that is rendered doubly effective at the films conclusion where the same hero makes a miraculous re-appearance after a underwater suicide mission to dislodge a unfortunately placed power drill that sabotages the hydraulics of a impregnable titanic ‘ark’ that has been constructed in record 18 months by the wily Chinese. What is the Chinese for ‘fail safe’ or ‘back-up systems’? The dialogue is hysterical, the funniest line ‘Are you suggesting that the director of the Louvre is a threat to humanity?’ being a quip that I’m sure will have Dorothy Parker and I.A.L. Diamond spinning in their respective graves. Emmerich’s masterstroke, his piece du resistance is the saving of a disagreeable tiny dog, a scene that reflects the first rule of Hollywood screen writing – you never kill animals or children, even within the context of 99% of the human race’s annihilation, you have to ensure that the audience understands that the cute widdle doggywog is OK. Awww….
2012 is wonderfully reminiscent of the Zucker brothers at their best in either the Airplane! or Naked Gun film series, one must congratulate Emmerich on the potential mileage of a new strand of comedy he has unwittingly unearthed , perhaps 2012 could initiate a far superior franchise to the baleful Epic Movie series of recent years with the next film in the series focusing on a hard-bitten, hard-drinking divorced cop whose African/Korean/Iraqi (delete as applicable) partner is mere days away from retirement. Although he uses unorthodox to get results and annoys the suits down at City Hall all bets are off when his angelic daughter is kidnapped by the super intelligent, evil yet bewitchingly charismatic serial killer / terrorist czar / alien mastermind (ditto) leading to a exciting, adrenaline fuelled climax at the docks which zeniths with a quip punctuated sequence of explosions – I think we have a sequel. 2012 is epic in its length (158 hysterical minutes), epic in its crass stupidity, epic in its embrace of the very worse of formulaic, insulting storytelling techniques but with its unintentional moments of constant hilarity it is thankfully not the end of the world.
OK, OK, enough with the sarcasm. As you may have guessed I wasn’t particularly impressed with this movie and before the protests of ‘what did you expect’ strike up no, of course I wasn’t expecting anything other than a ridiculous, stupid, big dumb action film – in fact that was what I was banking on after enduring a double bill of Michael Haneke’s so called ’glaciation‘ trilogy in preparation for next weeks screening of The White Ribbon I wanted to lose myself in some total nonsense but they couldn’t even get that right. If you’ve seen the extended trailer with the LA destruction then you’ve seen the best – a word I use very tentatively – the best sequence in the movie, they can’t even build to an adequate set-piece finale and instead leech off a scene lifted directly from The Poseidon Adventure which holds all the tension of a box of Quality Street. I’m a fan of John Cusack just like anyone else, male and female, of my generation but with this atrocity adding to the staggeringly terrible War, Inc. and the recent charming revelation of his lambasting the recent bankers bonuses yet suing the production company of Stopping Power for $6 million for a film he didn’t even make means he is dropping in my estimations, somethings he’s losing sleep about I’m sure. Anyway, more sad news was the passing of Edward Woodward, I remember being a big fan of the TV series The Equaliser which I’m sure was bloody awful but of course we have to pay tribute with something a bit more appropriate, one of the strangest horror films to emerge from not only the UK but any other country, you know what I’m talking about…..
EDIT – Group brain seems to be working again.
If there can be said to be anything approaching a cult journalist in the UK – and we’re not exactly talking Hunter S. Thompson here – then I guess Jon Ronson would have to be it. His recent exploration of the murky world of conspiracy theories and more importantly conspiracy theorists was a underground hit and boasted a well constructed documentary that aired on UK TV in 2001 and 2004 . Ronson was also the first and (to the best of my knowledge) only journalist granted access to the Kubrick estate in the early noughties to delve amongst the scintillating paraphernalia of Kubrick’s career up at Childwick Bury, obligatory Guardian article here – Like my good self I think Ronson finds the characters and motivations, deluded or otherwise, fascinating in a sort of sociological and psychological fashion, how these lunatics can justify the most outrageous claims (David Icke’s lectures for example are comedy gold) and crucially how sometimes their research and conclusions sometimes, however hesitantlybut sometimes actually docross over into the timidrealms of truth. As such any film burrowing into the tales of MKULTRA experiments (which have been certified as true, yes the CIA did experiment with LSD on unsuspecting US citizens) psy-ops research and the more fantastically exotic realms of cold war intelligence research was always going to be on my radar, unfortunately The Men Who Stare At Goats like the mainstreaming of The Road takes a fascinating premise and smoothes out all the interesting delineations, boiling down the story into a unpalatably conventional and insipid mush. But then I would say that wouldn’t I, the world can’t handle the truth….
Formed around a buddy / road movie template The Men Who Stare At Goats concerns the bizarre adventures of journalist Bob Wilton (a horribly accented Ewan McGregor) who seeks a new direction in his life after his fiancée breaks off their engagement to reveal an affair with his newsroom superior. Ensconced in a Kuwaiti hotel on the eve of the invasion of Iraq of 2003 Wilton eavesdrops the name Lyn Cassidy being uttered and recalling an interview he performed earlier in the year with a former intelligence officer who now claimed supernatural powers amongst a elite cadre of retired agents Wilton hesitantly makes contact with the suspicious Cassidy (an enthusiastic George Clooney) who eventually takes him under his wing and into Iraqon a secret, perilousmission. As the sortieprogresses Cassidy recants the tale of his military career within the experimental First Earth Battalionto Wilton, his remarkable story of a secret elite unit formed by the messianic Bill Django (Jeff Bridges in Lebowski mode) to combat communist aggression with the promotion of secret powers, telepathy, ESP and various other impossible paranormal techniques. As the mission becomes more hostile and dangerous Wilton begins to wonder if Cassidy is a super soldier or super deluded, fearing for his life and sanity in the hostile Iraq desert…
The problems with this film revolve around itstone and structure. One can understand the decision to frame the film around aroad movie template with Wilton serving as our screen avatar, the centralcharacter who like the audience is absorbing the tale from Cassidy’s enigmatic lips, their current assignment twinned with Cassidy’s recollections of his unusual career. When the purpose of the desertmission is revealed the logical conclusions of the narrative are squandered, the film doesn’t have the conviction to expose how these outlandishresearch programmes came to be twisted to suchhorrifying consequences during the War On Terror at the likes of Guantanamo, torture techniques culled from a corruption of First Earth’s fifty year empirical pedigree being inflicted on suspected insurgents and Al-Queda combatants. I can’t help feeling that the film would have been far more effective if the whole journalistic approach was dropped and instead they concentrated on the biography of Cassidy, a significant portion of the film is his story anyway and all the films best moments are culled from his recollections and tales.
The late introduction of Kevin Spacey as Django’s nemesis in the form of spiritualist turned solder Larry Hooper feels clumsily manufactured to provide a traditional villainous conflict, he is barely introduced until at least half way though the movie in an effort to up the ante on the awkward culmination of the plot, a denouement which with its broadly comedic flavour feels uncertain in both pitch and flavour. Still, the ever reliable Jeff Bridges playing Dude-lite was fun, in this case a counter culture shaman and there are some genuinely amusing interludes with the juxtapositions of his sixties ethosof the First Earth battalion versus the expected cold war military belligerence. The final scene is lazily predictable, echoing the opening routine of a general ‘willing’ himself to pass through a wall with the power of his mind that proves that screenwriter Peter Straughan must have graduated with first class honors from cliche school. The Men Who Stare At Goats wants to be Dr. Strangelove but ends up more Sgt. Bilko, Clooney’s buffonish performance and Bridges piquancy aside there are no secrets to unearth here.
Three years old. That’s one home, four assignments, one computer and almost 1,500 films ago, how time flies eh? I was aware of my birthday which occurred amidst the LFF shenanigans but quite frankly I didn’t have the time to incorporate another mammoth blog post until the dust had settled and I had sorted out some work nonsense. The good news is I have completely smashed my cinema visit target for the year – it’s currently running in the mid 60’s – and I have around half a dozen more visits planned although pickings are now slim as we move toward the end of the year, don’t get me started on how barren 2010 looks, I’ll save my vitriol on that until the 2009 round up next month. So my secret project can finally be revealed – I’ve been writing reviews, mostly covering the LFF for these guys, a Canadian outfit that I approached a few months back. I’ve been thinking about expanding my horizons all year, to see if I could get my ill-informed scribblings published in another format so I was quite pleased to see the Sound On Sight editors jump at the chance after I got in touch following an episode of their podcast which asked for potential submissions. It’s not paid or anything but they will be arranging press credentials for future events – if I’m still with them that would mean a pass to all of next year’s LFF press screenings for example – and I’ve got some free DVD / Blu-ray screeners to review on the way so I can’t complain. Given that all I really have to do is amend the stuff I put together for the blog to remove all the first person references it’s a no brainer really, I’d be writing my reviews for personal satisfaction anyway so why not see what freebies I can spin out of it? I’ll admit it was also something of an ego-boost to see my words hosted elsewhere, if you’d told me that was feasible back in my tender teenage years of rushing down to the corner shop to pick up the latest copy of Empire then I probably would have passed out. If you’re so inclined then do visit the site and subscribe / rate the podcast on iTunes as all the traffic helps of course.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, the horror . I’ll not waste time on any detailed plot synopsis for the most part, if you’re so inclined they’ll be buried in the links. I was planning to go and see the first film – Werewolf - at the cinema but the re-release was really quite limited to only one 10.00pm screening at a handful of cinemas on the 31st and quite frankly I was feeling a bit under the weather so I compromised by blowing £50 in HMV on Saturday to complement some existing films I had hanging around on the shelves, I really wanted the Blu-ray of Werewolf due to the great reviews of the two hour making of documentary Beware The Moon that is on the disk, I haven’t enjoyed a well researched, comprehensive account of a cult classics construction in a long time. In another moment of serendipity lets kick things off with this link, a list of Scorsese’s favourite horror movies, a link that leads nicely to my smugly acquiring a ticket to see Marty in person at an NFT event next month, an evening that will crown ten years of my living in London and attending this sort of event. That’s like, so totally awesome – see, already I have my North American vernacular down ya’ dig?
An American Werewolf In London - Talk about starting at the top eh? People claim that Shaun of the Dead gives Werewolf a run for its money as the greatest horror comedy ever made, these people are horrendous idiots who must be ignored at all costs. Sure Shaun is funny and entertaining, a good film which merits semi-regular repeat viewings, no problem – but it isn’t even in a fraction of a molecule of the remotest sense scary or horrifying. In Werewolf the initial attack on those desolate moors remains brutally shocking, almost unwatchable and the thoroughly unnerving fever dreams that David suffers instil an unsettling atmosphere, all of which is counterpoised by the grim humour of the slowly disintegrating corpse of best friend Jack, probably the films despicable masterstroke which provides most of the nervous laughter whilst tying the tale to the monster movie lore of history – the cursed lunar cycle which can only be cured by suicide or death. The transformation sequence, intentionally rendered in full daylight, remains unmatched:
….as does Jenny Agutter whose presence made quite an impact on everyone in my generation who furtively hired this from their local VHS emporium. The 1981 London locations – the tube, Piccadilly Circus, what looks to me like Belgravia and Mayfair – are interesting to see, not sure how a nurse could afford a telephone box let alone a flat in that area of the Capital even back in them olden times though. Stan was supposedly a big fan and when you consider the ironic use of the music against the horror, the pitch black comedy it isn’t difficult to see why. A seminal monster movie, I’ll See You Next Wedneday.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – I’ve had this sitting on my shelf for about three years and although I have seen it before, when studying German Expressionism as one of the modules on my A Level course many years ago, I’ll admit is has been one of those ‘oh I must watch that one day’ choices that is ignored whilst reaching past it for something else which looks more fun. Something like The Hottie & The Nottie for example. OK, I jest, its only 52 minutes long first of all and although its 90 year pedigree can test the patience it is a remarkable looking film for its period and is one of the core texts of supernatural genre cinema. The somnambulist prowling the distorted mise-en-scene is a snapshot of almost every horror film made ever since with that use of make-up, lighting and set design setting the standard for a whole slew of immensely influential films that emerged out of UFA and then Universal studios after the hemorrhaging of talent across the Atlantic in the thirties. It’s an academic exercise to be sure with a clunky ‘it was all a dream’ style conclusion but I enjoyed it, you have to pay your respects to your elders now and again…..
Trick ‘r Treat – no, not that one, this one. I picked this up on a chance, it has been getting some terrific reviews amongst the genre community as a real return to the 1980’s heyday of horror cinema, specifically the anthology films such as Creepshow, Cats Eye, Tales From The Crypt series and erm….Creepshow 2. Taking place over a bloody Halloween the film interweaves a host of gruesome tales including a chaste Anna Paquin travelling to a costume party with her promiscuous sisters (she is dressed as little red riding hood if you want a clue where that one’s going), an abandoned mine where a school bus mysteriously crashed 30 years ago to the day, supposedly killing all the mentally challenged kids on board and Dylan Baker playing against type as a school principal candy poisoning child killer, all the strands being stitched together by the eerie Sam, the pint sized mute spirit of All Hallows’ Eve who also seeks some terrible vengeance on the elderly Mr. Kreeg for some unspecified discourtesy. This was probably the best fun I had all night (child murder, ravenous kid zombies, slutty lycanthropes, I’m a man who is easily pleased) with a firm hand on the tiller that steers between the key points of knowing winks to the audience and quick scares, the way that the divergent tales intersect and morph with each other with certain key events in one strand playing out on the background of developments of another strand is quite skilfully presented. It’s good, nasty, gory fun with some neats twists on the tropes of the genre, highly recommended.
Drag Me To Hell - Unmistakably diminished on the smaller screen this is still terrific fun, if you overlook the somewhat suspect gypsy bashing. I don’t really have much to add to my previous review so I’ll just link to some scenes from The Incredibly Strange Film Show with Raimi that I unearthed recently, I have fond memories of staying up late to watch that back when it aired in 1988.
Halloween II - A shame to end on such a travesty but there we are, I am referring to the 1981 sequel to the original slasher classic, not this years supposedly execrable sequel to the remake, a film which is running high as the worst film of the year which considering its opponents sounds like quite an achievement. Picking up from exactly where the original finished What is most disappointing about this isn’t the lacklustre and frankly boring parade of kills, it’s the presence of both John Carpenter and Debra Hill as the writers in the credits, they must really have worked fast to get this roughly hewn piece of nonsense together. Donald Pleasance should win an award for his cringeworthy OTT performance which makes it worth watching. Almost.
Paranormal Activity will be the last horror review of the year, I’m already amused at the ‘most scary film ever’ and ‘most profitable movie ever’ marketing angles which have been trumpeted for some movie or other since the 1950’s with the inception of the B-Movie, William Castle would be proud. Still, I am intrigued about it, it looks like fun and it’s a shame it wasn’t out over here for Halloween, here’s one of the trailers:
Well, for free I guess I really can’t complain, especially since it is a film concerning the evils of commerce and greed. When Capitalism: A Love Story was revealed as this years London Film Festival mystery film there were some grumbles of discontent flying around, mostly I suspect to do with it not being Where The Wild Things Are and the enormous praise that Spike Jonze’s return to the screen has been garnering across the pond. I admit I was a little disappointed at first, I quite like Michael Moore’s documentaries although like any intelligent adult I do take some of his conclusions and suppositions with a herculean pinch of salt, nevertheless once I’d settled in to the comfy environs of the NFT1 and as the film got going I was fully absorbed in Moore’s latest scabrous assault on the perceived forces of darkness, although their are some issues with the piece Capitalism: ALS is another effective slice of entertaining propaganda from the left hand side of the political spectrum. Following the same structure and technique of his previous critical and commercial smashes Bowling For Columbine and the lacerating Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore excels in constructing an anger inducing, scathing attack on his chosen subject, in this case a target no more intimidating and vast than the entire western capitalist system, a target perhaps too vast, too much of a behemoth in scope and scale to fully assault but I’ll concede he’s produced something of a noble effort, mostly due to the slightly uncharacteristic closing movement of the documentary - but we’ll come back to that.
Full disclosure – I am one of those lefty, commie loving crypto-Stalinist Guardinistas that this film is designed for and as such it does strike me as a little redundant, I can’t see it playing in the lobby of the Manhattan Mandarin Oriental or exotic dancing cocktail bars of the square mile but what Moore manages to achieve in his work and especially in Capitalism: ALS is to crystallize some of the cumulative ripples of recent events, taking a diverse selection of stories you may have heard about in the print and visual media, cherry picking examples to support his central conceit and ideological stance. The documentary utilizes his familiar style of counterpoising archive footage, humorous or ironic soundtracks, Moore’s own commentary and protest themed stunts with Regan’s 1981 inauguration as a rough start point for the inception of the hyper accelerated embrace of the free market, of the selfish society, of acquiescence to big business and the corporate mandate at the degradation of all other societal concerns. There is a breathtaking clip of the then treasury secretary Don Regan (no relation) ordering Ronald Regan, you know, a man who happened to be the President of the United States and therefore the leader of the free world at the time, to rush his speech along at a Wall Street press conference.
Through a montage of financial charts and graphs Moore quite deftly illustrates the enormous chasm that has developed in the past thirty years between the elite ruling 1% class and the rest of us peasants, touching on how the media and culture industries have hoodwinked, cajoled, entranced and hypnotised the vast majority into the Weltanschauung of conspicuous consumption, how capitalism is supposedly the only fair and balanced model of government and democratic delivery model when the levels of debt, depression, inequality and political apathy have steadily spiralled throughout the last thirty years. Some of the disparate examples are a little unsure, in particular a sequence taking the viewer through the current airline industry is a little undisciplined although the revelation that some pilots are on on $20K a year and having to take second jobs to make ends meet is particularly when you consider that these professionals are responsible for the lives of hundreds of people on a daily basis. The most incredible citation however is a strand covering the particularly repugnant practice of corporations taking out abstruse insurance policies on their employees and collecting large windfalls on the event of their death, crucially these being enacted without the knowledge of the employees and the bereaved are not entitled to a single penny of the dividends, a practice akin to taking out an insurance policy on an acquaintances house burning down which is illegal outside of the corporate arena as it gives the policy holder a vested interest in possible arson. I wasn’t surprised to see some of the usual offenders – the Wal-Marts, Citibank’s and Procter & Gamble’s conducting this practice, however the inclusion of a certain international credit card company that I used to work for was personally shocking- take a look.
The film them moves into the details of the global financial Armageddon of 2008 and the the $700 billion bailout in the States alone which is were the documentary could be accused of verging into conspiracy theory territory with the elected political class powerless to stop the executives demands of funding despite their opaque remit to represent the people and national fiscal stability. Now, I know what people might think about this – you’re just a tin-foil beanie sporting lunatic for siding with Moore on this one. Well, no I’m not, I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that 9/11 was solely conducted by two dozen Saudi extremists without any controlled demolitions and the Illuminati do not meet once a year at Bohemian Grove to decide next years interest rates, president of the IMF, World Bank and next POTUS whilst drinking the blood of albino virgins acquired for them by catamite Goldman Sachs executives. It’s ludicrous. However there is something to be said for undue influence by the wealthy class on the main organs of the state, of the modes of communication and ‘entertainment’ with the political class usually adopting a position straddling both spheres - it’s a practice that you can chart in human civilisation back to the Greeks and Romans. The films thesis reaches a conclusion that despite an initial rejection of the bailout the motion was eventually carried – and let us not forget that these bailouts are our tax funds to build more schools, more hospitals and to deliver the essential public sector services that are critical to a healthy functioning society – for the funds to be given carte blanche, with no oversight, no legally binding contracts, to the banks with no rigidly structured repayment model. That’s the same money we have seen funnelled into the same lucrative bonuses in the City and Wall Street, into enormous corporate spending sprees and holidays, private jets and expense accounts. It is sickening to behold but thin on evidence for these handshake agreements which left me unsure of their veracity, nonetheless it is a compelling viewing.
But it appears all is not lost. The final twenty or so minutes of Capitalism: ALS does differ from Moore’s previous work in that he wraps things up in a optimistic way (perhaps a little too optimistically but that’s another story) with some heart-warming exposes of direct action, of workers occupying the modes of production and refusing to be made redundant and winning, of families violating property expulsion orders and securing a room over their and their children’s heads including the remarkable example of a Miami Sheriff who declined to conduct any more evictions on behalf as in his estimation the bailout, the peoples tax money had been spent keeping these organisations afloat only for them to then jettison any sense of moral responsibility and continue to put young families back on the street. It’s stirring, inspiring stuff which takes the political momentum behind Obama and the grass roots campaign that led to us historical victory as a model for a potential more equitable future society. One is left with the impression that Moore’s undisputed talents would have been better served by reigning in his parameters to maybe one family that has endured the ordeal of eviction or selected one particular element of the system – Lehman Brothers, AIG, Goldman Sachs – to laser in on to explore and map his evisceration, a more personal and disciplined approach that worked so effectively in the likes of Roger & Me. In Capitalism: ALS there are no dissenting voices, no counterpoint to Moore’s proclamations and in one sense it’s simply just too broad without any real convergence to completely work, not to mention the unpleasant partial irony of the most commercially successful documentary film-maker in screen history whose films are distributed by major studios railing against ’the man‘ Still, for all these faults it is quite exhilarating to watch with some undeniably powerful moments and revelations.
So there we are, another film festival over. Given the paucity of last years offerings I am far more satisfied with this years activities, it was all on something of a curving slide from the stunning heights of Enter The Void which is unquestionably one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen at the movies this year but at least things swung back with The Informant and A Serious Man. There were a few things I missed that I would have liked to see – The Men Who Stare At Goats, Up In The Air, American: The Bill Hicks Story and Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans but they all either clashed with other things or were matinee screenings, besides which they should all get full releases next year. I was annoyed at missing The Limits Of Control which had only one daytime screening but the NFT schedule for December has come through with a NFT1 preview which I should get a ticket for, similarly I already have tickets to see The White Ribbon in three weeks with a Hanake Q&A to follow – now there’s a Sunday that should be a barrel of laughs. Next up, a belated 3rd birthday celebration which I’ll combine with the mammoth Halloween horror marathon I conducted last weekend, and I’ll finally reveal the mysterious details of my super secret special side project….
