Flotsam & Jetsam Revisited
So farewell Colchester, I hardly knew ye. After five months it’s time to move on to pastures anew, as I have been approached for and accepted a new mission down in deepest, darkest Surrey. Unfortunately this has obliterated some of my screening ambitions for the LFF as my new contract starts on the same day as the press screenings, but there are some other possibilities I am pursuing and there are always the weekend screenings in October. As something of a risk mitigation strategy I have acquired £100 worth of tickets to public screenings to reduce the possibilities of an even mix of material, which means that The Witch, High-Rise, Hitchcock/Truffaut, a few other screenings and the Todd Haynes Q&A are all in the bag, so it’s only Carol, The Assassin and Son Of Saul I really have to see. Oh, and The Lobster. And The Green Room. And The Club – Jesus Christ in a sidecar this is never easy is it? So having acquired a pop-pourri of material over the last fortnight I thought I’d throw together a gold old fashioned flotsam & jetsam post, so crane your neck to this;
I think what I really admire is the editing job on this, the wealth of material they had to wade through to go from 1° to 90° is quite an archaeological effort, and a fine selection of soundtrack from Mr. Glass;
Recently there has been something of a small movement among film critics of the modern ilk with regard to venerating a so-called vulgar cinematic aesthetic. You can read through the links at your leisure but the gist is some hopelessly numb effort to replicate some modern cinephile movement, aping the Cahier Du Cinema crowd of the 1950’s to attack the prevailing dogma, to burst the status quo and establish a new, fresh canon of cinematic contours. Unfortunately I regard this as little more than some contrarian post-modern circle jerk, you may call me a elitist snob but P.W.S Anderson, Michael Bay and Tony Scott are not some diamonds in the rough, waiting to be properly excavated and appreciated, their works secretly harbouring a new paradigm for the 21st century…..or maybe they are? It is fun to read this sort of material, from my admittedly cursory skim reading this is perhaps a perfect synthesis of a contemporary style and movement in 2015, as frankly the breadth and quality of modern web criticism does seize upon the spectaculars, the blockbusters, the popcorn tent-poles and almost utterly eclipses the alternatives – I don’t need to point to the collapse of The Dissolve again do I? A cultural landscape that spends roughly five times the effort, advertising and ink in frantically debating casting decisions of superhero movies, of cinematic movie universe cohesion or the construction of action set-pieces than it does in appreciating the final work itself is quite vulgar, so maybe, just maybe these guys are on to something….
Finally for now a fine archival documentary on the 1960’s restructuring of Hollywood, back in those halcyon days when the likes of Lucas and Scorsese were storming the citadels gates, rather than being the elder statesman gatekeepers. Apparently this piece never aired on TV, so this is quite a rarity…..
Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015) Teaser
What’s that? Oh speak up grandchildren , your grandpappy can’t hear so good these days. Oh, you want me to tell you the story of the last Star Wars Trailer? Well, it was a long, long time ago in a century far, far away, of course back in those days we congregated in communal areas and paid cash money to see films with total strangers. The world only had 2D then although colour had been something of a success, and lots and lots of portly men got very excited about a red faced demon and his two pronged ruby weapon. Yes, to be sure children we all got rather excited but that exhilaration sure didn’t last long, and now it’s all coming back again;
Just a fortnight ago I was briefly discussing the franchise with friends and I remarked that my overall feeling is that it’s just gonna be weird, and difficult to overcome seeing Hamil, Ford, Fisher and the rest back in those roles. Still, if they manage to give them a purpose beyond character window dressing and if J.J. Abrams remains a sleek purveyor of near perfectly engineered entertainments we could be in for quite a ride, with none of that auteur nonsense getting in the way of a good yarn. I’ll confess I grinned at seeing the Falcon again and the burst of Williams iconic score stirred this jaded soul, but I think we’re gonna have to wait for a full trailer to get a real feel of this ones………force.
BFI Days Of Fear & Wonder Sci-Fi Season – THX 1138 (1971)
Six years before a certain, small, swashbuckling in space picture descended upon cinemas and changed the culture forever George Lucas had already explored the cosmos of the SF genre, with his initial student film remade with a modest budget and renamed THX 1138. If Star Wars was Lucas assimilating the theories of Joseph Campbell through the lens of Flash Gordon and Republic pictures adventure serials then his first foray into Science Fiction is a far darker and politically minded proposition, a melding of Orwellian oppression and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In some unspecified cold and sterile future world the human population is enslaved by technological surveillance and the mandatory digestion of emotion deadening drugs, with even names and personalities replaced by a code to denote the inhuman hive mind mentality of our future civilization. All devoid of hair and garbed in identical white jump suits only THX1138 (Robert Duvall) begins to quietly question the system and eventually embarks on a desperate mission to escape the subterranean oppression, encountering a procession of characters and incidents laced together in an abstract cocoon, with scant interest in the soon to be embedded fixtures of the form – blaster battles, interstellar dogfights, bizarre alien worlds and creatures, the wonders of the cosmos.
In that sense THX 1138 is very much a science fiction film with an emphasis on the science, of how technology and automation impresses itself on the human animal and wider human society, and from Lucas’s pessimistic perspective the prediction is not in the least attractive or desirable. I was very happy that the film which was presented as part of the BFI’s Days Of & Fear Wonder SF season was an original 35mm print, the only copy in the country according to a brief introduction from some knowledgeable boffin, as opposed to a digital projection of the 2004 directors cut where as usual George fucks his film with pointless tinkering and obsolete additions as illustrated here. It was a degraded print which had significantly shifted to a pink spectrum as discussed and explained here, it was also quite glitchy around the reel changes but a perfectly serviceable print nonetheless, on a somewhat related note this crossed my social media stream today. I can’t say much for the film itself as truth be told I really didn’t respond to it, it was much more abstract and distanced than I remembered, a rather turgid collection of scenes which didn’t seem to have any overlaying principles or specific allegorical intent. I think it was Francis Ford Coppola (who mentored Lucas and helped produce and finance his early films) who observed that George was terrific at design and editing, the intrinsic and interrelated subconscious elements of film communication, and perhaps he wasn’t quite as strong with actors or dialogue (which is a diplomatic comment at best), so while I’m glad I saw the film on the big screen and admire some of its elements it is a film which struggles to reach the head and certainly doesn’t engage the heart.
A cursory glance at the credits presents a roster call of legends in the field, alongside Coppola there is of course the great Walter Murch on sound montage duties and he has certainly crafted an aural labyrinth, Lucas was always good with sound and consistently surrounded himself with the best and most visionary technicians in the business. THX 1138 reminded me for some bizarre reason of Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor which was a similarly savage snarl at the state of the nation, perceived through the lens of a lunatic asylum, while this future world is clearly an allegory on the perceived direction of society and a repressive state contorting to social change and pressures from the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movement, a statement that you’d expect from any left leaning liberal arts college graduate emerging in the shadow of Woodstock and the hippie movement. The images of those leather garbed, jackbooted silver-faced stormtroopers instantly evokes images of the state beating protesters during the civil rights struggle in the previous decade, with the state organ ritually warning the populace that it is a crime not to take your mandated diet of daily drugs, a satiric inversion of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ mantra. It’s fun to see Robert Duvall in his first starring role before he was the Robert Duvall who would go on to work with Coppola on The Godfather the following year, Donald Pleasance is always fun and cult exploitation actor Sid Haig even gets a look in as some aggressive, loosely rebellious wretch.
The use of negative space is starkly designed and executed in the film, framing characters in isolation on the periphery of the plane, to subconsciously communicate their claustrophobia, the repression and suffocating burden of oppression. It makes you wonder how this sparely efficient director who understood these critical concerns came to be the man responsible for digital maelstroms of visual pollution in his latest films, as sometimes budgetary restrictions lead to solutions which can cleverly meld into a films overall thematic aura. I did admire the touch that the hunt for THX 1138 is abandoned not because of his cunning or strategic evasion, but purely due to the fact that due to some accidental circumstances various units are damaged or destroyed in the melee, meaning that the budget to apprehend him becomes too high so the chase is suspended due to purely fiscal concerns – that’s capitalism writ large in all its cold, dispassionate cruelty. Some say that following the social tremors of THX 1138 and the warm, genuinely affectionate and amusing American Graffiti indicate that Star Wars was the worst thing that ever happened to George Lucas the ‘filmmaker’, as of course it has utterly eclipsed his career and been his central emphasis for almost forty years, at the expense of other projects and stories he could have brought to the screen. Maybe so but we shouldn’t forget that whatever the merits and failures of his films they organically birthed Industrial Light & Magic, the THX sound system and a little animation studio called Pixar, positing technology as the reactor core of Lucas’s work and life on a textual and industrial level.
RIP Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013)
Not wanting to start on a narcissistic point but there I was thinking that this was a pretty good day for a Tuesday and then the sad news started circulating. The term legend is bandied around in this industry with careless abandon but Harryhausen was a talent equal of the hagiography, a gentle and nice fellow by all accounts who assisted many young protegés to break into this industry. Many of his images are indelibly seared on the imaginations of a generation of filmmakers, and just consider the roll call of cinema behemoths he has clearly inspired – James Cameron, Tim Burton, Frank Darabont, Guilermo Del Toro, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George A Romero, Peter Jackson and a couple of small-scale Americans by the names of George and Steve;
As Kim Newman recently remarked and please forgive the paraphrasing but ‘contemporary monster or fantastical element movies take hundreds of digital artisans and millions of dollars to craft, Ray did it all on his own and transformed the industry’ – who else has equally that lofty achievement? Here’s his lifelong friends Ray Bradbury’s recent video message, now if you’ll excuse me it’s got a little dusty in here;
I couldn’t possibly best my BFI Tribute report from 2010, easily one of the best events I’ve ever attended at the Southbank, with a genuine and heartfelt sense of occasion and tribute which really hasn’t been equalled since – you can see some of that here, and go watch a monster movie as a mark of respect;
Swede Wars (2012?)
I’m not sure what this is, but I think I like it;
I must admit it’s hilariously watchable, purely by virtue of the frequent changes which make it exceptionally amusing and interesting – the cantina scene was terrific. In other news, SOPA was neutralised….and if this piece gets clipped then this might last longer. A&J may be mystified….
Minty's Menagerie 
Recent Comments