Stranger than Fiction – Marc Foster - admirable aspirations, bland and
disappointing execution – Charlie Kauffman without the self awareness and
intellect. Not as interesting as it clearly wants to be. 5/10
Mona Lisa Smile – Julia Roberts plays a subversive modern art teacher
in a conservative New England school in the 50s…plays out like The Dead Poet’s Society for gender
equality. Unfortunately, Julia Roberts unveiling the progressive
experimentation of Jackson Pollock to over privileged and under challenged
American students feels about as convincing, worthwhile and uninformed as Jason
Statham articulating the nuanced virtues of Avant-Garde poetry, to dedicated
fans of the Transporter films…
Unexpected and quite interesting, but ultimately clumsy, superficial and very
far from enriching. 4/10
Songs from the Second Floor – Roy Anderson
– Part of a proposed trilogy including You,
the Living (which I’ve seen, but created less of an impact on first viewing
– will revisit). Takes the form of interconnected vignettes (closer to
‘windows’ or remote sketches), with each shot allowed to play out as a single
long take-the camera remaining static. This cold and composition-conscious
style is maintained throughout. A town of grey oppressive towers, concrete
blocks and derelict space, falls prey to an unexplained eternal traffic jam;
cars crawl along a road, inching with a sense of futile inevitability toward an
undisclosed sense of apocalypse. A large man, his bloated shuffling form
wrapped in a ash smudged coat, despairs that his business has burnt down…only
to reveal it was he who burnt down the shop. His son has ‘gone nuts from
writing poetry’ and is sporadically visited in the sterile corridors of an
asylum. To mark the millennium a business contact decides to stock buy/sell
crucifixes…only to realize the absurdity of his impractical business ambitions.
A magician calls a volunteer onto the stage, the crowd looks on with amiable
good will, the magician then proceeds to actually
saw a man – his trick going horribly, predictably, wrong. Generic
businessmen, ill fitting drab suits and perennial briefcase clutching intent,
populate the grey universe of Anderson’s bizarre creation. An anti bourgeois
lament of the conformist routine of economic gain, where human interaction is
drained and stifled by market values, and where insomniac eyes peel, unseeing
through the drudging, endless, absurdist working day. This is a theatrical,
sobering and morbidly humorous blend of Kafka’s clinical existentialism and the
tragicomedy of Beckett’s ‘end of the world’ conjuring. A truly eccentric,
individual and surrealist (without ever needing to rely on visual effects)
drama on pathos, despair, the absurd and the frightening…all in the trudging of
every day towards some, never seen, never known, abyss.
The camera’s fixed positioning, which allows each scene to evolve around
a static, unchanging, viewpoint, demonstrates an artful sense of depth and an
intriguingly painterly composition. Imagine Edward Hopper, drained of colour
(Diners for the dead) and marinated in a near biblical volume of
melancholy…then twisted with a mischievous slap of bleak comedy. There is also
the way in which Anderson subjects each figure to a whitening make up; all the
faces are cadaverous, sweating and unnervingly chalky. Often a character will
stare out to the middle-distance/camera, like a disillusioned model in a
Francis Bacon portrait…just without the brush strokes of movement. Everything
unfolds with the natural and yet paradoxically otherworldly movement of an
interrupted still life, the postures of adopted realism, warped and shuffling
out of place. The expressions of Anderson’s actors are pained, waxy, and
tangibly physical masks. Each face made grotesque, each character both
relatable and opaque, and each unraveling story grimly set in the fatigue of
sweating, smelling, wrinkled, fat, flawed and ghoulishly human existence. 9.8/10
9 – Shane Acker
– Set in a dystopian future vision, so beloved to filmmakers, in which the
archaic, bleak and rusty stands alongside laser technology and newly fangled
futuristic robotic oddities; a steam punk wasteland set after an apocalyptic
war between man and machines. Standard. Except that this is an animation, the
protagonists: small zipped fabric creatures endowed with life. Imagine Tim
Burton (who produced) designing a computer game (a sort of Medal of Honour infused with fantasy friendly quests) with sock
puppets - and you can imagine the film’s prevailing aesthetic. Unfortunately,
for a fairly alternative animation landscape, the film is devoid of any sense
of development or character. Instead it feels like a half cooked amalgamation
of Lord of the Rings (Elijah Wood is
the voice of the main, distinctly bland, character) with an industrialised
Mordor, The Matrix with man and
machine in grubby combat and various other less notable influences, stumbling
around without a script. The pace is flat, the characters are archetypal and
functional, and, worst of all: the screenplay, an uninspired monosyllabic void
of humour, interest, insight, wit…or in fact anything that makes dialogue
anymore than an obliging chore, arduously punctuating one unexciting action
sequence to the next. 2/10
A Taste of Honey – Tony
Richardson – An adaptation of Shelagh
Delaney’s play: the humorous portrayal of a working class girl who lives with a
homosexual male friend, after becoming pregnant with the child of a black
sailor. For 1958, arriving alongside the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement in theatre,
Delaney provided her own progressive perspective on social ‘restlessness’
explored, as ever, in the industrial inauguration of kitchen sink drama: the
North of England. Set in Salford, much of A
Taste of Honey’s reception was dictated through brash contextual
condescension. Delaney was only 19 when she wrote it, consequently most reviews
focused soley on her youth, her gender-and her working class ‘authenticity’.
Thus a warped identity of Delaney obscured that of the play, substituting
sincere critical appraisal for veiled sexism and socially patronizing
voyeurism. Moving on from its existence as a play, Delaney worked with Tony
Richardson in constructing the screenplay. The film carries the black and white
adherence to social realism, characteristic to much of British New Wave cinema.
It interestingly has a carnival scene which, similar to the sequence in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
introduces an interlude of more stylized aesthetics. In A Taste of Honey, Jo (the female protagonist, played memorably by
Rita Tushingham) enters a hall of mirrors at the fair, a brilliantly realized
moment of confused self analysis. It is a sequence that, in its implied
departure from the every day realism of Salford existence, offers a telling
indication of the more navel gazing subtext that runs beneath its robust
realism. It is a compelling and tragic narrative, a daughter perhaps socially
condemned to the same cyclical entrapment that her mother has so gracelessly
inhabited (the social climbing, sex exploiting and deeply unreliable mother –
‘Helen’ – is portrayed excellently by Dora Bryan), which is approached with a
genuine energy, one that avoids ever succumbing to the theatrical temptations
of misery. Perhaps much of the play’s strength, and similarly the film’s, lies
in the tension between a resounding positive humanism (in the character of Jo)
and the disillusionment with a society that weathers such positivism. Class is
a condemnation to be endured, while social mobility is to be gained only
through the expense of morality. 7/10
Square du Temple/ The Invention of
the World / Neither Eve Nor Adam – Michel Zimbacca – A series
of rarely seen short surrealist films, screened at the Star and Shadow Cinema. The first film (Square du Temple) paralleled the aristocratic history of a grand
house’s tenants (specifically their love lives) with the shuffling courtship of
two pigeons on a telegraph wire. After the male pigeon briefly mounts the
ruffled submission of the female, we are shown a group of boys playing in a
nearby park. One boy is inspecting a small rifle. Before the pigeon has a
chance to finish any post-coital cigarette (that I imagined…no avian smoking is
shown…unfortunately) or apologise for the brevity of his performance, we see
his lifeless body drop from the trees, shot down by the boy. The camera lingers
on a bloodstain left on the ground, after a passing policeman removes the
feathered corpse. We see the boys gather for an unexpected photo-like a troop
of underexperienced hunters posing for an akward trophy portrait.
The second film (and longest): The
Invention of The World was more of a crude film essay, a montage of tribal
artefacts, with a voiceover detailing the notion of some vague evolution of
symbolism-or a kind of global formative mythology. This was combined with a
very intriguing soundtrack of hypnotic drums and repetitive mantric sound –
half way between abrasive and transcendental. The film uses the words of
surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, producing some beatufully absurd and aresting
lines: ‘we implore the wind blown ostrich’; ‘I, the bear’; ‘I am the crow
bride, the wings open each side of my head’; ‘the moon nibbled by a rabbit in
the rain’. Several phallic spearheads later, one looping climax of discordant
chimes and drumming (as we watch the rotating statue of some elaborate, many
limbed deity) and it’s over. Although the fetishised worship of odd and
beguilling objects is well accounted for by Breton, his ideas of ‘objective
chance’ and trips to the flea market ending in strange purchases brimming with
latent revelation…it is still hard to dispell the suspicion of a disquiting
imperial tourism, in this veneration of tribal artefacts.
The last film: Neither Eve Nor Adam (1969) was my favourite. A couple entwined in bed
turn to the side of the bed and pull out a large mirror. After staring at
themselves, as a conversational pre-requisite to much meditative indulgence,
the woman declares she wishes to be immortal. The man gets out of bed, climbs
beneath the bed and then begins to produce bones-which he piles beside the bed.
In the corner of the frame we are shown the date, revealing the passing of
years, in which time an entire skeleton is produced-from where, and how, is
cheerfully unclear. This is all done by the man, in pursuit of immortality for
his wife, so that, he explains: ‘your skeleton isn’t waiting for you’
(obviously). After this impressive effort by the man (in which the concept of
‘boning’ is re-defined), he returns to bed, whereupon the woman promptly asks
him to ‘rape’ her. It’s around about here we encounter a particularly inspired
phrase: ‘Ravish my dream, rape my life’. Dynomite. What follows is a brilliant
and theatrical hallucination of a grave-side rape. This sounds far more brutal
and morbid than the sequence actually is. It involves the artist, Jean
Benoît, in a camp and highly elaborate
costume-playing the ‘Necrophilliac’. He looks essentially like a large castle
piece from a game of chess, with the make up of a Halloween devil. The woman
from the bedroom swoons lasciviously in his arms, beside her own open grave.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack machine gun fires with the non-diagetic sound of a
pneumatic drill…all very penetatrive…and enteratining!
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning – Kare Reisz
- Based on the novel by Alan Sillitoe,
this is rightly considered a classic of British New Wave cinema. Creating the
iconic ‘Arthur Seaton’ and launching the stardom of Albert Finney, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is a
comical, quotable, painful and poignant depiction of defiance, class and
masculinity. In the immortal words of Mr. Seaton: ‘Don’t let the bastards grind
you down…’ a sentiment for all occasions. Finney’s performance manages to be
effortlessly charismatic, while retaining the inherent ambivalence of a
character at once roguishly charming and destructively selfish. Cinematography
is a consistently superb, with a particularly stylised turn in a scene at the
fair (in which carosouel dodgems – if such a thing exists – become
nightmarishly emblematic of a paranoid wheel of the inevitable, spied on by two
military sentinals of justice/the law/comeupance). Arthur is the archetypal
‘Angry Young Man’, an avatar of the middle class perception of working class
anger and authenticity, or, more sincerely, an everyman resisting the stifling
domestic expectations of ideological expectation, while weathering the grind of
the working week. The final scene is heartbreaking, the character of Arthur
Seaton seeming at once durably symbolic and somehow irresistably honest. A
despicable, pathetic and transparent figure, that in spite of such attributes
is also undeniably magnetic. The film also has a genius jazz inflected
soundtrack, its reocurring motif moving from a cocky swagger to the more
meloncholy pace of a hangovers and reflective doubt. 8.5/10
Keyhole – Guy Maddin –In an article in The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/30/guy-maddin-keyhole] I encountered the pleasingly bizarre
revelation that, in preparation for Keyhole,
Maddin staged ‘collage parties’ to help generate script ideas: "I invited
the best young up-and-coming scene-grabbing artists, in various cities. I would
prime their pumps with a few words – 'electric chair', things like that – and
supplied a stack of old melodrama magazines, a stack of porn, and a few kegs of
bourbon. We embarked on a very peaceful and therapeutic and yet disruptive
process of snipping paper into blizzards of nipples." As far as cinematic
foreplay goes, a surrealist ‘blizzard of nipples’ - snipped so judiciously in
flurries of glossy flange and snowing scraps of forgotten…well, I could get
carried away with the imagery (delving unecessaryily into scatalogical
digressions and misguided anlogy). Anyway, once the phrase ‘blizzards of
nipples’ has been given time to comprehensively settle, this unorthadox
practice makes a lot of sense. I would go into further detail, but I plan to
burrow excitably into this particular direction for a different project of
research-and so shall restrain from mapping many a tangled association…another
time, another time…
The film, taking place in a haunted house, begins as a pastiche of
gangster noir wih the house surrounded by cops and their streaming flashlights…and
then slowly twists into a more ghostly and bewildering meditation on the space
of memory. Near the beginning of the film one of the gangsters orders ‘everyone
who’s dead to face the wall’ (or words close to that) to discern between the
living and dead. Not dissimiliar to children reluctantly conceding defeat in an
imaginary game, the ‘ghosts’ confess to their spectral nature and slope out of
the house. It is a brilliantly simple and humourous moment, in which both genre
expectations and existentialist musings are shrugged off in the joy of a
well-timed joke. Maddin consistently punctuates the dense, busy and haunting
film with absurdist humour. The dead are just as eccentric as the living; a
spectral acquaintance wanders corridors slurping from a glass of milk, the
sprinting nude formless form of a woman dragged by a careering poltergeist
poodle; an old man, the ghostly patriarch, kneels to fellate a cock-that just
happens to be perpetually poked in eternal erection through a dusty wall…the
ghost of an old man fellating a disembodied cock…yup, it’s fair to say that
Maddin has excercised a gleefuly liberal imagination with commendable talent!
Following the tale of Ulysses, the film takes the hazy shape of a
father’s journey. Ulysses makes his labarynth-like pilgrimage through the old
house, a repetitive, uncanny and odd enactment of visiting and revisiting the
past. The various rooms of the house hold memories, vividly imagined as naked,
demented, debauched and disturbed ghosts, all wandering in restless tribute to
lives left unresolved…or simply animated by the curiousity of reflection. Who
is living and who is dead, what is real and imagined, occupying the present or
presented in remembering, all become spirallingly confused in the film’s
flexible subversion of the early comedic distinction. At the start of the
journey ghosts were told to put their hands up and admit their ghostliness, by
the end of the film the mesmeric circulation of memory haunts the living with
the dead and vica versa, until such a distinction seems immaterial.
An unreal communion with family members manages to lend the film both an
intimate tone of introspection (as Maddin has often cited seeing his father in
his dreams-and the influence this holds on his approach to memory) and a more
expansive, ambitious and textural essay on the past within the present.
The
psychology of architecture, repressed rooms and imagined passageways all become
churned up in an oneiric rhythm, one that becomes wholly immersive. From the
beautifully theatrical opening, an octagenarian man (wearing noubt but Y-fronts-looking
unnervingly like the escaped flesh embodyment of a Lucien Freud painting) plodding
a lace curtain across a mysterious stage, to the final thunder crash and
whisper of melodrama, the film maintains a compelling momentm. Significantly
memory, like dream, reacts to and communicates the unknown depths of the
unconscious, and so the film is populated by eroticised flesh, sex, hysteria,
sadness, pain and the inexplicably unexpected. Tuned constantly between two
stations, Keyhole soaks its haunted
noir palette in Maddin’s own beguiling, home- brewed static. A shifting
portrait that begs repeated viewings! 9/10
Skyfall – Sam Mendes
– The 50th anniversary Bond film is a fascinating beast. Retaining
the more human development of the last two films, through an exploration of
Bond’s age, Skyfall introduces a
streak of previously absent humour. At first, my initial reaction was
apprehension – the ‘could Bond have its
cake and eat it’ scenario – balancing the more mature gravitas of psychology
and ‘grit’ (heralding comparisons to Nolan’s re-invention of Batman) with the
pantomime punning of old…could this hybrid exist? This question, of whether or
not Bond can, or even should, exist, provides the film’s momentum and its
intriguingly insistent gesture towards analogous meanings. During the opening
sequence Bond is shot, we then discover he has been subsequently residing on a
tropical Island, playing scorpion-based drinking games and indulging in
vigorous beach hut sex (a must for any wounded and existentialy challenged
ex-spy in search of resurrection). This is a weathered, older Bond. Daniel
Craig’s unshaven, granite hewn facial features and red-rimmed eyes, present a
man who may have lost his ability or capacity to perform in the field. Thus,
what follows is a sort of resurrection-a need to prove that an old dog can be
taught new tricks.
In a playful inversion of the traditional charcterisation, ‘Q’ is
presented as a young, boyish, cardigan-wearing, geek-chic, laptop prodigy. Gone
is the white haired mad scientist eccentricity, Ben Whishaw inaugurates the
film’s acknowledgement of a post-Apple generation. When Bond is first
introduced to this newly imagined Q, both are sat in the national gallery,
looking at Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’. Q offers the observation of the
painting’s poignancy: the old ship, once majestic, towed away as scrap (a less
than subtle metaphor for the ageing Bond). To which Bond replies, all he sees
is ‘a bloody big ship’. The question of Bond’s validity extends beyond the
immediate narrative, bringing up the question of why we need, or would want the
Bond films now? Why, when Ian Flemming’s charcter was founded on the casual
veneration of misogony, the concerted celebration of imperialism and a
worshiping abandon to all things indicative of phallic prowess, why would
filmmakers and audiences consistently support such ideologically regressive
material? This is the question that, rightfully and competently, Mendes seems
to engage with.
Diluting the seriousness with more humour, and various references to
older Bond films (thus furthering the reflexive nature of Skyfall’s nature) feels as though, through the cleansing
reinvention of Casino Royale and Quantam of Solace, the Bond franchise
had earnt its return to comedic roots. The bold departure had been the
cinematic equivalent of a confession, that the legacy of Bond was obviously
problematic, it could not have continued in the same way. No more could
un-ironic hammy puns signify the smug superiority of imperialism, no more could
the continual pageant of ‘bond girls’ be marched – bikini-clad- out of the
rolling surf, and no longer could espionage be portrayed as a gloating form of
suave sex tourism, with occasional gunfire between shags. Since Daniel Craig,
the films have exchanged the objectified female for the objectified male
(Craig’s torso and blue speedoes replacing pussy Galore and pals), extended
gunfire and the dismissive slaughter of henchmen was exchanged for more
visceral scenes of grappling and uncomfortable violence, and Bond’s libidinous
conquests were superceded by crying in a shower, vulnerability and a more psychologicaly
nuanced portrayal. Having experienced this evolution, much needed after the
bearded Brosnan/ice/madonna travesty of Die
Another Day, Mendes is able to return to the more playfully comedic
elements, safe in the knowledge that the previous two films had made clear the
anachronistic absurdity and offensive reality of much that is Bond.
As a result Skyfall has some
genuine moments of comedy, able to exist because never complicit or ambiguosly
jeapordised by questionable connotations. This is a film that embraces the
dated nature of Bond, incorporating it to the extent of a plot device. Britain
and empire become reocurring motifs, with much of the action in London’s
antiquated underground system. Javier Bardem brings the tradition of
extravagantly camp villian back with relish and memorable, show-stealing,
ability. His theatrically aryian follicles mischevously subverts the actor’s
Spanish identity and creates a genuinely entertaining villian, redolent of the
sort of sinister creation that would appear in League of Gentleman. Another exciting touch is the inclusion of
Albert Finney, made all the more special by his ‘delicate’ reference to Daniel
Craig as ‘a jumped-up little shit’. The cameo of Albert Finney (fresh from me
watching Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
) resonated effectively with the film’s meditation on age and the alpha male –
also on the notion of a filmic ‘old guard’ meeting the new generation –
Finney’s shotgun wielding charcter also enjoys a cinematically appropriate
chemistry with the, simarlaly prestigious (‘British Institution’) acting
stardom of Judi Dench. A Bond film that simulatenously interrogates and
celebrates the Bond legacy, and in doing so, creates an enjoyably triumphant
justification for why: James Bond will
return. 8.5/10
