FILMS 0F 2009: THE SILVER AWARDS

See here for the Bronze awards.
Gold awards coming soon!



Milk

The only criticism I’d make of Gus Van Sant’s quite splendid biopic of gay rights activist Harvey Milk is that it succumbs to the standard movie depiction of crowds. Cinema crowds are always painted as less than the sum of their parts, a Freudian regression into brute instincts who require leadership and direction from a few great men. It’s like they’re wary of the assembled audience ever discovering it’s collective identity, looking to each other rather than that shiny screen.

Though there’s little in modern research to give credence to this view, it seems our society is so dependent upon it that it must be maintained at all costs. Admittedly other films play up this cliché to a far worse degree than here, but it’s disappointing to see it in a film that is otherwise so socially progressive.

Watchmen

Yep, the comics adaptation we know-all fans said should never be! Maybe it’s a good job no-one listens to us after all. (My full review here.)




District 9

To me the genius of this South African SF black comedy didn’t lie in the ‘alien apartheid’ theme everyone else has commented on, but in making such a geek the hero. Though the character is reasonably well played by Sharlto Copley, what makes it is the jarring context he’s put in. We watch him travel from petty bureaucrat, a semi- tolerated imposition upon his colleagues, to despised pariah and finally... well okay, no plot spoilers! Socially speaking, he is the alien.

Tales From the Golden Age

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu comes up with quite a change of pace from his earlier bleak docu-drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days This is a blackly comic portmanteau of urban myths told during the days of the Ceausescu's dictatorship, all seeking to highlight it’s absurdity with laughter. The absurdity of the final image of the first tale will stay with you for a while, and perhaps even remind you of Even Dwarfs Started Small. Interestingly, some tales also seem to retain a folkish undercurrent, with their insistence on the fall of those who fail to follow the rules.



Up

Pixar pull it off again! If not quite the absolute best of their films, this may well be the maddest - crammed full of crazy images and sequences. True, you can see references in it. The take-off scene, with its combination of the adventurous with the cosily domestic, recalls the suburban moonshot of the first Wallace and Gromit. There must also be an influence from the famous early Keaton, where he takes the concept ‘moving house’ so literally. And the bird which everyone is hunting is surely Road Runner.

But, in what’s probably the key to Pixar’s success, the whole film started with a personal daydream - Director Pete Docter would imagine that he could somehow upend and fly off anytime other people got annoying. As he comments:

“One of the things that's really important to me in everything that I've worked on is finding some relatable thing that the audience can identify with, ... that they understand is true for them in their own life.”

This leaves even such a madcap adventure feeling – if you’ll forgive the phrase – grounded.

The Inferno of Henri-Georges Clouzot

Truth can be stranger than fiction even when it’s about fiction. This documentary focuses on acclaimed director Clouzot (“the French Hitchock’s”) attempt to make his mid-Sixties masterpiece - Inferno.

Of course it all goes terribly wrong. As the title here hints, the study of a man on the brink came more and more to be made by a man on the brink. Given an unlimited budget but a strict timescale, Clouzot obsessively re-shot a small number of scenes over and over while fixating over technical tests, until struck by a heart attack which scuppered filming. Watching both the reconstructed story and surviving footage, you feel strangely torn. You ache to see the finished film while being aware that in one way it all went terribly right - the story simply feels so much more appropriate played out as a grand folly.

Despite their dry description, the technical tests are actually one of the most interesting aspects. Clouzot wanted to portray psychological states on the screen by playing with colour and form. It’s reminiscent of the way psychedelic music of the era would use the studio as an instrument rather than a recording device, treating and reshaping the sound it captured, though in this Clouzot was ahead of the curve – filming happened in 1964.

(Shown as part of Brighton’s Cine-City programme.)


Paranormal Activity

PLOT SPOILERS! (For this review only)

Sound-bite description: imagine the creepy attic noises from The Exorcist given their own spin-off movie.

Despite the generic title, and the suggestion that this ‘faux-found-footage’ horror could just be another Blair Witch Project knock-off, this film succeeded quite remarkably. For one thing, the swapping of Blair Witch‘s woodland setting for suburban house sounds counter-intuitive but works well. It relies on the paradoxical estrangement of suburbia; though surrounded by other houses, the central couple might as well be in the middle of nowhere.

But there’s a bigger difference. Blair Witch was ultimately about age, about adults being reduced to children, fearful of the dark. Their totems of adulthood, their camcorders and maps, their ‘project’, help them not at all. This film, with its demon-haunted woman, is much more about the gender divide.

It’s even mildly reminiscent of Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman’s classic early feminist short story, The Yellow Wallpaper. We’re told that the girlfriend is studying to become an English teacher, leaving the implication that it’s the boyfriend who is paying for their expensive home and it’s many mod cons. (Though there’s only one passing reference to him trading.) The paranormal scenes terrify her, but drive him to ‘take control of the situation’.

His gormlessly literalist disregard for the demon’s disembodied status becomes almost a black joke. He lays talc on the floor to capture its footprints, like it’s a stray mouse. It responds by leaving impossible prints, which stop tauntingly in mid-stride. It’s surely no accident that his interventions provoke the demon as much as they annoy her. The demon is surely her subconscious rejection of him and his domineering tendencies. (Though interestingly this interpretation relies heavily upon the ending we have now, which was only suggested post-hoc by Steven Spielberg.)

FILMS 0F 2009: THE BRONZE AWARDS

See here for the Tin-Plated and the Not-Even-Going-To-Say-What-Substance awards.
Coming Soon(ish)! The Silver and Gold awards!



Star Trek

Reboots rock! It’s not just that the title looks bolder and neater on the film poster, freely shorn of those appendages and fannish encumbrances. (Though that alone would be reason enough.) Like forest fires, reboots burn away all the overgrown entanglements, and allow fresh new shoots to sprout. They keep things young and lively.

Yet paradoxically they also contain an element of fatalism. We know in advance things will only burn down to the root, that the same basic shapes and arrangements will inevitably regrow. So, to stop things becoming merely repetitive, reboots often try to wrongfoot you. But, like the folktale character trying to escape a curse and thereby enabling it, this merely exposes the problem. We know Kirk and Spock will end up as friends and colleagues, despite any feints otherwise. So Abrams’ decision to inject elements from the old Star Trek, the one we all know, is no cop-out but actually the smartest move to make. Staying silent about it would leave it the proverbial elephant in the living room. Allowing limited, supervised contact was the way to go.

Where the film turns strange is in basing itself around Kirk, but giving him the mere appearance of a ‘journey’. It’s more like Spock and everyone else have the journey, reorienting themselves around him – the man who’s always right no matter what. He's initially presented as a reckless youth, fighting in bars for want of anything better to do. But there's no rite of passage for him, he passes effortlessly from stealing cars to assuming command of a starship by something of a backdoor. Even when he does dumb things, like fighting the security guards on deck, it's like we're just supposed to root for him.

Interestingly, they did a similar thing with Johnny Storm in the (first) Fantastic Four film. He’s first told never to take his flame to nova, as some sort of code that his headstrong impetuosity needed reigning in. Yet it’s the very reverse which happens - he wins the day precisely by going nova!

Does our culture now consider that any kind of self-discipline or even simple consideration of your actions to be 'un-heroic'? Could this be something to do with the schizo rules we get given in daily life, increasingly micro-regulated at work yet bombarded by adverts telling us the road to personal success is just to give in to our indulgences?

I can't help but wonder if, as the Shatner incarnation was Kennedy, this time Kirk has become Dubya – the ultimate screw-up rich kid who got into the position he did because of family connections. Kirk's logic-be-damned-we've-just-got-to-fight-the-foe speeches seem remarkably similar to Bush's railing against the UN or Geneva Convention, or just about anybody at all. (“Never mind what those reports say, I knows what’s right, goddamit!”)

And if I’m right about this, what can we look forward to with the subsequent Obama era? Is Uhura secretly angling for that promotion from telephonist to Captain?

Of course nothing in this complaint should be taken to suggest it makes this a bad film. You could even argue the reverse, it makes it a better work of art by embracing the zeitgeist so neatly.

Drag Me To Hell

Lightweight but enjoyable Sam Raimi shocker. Perhaps oddly, after so many films which stole the look of Ring, this film takes it’s plot while looking nothing like it!

Looking For Eric

Unlike others, I had no problem with the magical realism intruding into the more regular realism in this new Ken Loach drama. (Which in any case you could read as merely going on in the protagonist’s head.) But, like other Loach films such as Raining Stones, the problem comes with the ending. I can see why they would want to avoid their every film finishing on a bleak-but-believable downer where the bad guys always win, but this is a little like a gritty urban drama turns Children’s Film Foundation for the final reel. I get the point that gangster’s main currency is maintaining ‘face’, but even so...



The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The main conceit of this film is that it allows us to journey into the mind of the titled Doctor, through the afore-mentioned Imaginarium. But it does make you wonder at times if you’re not actually entering the mind of one of Terry Gilliam’s decriers, and seeing one of his films through their eyes.

Of course, we all know the story that Heath Ledger tragically died during filming. And, as most of us will also know, Gilliam then employed a secondary conceit on the back of his first – to finish the film by shooting the missing scenes inside the Imaginarium, putting different actors in place of Ledger under a big dollop of dream logic. You actually get used to this quite quickly.

But the result really makes little sense, even for a Gilliam film. Points which are clearly intended to pack an emotional punch just leave you head-scratching. You suspect there were vital scenes outside the Imaginarium which remained unshot, as they fell outside Gilliam’s back-up conceit. It’s as dazzling and ceaselessly inventive as ever (as that surrealist-style poster might suggest), but bewildering and ultimately unsatisfying.

Still, Tom Waits as the devil... that can never be bad.

The Limits of Control

As reviewed here.

FILMS OF 2009 (Part One):

Time was, when I seemed to do nothing but review films here. This time, I find I’ve only previously written about three the whole year long. So perhaps an end-of-year catch-up is timely. This will be done in reverse order, in the vain hope of generating some kind of excitement. This time, those films I have ranked Tin-Plated and Not-Even-Going-To-Say-What-Substance. Coming soon, The Bronze, closely followed by The Silver and then The Gold!

Please note, if I seem to have more to say about some films than others, that shouldn’t be taken as a measure of appreciation but just the way the words came out.

THE TIN-PLATED:



Broken Embraces

I either end up persistently seeing the wrong Almodovar films or else he’s quite absurdly over-rated. But this was almost definitively a ‘meh’ movie. The film-within-a-film they keep making is often played as a joke, yet it seems so much more alive than the film we’re actually watching.

Che (Parts 1 & 2)

The great thing about the old Cold War films about Cuba, whether pro or anti, is that they’re so impassioned. Even Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment, so insistently a tale of non-involvement, is ferventlynon-involved. By contrast, these two films feel almost un-involved. It’s like the difference between a speech by a political campaigner and a dry broadsheet analysis, stuffed with diagrams and tables. They’re like a project, another weighty topic to research and add to your film-maker’s CV.

Admittedly I would be less harsh on this two-parter if comparing it to its contemporaries rather than predecessors, and the second part is more involving than the first. And it was a lot better than...

THE NOT-EVEN-GOING-TO-SAY-WHAT-SUBSTANCE:

The Baader Meinhof Complex

aka The Baader Meinhof Simple As reviewed here.



Public Enemies

After seeing the trailer, I was actually looking forward to Michael Mann’s presentation of John Dillinger’s life of crime. That trailer didn’t lie, particularly. In fact you could stick together pretty much any scenes from this film to engender the same sense of excitement. The problem is when you stick them all together. There’s no take, no engagement either with Dillinger’s life or his public image. There didn’t necessarily have to be insight, but some kind of through-line might have helped! All we get is a shopping-list of (apparently well-researched) moments from the mobster’s life transformed by a crew of professionals into event movie-making. It’s like picking nice-sounding words and calling them a sentence.

But even that was better than...

Il Divo

A great artist can take a complex subject and present it to you simply, memorably and with great clarity. This film does the reverse. It’s not even that it’s gimmicky and expensive-looking. It just looks expensive-looking. Somebody could make a fantastic black farce out of the current state of Italian politics. (Whose stinky goings-on seem even more egregious than here in Britain.) Hopefully, somebody still might.

But even that was better than...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The risible low-point of my filmic year. I can’t believe David Fincher... yes, the man who made Fight Club... was behind this sickly-sweet slice of Oscar bait! If anything surfaced that was worse than this, I simply don’t want to know about it.

What really sums the film up is that bloody humming-bird, so clearly signposted as ‘symbolic’. But doesn’t a symbol have to be a symbol of something?, not just some slo-mo arthouse stand-in for redemption. Or transcendence. Or rejuvenation. Or whatever. I don’t know which, and neither does anyone who made this overlong indulgence. It was like eating sugar from the bag whilst a tuxedoed waiter compliments you on your “excellent choice, sir!” No it isn’t.

CINE-CITY 2009 (Part Two: Wojciech Has retrospective)

Apologies for the late arrival of this second part of my Cine-City retrospective. A third part was originally promised, but that no longer seems current now. Perhaps I should be wary of making such rash promises this time of the year. I have at least kept up my tradition of always posting something on Christmas Day.



THE NOOSE (1958)

Perhaps the prevalent view of the Polish director Wojciech Has is summed up by Wikipedia, that he “was independent of the over political themes that dominated the prevailing Polish (Film) School.” In fact it could be possible to push this line too far. Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds, often regarded as the very definition of the Polish Film School, is itself very much an ‘inner’ story of a conflicted individual - a Hamlet not a Julius Caesar. Yet the issues which beset this individual are very much social and political. Conversely Kuba, the central character of The Noose, wears his alcoholism like an existential curse. He makes no excuses for drinking, along the lines of poverty or unemployment. It’s much more one man’s way of dodging life’s central question ‘what is a man to do?’

There’s also more than a hint of the Sartrean concept that ‘hell is other people’. Take for example the recurrent emphasis on windows and mirrors, and indeed characters often become windows and mirrors to each other. Tellingly, the inevitable noose of the title is made from a telephone wire – the mechanism by which others assail him.

The film follows the ‘faux unities’ of time, as we follow him for a day trying to stay clean and sober. (There must be a term for this ‘compressed real time’, used in films like High Noon, which I don’t know.) Reflecting it’s psychological themes it’s quite a theatrical piece, indeed too much so during some of the scenes when he’s alone in his flat. Yet, for a cracked portrait of so flawed a man, that is surely it’s only failing.

FAREWELLS (1958)

Though only made later that same year, this couldn’t be more of a contrast. It’s a historical film, covering a wide span of time. But despite this emphasis on the crushing weight of history, in its way it’s as much a chamber piece as it’s predecessor. Though not entirely made up of interiors, it feels dominated by them. There’s a great importance attached to where characters are staying, from the young runaways early in the film onward. Only at the very end do the events of history actually intrude. (Particularly odd is the reduction to a passing reference of a character’s imprisonment in Auschwitz.)

The theme is the decline of titled families between and (especially) after the wars. Not a single character welcomes the Soviet invasion, the reactions range only between fear and indifference. In this way it’s closest cousins would not be the Italian neo-realism which so inspired the Polish Film School but its’ immediate successors, particularly Visconti’s The Leopard or The Damned. (Though intriguingly this film predates them both.)

Though The Noose was also based on a novel, Farewells betrays its literary origins more, and (for all its grander themes) is the lesser of the two films for it. Just as it’s span is greater, it’s grip is weaker.

HOW TO BE LOVED (1963)

This later film takes the historical span of Farewells, but uses it more successfully. It is also the only one of the three to place a woman in the lead role. (Though her life is given to obsessing over a man, and she is much more similar to the supportive surrogate mother in The Noose than the more independent woman from Farewells.)

Though the Polish School never subscribed to the restrictive connotations ‘realism’ might imply, here is the point were any such notions are actively attacked. Set among actors, it uses their world to question reality rather than just portray it. Indeed the central event of the film occurs off-screen and is left ambiguous, with several different explanations given for it. The ending actually copies what had earlier been a false rumour.

Character voice-over is used, but to enhance ambiguity rather than clarify it. The protagonist’s thoughts are more stream-of-consciousness than ordering; at one point she even becomes drunk and the voice-over itself becomes incoherent. At another she veers off-script while recording a drama, seemingly preferring her own words better. In this way it almost becomes a synthesis of the two previous films, despite their first seeming so far apart.



THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965)

This, perhaps Has’ best-known film, marks a major break from his earlier realist works. Though there are links for those who go looking (such as his interest in psychology) it’s hard to think of another director from the era who so completely changed their style. Compared to Has, even Fellini remained in the shadow of neo-realism.

It’s most commonly said that Has moved from realism to surrealism. Indeed, he claimed himself that he ”was brought up on surrealism.” Yet, though this was often cited by Bunel as his favourite film, pedants might debate just how surreal it is. After all, it’s based on a pre-surrealist book from 1815 (by Jan Potocki). Though supernatural events occur, it could be argued that it is actually closer to folklore.

The film’s fascination comes from its byzantine structure – it’s not merely a portmanteau but presents nested and even overlapping stories, as if they are coagulating together. Yet the frame story device is primarily a literary conceit, and in a way the film fetishises the book object as something with almost magical powers, drawing in the reader in an almost literal sense. Which all makes for an engrossing film, but weren’t the surrrealists one of the forces who encouraged film away from literary traditions?

(NB: I didn’t actually see the film as part of this festival, having watched it only recently beforehand.)

THE HOUR GLASS SANATORIUM (1973)

This, the only film Has made in the Seventies, must surely count as his magnum opus. This time based on a Bruno Gans collection, if it is not surreal then surely nothing is! It’s hard to comment on after seeing only once, the viewing experience being so overwhelming. (It often fascinates me how, even in the pre-video era, so people made films which demanded multiple viewings.) You emerge feeling some strange combination of intoxicated and travel sick, split between the desire to see it all again and the wish to have a good lie down. There’s a repeated motif of a wave of activity, one character entering a still setting which leads to it erupting into activity, though I’m at a loss to explain this apart from that being the way the film feels on your mind.

Much of its style comes from incorporating a standard trope of neo-realism, deep field photography, but thrusting it into a surrealist settings – resulting in a kind of baroque surrealism. (Has’ influence is all over Gilliam.) Each scene seems so crammed with detail, but you are only able to take in any of that for a minute before being whisked off again. Like Saragossa Manuscript it tells a family story through employing disdainful approach to time. Scenes are rarely linked naturalistically but juxtaposed, the protagonist impossibly leaping and lurching from one place and time to another.

Here’s something I wrote last year, about Wajda, the other great ‘Polish school’ director, following last year’s Cine-City.

More about Cine-City here.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

PLOT SPOILERS AHOY!!!

This new Jim Jarmusch movie has proved controversial in many quarters, generating a lot of baffled resentment. As a longtime fan of his work, I have to tell you it looks, feels and sounds absolutely great – in particular with some fantastic photography. More than any previous Jarmusch film, it is surely challenging Antonioni (in particular The Passenger). The soundtrack (by drone outfits such as Earth, Sunn))) and Boris) is so superb you wonder if all films should have such a soundtrack by law. You feel such music as much as hear it, it has a subliminal effect upon you as if creeping beneath the radar of your critical faculties - the perfect soundtrack music.

Some commentators have despaired of the way this espionage story doesn’t have any literal kind of resolution. Yet even classics of the genre, such as The Big Sleep, had supposed ‘plots’ which even the makers couldn’t follow – without it mattering much. Indeed, such an absence may even count as an improvement. As the comics artist Eddie Campbell has pointed out of this genre, “the solution is often a pin that lets the air out of the balloon, dispersing forever anything that was there in the first place.”

You would in any case need fairly hefty blinkers not to recognise that proceedings here merely use the form of an espionage film to get you watching in a particular way. As Jarmusch has commented:

“This is not a neo-neo-realism style of film; it’s fantastic in a certain way. I didn’t want to make a film that people had to analyze particularly while watching it. I really wanted to make a film that was kind of like a hallucinogenic in the way that, when you left after having seen it, I hope the audience will look at mundane details in a slightly different way. Maybe it’s only temporary, maybe for only 15 minutes, but I wanted to do something to… I don’t know, just trigger an appreciation for one’s subjective consciousness.”

The film mostly follows nameless ‘Lone Man’ as he undergoes a series of encounters, which may or may not be full of clues. Each individual he encounters seems to embody some discipline – film, music, science. There’s something almost Gnostic about it, the scenes are structured as if he’s being imparted knowledge but the sense of them is more that he’s becoming steeped in a worldview.

More neatly still, Jarmusch achieved this effect mostly through improvised filming, turning up to locations with only the most minimal script to see where the journey took him. One way to read the title is that ‘Control’ is a conventional shooting script, insisting reality conforms to it.

This is of course a great idea for a film. It’s surely no accident that one of the great blockbusters of our time was called Titanic, while it’s successors have become increasingly obsessed with gargantuan disasters. Hollywood feels virtually the last Fordist industry left, oversized, clumsy, it’s projects impossible to resteer once they’re set out on. What better counter than to make a film more like an improvising troupe?

And if it didn’t have a hallucinogenic effect on me, it did bring back to my mind the spy games we’d play as kids. We had nothing in particular to say in those messages we’d elaborately code, nor anyone to hide them from. But this very lack of function gave them their significance, the medium was the message. We wanted so much to talk to each other it wasn’t enough to just say things, new languages had to be invented just so they could be used. So much effort was put into the form, the content was rendered important.

But does this cool idea actually come off? First, there’s a formal distinction to contend with. Unlike music or theatre, film doesn’t happen live before the audience; we never see the process, only the result. So when we see, for example, a black helicopter at the start then again at the end – in a sense it was already present at the end, the film exists for us in a kind of simultaneity of time.

But worse, rather than counter this tendency the film instead enhances it. The character we follow doesn’t extemporise on what he sees (like say in Fellini’s 8 1/2), he follows what appears to us a pre-set arrangement of clues which take him to a denouement. The end result is not impressionist but deterministic; we don’t make sense of the world we are thrust into, we soak up these clues and wait for their sense to be made manifest to us.

This is reinforced by the style of the film which (though arresting in itself) is not freely associative but rigid and almost minimal. At one point, in the art gallery, a big painting behind the Lone Man’s head carries only a big cross, as if marking the spot where he should sit. It’s surely no co-incidence the camera here seems so in love with architecture and design. If it was a painting it would be by Ed Ruscha, with it’s sterile yet numinous empty urban spaces, not a Dadaist collage or teeming Futurist street scene. Objects arrive almost labelled as clues, like some cerebral kind of video game.

I am also unsure whether there is the connection between imagination and the figure of the secret agent which Jarmusch seems to be implying. A character like James Bond is clearly an agent of chaos, breaking into the clockwork order of the secret base in order to disrupt it. But is chaos the same thing as imagination? (Crucially, the hero here is explicitly not sexualised.)

Admittedly, I may have been weighted against the film by being wrongfooted by it. Early on, I assumed that this heady stew of significance somehow existed only in the lead character’s mind. He’d see paintings in a gallery which he’d later translate into encounters. Yet something I always responded to about so many previous Jarmusch films (including the direct predecessor, Broken Flowers) was the way the protagonist would be not so much an unreliable narrator as a hopeless one – the last person who was ever going to reach an understanding of the world he was in.

But the biggest weakness of all is the denouement, which spells out the antagonism between imagination and control and in the process lets all the air out of the balloon just as surely as if the caretaker had dunnit. Though, as Jarmusch has indicated, the title references Burroughsian control he doesn’t really honour the concept. Bill Murray’s American is really just The Man, a one-dimensional authoritarian Aunt Sally. Try comparing the ending here to the face-off against Number One in the final episode of The Prisoner. Both endings employ genre conventions to subvert them more deeply, but The Prisoner. The Prisoner’s subversion is deeper, a much more challenging and ambiguous sequence which tantalises the viewer with easy answers yet ultimately deprives them. And with such a view of Control, the film itself cannot help but feel limited. Imagination good, Control bad. That’s not actually very imaginative. Just as The Baader Meinhof Complex wasn’t really very complex, The Limits of Control is ultimately rather limited.

Conversely, perhaps the problem with this character is that he is all too tawdrily accurate. Against widespread speculation that the American is a thinly veiled stab at Dick Cheney, Jarmusch has responded:

“It’s not pointed at the Bush administration. That’s a great example. But it continues; it’s continuing now. Who is telling us what world economic/financial structure are we trying to repair? Are we trying to prop it up, are we trying to patch up its wounds? It’s something that’s already dead; the structure is the problem.”

But by being so perfunctory and one-dimensional the American fails to represent any such structure but becomes almost the perfect description of Bush or Cheney – whose role on the stage of history was only ever as bad melodrama villains. Brecht referred to Hitler diminutively by turning him into Artuo Ui, a Chicago gangster with designs to control the vegetable trade. But a fictional biographer of Bush and Cheney, attempting to make them into characters deserving audience interest, would be forced to do the opposite - magnifying their dimwitted scheming and elevating their grasping into something grander. As the old New Model Army song went: “Not foolish and brave, these leaders of ours/ Just stupid and petty, unworthy of power.”

I’m finally torn between two responses to this film. In some ways it left me feeling as I did with I’m Not There, a success in it’s own refreshingly idiosyncratic terms, but not ultimately terms I favour. Or perhaps it was simply a failure, a brave and noble failure but nonetheless unable to live up to it’s own intentions.

NB: The resy of my Cine-City write-up is coming shortly. Honest, guv. Would I lie to you?

CINE-CITY 2009 (Part One: New Features)

Coming Soon! Features on the documentaries and Wojciech Has retrospective from Brighton's Cine-City Festival.



THE ROAD
This is quite definitely not another entry in the burgeoning genre of theme-park apocalypse porn, whose excessive budgets and rampaging levels of tedium must surely be hastening the destruction they ostensibly warn us about. In fact not since Children Of Men has a dystopian future been so convincingly realised on screen. Present at the screening, director John Hillcoat described it as “a love story between a man and his son, with an apocalypse in there too.” Indeed you could almost see the movie as an extreme form of one of those lovers-versus-society films, like Betty Blue. Yet while others do intervene they have little to fear from society – no such thing is left.

Perhaps what’s smart about the film is its ability to permanently skirt horror movie territory without ever tipping into it. Which is of course what makes it so genuinely horrific, it’s appalling credibility. Hillcoat also smartly used real locations, depriving the viewer of that glossy sheen that accompanies CGI and tips the wink to the viewer that all is actually allright. It becomes quite compelling to watch these two tiny figures perpetually lost against such a vast landscape of ruin. What few objects they have (bin bags, a shopping trolley) take on an almost fetishistic importance.

True to Hillcoat’s description, the apocalypse is very much taken as read. However it is still something literal. This film isn’t akin to Godard’s Weekend or Haneke’s Time of the Wolf where the ambiguity of the apocalypse turns it into something metaphysical. (With the combination of forever occluded skies and the father’s continual coughing-up I assumed that Cormac McCarthy’s source novel had specified a nuclear winter, which Hillcoat had assumed rather than described so as not to foreground. But according to Wikipedia the book is similarly ambiguous.)

Unfortunately, like those crumbling bridges, the film has a fracture line running right through it. Inevitably, as it follows its foraging leads, it falls into something of an episodic structure. But this structure requires a strong ending, something to tie everything together into some sort of perspective. Unfortunately the ending we are given is quite banal, and strangely out of place. If apocalypse porn is a theme-park ride, this becomes an instillation piece – giving us a taster of how such a bleak non-future would pan out, but sadly nothing more.



PONYO

Some of the imagery in Miyazaki’s new animation is rich enough to turn Pixar green around the gills! (The opening scene itself is little short of stupendous.) And yet you can’t help but feel that something of the taint of Disney lies around things, as if his western distribution deal with them was enough to cause some degree of contamination. (I later read that he had been inspired by their Little Mermaid.) This feeling was probably exacerbated on my part by watching the dubbed version, while I normally go for the subtitled.

Now an old man who has come back from retirement more than once, it’s even possible that Miyazaki’s prodigious talents are now in decline. This is not the equal of Howl’s Moving Castle, itself no match for Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. Yet even a below-par Miyazaki turns out to be well worth turning out for. Still present is his archetypical insistence that the aim must be balance not victory. (Even if the resolution here is rushed and neat.) The film is filled with images of things frothing over, even a can of drink from a fridge. Yet though the swelling sea unsurprisingly represents the unconscious, it neither stands for a twee belief in fairies nor a vengeful id, but is something strange and otherly. Much of what happens isn’t simply unexplained but feels convincingly inexplicable.



TREELESS MOUNTAIN

Those who like to cling to their cultural stereotypes may be surprised to find a Korean film so far removed from vampires, extreme sex acts or other manifestations of ‘extreme cinema’. However, the programme’s comparison to Iranian films such as The Apple surely misses the point. While Iranian films always have a beguiling quality, So Yong Kim’s film is much closer to social realism. It’s success lies in conveying the way children perceive the world without degenerating into kitsch. The way the young girls take what the adults say so literally is often simultaneously charming and heart-rending. It’s also notable what a women-centered world the girls live in, male characters are at best marginal and those that do have a strong effect on the plot tend to be shown the least. (In one case, not at all.)

I wondered if it might be perceived differently in the West, whose cinema so often indulges in a saccharine feelgood “belief” in childhood. Though we see the girls get poorly treated, it’s theme is clearly their reaching a kind of rapprochement with adulthood, including the importance of chores! Thematically it might be similar to the otherwise worlds-apart Spirited Away.

I have no idea about the title! Is there a Korean saying about the treeless mountain being hardest to climb?

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL

It’s difficult to talk about this new Jim Jarmusch film without going into the ending, and seems a little pointless to give plot spoilers on films before they go on general release. So I shall be holding fire on it until then...

TIME TO REVERSE THE POLARITY (aka WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS A NEW NEW DOCTOR) - Part 2

This is the wrap-up part of my imagined new direction for Doctor Who, a response to Andrew Hickey’s tag game of reworking established characters. It has been held over till now in classic cliffhanger style. To take it from the top, click here.

The Conclusion:

Finally the Doctor is ‘rescued’ by UNIT, who it seems have been looking for him all along, and separated from Isobel. He’s taken to their head, at which point his sonic screwdriver starts beeping. The Doctor firmly states this identifies him as “trouble.” But he takes the screwdriver, correctly identifies it, and explains you can reset its dampener field and range. He sets it at short range, holds it near himself and it beeps again. He then holds it near the Doctor – again it beeps.

He explains that they are both Time Lords and he is in fact the Doctor’s brother. He won’t tell the Doctor his name, he’s sure in time his memory will return and he will then remember it. As superior beings, their task is to intervene, improve and correct history. Have not the Doctor’s own adventures showed him how poorly the humans handle their destiny? But to offer this guiding hand they need their Tardis. He has managed to find it, but only the Doctor has the key.

They step into the Tardis. The Doctor comments it’s bigger on the inside. The head asks him to go out to get the sonic screwdriver, which he claims to be a necessary component, and then locks him out. He explains himself to the Doctor over the monitor, but has the speaker turned down so he can only see the Doctor mouthing back at him.

He reveals himself to be the Doctor’s old adversary - The Monk. He scorns the Doctor for believing they might be brothers, and contemptuously explains they were enemies. Abandoned on Earth from 1066 to the present day, he has spent all this time working himself into positions of power and trying to track down another Tardis. But in all this intervening time he has become embittered against the Earth, no longer the gamer of history, and he now wants to use the Tardis’ power to press humankind into servitude – he’s no longer meddling, but megalomaniac. The feeling of his boot upon the Earth’s neck is the only thing which can satisfy him now. He will return with the Tardis made an arsenal of every deadly space weapon he can get his hands on. He only regrets that he could not have fought again with the Doctor as he was then – a worthy adversary, not this simpleton, barely more than one of the humans he once took as pets.

The Doctor finally just waves at him, like a child saying bye-bye. He laughs disdainfully at this, cries “now it’s me who’s in the driving seat” and triumphantly presses the big red button...

...but this sequence then just repeats over and over again.

Cut to oustide the Tardis. The Doctor and Isboel are now both there, the Monk’s phrase repeating over the speaker. The Doctor raises the sonic screwdriver to switch it off. The Doctor had grown to suspect him, particularly the way he kept the Doctor away from Isobel in order to tempt him the easier. So the Doctor had already secretly entered the Tardis, regained his memories and constructed a time loop to trap him in, set to trigger when he pressed dematerialise. If a thousand years wasn’t long enough for him to learn the error of his ways, time was no benefit to him and he may as well live the same few seconds over and over. He’ll be happy that way, forever at the very moment of his triumph. Let him have what he wanted.

The Doctor explains to Isobel that the whole affair had the opposite effect upon him to the Monk. Before he would flash past places like a tourist, hurtling from one grand event to the next, always looking up, never around. This time he has lived among humans. He’s been to Gallifrey and Metebilis 3, but his favourite place of all was a service station just out of Auchterlounie.If you want to find the extra-ordinary then the place you need to look is in the ordinary.

Isobel asks if he can now fly the Tardis, and he replies suitably evasively – it will probably all come back to him. He assumes she’ll be entering the Tardis with him, but she refuses - insisting that he’s the Doctor again, and no longer needs a Nurse. Besides, she has a ticket to Thailand, for which she isn’t entitled to a refund. Laughing, he tries to tell her the Tardis could take them there without any queueing, not even aything to carbon offset. But she explains she had been putting back the date of her flight, always by a few months at a time, but for the past few years. There was always some reason why she couldn’t go just yet. Now she will go - she needed all this just to walk through the same passport control that thousands do every day. The Doctor becomes more desperate to persuade her, boasting that the Tardis is bigger on the inside, a plane isn’t bigger on the inside. She replies “aren’t we all?”. As she leaves she comments it’s a shame she already got the ticket, as she’s thinking of changing her name. After she’s gone, he silently enters the Tardis and it dematerialises.

Postscript:After reading Andrew’s take I sent him a mail pointing out that the amnesiac old man was part of an early draft for Doctor Who, that he was taking the show so far back to its roots he’d reached a point before it even sprouted. Though Andrew replied this was at most unconscious, he seems such a fan of the early show it must surely be an influence. (His New Doctor is an old man, like the First, for example.) But while Andrew won’t even watch New Who, my impetus was very much to fix what-has-seemed-broken about the show recently. (Though I was also inspired by the way films such as Resident Evil used amnesia to throw you straight into events and then teasingly drip-feed backstory. You can also see some of The Thirty Nine Steps in there if you stare for long enough.) It’s probably too much of a departure to ever stand a prayer of being made, though I would also insist it contains some of the back-to-basics approach as well.

TIME TO REVERSE THE POLARITY (aka WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS A NEW NEW DOCTOR) - Part 1

This is a response to Andrew Hickey’s tag game of reworking established characters, in particular his take on Doctor Who. The supposition seems very much to be that most such characters have lost their way, and need re-finding it as much as they do reinventing for our age. It is weird in many ways to find myself back to writing what’s essentially fanfic! I suspect I was galvanised to respond by already having formed some very similar ideas myself, just through watching the show.

Where we come in:

NB: At the time of writing, I am assuming this is how the current run of the show will end, bases upon what’s happened or been hinted at so far. Of course only time will tell whether this is my reading, or whether I’ve actually rewritten it without knowing it.

First, some retro-continuity is revealed. To defeat the Daleks in the Time War the Doctor has to enlist the Time Lords, but then it comes to be that his only chance to kill the Daleks off means wiping out the Time Lords as well. Traumatised by slaughtering his own species, he suppresses this memory in his mind. He also leaves himself unable to do anything similar again, inserting a kind of mental circuit-breaker in his thought processes. (This is why he is unable to set off the bomb he himself assembled in ’Parting Of the Ways’ claiming “coward every time.”)

But this conditioning starts to break down, and the Doctor becomes more megalomaniac about his powers over time. Perhaps partly as a result of this, this suppressed memory reawakens. (Perhaps he is also forced into a similar position again.) This time the Doctor responds more radically, both regenerating and developing fully fledged amnesia.

The new series – the opening:

A hallucinogenic montage scene of lights and starfields. This gradually morphs into something more violent -  an aural fever dream of explosions, voices and cries from previous shows, Daleks chanting “exterminate” etc.  (No actual clips, but snatches of dialogue over near abstract visuals.) A voice arrives much more loudly over the top of it, shouting repeatedly “Doctor Doctor!”

A man suddenly sits bolt upright. He’s in pajamas on an old metal-frame bed, in a small and spartan-looking room. A woman is shouting “Doctor, Doctor!” down the phone, finally realises the connection is lost and crossly slams the phone down. She looks around and is astonished to see him awake. Figuring he awoke to the word “Doctor” she calls him that. For his part, he remembers nothing.

She explains she is called Isobel, that they are on a remote Scottish island. He was found on the shore and she has spent several weeks caring for him. (She doubles as the island Nurse, but as it lacks a single hospital bed she has had to do this at home,) She had been trying to get through to the GP on the mainland, the lines are normally bad but seem significantly worse whenever she tries to call him. But, she adds brightly, she got a call through to the Police who are coming from the mainland to interview him, in a day or two. They might be able to tell you something.

She shows him what was in his pockets, a Tardis key, a sonic screwdriver (neither of which he recognises) and a plane ticket to Thailand. She remarks on the co-incidence, as she was shortly to travel to Thailand herself. He shows her the ticket back, commenting it’s just a blank piece of paper. Concerned, she immediately checks his eyes for damage. (Of course it’s psychic paper.)

Character of Isobel

Isobel is Scottish but not native to the island, her hippy traveller parents settled there after a long time roving – a clapped-out camper van still stands beside her house. Despite growing up with stories of all their adventures, she’s never even been to the mainland very often and is now excited about her trip to Thailand. Exotic-looking posters of Thailand adorn her otherwise simply functional home. She’s level-headed and practical, as much Matron as Nurse. (A running gag is how many different jobs she does on the island.) She’s also something of a rallyer, good at getting people to do what she wants. But she is also frustrated at this ordering side of herself and would like more chaos in her life. She comes to see in the Doctor the freely associative wild card she needs to play.

Character of the New New Doctor

This Doctor is a mystery to everyone, including himself. He constantly says things which surprise even himself. He’s not talkative, charismatic or tricksterish like the Ninth, he’s more spectral and spaced out, forever on the borderline between breakdown and revelation, always saying something between gibberish and insight – a figure like Syd Barratt, David Bowie in Man Who Fell to Earth, or perhaps Fiver in Watership Down. People are always underestimating him, including himself. But when in danger his old survival reflexes come back.

Given his condition, his dependence upon Isobel is greater than with any previous companion (except perhaps with the First Doctor and Susan). He’s continually forgetful and impractical, which tries her patience. (She continually complains at him that she gave up Thailand for this.) Yet one moment he’s burning the dinner, the next demonstrating some flash of genius.

Like in The Avengers the gender roles become reversed, when what’s required is fisticuffs then it’s left to Isobel (who turns out to be a keep-fit freak).

Continuing the set-up...

The Police arrive, taciturn and robotic, something which stands out against the island’s face-to-face society. They take one look at the Doctor and announce he’s immediately to be taken back to the mainland. Isobel protests, he’s still so weak, and finally insistant. At this they forcefully shove her back. Then when they’re about to put him on the boat they find she’s rallied other islanders to his defence (though some are clearly more fearful than her at the prospect of this). They use a piercing siren device to incapacitate everyone, clearly some kind of alien technology.

Isobel (somehow) rescues the Doctor and escapes the Police. Fearing a manhunt on the island will now ensue, they take a small boat to the mainland, landing on a remote beach.

She searches for ‘The Doctor’ in an internet cafe in a nearby town and discovers all the Who lore. She rushes back to explain to the Doctor he is part of “it all” He’s at first confused by this explanation (“all of what?”), then dismissive of the whole idea (“you can’t believe what you read on the internet”), but to her it seems to explain much.

The series formula

From that point, they’re forced to go on the run. Authority figures are always after them, and it becomes there is someone who wants the Doctor who is both powerful and clearly knows who the Doctor is – the only person within the series who knows this. With the Doctor not even knowing what the Tardis is, all these adventures happen in Britain. It would be something of a cross between the Pertwee Era, (dare I say it) Torchwood, The X-Files and The Fugitive. Like The Fugitive, their constantly having to move on will propel into fresh adventures all the time. (The otherwise inexplicable Sonic Screwdriver turns out to beep when in the vicinity of alien technology, like a geiger counter of alien-ness, drawing them into story situations.)

The theme would be modern paranoia and technofear – the conspiracy theories that all new technology is actually alien etc. Technology would always be a step ahead of what you suspected, governments and authorities just fronts for shadowy institutions never up to any good. Unlike the different-alien-invasion-every-week of the Pertwee era, alien influence would be more indirect – more akin to Quatermass.

Despite this throughline, each adventure would itself be standalone and comprehensible in isolation. (If always expounding upon the theme given above.) However, moments would allude to the throughline. For example, they could come across an old Police Box in a museum. This triggers a memory in the Doctor, who even tries his key in it. It doesn’t fit, and Isobel chides him for wasting time. Or alien dialogue would be incomprehensible, then switch into English when the Doctor entered the room.

With them travelling everywhere by normal means, the feel and pace of the show would be correspondingly slower-paced, much less frenetic. They would steep in situations rather than just charge through them. There could be scenes of trying to get an emergency shelter put up hiding out in the rain etc. The whole thing would be more ‘grounded’, the viewer should feel the earth beneath their boots. There’d be no magic maguffin solutions to problems, but instead a renewed emphasis on teamwork, on their winning the day by forging friendships and alliances with the people they run into. Isobel is but the first of these occurrences.

Similarly, music and sound effects would be less invasive, and ‘spacey’ only when accompanying something alien.

Sample episode:

A green energy company is promising to solve the earth’s energy problems with an inexhaustible and nonpolluting supply of energy – if for a price. This secret source turns out to be from a UFO they have discovered and are tapping it’s power source, but without understanding it – once the whole power source is switched on it will surge, and blow up everything in a wide vicinity. The aliens have all died upon impact, so do not actively participate in the story, but the initially altruisitic become possessed by the power (in both senses) this will give him. The power source is triggered by thought power, so the company chief must put on a (somewhat symbolic) crown-like device to use it.

Advantages to this approach:

Advantages of this new direction would be the firewalls it would create against some of the problems of the old series recurring:

i)              The ‘Lonely God’ stuff is now literally written out of the memory of the show. Added to which, the New Doctor is much humbler and unsure of himself.

ii)             A whole house of get-out-of-jail-free cards had been stockpiled, dampening development of any dramatic tension, which would now be knocked down. These are toys the show has behaved so badly with up till now that they need confiscating. So now no-one now knows where the Tardis is, the Doctor has his sonic screwdriver and psychic paper but no knowledge of how to use them – they are clues not devices.

iii)           While the previous series didn’t suffer overly from continuity obsession, this format would insist that anything referred to from a previous series, even the most recent ones, would need explaining – making for a better jumping-on point. At the same time, with for example the Police Box scene above, the old viewer would recognise the Tardis but nothing within the show would expect the viewer to do so. To the new viewer, it would merely add to the mystery – a mystery which would be fully explained later.

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE 4 (Part Three: Malcy Duff’s Comics Workshop)

NB: There is no particularly good reason for the late posting of this final installment, covering the Colour Out Of Space festival!

As anyone with ears will know by now, I’m a fan of the left-field comics of Malcy Duff so when I heard this year’s Colour Out Of Space was running a comics workshop by him, I excitedly signed myself up

After some warm-up exercises, it transpired that Duff was not aiming to overexert his charges during the workshop – in fact our task was to complete one single panel. But there was an inevitable twist! Duff handed out copies of an already-drawn two-page strip, Blue Peter style, but with one panel on the second page left blank for us. Our instructions were, and I quote:

”Find an object which may appear at some point in this action and use the [blank] panel to present it. The panel should look nothing like any of the other panels, so it sticks out immediately, it catches your eye first.”

In fact, even the object had already been found for us – and was in fact a cauliflower. Our task was simply to work out how to present it. Typically, Duff was thinking of something which could only be done in comics. When we see a double-page spread our eye cannot help but cast itself over it, before our brain tells it to pull back and stop reading at top left. This means that anything unusual-looking will be taken in during this first glance, but semi-subliminally. We will assign an importance to that object without really knowing why. When we reach it through reading, we’ll stop at it like at a landmark on a trip.

Duff showed us various experiments he’d already made, including with collage or expanding the panel so it overflowed around and behind those surrounding it. As, for the main part, characters in the strip were side-on and in semi-long-shot, I experimented with a sudden leering close-up of a cauliflower seller – the equivalent of someone in the street leaping out to eyeball you, then being gone. (A whole sequence of actions you can simulate just by juxtaposing three static images.)

The beauty of it is, you can think about if for a few minutes and find your own. You don’t need to be an accomplished artist or knowledgeable about comics history, you just need your imagination. What’s in the panels is always secondary to how they connect.

Another notable feature of Duff’s strip (one he didn’t mention during the workshop), is that it’s structured around a character posting a letter – yet not a word is spoken throughout! We don’t even get to see the writing on the envelope. Ironic, with the frailty of communication so much one of his themes, that Duff is able to run such an involving workshop!

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE 4 (Part Two: Fabio Roberti’s talk)

Above: a video run-through of some of the artists, many mentioned by me last time.

Fabio Roberti, DJ at a non-commercial radio station in New Jersey, led this talk and discussion on ‘Failure and the Technology of the 21^st Century’. As he spoke, and quite improbably, a vintage car rally on their way Brighton seafront chugged to behind him! Who knows, perhaps the organisers cunningly planned it that way?

Roberti’s argument was that ‘technology’ was but a ruse for corporations to short-change us into formats of ever-worsening quality – from vinyl to CDs and finally the degredation of MP3s. Worse, their attempts to capitalise on music devalued it in other ways, for example MP3 players which encourage listeners to non-stop shuffle without ever actually listening to anything.

Though he underpinned this argument with strong examples, it’s possible to criticise. For one thing it all seemed to rest upon an all-embracing notion of ‘corporate power’, where their scheming is always one step ahead and we are but patsies. (Asserting for example that they knew from the beginning the lackings of the CD format, yet persevered for marketing reasons.) Yet are things actually so linear and monolithic? As the cartoonist Larry Marder once said, he got a job in advertising expecting everyone to be a diabolic mastermind, and was rather disappointed to find out they were all actually stupid and greedy and mostly preoccupied by not getting fired. As one example, net piracy may prick against the musician struggling to give up the day job but it also torpedoes the profits of those very same music corporations – it is scarcely their creature.

And as one attendee pointed out, “the elephant in the room here is capitalism.” Making such arguments against the music business, in isolation, is never likely to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of it. It’s like looking so hard at the fist you fail to see the arm and body it’s attached to. If songs are sold like soap powder, that is because they inhabit a world where everything is sold like soap powder.

But more to the point, as another attendee mentioned, when you’re at an alternative music festival surely the question is how such changes affect you. The way the internet is used to disseminate music might well be problematic, but surely the point is that it is already used in ways completely beyond it’s Cold War origins. It can change and morph, it can be used in a multiplicity of ways. And for a scene which tends to spawn high interest from low numbers, surely something pan-geographical like the net offers advantages.

But perhaps the real point was made by Ed Baxter of Resonance FM, that there has always been a symbiotic relationship between music and technology. For two famous examples, blues became electrified partly to sound the better on the emerging juke-boxes while Phil Spector based his sound on what sounded best on car radios. (I always fancy today’s R&B to be related to MP3s, with its skittering rhythms attempting to avoid the need for a deep bass sound. Whether there’s anything in that, however, would require someone who knows more about that music than me.)

But the real real point is going to be made by me. New media rarely kill their fathers, more often their getting up and leaving home gives their fathers a new lease of life. As the comics critic Tom Spurgeon once remarked: “The emergence of every new medium forces existing ones to retreat to their fundamental strengths.” The classic example of course, is the way photography freed painting from having to mimic or duplicate the world. Now we can hear music free from vinyl crackle or tape hiss, those sounds are suddenly thrown into relief and become interesting. We don’t necessarily have to take things as far as Reynols when they released Blank Tapes, a CD entirely composed of tape hiss. But we can look at those media the way an artist would paper or canvas, seeing what strokes sit the best upon them. Technology is not our enemy. Novelty, fashion and designer obsolescence are our enemies.

I’d have said all that but I was distracted by those passing classic cars...

A podcast of David Keenan’s talk on impro music of two years ago. (Plus my response.)

And we still have that comics workshop to come...